My First Suicide. Jerzy Pilch

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СКАЧАТЬ he ought to have taken his seat long ago. I stood for about another half a minute, and finally, in deathlike silence, I sat down on my chair. Copious sweat appeared on my forehead—I knew that I would have to suffer punishment.

      The cooks brought in the second course, but the beef roulades and the veal cutlets were not salvation, they signified only a delay full of torment. Anyway, I didn’t have to wait long. My old man didn’t even try the second meat dish, he chewed a bit of the first (in other words, the roulade), stood up from the table, and went to change into his work clothes. A first, a second, a third slamming of doors reached us from the depths of the house, and after a moment the rhythmic pounding of a hammer resounded from the garage. The Lutherans, who were gathered around the table, relaxed a bit, began to glance at each other with recognition, and they smiled with pride: it is well known that when something bad happens, when the demons come, the best thing to do is to get to work. In spite of the horror of the situation, or perhaps on account of that horror, the question suddenly began to torment me: What sort of task had my old man set himself, and what was he so rabidly hammering?

      Mother bustled over to the kitchen. I flew after her, I stood by the window, and I glanced at the snow-covered garden. “Mama,” I said quietly, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.” She turned toward me, a monstrous fury—all the more monstrous, because it was silent—contorted her face. She began to threaten me in silence, to make signs—toward the garage, in which my old man might die any moment from overwork; toward the dining room, in which the guests now sat, left to themselves—and she threatened me with all her might. For a good two, three minutes she didn’t say a thing; in the end, however, she couldn’t stand the pressure of the silence; she stood on tiptoe, and she hissed: “How could you lie! How could you lie about going on an excursion to the dam in Porąbka, to the camp in Auschwitz, or to the Błędów Desert, when you went who knows where!” “Mama,” I said with a trembling voice, “that was more than thirty years ago.” “And what if something had happened to anyone, how were we supposed to let you know? Where were we supposed to look for you. What if someone had died? What then? Everybody at home is certain that you are at the dam in Porąbka, in the camp in Auschwitz, or in the Błędów Desert, and you are who knows where! Alone to boot! And what if something had happened to you? Where did you go? To the mountains? By bus? But we had a car! Father would have driven you everywhere! I would have been glad to go myself! But you, you arrogant egotist, preferred to go alone! By bus! In the crush! Paying money for it! Instead of comfortably and for free! An entire life of worry!”

      Mother covered her face with her hands and tried to summon up tears of despair—she wasn’t having much luck. The hubbub in the dining room was increasing. I didn’t have to be there to know that the fledgling singer in the lizard-green dress was beginning to figure out that something wasn’t right, that she was getting up from her place, that the remaining guests were interpreting this gesture as a demonstrative desire to leave the dinner, and they are attempting to stop her almost by force, that the amber suntan of my current love is turning pale as paper, and suddenly the terrified girl begins to assure them spasmodically that she doesn’t know what is going on here, and that she doesn’t know where she is at all; or what it is about; and she doesn’t have a clue where, and to whom, I travelled after my matura, because it certainly wasn’t to her! Perhaps I didn’t travel to the dam in Porąbka, to the camp in Auschwitz, or to the Błędów Desert, but it wasn’t to her either, because she wasn’t even born then! And she hasn’t been with me for thirty years, because she is only twenty-four years old, and why these absurd lies? Lutheran customs are one thing, but absurd lies are quite another matter!

      Through four, five, and perhaps even six walls you could hear that the fledgling singer in the lizard-green dress was beginning to cry, that the Protestants surrounding her in ever tighter circles are first seized by agitation, but they immediately begin to calm down, and they attempt to calm her, too, and they defend me with all their might. They assure her emphatically that I hadn’t lied, and that I’m not lying, because Lutherans never lie, but that I speak the truth, and I pray for the truth, because what I had said was a prayer for truth, the prayer of a person who had strayed in a moment of weakness from the path of truth but prays for a return to that path, and my prayer was heard, and it became the truth. And through the walls I heard my current love’s scream, full of animal fear, and, on my word, I absolutely intended to return there as quickly as possible, and to explain everything, perhaps even to defuse the situation with some sort of joke—although I didn’t yet know what sort. But first I had to run to Father. I left Mother, who was still having difficulty—this was altogether odd—trying to get a good lament going, and in a sprint, skipping two, three steps, I flew to the garage.

      At first, I was horrified in good earnest, for it seemed that Father had gone utterly mad on my account. In canvas pants lowered to his knees, he stood next to an enormous oak table, which served him as a workbench, and he pounded—extremely methodically—an enormous steel nail into the table-top. He pounded it in methodically, but very shallowly—a half centimeter—then he tore it out, furiously and with superhuman effort, moved it over some three centimeters with incredible precision, and pounded it in again, and again tore it out, and again moved it over. Terrible was my horror, and equally great the relief, when I realized that my old man had not gone mad after all; rather, as normally as could be, with all precision and solidity, he was pounding extra holes in the pants belt that was lying on the table. I stood in the doorway. The table was high, and what is more it was outfitted on two sides with a slat that stuck up above the table-top, so that screws, nails, and all sorts of miniature elements wouldn’t fall on the ground, and quite simply—and my agitation was not without its significance here—at first I hadn’t noticed the belt carefully laid out on the table. “Papa,” I said in a panicky attempt to pretend at being matter of fact, “can I help you with anything? Or can I bring you something to drink?” Father stopped pounding extra holes and looked at me the way he was accustomed to look at all intruders and spongers who interrupt his work—motionlessly and heavily. The hammer hung in the raised hand equally motionlessly and equally heavily, while the belt, as if the spirit of a snake had entered it, began slowly, then ever more quickly, to slide off the table. With an elemental reflex, I jumped up. I was unable, however, to grab it in flight. It fell on the cement floor. I bent over to pick it up, and again I was unable to do it, for I felt a light—I emphasize—very light blow to my head.

      The fledgling singer claims to this day that she found me lying under the table, unconscious and covered with blood, but this is rather a schoolgirl’s and—if I may say so—non-ecumenical and typically Catholic hysteria. Father had tapped me very lightly also because, at his age, he was simply incapable of tapping forcefully. In addition to that, he was standing there—I remind you—with his pants down, and it is well known that a man with his pants down is totally self-conscious, and all his movements, including movements of the hands, are self-conscious and limited. (A man with his pants down—to forge a dazzling aphorism on the fly—has no other goal in life than to pull his pants up.) True, an insignificant splitting of the skin and some bleeding, incommensurately abundant for the small wound, had ensued, but all the further results—that is to say: the trip to the emergency room; the examination; the obstinacy of the mean-sprited doctor, who stubbornly insisted that, as a result of the blow to the head from a blunt instrument, I had received a concussion; the narrow-minded phone call to the police; the arrival of the policemen at home; Father’s arrest and detention at the police-station for forty-eight hours—these were all absolutely unnecessary things.

      Although, on the other hand, maybe they were necessary. In some non-superficial and—if I can put it this way—deeply familial and genuinely communal sense, perhaps they were downright indispensable. For after that, whenever I would meet with my parents, we would laugh ourselves to tears over those events. We especially split our sides over the memory of the guests, a portion of whom—upon hearing that Father had murdered me with a hammer in the garage—couldn’t measure up to the demands of Lutheran toughness and rushed into panicky flight. While the other portion—Father adored precisely that episode, and when he recalled it, he cried, in the strict sense, he cried from laughter; for the portion of the guests that didn’t rush into panicky flight, but rather СКАЧАТЬ