Read Cosmos for Free Online Page B

multitudes gushed also from the boards of the shed, from the wall. I got bored. I straightened up and looked at the house and the garden—these huge, synthesized shapes, these enormous mastodons of the world of reality, were restoring order—I rested. Let’s go back. I wasabout to say this to Fuks but his face, stuck to one spot, stopped me short.
    Slightly above our heads the cracked wall formed a recess consisting of what looked like three caves diminishing in size—inside one of the caves something was hanging. A stick. A small stick, about an inch long. It hung on a white thread, not much longer. It was hitched over a jagged brick.
    Nothing more. We searched through everything in the area once again. Nothing. I turned around and looked at the house, glistening with its windowpanes. A whiff of freshness announced the evening, a breath that released leaves and grasses from their torpor in the heat. The leaves trembled on the young trees standing in a row, whitewashed and propped up with stakes.
    We returned to our room.
    Fuks collapsed on his bed.
    “Say what you will, but the arrow has led us to something,” he said warily, and I, no less warily, muttered: “Like what?”
    Yet it was hard to pretend that one didn’t know: a hanged sparrow—a hanged stick—the hanging of the stick from the wall repeating the hanging in the thicket—a grotesque result that suddenly increased the sparrow’s intensity (revealing the extent to which the sparrow had lodged within us, regardless of any pretense of our forgetting it). The stick and the sparrow, the sparrow reinforced by the stick! It was hard not to think that someone had led us to the stick to make us see the connection with the sparrow . . . but why? What for? As a joke? A prank? Someone had played a trick on us, made fools of us, to amuse himself . . . I felt uneasy, Fuks felt it too, and this prompted caution.
    “I wouldn’t bet three cents that somebody isn’t pulling our leg.”
    “Who?”
    “One of them . . . someone who was there when I talked about the sparrow and how we identified the arrow on the ceiling in the dining room. The same person gouged the arrow in our room that leads to what? To the stick on the thread. A practical joke. A hoax.”
    Yet it didn’t make sense. Who would want to play such elaborate jokes? What for? Who could have known that we’d discover the arrow and take such a deep interest in it? No—this concurrence, however small, between the stick on the thread and the sparrow on the wire—was pure chance. Granted, a stick on a thread, one doesn’t see this every day . . . yet the stick could have been hanging there for a thousand reasons unrelated to the sparrow, we had exaggerated its importance because it turned up at the end point of our search, as its outcome—when in fact it wasn’t any outcome at all, it was just a stick hanging on a thread . . . Pure chance then? Indeed . . . and yet one could sense in this series of events a propensity for congruity, something hazily linking them together—the hanged sparrow—the hanged chicken—the arrow in the dining room—the arrow in our room—the stick hanging on a thread—something was trying to break through and press toward meaning, as in charades, when letters begin to make their way toward forming a word. What word? Indeed, it seemed that everything wanted to act in the name of an idea . . .What idea?
    What idea? Whose idea? If there was an idea, someone must have been behind it—but who? Who would have wanted to bother? But what if . . . what if Fuks had played a trick on me, I don’t know, out of boredom maybe . . . but no, why on earth Fuks . . . so much effort into a stupid caper . . . no, this didn’t make sense either. Pure chance then? I might have finally conceded that it was pure chance were it not for another abnormality that somehow had the tendency to hook onto this abnormality . . . were it not forthe strangeness of the stick backed by another strangeness