The Ambient Music of the Cosmos
by Krzysztof Varga
translated by Wiesiek Powaga

Copyright © Krzysztof Varga, translation copyright © Wiesiek Powaga, reproduced by kind permission of the author

Again the same leaf tea, strong, in the same mug, a clay measure of time with a handle. On its thin walls and on the inner wall of the teeth beyond the reach of a toothbrush gathers the tea silt. Another Sunday and the same, recently unwashed window onto the world with broken hinges. On its other side a lazy bus on a sweaty post-Saturday road slowly, reluctantly pulls up at the bus stop.



The earthly remains of grey snow on the stinking rotting grass. Burnt out tree stumps and picking it’s way among them a colourful buggy with the screaming evidence of the demographic high, the result of a really good party, alcohol and a spare room, whose intimacy was guarded by your best mate whose job it was to turn away the intruders.



It’s all the magic of numbers, I say, punching a complex set of numbers into the telephone pad, holding the receiver at a safe distance. That’s what it is, something difficult to get off the ground: the unwritten letter, the undrawn journey plan, the stifling inability to go through with this conversation which reminds one of yet another round of the peace talks shown everyday on television.



Behind the net curtain, which is trying to hide the dirt on the window pane, on the four-coloured sky, making love amidst their mating drone, two helicopters are being observed with the thrill of an unknown emotion by extraterrestrial voyeurs who sometimes visit these parts.

You know what I mean, I say to the receiver which has pricked its ears, ready for another many-minute talk about popular science articles read in weeklies with red covers. Recurrent or parallel worlds, that’s what bugs me when I see myself making with manic insistence yet another wrong decision.



Just think, I say into the little plastic sieve, that the same conversation is taking place in an identical city some millions of light years away form here. Another me, exactly the same, really, with exactly the same pox marks, nice and witty, saying the same words with the same warm, slightly rasping voice, wearing the same clothes smelling of conditioner for delicates.



The same ivory plastic telephone, the same dear friends. Or several, identical me’s: five, ten me’s on the same wonderful afternoon, saying the same things into amazingly patient telephone receivers. Or: regular repetition of the same situation, life as a recipe for apple cake copied into several hundred copies, spat out on still warm A-4s from the hot innards of a cosmic photocopier every other galactic springtime.



Just think: we here (young or perhaps middle aged?), that long unimportant conversation, helicopters and then sudden hibernation, in the worm wriggling earth rather than in a fridge, waiting for a smaller or bigger explosion, the gigantic churn making the plant dough, screeching pterodactyls, Neanderthal men from the old illustrations, just beginning to look different from animals by way of using tools, and then us.



Cool, as if nothing happened, with my pox marks and silly jokes up my sleeve, you with your irritating whinging, while clouds and cars are passing us by, a string of wasted Saturdays and Sundays, Christmas full of food, wasted holidays, books read god knows why, only to be forgotten to make room for more books. Again, someone will have to invent the telephone and the helicopter. It will be warm, like in spring, though it’s hard to enjoy the exhumation of nature.



Coming from a colourful buggy can be heard a child’s cry, which in a moment will stop and then start again, in so many light years in the same place. And again, as if driven by some curse laid on my ancestors, I will have to dial that number, hoping no one will answer.