The Horoscope sprang up before me on the screen, and for an hour it held my gaze captive. First of all I looked at Saturn. Saturn in a fixed sign is often a signifier of death by suffocation, choking or hanging.
For two evenings I laboured over Big Foot’s Horoscope, until Dizzy called and I had to dissuade him from the idea of visiting me. His valiant old Fiat 126 would get bogged down in the mushy snow. Let that golden boy translate Blake at home in his workers’ hostel. Let him develop English negatives to produce Polish sentences in the darkroom of his mind. It would be better if he came on Friday – then I would tell him the whole story, and present as proof the precise configuration of the stars.
I must be very careful. Now I shall dare to say this: I’m not a good Astrologer, unfortunately. There’s a flaw in my character that obscures the image of the distribution of the planets. I look at them through my fear, and despite the semblance of cheerfulness that people naively and ingenuously ascribe to me, I see everything as if in a dark mirror, as if through smoked glass. I view the world in the same way as others look at the Sun in eclipse. Thus I see the Earth in eclipse. I see us moving about blindly in eternal Gloom, like May beetles trapped in a box by a cruel child. It’s easy to harm and injure us, to smash up our intricately assembled, bizarre existence. I interpret everything as abnormal, terrible and threatening. I see nothing but Catastrophes. But as the Fall is the beginning, can we possibly fall even lower?
In any case, I know the date of my own death, and that lets me feel free.
V
A LIGHT IN THE RAIN
Prisons are built with stones of Law,
Brothels with bricks of Religion.
A thump, a distant bang, as if someone in the next room had clapped an inflated paper bag.
I sat up in bed with a terrible foreboding that something bad was happening, and that this noise might be a sentence on someone’s life. More of them followed, so I hurriedly started to dress, though not entirely conscious. I came to a halt in the middle of the room, tangled in my sweater, suddenly feeling helpless – what was I to do? As usual on such days the weather was beautiful; the weather god clearly favours hunters. The Sun was dazzlingly bright, it had only just risen and, still red from the effort, was casting long, sleepy shadows. I went outside, and again I felt as if my Little Girls were running out ahead of me, straight into the snow, thrilled that the day had come, showing their joy so openly and shamelessly that I was bound to be infected by it. I’d throw them a snowball, they’d take it as a green light for all sorts of high jinks and immediately be off on their chaotic chases, in which the pursuer suddenly turns into the pursued, so the reason for the race changes from one second to the next, and finally their joy becomes so great that there’s no way to express it other than by running around the house like mad.
Again I felt tears on my cheeks – perhaps I should go and see Doctor Ali about it. He’s a dermatologist, but he knows about everything and understands it all. My eyes must be really sick.
As I strode towards the Samurai, I unhooked the carrier bag filled with ice from the plum tree and manually felt the weight of it. ‘Die kalte Teufelshand’, a distant memory came back to me from the past. Is it Faust? The cold fist of the devil. The Samurai started up first time, and, as if it knew my state of mind, obligingly set off across the snow. The spades and the spare wheel rattled in the back. It was hard to localise where the shots were coming from; they were bouncing off the wall of the forest, amplifying. I drove towards the Pass, and about two kilometres beyond the precipice I saw their cars – swanky jeeps and a small truck. There was a man standing by them, smoking a cigarette. I accelerated and drove straight past this encampment. The Samurai clearly knew what I was thinking, because it enthusiastically splashed wet snow in all directions. The man ran a few metres after me, waving his arms, probably trying to stop me. But I took no notice of him.
Then I saw them, walking in loose line formation. Twenty or thirty men in green uniforms, in army camouflage and those idiotic hats with feathers in them. I stopped my car and ran towards them. Soon I recognised several of them. And they saw me too. They looked at me in amazement and exchanged amused glances.
‘What the hell is going on here?’ I shouted.
One of them, a helper, came up to me. It was one of the two moustachioed men who’d come to fetch me on the day of Big Foot’s death. ‘Mrs Duszejko, please don’t come any closer, it’s dangerous. Please move away from here. We’re shooting.’
I waved my hands in front of his face. ‘No, it’s you who should get out of here. Otherwise I’ll call the Police.’
Another one detached himself from the line formation and came up to us; I didn’t know him. He was dressed in classic hunting gear, with a hat. The line of men moved on, pointing their shotguns ahead of them. ‘There’s no need, madam,’ he said politely. ‘The Police are already here.’ He smiled patronisingly. Indeed, I could see the pot-bellied figure of the Commandant in the distance.
‘What is it?’ someone shouted.
‘Nothing, it’s just the old lady from Luftzug. She wants to call the Police,’ he said, with a note of irony in his voice.
I felt hatred towards him.
‘Mrs Duszejko, please don’t be foolish,’ said Moustachio amicably. ‘We really are shooting here.’
‘You’ve no right to shoot at living Creatures!’ I shouted at the top of my voice. The wind tore the words from my mouth and carried them across the entire Plateau.
‘It’s all right – please go home. We’re just shooting pheasants,’ Moustachio reassured me, as if he didn’t understand my protest. The other man added in a sugary tone: ‘Don’t argue with her, she’s crazy.’
At that point I felt a surge of Anger, genuine, not to say Divine Anger. It flooded me from inside in a burning hot wave. This energy made me feel great, as if it were lifting me off the ground, a mini Big Bang within the universe of my body. There was fire burning within me, like a neutron star. I sprang forward and pushed the Man in the silly hat so hard that he fell onto the snow, completely taken by surprise. And when Moustachio rushed to his aid, I attacked him too, hitting him on the shoulder with all my might. He groaned with pain. I am not a feeble girl.
‘Hey, hey, woman, is that the way to behave?’ His mouth was twisted in pain as he tried to catch me by the hands.
Just then the Man who’d been standing by the cars ran up from behind – he’d clearly driven after me – and grabbed me in a vice-like grip. ‘I’ll escort you to your car,’ he said into my ear, but that wasn’t his plan at all; instead he pulled me backwards, making me fall over.
Moustachio tried to help me to my feet, but I pushed him away in disgust. I didn’t have a chance.
‘Don’t upset yourself, madam. We’re within the law.’
That’s what he said: ‘within the law’. I brushed off the snow and headed for my car. Trembling with anger, I kept stumbling. Meanwhile, the line of hunters had disappeared into the low brushwood, young willows on boggy terrain. Soon after that I heard shots again; they were shooting at the Birds. I got into the car and sat still, with my hands on the steering wheel, but it was a while before I was capable of moving.