The exit door slammed twice, the security lock gave a guttural squeal, and a titanium bolt flashed, and Kosma was already on the stairs. After a few days spent writing, he always felt light, insignificant, as if drawn with a finger on the window. A long period spent not writing had instilled in him an ever-increasing weight of sentences, maxims, paragraphs, and chapters, while now he could barely graze the steps with his instep. He stopped on the landing and looked up the decade of floors, through the trellises of the balustrades and the leaves of the withering ficus trees. Somewhere above him lurked ten floors he knew nothing about, ten floors filled with people he'd glimpsed only fleetingly in the square outside his apartment building, or in the queue for rolls and rolling papers. Kosma never ventured a single step above the floor he lived on, which filled him with shame. He thought that if he had already set foot on that first step, and someone had noticed him, to avoid giving the impression of a peddler or a thief, he would have had to continue on with a confident and determined step. He imagined passing each floor, and that person entering with quiet persistence, right behind him. Kosma would have been afraid to stop at any door and pretend to be searching for keys, lest it turn out to be that person's apartment. And so they would have climbed ten flights, huffing and puffing. And the moment Kosma approached the last door, still feeling that person's breath on his back, and realizing they lived in the last apartment, on the top floor, all that was left for him to do was, so as not to give the impression of a peddler or a thief, open the vent to the roof and plunge ten flights, ending his flight in the square in front of the building. Kosma had never, ever dared to set foot on a step above the floor he lived on.
He was now running downstairs, whistling merrily, curiously observing the colorful scribbles that had sprouted like mushrooms on the walls of the cage during his hibernation. Short, sparse messages of love and hate had accumulated over the years, creating a kind of expressionistic chronicle documenting the residents' mutual animosities and affections. Due to the limited space, the inscriptions gradually overlapped, resulting in a growing confusion of terms. It was increasingly difficult to determine who loved whom, who hated whom, who had the best tits on the estate, and who was a whore, a scoundrel, and who was generally not worth hanging out with. Kosma concentratedly traced the ornate tags and ornate slogans with his fingertips, tracing the biographies of their creators, their highs and lows, their rosy and blue periods, their alcoholic deliriums and drug-induced traumas. When the caretaker's door opened downstairs, he struggled to break away from it, ran down the last six steps, and went outside.
Mortal reality was depressingly gray and damp, a damp wind whipped the lapels of Kosma's jacket repeatedly. A tall linden tree exuded a sweet fragrance carried far and wide by the wind. Wild pansies, red and purple, bursting into bloom in the long-unmowed square, vanishing in clusters of weeds, glistening with pearly droplets, were ablaze. When Kosma looked back, he saw a cascade of ten balconies, flowing with a curtain of multicolored geraniums, tightly covered with menacing gray cumulus clouds. Nearby apartment buildings, long unpainted, creaked with chipped gutters and warped glass vents beneath bumps in the dark blue plaster. Everything was exactly as Kosma remembered it when he'd lit a cigarette six months ago.
He turned onto the sidewalk that snaked between the apartment buildings in the grip of a strong young hedge. The sidewalk ended in four steps leading to a tram terminus, beyond which began the allotment gardens. At the terminus, Kosma bought a set of the day's newspapers and cigarettes. He stretched out on a nearby bench and, ignoring the drops of water that spilled in dark smudges on the chalky white pages, scanned the front pages.
The Prime Minister delivered a moving exposé, which, to the surprise of the opposition, the current coalition, and himself, resulted in a vote of confidence for the following year. In Poznań, during a pre-sale of a book by a young, ambitious writer, riots broke out – three people were seriously injured, and more than a dozen shops were looted. The autobiography of one of the presidential candidates was published, resulting in support for him exceeding that of the other contenders several times over.
The rain intensified, and Kosma was forced to continue his reading under the tin roof of a newspaper kiosk. He skimmed the obituaries, briefly and without much thought, pausing on the epitaph of the painter Franciszek Ptak, which brazenly took up an entire page. A few columns back, he read that his paintings were fetching record prices at auction posthumously, increasing their value several times over after the artist's death.
The entire world turned to ashes for a split second in the deathly pale glare of lightning, then the trees buckled under the weight of a booming thunder. Kosma maneuvered between brown puddles that spread wider with each passing second, shielding himself with a fan of thoroughly soaked newspapers. When he reached the ATM, nestled in a sheltered alcove on the corner of the building, he tucked it into his belt. He'd always wondered how it was possible that, seconds after inserting his card, a cubic meter of electronics could tell Kosma how much money he had and how much he couldn't declare. His home computer hiccuped when it displayed photos of more than two people, yet such a primitive ATM could decide in a split second whether to spit out a wad of banknotes at Kosma or calmly inform him that he could kiss his ass, but he couldn't get the money because he had an overdraft. Presumably, each time, the ATM was bluffing, perhaps gauging the person in front of it with the temperature of his finger or the twitching of his eyelid to determine their level of nervousness, and based on that, he either threw up cash or didn't. Kosma wiped his hands on his pants and, with his eyes closed, trying to appear friendly despite this, punched in his PIN. The screen came to life, boasted about what it could do, and, as Kosma had instructed, displayed a history of recent transactions. Kosma was pleased to see that the fees for the exposé, the novel, the biography, and the epitaph had already been deposited into his account. The rain began to unleash spontaneously, lashing the sidewalks, the flowerbeds, and the unexpectedly besieged passersby. It also lashed the stooped figure of the world's greatest writer, who glided like a frog, dodging puddles toward the geranium-red apartment building.
He remembered lying on the bed with Anna once, stretched across her lap, gazing at the pastel-painted sky on the ceiling. Anna had asked him then, as she always did, with a hint of amusement, a charming note of mockery hidden behind slightly parted lips. She had asked him as she always did, casually, between one unfinished sentence and the next, half-started, half-sitting, half-lying, ambiguously. She had asked him how it was possible that Kosma was the best writer in the world.
Kosma had then rolled onto his back and replied thoughtfully,
"Do you know Stanisław Jaskółka's books? He's said to be the best writer because his books sell in fabulous numbers, numbers that outshine all the competition combined in their sheer scale." But true critics sense through their skin that this is actually a fraud, and behind the facades of artfully constructed phrases and paragraphs lurks silence. Does lying make a master of the one who wields it with a virtuosity that arouses the envy of others?
"My golden-tongued one," whispered Anna, following Cosimo's gaze from cloud to cloud.
"There's also John Trout. A Nobel Prize winner, author of several unassuming collections of poems that brutally brought connoisseurs of lyric poetry to their knees. It's said that no one else has ever rhymed with such subtlety, such tenderness, no one but John Trout. If we're talking about the greatest writers, we have to mention him as one of the first.
" "And as whom do we mention you?"
"We'll get to that in a moment. When listing the most eminent, we can't forget Moses Wurm. His thousand-page novel "The Cage" fascinates readers worldwide. Not a single word on a thousand pages is accidental, and the whole thing is held together by a mathematical formula, like the notation of a chess game, reminiscent of a simulation of ocean tides. This book contains a thousand other novels, read every other word, every other chapter, backwards, diagonally, diagonally, with the movement of a chess knight—it is a great work." One should also not forget the diaries of Amelia Truhard, the essays of Hitomi Nakoischi, the disturbing short stories of Yuri Perefiev.
"And you?
" "And I..." Kosma closed his eyes and found that even through his closed lids he could see clouds, clouds, and clouds above him, white ribbons left behind by airplanes slicing the sky, the black dots of birds gliding unconsciously through the cold, empty air. He felt the gust of the approaching wind on his cheeks and ears, which would soon sway the red geraniums in their little pots on the windowsill, and he heard the echoes of other cities carried along the electric lines.
"And I..." he began, "I wrote all of Stanisław Jaskółka's books, John Trout's poems, Moses Wurm's novel, Amelia Truhard's diaries, Hitomi Nakoischi's essays, Yuri Perefiev's short stories."
They lay quietly side by side, long after dusk had fallen.
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