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wasn’t there.” I heard him scramble out of bed, and I saw him in his underpants, craning his neck, examining the ceiling—it surprised me—such diligence! That ogling expression! He stuck his ogle face at the ceiling and declared: “ Fifty, fifty . * Yes or no. Devil only knows.” And he returned to his bed, but I knew he continued looking from there, which I found so tiresome.
    After a while I heard him get up again and walk over to look at the ceiling, I wished he’d let it go . . . but he would not let it go.
    “The scratch that goes through the center, the shaft itself, mind you . . . I have a hunch, it seems freshly made with a nail. It’s more conspicuous. It wasn’t there yesterday . . . I would have noticed . . . And it points in the same direction as the other, the one in the dining room.”
    I lay there.
    “If it’s an arrow, it must be pointing to something.”
    I replied: “And if it’s not an arrow it’s not pointing.”
    Last night, at supper, while examining Ludwik’s hand with that disgusting curiosity of mine—again!—I shifted my gaze to Lena’s hand that also lay on the table, and then the little hand seemed to tremble or coil ever so slightly, I was not at all sure, yet fifty, fifty . . . But as to Fuks, I didn’t like it, maybe it even infuriated me that whatever he did or said derived from Drozdowski, from disrespect, dislike, disgust . . . all the “dises” . . . well, if only I didn’t have my own problems with my parents in Warsaw, but the two together, one fed on the other. He was talking again.
    He stood in his underpants, in the center of the room, talking. He suggested that we should see if the arrow pointed to anything—“what’s the harm in checking, if we’re satisfied it doesn’t point to anything, it will give us blessed peace, then it will be clear this is not an arrow that anyone has drawn on purpose but merely an illusion—there’s no other way to establish whether it’s an arrow or not an arrow.” I listened silently, I wondered how to refuse him, he insisted rather weakly, but I felt weak too, weakness pervaded everything. I suggested he check it himself if he was so keen on it—he began to insist that I would be indispensable to him in establishing the exact direction because someone has to go out, mark the direction in the hallway, in the garden—finally he said, “Two heads are better than one.”And all at once I agreed, I even rose immediately from my bed because the thought of a thrusting, resolute motion along a fixed line suddenly seemed more delectable than a glass of cold water!
    We pulled our pants on.
    The room now filled with decisive and clear-cut activitiesthat, originating as they did from boredom, from idleness, from whimsy, concealed some kind of idiocy within them.
    The task was not easy.
    The arrow didn’t point to anything in our room, we could tell at a glance, so it was necessary to extend its course through the wall, to see if it connected with anything in the hallway, and then continue the line as accurately as possible into the garden—this called for rather complicated maneuvers that he really wouldn’t have managed without my participation. I went down to the garden and pulled out a rake from a small shed so that I could use the handle to show the line on the lawn which would correspond to the one that Fuks was signaling to me with a broomstick from the staircase window. It was close to five in the afternoon—the burning-hot gravel, the drying grasses around the young trees that gave no shade—that was down below—while above, white whorls of large, roundish clouds drifted in the mercilessly blue sky. The house gazed with two rows of windows, on the first and second floor—the windowpanes glittered . . .
    Did one of the windowpanes look at me with a human eye? People were still having their afternoon naps—judging by the silence—but it was quite possible that someone watched us from behind a windowpane—Leon?