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up the newspaper, Ludwik rose, a bus rolled down the road, Roly-Poly asked “did you make that phone call?”
    *The name of a beautiful princess and also title of a poem about her by Adam Mickiewicz.
    *A variation on the name Isaac.

chapter 2
    I don’t know how to tell this . . . this story . . . because I’m telling it ex post . The arrow, for instance . . . The arrow, for instance . . . The arrow, at that time, at supper, was no more important than Leon’s chess, or the newspaper, or tea, everything—equally important, everything—was contributing to a given moment, a kind of consonance, the buzzing of a swarm. But today, ex post , I know it was the arrow that was the most important, so in telling this I move it to the forefront, from a myriad of undifferentiated facts I extract the configuration of the future. But how can one describe something except ex post? Can nothing be ever truly expressed, rendered in its anonymous becoming, can no one ever render the babbling of the nascent moment, how is it that, born out of chaos, we can never encounter it again, no sooner do we look than order . . . and form . . . are born under our very eyes? No matter. Never mind. Katasia awoke me with breakfast every morning and, with my eyes just opened from sleep, I would catch above me the impropriety of her mouth, that slippery slipaway lip superimposed on her peasant-woman’scheeks, looking on, blue-eyed and kindly. Couldn’t she have moved away from my bed a quarter of a second sooner? Wasn’t she stooping over me a fraction of a second too long? Maybe yes . . . maybe no . . . the uncertainty . . . this possibility burrowed into me as I lay thinking of my nocturnal machinations with her. On the other hand . . . what if she stood over me out of sheer kindness? It was hard to tell, there are substantial obstacles to watching people, it’s different with inanimate objects, it’s only objects that we can truly watch. In any case, my lying beneath her mouth pinned me down each morning and remained with me throughout the day, maintaining the configuration of her mouth in which I had so stubbornly entangled myself. It was too hot for us to work, we were tired, he was bored, he stewed in his own juices, became a wretch, he was like a howling dog though he didn’t howl, he was just bored. The ceiling. One afternoon we lay supine on our beds, the windows were shaded, the afternoon buzzed with flies—and I heard his voice.
    “Maybe Majziewicz would give me a job, but I can’t leave where I am, it counts as training, I’d lose a year and a half, no doubt about it, I just can’t . . . Look there, on the ceiling . . . ”
    “What?”
    “On the ceiling. There, by the stove.”
    “What?”
    “What do you see?”
    “Nothing.”
    “If only I could spit in his mug. But I can’t. And why should I? He means well, but I really get on his nerves, his jaw goes out of joint when he sees me . . . Have a better look at that mark on the ceiling. Don’t you see anything?”
    “What?”
    “It’s like that arrow, the one we spotted on the ceiling in the dining room. It’s even more distinct.”
    I didn’t answer, one minute, two, then he spoke again:
    “The remarkable thing is that it wasn’t there yesterday.” Silence, the heat, my head lies heavy on the pillow, a feeling of faintness, but he spoke again as if clinging to his own words that were floating in the juices of the afternoon: “It wasn’t there yesterday, a spider lowered itself from that spot yesterday and I watched it, I would have noticed the arrow—it wasn’t there yesterday. See the main line in the middle, the shaft itself, that wasn’t there, the rest, the point, the branching at the base, those, I grant you, are the old pockmarks, but the shaft, the shaft itself . . . that wasn’t there . . . ” He drew a breath, lifted himself slightly, leaned on his elbow, dust whirled around in a cluster of light rays coming through a hole in the window shade. “The shaft