My First Suicide. Jerzy Pilch

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a little piece. Mother ruthlessly exploited this moment of inattention and attacked him with her whole body. The old man began to retreat. She dexterously opened the refrigerator and extracted a bunch of frankfurters, obtained by God knows what sort of miracle, and began to flog Father with them like a mad woman. He, in turn, raving with pain, blindly felt around for the jars of compote standing on the shelves in the hallway, grabbed one of them (it turned out to be greengage plums), and with an automatic motion, practiced during a thousand Sunday dinners, pulled the rubber seal, opened it, and poured it on her, as if in the hope that this would sober her up. But no, she went on flogging him. He shook the empty jar like a tambourine, or perhaps like the flag of defeat.

      In a more and more powerful and spasmodic clench, like a couple of avant-garde performers, or wrestlers of equal strength, they sailed through the hallway and rolled into the bedroom. The door, as if touched by an invisible force, closed behind them. For a moment you could still hear the lashing of frankfurters, then silence set in, then the lights went out.

The scene of the auditioning stripper had passed irrevocably. There wasn’t any point in comforting myself with the thought that, when I grew up, in addition to being a famous soccer player, I would also be the manager of a strip joint. I had to accept the more tragic truth: namely, that I would die without seeing a naked woman. That not even on the screen of a Nefryt television set would it be given unto me to verify whether there was even a grain of sense in Pastor Kalinowski’s exceptionally enchanting biblical metaphor of the roe-deer twins that feedeth amongst the lilies.****

      I did my best to bypass the warpath marked out by the shreds of frankfurters, pancakes, cutlets, and other minerals that formed the rock of our house. Once, twice, maybe three times, I made the leap back and forth, but I wasn’t drawn by this new Olympic discipline. There wasn’t any call for it, but in the face of the final prospect I made my way to the bathroom. I didn’t have a particularly keen awareness that I was washing a body that, in a few hours, would become the body of a corpse, but it could be that I was genetically burdened with that sort of awareness.

      For ages, Grandma Pech had been a well known Wisła virtuoso in the art of washing and dressing corpses. Tens, or perhaps hundreds, of the deceased passed through her hands in the strict sense of the phrase. In the next to last year of the First World War—when her mother and three of her brothers died from the Spanish flu almost simultaneously—my eleven-year-old Grandma was initiated into the arcana of the lightning-fast washing and dressing of corpses before they could grow stiff. For years and decades thereafter people sent for her from households with suddenly closed drapes. She never refused, she was always ready. She would get up in the middle of the night, put on the gray-black dress that was like her service uniform, pack a kitchen apron, a supply of flannel, cotton wool, and a bottle of rectified spirits into an oilcloth bag, and, either on foot or with the horses sent for her, she would hasten to the house surrounded by a different light, and she would wash and comb the bodies as they were losing softness, and wipe the faces with spirits. She would plait the tresses of the deceased women, and hundreds of times she would hear and see the signs left by the departing souls.

      The atavistic nature of the thing forced me to repeat her motions. I glided the sponge over my shoulders with the same solicitude with which she touched the deceased Lutherans with cotton wool soaked in spirits. I was finally ready. I opened the sofa, made my bed, lay down. I kept constant vigil. I didn’t fall asleep. Time passed slowly, but it passed, and after at least two, and perhaps three penultimate hours, the final hour rang. I got up cautiously, brought the chair over, got on it, and began to move hook after hook to perfection. After moving the seventh, when in the first drape I had only four hooks left to the end, the light went on in my folks’ room. The door there opened abruptly, Father flashed through the hallway like a shot, then he fell into the bathroom like an exploding artillery shell, and immediately there resounded from that direction the sonorous rumble of bestial hurling.

      I jumped down off the chair, put it back in its place, and returned to bed. I heard Mother’s delicate steps. She came into my room; she smelled of raw meat; from under half-shut eyes I saw that smile of hers, bizarre and not of this world. A streak of food, rubbed to a tawny mucous, cut across her cheek. She went up to the window in absolute somnambulistic absence and mechanically closed the drapes.

      Only now do I understand that the history of my first suicide is also a story about how alcohol, for the first time in my life, deprived me of my freedom. I mean, of course, the alcohol that was making its presence known in my old man’s entrails. The poor guy puked almost to the break of dawn. He had a weak head.

****There isn’t.

      All the Stories

      I

      In the environs of the little Austro-Hungarian town in which we performed our Socialist Student Workers’ Traineeship there prowled a Silesian vampire, and from the very beginning the girls from the local Dressmakers’ Technical College looked upon us with fear. They would turn tail, pick up the pace, respond badly to even the most sophisticated attempts at striking up a conversation. And we really knew how to strike up a conversation—not all of us, of course; not all of our five-man brigade knew how to strike up a conversation—but Wittenberg and I had an innate expertise. We strove for the maximal effect, elaborated on the plenitude of possibilities, turned cartwheels to construct tempting persuasions—all for nothing. The splendidly dressed misses from the clothiers’ school wouldn’t even pretend that they were making a date, that they would come for coffee, that they would say yes to an invitation to the dance. Not even as a form of good riddance would they say that they would see, they would make an effort, they would give it a try, and if they could find a moment, they would drop by.

      Every day, after knocking off work, we would go to the local dive called Europa and one of seven indistinguishable local alcoholics would tell us the next in the series of stories about the vampire; we would each drink two beers and then go over to the Technical College building, which was beautifully situated in the depths of a park that had run wild. These expeditions were conducted in vain. Almost all the windows were closed, in spite of the September heat wave; the massive crowns of the oaks, and the equally massive clouds were reflected in the panes—and not a living soul.

      Out back, on the playing field, there was no one; in the residential wing—no one; in the quite visible corridors—no one. Not a trace of a figure running by, not a shadow of shoulders, hair, feet. No billowing frock, cast off scarf, brooch, bracelet, ribbon. There was the barely perceptible scent of perfume—but even this might have been a pious wish. No song, no laughter, no giggles. Once, it seemed to us that we heard the murmur of a hair dryer; but this could just as well have been the distant drone of a biplane flying south. Other than that, neither hide nor hair. A complete void, wilderness, and, what follows from this, the complete absence of civilized customs.

      It goes without saying, Poland at that time—anno Domini 1971—was under the Muscovite yoke, but regardless of the yoke, and regardless of the political system, it is accepted in all of human civilization that when, outside a woman’s boarding house, school, dormitory, workers’ hotel, convent, or even, for that matter, prison, there stands a group of starving men, and even if they are not granted entrance, they will at least receive an answer. Sooner or later, a window is cracked, and at first in the cracked window, and later in the wide open window, the boldest of the inhabitants (usually the chorus leader of middling looks) appears, and the exciting dialogue—although usually full of every sort of idiocy—begins.

      “Are the gentlemen seeking something? Have they perhaps lost something?”

      “We haven’t lost anything, but we are seeking.”

      “If you haven’t lost anything, you can’t be seeking it.”

      “We СКАЧАТЬ