Fragrance of Phloxes or 128.308.567

Fragrance of Phloxes or 128.308.567 A short story by © Richard A. Antonius

A short story by © Richard A. Antonius Translated by Suzie Komza

Adams´s father arrived at the Old Colony for a fleeting moment, because he had to rush back. The company car cooled off beyond the tangle of phloxes. The driver, while waiting for his passenger, shooed the neighbours’ dog away from the tires with a stick. The exhaust fumes and the sweet fragrance of flowers grappled with each other, rippling the air over the side street.

Grandma Philomena asked her son-in-law if he would like to taste some chicken soup, but he immediately swept his son out of the blackcurrant bushes, and ordered him to bring his mathematics exercise book.

“If I weren’t so active in the Society of Friends of Children, this ruddy boy would be repeating third grade.” The father’s words flew over the boy’s head, as he dilly-dallied along his grandmother and grandfather’s attic for his exercise book.

“I’ll soon cure him of his dyscalculia.”

Grandma wrung her hands. “Is something the matter with Adam? Is it a particularly troublesome illness?”

“Yes indeed, good mother. An illness that pounces on stinking sloths.” The father, wearing a summery blazer with trimmed sleeves, settled himself on the deck chair in a sunny patch. Adam hobbled over with his notebook and math textbook.

“What’s this, you haven’t finished these exercises yet? I can see, you know.” The father flipped through the notebook hastily. “What a hopeless case!”

And Adam felt the heat rising.

In the kitchen, Grandma poured chicken soup into a dish. She heard some sort of shot – not a shot, but her grandson’s snivelling, and her son-in-law’s angered voice. She hurried into the front yard with the dish.

“What’s the point of tyrannising…?” said Grandma as she appraised the situation.

“The little snot didn’t learn his multiplication table. He speaks sixes and sevens. When I ask him what 7 times 8 is, he responds with 47! And his textbook exercises also remain untouched.” The father flailed his hands, rose from the deck chair, and glanced at his watch.

“I’m short on time, mom. We’re fighting for the rural electrification of Florynka. And then onwards to Krakow. A plenary meeting of the presidium of the Voivodship National Council. Rose and I will swing by for him in two weeks’ time. Chicken soup! I’ll gladly eat it in the kitchen.”

At the edge of the veranda, he turned around to face Grandma. Something was bothering him.

“If you only knew, mom, how much that little snot spoils… all sorts of affairs.”

“What are you talking about?” Grandma nearly spilled the soup.

“Yes, yes, even hunting. It’s because of him that I drastically limit these activities. You must know, mom: when I bring home a goat, right away, nothing but screams and sobs.”

“Adam is a sensitive child.”

“Is that right?” And the father aimed his finger towards the corner of the yard. “But when his mom is chopping off the rooster’s head into the manure pile, the ruddy snot doesn’t even flinch… and then, how he guzzles down his chicken soup.”

“Especially the cerebellum.”

“Ah, exactly – the cerebellum.” This gave him something to mull over. “Do you give him a lot of that, mom? Because who knows, who knows, if he doesn’t get his chicken brain from that?”

Grandma waved him off. “It’s tiny – it would fit on a nail. But he likes the heart most of all.”

Adam lingered alone over the blindingly white page of his notebook. The tearstain rapidly evaporated. He looked at the figures, nibbling on the end of his pencil, and he wondered how much 4 times 9 could be. The rooster Figaro crowed from the woodshed (Grandpa Julian had named him thus). The boy noticed that at the third cockcrow, the rooster’s cry became a dragging wheeze. In another moment, a clatter resounded. Someone in the street was hammering roofing felts onto the veranda rooftop. Adam counted it to be six times. A thought struck him. He jotted down 3 and 6.

“You’re lucky, you dyscalculius!” he suddenly heard the voice from overhead. “You’ve only to want to think. Who said that numbers must be dry?”

In another moment, the father, sweeping his suitcase over the gooseberries, hurried to the gate. A light, coffee-coloured car shot a black puff of petrol fumes into the phloxes. As Adam ran up to the gate, the car vanished beyond the house belonging to the train orchestra conductor. He had wanted to wave his hand. And he only dispelled the bitter smell of petrol fumes.

In the kitchen, Grandma pounded the cutlet seven times. The neighbours’ dog Ypsilon barked twice, and clanged his chain. Together, that was 9 – thought – didn’t think Adam.

He ambled into the garden in search of ripe gooseberries. From day to day, on the bush next to the veranda, those red, sun-glazed beads emerged. They were delicious. The summer, boiling in sunlight, seemed to propagate the home garden. A large balsam plant shuddered – an impatiens touch-me-not on the point of a salute, which no doubt must have been a signal to autumn. Adam felt that in this shimmer of lights and juices, the end of summer break concealed itself, along with the prompt farewell to Grandma’s house. Fourth grade awaited him at school, the pungent smell of students and their shoes, tedious multiplication tables and homework done under yellow light bulbs. Not to mention, that which his father had forecasted: “Wait and see, they’ll have a go at you.”

He borrowed Grandpa’s cup. Usually, Grandpa Julian filled it in the evening with water from the bucket, and he placed it in his bedroom, next to the bed. Then he deposited his dentures inside. Today, however, Grandpa was at work – he tapped the wheels, while Grandma Philomena watered the geranium on the windowsill with his cup. When a Soviet Mule biplane flew over the neighbourhood, she left the cup on the windowsill and ran out onto the street. There was a better view from there of the machine, rumbling like a hornet, and circling over the railwaymen’s family house roofs. Auntie Lola emerged from the neighbouring house, and both cousins began to chat, submerged in the backdrop of phloxes, themselves wearing floral patterned kitchen aprons. Grandma had forgotten all about the cup.

Adam twitched. An armoured insect sat on a leaf, and it seemed to the boy that the green knight challenged him with a warlike expression; add to that a ruffled nape, as though he wanted to keep the daredevil from entering the sweet kingdom. He flicked him off with his finger in disgust. The bug shot into the air and vanished. Just like a puffed touch-me-not. An unpleasant odour remained on his fingers. Had he pooped, or what? – The thought crossed the boy’s mind. He winced in disgust once more, causing several gooseberries to drop from the cup. He bent over, gathering the branches. Something white, like fog, lay on the dark ground next to his sandals. A silkworm cocoon? He thought so, not without reason.

For some time, Grandpa Julian had intended to – as he phrased it himself, start “a profitable silkworm colony.” In spite of Grandma’s grumbling, he concealed in his bedside table a cardboard box after some old Czech shoes. It was filled with silkworm larvae. He had procured them from an engineer’s assistant, who, through the Leluchow station, had imported larvae from Czechoslovakia. Czech silk. Grandpa showed them off one day, displaying them to Adam’s father. “Budou to hedvábné košile.” His father wasn’t convinced. “How’s this, my dear father-in-law? A private initiative?” He posed the unsettling question. “Perhaps even in socialism it’s prohibited,” Grandpa admitted. “But wait and see, we’ll treat the party comrades from the city to our first production! In addition, we’ll throw in some red ties for the Work Holiday of the First of May, no? Polish pioneers and the entire working class deserve to have some silk as well, don’t they? Or can only the bourgeoisie be allowed to dress up? Lenin himself…”

Father waved his hand. “Let’s not involve Comrade Lenin in all this.”

Adam committed to memory the flash in his Grandpa’s eyes. It always appeared when he buried a joke.

“Well, keep on with your games, dad,” said Adam’s father, swatting his hand (though he did not schlock him with it). “After all, maybe it’s better than the production of those tin water whistle birds?” He patted his father-in-law on the back.

“Elegantní, hedvábné košile,” repeated Grandpa in Czech.

“Well, now all you have to do is ask around the neighbourhood to see if someone has a mulberry tree.”

And then, Grandpa smiled mysteriously. “One of them grows in the park at the railway station. Not far from the semaphore. I espied it from the bridge, when I was coming home from work. The larvae will grow huge, you’ll see. The silk will be stronger than the world has seen yet.”

And he cut the conversation short, because Grandma passed under the window, from the side of the woodshed.

Adam returned his thoughts to the gooseberry thicket. In one hand he held the cup, and in the other he rotated in his fingers a discovery from under the bushes. It was a cotton ball from someone’s ear. It must have been Uncle Stan’s, who was Auntie Lola’s husband. Yes, that was for sure, because it was properly compressed and yellowed on one side.

The green warrior reappeared on the rim of the cup. Adam froze. For a brief moment, he didn’t know how to free his fingers from the sticky vat. He stuffed it into his trouser pocket. Only then did he send his hand, like a nose diving plane, in the direction of the stinker, taking care not to loose any gooseberries. Beat it, damned snot!

Adam sat on a bench underneath the apple tree, and with a spoon he scraped out the last drops of the blood red sugar.

He remembered the cotton ball. He had always been curious as to why his uncle had needed a vat in one ear. He had never asked him. He now took it out, and squeezed it into his right ear. Something grated in his head, and at first, the boy thought that he had pushed that wide-mouthed insect into his ear with the vat. He started up and listened hard. It was odd. He heard the muffled whistle of a steam engine, and something like rumbling on train tracks. With a quick movement, he plucked out the vat. The railroad sounds disappeared. But when he put it back in – the steam engine’s whistling restarted. It was reminiscent of the drowned out audition of the Western radio programme, Free Europe. All of a sudden, he heard a screeching voice. He looked around, as he had recognised Auntie Lola’s language. There was nobody in the front yard, and yet, her voice rang out at the utmost. He couldn’t make sense of a single word. Auntie spoke strangely, as though in Hungarian… no, that was impossible. He removed the cotton ball, and once more, there were only the sounds of the neighbourhood. As usual, the dog Ypsilon yapped, (twice) and the hoarse coughing of Mr. Fiver reached him. “Together, that’s probably seven.”

For a moment, he dwelled deeply in his ruminations. So, if he were to take this vat soaked in conversation, and stick it backwards into his ear, he would hear sentences, but… in reverse?

This time, he stuck it in the right way – with the yellowed side inwards. He had to sit down, bewildered. Auntie Lola chattered like a CKM machine gun. It was clear as day. He extended his neck, preferring to be sure that his Grandma was still beyond the gate. What he had heard in his right ear wasn’t fit to be repeated. After a while, he grinned to himself. He was aware of things that weren’t spoken of in the front yard, certainly not in the presence of children. Inside of Uncle Stan’s vat, all of Auntie Lola’s chattering had been affixed! What wasn’t that woman talking about! Here she criticised him, there she numbered his many oversights, carping about what the world was coming to. And Konkol’s daughter took a hit, with whom she candled eggs at an egg cooperative, because they squabbled over which of them would take the nine eggs with double yolks home. “Bloody hell!” Auntie concluded, and presently the screech of the train from the station freed itself from the cotton ball. He couldn’t hear what his uncle thought of all this. Adam wasn’t surprised; Grandpa Julian had already said that Stan sits there like a rabbit; lying doggo.

Grandma appeared next to the veranda, and with one movement, Adam stuffed Uncle Stan’s vat under the bench. “Because of that chatterbox Lola, I’m late with dinner,” Grandma said to her grandson.

The following morning, a rhythmic masticating, moaning and rumbling of a motor woke Adam up. In the attic, where he slept, a heavy stench wafted in through a cracked window. He darted downstairs barefoot, in his pyjamas, and he stuck his head out onto the veranda. A huge, filthy earthworm crawled across the front yard. Its mass pulsated in digestive convulsions, and every now and then it sighed heavily. Grandma stood under the carpet beater, pinching her nose. Adam realised that a sewer cleaning truck had arrived to suck the faeces from the septic tank in the woodshed. Grandpa had sought that service for some time now.

“Don’t breathe, Adam, you’d better go upstairs and hide under your sheets.” Grandma waved her hand, as though she wanted to create a hallway in the air that was free of effluvium. Through the veranda window, Adam noticed that the long and thick conduit went from the woodshed all the way to the gate, behind which, like a large grey elephant, a cistern automobile hummed. With revulsion, Grandma stepped over the conduit and hid herself on the veranda.

“What about that old man, Grandma?”

Adam had to pose the question, for he couldn’t explain the sight he witnessed from the window: astride on the conduit, sat an old, bony man in a rimmed hat. He succumbed to the vibrations of the conduit as though he were a cowboy in an American prairie.

Grandma waved her hand. “Julian warned me about him. It’s the father of the Sanitation Department Head. And, like his son on the stand, he could in no way be moved. Supposedly he’s healing his prostate. It’s to do with the vibrations. But because of that, the old geezer has been permeated with that ghastly odour.”

“Like ten million green stinkers, Grandma.”

“Ah yes, Adam – they’ve even tossed him out of the bus a couple of times. Ah… ah…” Grandma felt sick twice, but she finished, “Well then, something for something.”

And suddenly: Good Heavens! They saw that the great mass of the conduit scraped against the bench under the apple tree. They heard the crack of wood.

“That’s it for the bench!” Grandma stated sadly.

“Oh, all is lost!” Adam observed, thinking of the cotton ball.

“You’re quite right, child. All of my phloxes will wilt now.”

He sat on the bench repaired by his Grandpa, slicing an apple with a pocketknife. The juice boiled on the edge of the knife, and the whole of the Old Colony rippled in the sweltering heat. Adam recalled his father’s words: “Really, everything is composed of numbers. The entire world. For instance, the number Pi, after the comma; the numbers drag from here to the Dunajec Bridge, and even farther, all the way to the sea.”

There must have been something to it, because the boy paid more attention to the background noise. A vague system crept into his head. For example: 1 – is stepping on Calico the cat’s tail. (He’s able to meow, once only.) 2 – are the two barks of Ypsilon, who sets his ears, because along the road walks Mr. Rig the dogcatcher with a pitchfork and slingshot. 3 – Figaro the rooster’s cockcrows (with three cockscombs).

He was delighted with this train of thought. As though on cue, Mrs. Kwarta laid out a begrimed rug on an old chair, and began to whack it. One, one, one, one! He counted 4 times. And almost certainly because of the agitated dust, the severely ill neighbour Mr. Fiver wheezed. Five times. As many times as there are petals on phloxes. And 4 plus 5 is as much as… that small tapestry at Auntie Lola’s with an embroidered silver thistle! Grandpa said that it grows only in the Tatra Mountains, and it always has nine leaves. Yes, absolutely – 9!

“We’re going shopping, Adam dear,” Grandma said. She stood on the edge of the veranda with a shawl wrapped over her head, with a shopping bag in hand, as well as a milk jar. She was ready for the excursion. “Only return Grandpa’s pocketknife to the kitchen, all right?”

He ran into the house. In the kitchen, on the table, he noticed Grandma’s pocketbook. She diligently jotted down her planned shopping along with the price of the products. He managed only to glance at the last notes, and in another moment he caught up to her past the gate. They walked towards the station, to the bus stop.

“What are you mumbling about, Adam? You know, Grandma hears you declaiming something or other…”

Whether or not he wanted to, he had to admit to it.

“Did you hear the four cow brays, Grandma? And seven times… beating the cutlet.”

“Ah, you’re counting to yourself in this way? And when there’s nothing to hear, what then?” Grandma took him aback with this question.

“Then it means zero, Grandma. And zero is like the letter O. Round and empty. Like the train whistle in the evening. Or the smoke from Uncle Stan’s pipe. He can blow smoke bagels.”

He stopped in his tracks, listening with his finger in the air.

“And now, Grandma: three roosters, and there, the shunting Mr. Arc Sevensky is sawing seven planks and again, eeee – that shrill cough.”

“Because Fiver is a tubercular, grandson. His days are numbered. The war ravaged him,” said Grandma Philomena. “Let’s go.”

After a while, they reached the station cloakroom. They sat down on an empty bench. He noticed that Grandma shifted around oddly. She slid towards him, attempting to cover up a word that was carved into the backrest. She sighed, because she had to accept that he had already read it. He did everything so that his ears wouldn’t redden. He even tried to whistle, and kick a cigarette butt with his sandal.

“What a nation. Writing obscenities wherever they can. Everything starting with ‘h,’ ‘k’ and ‘f.’”

“That ‘h,’ Grandma, they write in different ways. Sometimes it’s ‘c-h,’” he contributed to Grandma’s contemplations. And probably needlessly, as he met with a reprimanding look from her beer coloured pupils, and the question: “How on Earth do you know how to write it?”

At that moment, they heard a man’s voice. Grandma turned her head, but in a way that suggested she didn’t wish to see the man who approached us from the side of the cloakroom.

“Ah, it’s that old Konkol,” she whispered. “After what his daughter did at the egg cooperative, I’d rather not run into him. In any case, Lola told me that the woman started to have relations with that dogcatcher Rig, you know, the one who snoops around our street. Yesterday he was roaming around with a slingshot and pitchfork. He’s hunting for dogs. He uses them to make suet.”

But Adam was preoccupied with counting.

“Grandma, nine eggs times two egg yolks equals: a cat and a nutria. Which means, one Calico meow, and eight nutria sneezes. Eighteen.”

Grandma grimaced. “Give it a rest with those nutrias. When the neighbour cleans out their cages, my peonies start to wither. What an awful stench.” She suddenly peered attentively at him.

“Wait a minute, how do you know about the business at the egg cooperative?”

Fortunately, he didn’t have to reply. The man tipped his hat. “Shit!” he swore, because a bit of paper flew out of his hand. Adam, not over thinking it, propelled himself in pursuit. He stomped down on the paper just as the edge of a puddle.

“You’re a scout, boy,” Mr. Konkol praised Adam as he seated himself on the bench. “I wouldn’t have caught it, as my heart palpitates. It’s my sciatica, you see…” He rubbed his hand over the lottery ticket that had been salvaged by Adam, and then he produced a bulbous fountain pen. Clearly, he readied himself to bet on sports. “You see, my good woman, my hands are shaking. I tried to climb a ladder today to apply roofing felt to the roof of the veranda, but I gave it a rest. My daughter won’t help, after whole days spent at the egg cooperative. She even takes up the graveyard shift.”

Adam could see Grandma furrowing her brows. But then, she remembered something. “My Julian could assist you. He has some leftover roofing felts.”

“I’d be very grateful,” Mr. Konkol smiled, and Adam noticed that four teeth were missing from his frontal gums.

“Do you have any ideas?” the man addressed Adam suddenly. With a movement of his pen, he invited him to help.

It wasn’t necessary to ask the boy twice. He smiled as he thought of his system. “18 egg yolks,” he said.

“Adam?” Grandma uttered warningly.

“And so… a marathon,” Mr. Konkol declared, placing a cross in the appropriate rubric. Again, he smiled at the boy. “That’s 4, then,” Adam said without hesitation.

“In that case we have: Obstacle Racing. What’s next?”

“Figaro the Rooster blows smoke from a pipe.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, 30, sir.”

“Ho ho,” said Mr. Konkol, and he set down another cross on the field of sport. “Hammer throw.”

Then obediently, and consecutively, he filled out the remainder of Adam’s suggestions.

They had to vacate the bench when the bus arrived, as it stuck its exhaust pipe towards them. Grandma and Adam hid from its black fumes within the bus.

As they drove past the park, Grandma smacked her head with her hand. “Darn it! I forgot my pocketbook.”

“I remember everything, Grandma.”

She looked at him.

“Adam, you’re rather strange today. And I, an old crone, forgot what I have to buy – aside from milk, which I remember.”

They returned from the city. Grandma expanded with pride for her grandson. “How did you remember all of this? And how did it go? Calico the cat and Ypsilon the dog is 12 potatoes, whacking a rug on the chair is 4 turnips, and the cat is smoking a pipe, blowing smoke like Uncle Stan… 10 eggs.”

Adam chimed in. “And seven cutlets for sickly Mr. Fiver. That’s 75 cm of tape in haberdashery.”

“And Rooster Figaro with his triple cockscomb untangles threads. Three spools.” Grandma concluded. “Something tells me, Adam dear, that you’ll be a poet someday. And to think, that at one time, I thought that you’d be an opera singer, just like Feodor Chaliapin… but no!”

Gingerly, they pushed the gate door open, and walked up to the veranda. They heard Grandpa and Uncle Stan’s laughter. Both were hunched over a newspaper.

“It says here, Stan, that the formula for the ideal shape of women are the numbers: 90 – 60 – 90.”

“As I understand it, that is respectively the bust, the waist and hips?” Uncle Stan wanted to make sure, swatting smoke from his pipe away from the newspaper. “Hold on, can you do this, Julian?” Saying this, he blew out of his mouth a fresh portion of smoke. When the slender smoke bagel hung over his nose, Uncle stuck his index finger into the hole, and wiggling it, he asserted with a grin, “Fee-foo, fee-foo.”

At this point, Grandma strode in. “Something’s on your mind, some fee-foo! Both of you – old as can be, but stupid as ever. Gone in their heads!”

Adam wasn’t familiar with this kind of language.

Grandma stepped onto the veranda and waved the smoke away. She stopped in front of Julian.

“Come on, Phela,” he muttered. “That’s what’s written in the newspaper. I’m just soldering on it.”

“So I’ll tell you one thing, you sly fox: you’d be better off doing something about that bedside cabinet with the larvae, because it’s already bursting at the seams. And in the end it will erupt, and the authorities will find out.”

In the evening, Grandma told Grandpa about Adam’s new abilities, about Mr. Konkol, the roofing felt and about the lotto ticket. And then when she went to make the beds, Grandpa called his grandson over to the kitchen table.

“This is called mnemotechnics. A memory system. I read about it. And now, I’ll go and move the bedside cabinet with my farm to the woodshed. So that Phela won’t seethe.”

Adam rinsed his face in the washbowl, and then he dragged himself up to the attic. Through the window, in the apple tree’s branches, a crow flapped and cawed, the dog rattled its chain, and from the side of the station, the semaphore barked. Behind the wall, Fiver’s ravaged lungs wheezed. He remembered these numbers, 90 – 60 – 90. It suddenly dawned on him, that those are to be the proportions of his… wife. Well, someday in the future. He smiled at the deer on the tapestry, and surrendered himself to sweet, half-dreaming contemplations.

90 – The rattle of crooked wheels of the cart that the ragamuffin Ted Maligniac always strolled through the city with. Add to that: the smelly smoke of the cigarette that Ted never removed from between his lips. 60 – Yes, even when he was hired to embed nails in the roof. 90 – Once again, the limp rattle: Maligniac pushes his cart, distances himself and vanishes in the cigarette smoke.

Very neat tale, this.

While drifting to sleep, Adam still had time to think, that the following day, in the morning, he’d use this method to try to fathom the name of his future wife…

It was Saturday. Grandpa Julian, with a roll of roofing felt as well as his own tarpaper nails, walked over to Mr. Konkol on Navoyovska. Adam ducked out of accompanying him, spreading out his mathematics book on the bench under the apple tree. He sank into the deck chair. He folded his hands behind his head and concentrated intensely on the numbers, which he invited under his eyelids. And a tale arose from these.

1 – On the cat’s tail 2 – Mr. Rig stepped. That dogcatcher went and shot the slingshot 8 – towards the nutria 3 – the rooster with three cockscombs. The rooster broke 0 – wind from fright, straight 8 – into the nutria cage, 5 – in Mr. Ignatius’ front yard, just when 6 – he hammered the sixth tarpaper nail onto the veranda with the help of 7 – a cutlet.

Adam scratched his head.

“It came out stupidly.” To be sure, he counted it all out on his fingers. Everything added up. When he put down the right letters – he was dumbfounded. Had he really managed to uncover the name of his wife to be? And how beautiful it was! Cynfonika. He then paced around the front yard in a circle, and with a twig from the fragrant tuft of phloxes; he scribbled the melodic name across the sky.

“Why are you so cheerful this morning?” He heard Grandma’s voice.

“I ate a very good apple,” he said the first thing that popped into his head. Oh, no! Even Grandma couldn’t have access to such secrets.

At noon, Grandpa returned. “Damn it,” he started to speak at the gate. “Stanley Konkol has passed away.”

“How’s this?” Grandma stopped hanging up the wet sheets on the laundry line.

“I ran into his daughter. I found everything out from her. His heart gave out.”

“That must be tragic for her.”

“Yes and no. She admitted to me that her father just won a heap of cash playing the lottery.”

Grandma quickly exchanged looks with Adam. “Well… the woman will finally be able to treat herself. She’s young. Maybe she’ll buy herself something at the department store in Krakow? Or… she could pay for a decent tombstone for him… why not? From marble.”

“Either way, she’s done working at the egg cooperative. That’s all I know.” And Grandpa shrugged his shoulders.

“You could try your luck at a ticket too, you know,” Grandma said. “It would be more useful than your silkworms. Or fulfilling some bonds or other.”

And once again, she exchanged looks with her grandson. But Grandpa wasn’t listening to her. He turned back to the gate and stuck his head out onto the street. “You hear that, Adam? Your parents are back.” He tried to sound cheerful.

“Already?” the boy blurted out.

“Look Phela, how his face has fallen. Well… don’t worry, I’ll give you a tin water whistle bird to Krakow,” Grandpa started to reassure him. “I soldered it yesterday.”

“Look at what that son of yours is scribbling in his math book!” His father turned angrily around on the veranda, holding up the notebook. It seemed to Adam that something grated next to his dirty yellow travelling coat, like the cotton ball that had jostled his ear.

His father read aloud, “Grandma pounds the cutlet – 7 times. Fiver the neighbour’s lungs wheeze awfully – 5. Or this: ‘Eight sneezing nutrias, because the smoke from Mr. Arc Sevensky’s cutlets is tingling them.’ NOA. What’s this? Some Arc of Noah?”

“807, The Old Colony!” Adam choked out, on the verge of tears. “Grandma’s house number.”

“Nonsense!” his father propelled the notebook towards the muckheap, at the very end of the woodshed.

“924.789!” Adam cried out without thinking, preferring to close his eyes.

“Adam! Adam?” he heard his mother’s muffled voice. He even smelled the fragrance of her powder. But in another moment, something dark, like the belly of a storm cloud, fell over the Old Colony. Maybe it was, after all, his father’s hand, because he saw – he didn’t see, his father’s lifeline, dashing like a river, additionally swelling with the scarlet of anger.

Bang! Bump!

“Don’t box his ears, or he’ll stay that way!”

“I’ll give him a system! Look! As if that weren’t enough for him, he’s smiling stupidly!”

Under Adam’s eyelids, thousands of bedazzling stars flared up. As though a vivid bag had erupted, and thousands of bright numbers had spilled out. The faces washed away in teary crystals. His father’s voice clearly mocked him:

“One sloth, reeking like that nutria, eats soup with a shovel. Then he devours the cerebellum of a rooster named wYe. Soup in the cup, and the jig is up!”

Gliding into epiphany, Adam noticed something unusual. Behold! The entire house with the veranda and the woodshed, there, behind his parents’ backs, had flinched and begun to drag itself, as though it were Gulliver’s body. His parents’, leaning over their son, hadn’t perceived this yet. Grandma and Grandpa – likewise no. Meanwhile, sharp streaks sliced the sky over their heads. Light threads appeared in the apple tree’s branches, and in the phlox thicket. They shot out, as if a drunken coachman lashed his whip over the roof of the woodshed. The threads entwined the branches.

They’re losing apples, shaking the last sweetness of the summer from the phloxes. Only then do his parents sense what is happening: an increasingly thick, threadlike fog blanketed the house, the woodshed, the apple tree, the phloxes, and the muckheap. The entire front yard is now one spindle, or a large ear cotton ball, or a giant cocoon, which slowly rotates, emitting cracks and creaks, first the rotten old woodshed, and then the grinding brick house. You could hear the spooked rabbits and clucking hens. Ypsilon’s yapping moved away, and somewhere in the distance, the nutrias sneezed. The roof panels crumbled. The roofing felt on the veranda ripped. Adam encountered a thought on his way: how does that cocoon know that it has to drag itself to the Dunajec River? Because that’s also happening… The electrical pole next to Auntie Lola’s house sparks like a match, and a huge sphere, rubbing against the neighbour’s chestnut tree; smothers the electric sparks under its mass. Adam knows that he himself is rolling towards the river, in the direction of the Kaduk neighbourhood. There, by some miracle, his parents dropped off, and then gently, onto a bundle of wheat, Grandpa and Grandma dismounted.

“Look at what you’ve done! They’ll lock you away, no doubt about it! For life!” He hears Grandma for the last time. Now, he’s travelling on his own, perhaps with one chicken and two rabbits. They fall softly into the water. The tempestuous Dunajec carries the silk spool all the way to the Vistula River. In the afternoon they pass by Warsaw (they see the Palace of Culture), and in the evening, they drift out to sea. The Baltic coast guard takes hold of the white ball beyond the wall of fog, and nobody raises the alarm. As it is, onwards we go! Upon the salty waves! Past the Iron Curtain! To Bornholm!

And the boy thinks he can see lights on the horizon. As though ten lighthouses had lit up simultaneously. And, even without his father’s strike on the back of his head, a string of bright numbers appears. Somewhat like white chalk on the night’s blackboard. From 1 to 9 and zero. And the equal sign. And those letters.

It looked like this: