A Thousand Peaceful Cities. Jerzy Pilch

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СКАЧАТЬ of the residents, an oval table covered with a cloth, the remains of banquets that never end, hammocks, easy chairs, old architecture, a thousand gentle rivers under a thousand old bridges, lazy girls going for walks along grassy shores . . .

      “My dear boy, I’m afraid it’s already too late. If you have the misfortune to chance upon a lazy body at the very beginning of your youth, you’ll be lost for life. Your innate tendency toward laziness will be awakened and set for all time, and you’ll spend your entire life searching for the promised land of laziness. You’ll pass through a thousand peaceful cities. All your life you’ll hunger for lazy arms. You won’t live; you’ll sleep instead. You’ll sleep your entire life away. To live, or to sleep, that, of course, is the question. But ultimately, as a believing Protestant you should adhere to Scripture, and in Scripture it is written that everything has its time, there’s a time to live and a time to sleep. Don’t you understand? Those two bodies sleep constantly. They are just two eternally sleeping sisters who sleep walking, and sleep eating, and sleep standing, and sleep sitting. Can’t any of you understand that’s why they drag their Babylonian blanket into the depths of the forest? Because they always have to have the saving, magical prop of sleep with them? But suit yourself, Jerzyk.

       “The third time I saw you was when, in the company of your Mom, Dad, and your eternally drunken house friend, you were walking to services at your church on a Sunday. I followed you, driven not only by the curiosity of the tourist. I sat in a pew at the back under the bell tower. I like the fact that in your Church you don’t have to kneel. But I didn’t like the sermon at all. The sermon was absolutely horrifying. I don’t wish to offend your religious feelings, but your local father pastor gives the impression of believing much more strongly in the devil than in God. Strictly speaking, he believes in the devil without question; whether he believes in God, however, remains undecided. If I’m not mistaken, Martin Luther had that same problem. Ultimately there’s no surprise here: either you make a schism, or you play tiddlywinks.

      “The fourth time I saw you in the swimming pool. Jerzyk, you swim badly. You play soccer, however, like a Brazilian. Last week I stood on the road that runs above the playing field, and then I saw you for the fifth time. You dribbled the ball faultlessly. But that time, when you set out from almost the middle of the field, and in a sprint you passed two defenders, you faked out a third, and then, one on one with the goalie, with a crafty feint you laid him flat in one corner of the goal, and with a delicate grazing of your foot you placed the ball in the opposite corner—oh, Jerzyk, that was so beautiful that my hands brought themselves together in applause of their own volition.

      “The sixth time—anyway, it’s not important where it was; I saw you for a sixth time . . . And the seventh and perhaps thousandth time I saw you in your room, where you peep at me, always in the same infantile pose. A thousand identical poses I count as one pose. You see, Jerzyk, I know everything about you. But don’t be afraid that I’m a state functionary who keeps an eavesdropping apparatus under her pillow. Or maybe, do be a little afraid. But now, to make it fair, I’ll tell you everything about me. Or rather, there is no question here of any sort of fairness. After all, you haven’t told me a thing, since you don’t say anything at all, and your silence, to tell the truth, is just as captivating as your shoulders. Men, Jerzyk, shouldn’t speak at all before forty, and even after forty—not very much. The infrequent exceptions confirm the rule. You do quite right, Jerzyk, by not speaking very much, by mostly attempting instead to record the sentences you hear. If, in addition, you could succeed in shaking off your inclination for lazy bodies (although I know you won’t manage it, you scoundrel), who knows, who knows—perhaps you could become a real man. Come here, we’ll rest a bit.”

      And we sat down on a bench on the river bank. Behind us the lights were burning in the windows of the Sports Center. Our multiplied shadows were laid out upon the water. Time and again a single coin of radiance fell upon her restless knees. It turned out that what she had been squeezing under her arm was neither a purse, nor a document case, nor a teacher’s day planner. Although all my cognitive powers remained absolutely dominated by her, nonetheless this amazing bit of information managed to reach me. And so, I watched with the greatest amazement as the angel of my first love placed a small photo album on our contiguous thighs and turned sheet after sheet.

      I glanced at photos of people I didn’t know with the aversion and disgust that a motionless crowd always arouses. It was as if random passersby suddenly stopped in their tracks, approached, and forced you to contemplate their repulsive randomness. To be sure, her face appeared in this crowd time and again, but every time it was altered, in other hairstyles and in other eras. She began speaking to me again. Her hand moved from photo to photo. She told me the story of her family, episodes from the life of closer and more distant acquaintances. I listened, and I looked attentively, but nothing here settled into a whole.

      “Here I am, standing on the balcony. A bad picture, but in the background you can see a little bit of Żoliborz. Trusia lived in this house, my best girlfriend. Her picture is also here somewhere. She’s no longer living. What can I say? My grandparents on their way to Biały. They had struck up a friendship with a certain German, but you can’t see the German; he must have taken the picture. My father, but I’m not sure where. Look, he seems to be standing in the middle of a huge field with a bottle of beer in his hand. So much time has passed, but I still can’t figure out where, when, and by whom this picture of him was taken. He’s looking somewhere in the distance. He still had his sight then, poor fellow. He’s looking as if he wanted to take in the whole world, the plain and the grass. The entire family and everybody else laughing. This was truly a rarity. No one would ever have thought that that was me, and yet that’s me in the very middle. I’m even younger than you in this picture. Here I am during my apprenticeship at Mr. Mentzel’s drugstore. You see how beautiful I was, how well that white chiton became me. Aunt and Uncle Fiałkowski with little Tommie on a sleigh. To this day I don’t like him. Already as a child he had the eyes of a devil. With mother in the window. Do you know that the same curtain is hanging in my apartment to this day? My brother on vacation. With friends on the Cracow Market Square five minutes before such a downpour—I’ve never been so wet in my life. And this, Jerzyk, is my wedding photo. Just don’t be jealous. I had a green dress. Just imagine what went on. My handsome husband in a grey suit. Do you know how much he earns? Her earns a lot. In addition, he’s intelligent and good with children. He adores playing chess. I don’t love him, and I’ve probably never loved him. He’ll be coming here day after tomorrow, on Sunday. If you know how to play chess, come over and play a game with him. I beg you, Jerzyk. If he doesn’t have someone to play chess with, he plays by himself, and I am always afraid something terrible will happen then. Those are my children. That’s Jaś, and that’s Małgosia, and that’s me, Baba Yaga. No, not Yaga. Teresa. I keep my word. I always keep my word, because that’s just how I am. Understand? My name is Teresa. Teresa, and that’s it. No diminutives, distortions, transpositions, forms of endearment. I hate that. I hate that, because that’s just how I am. Understand? Just Teresa. No Terenia, Renia, Tereska, Kareska, no Tessa, Tereńka, Eśka, no Teresiuńka. Teresa. The whole story. Teresa at her high-school graduation. Teresa at the beach. Teresa in a ball gown. That one in the uniform is my husband’s boss. There’s a full vodka glass in the foreground, of course. You understand, Jerzyk, there is no joking with these gentlemen. They mostly don’t smile. Even if you were to tell them a delicious joke about an assassination attempt on the life of the First Secretary, I assure you—they won’t laugh. And that is mother and father half a year before their deaths. By the end of their lives they had come to hate each other so much that the one couldn’t live without the other, and Dad died six weeks after Mom. And half a year earlier they both had passport photos taken. This appalls me, Jerzyk. A horrible secret lurks here, a terrible mystery.”

      And indeed, there was something peculiar in the seemingly normal passport photos of two old people. She had smiled at the camera, but it was a smile that was not so much artificial as stamped with some sort of desperate determination. In the widely gaping eyes of the blind man you felt the childish hope that in a moment he would see the flash of the magnesium cutting through the all-encompassing darkness.

      “Neither СКАЧАТЬ