My First Suicide. Jerzy Pilch

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СКАЧАТЬ in the biblical Babylon, they didn’t use gas to heat the stoves and the baths, but in Krakow they do! In Krakow, at any moment everything might be blown sky high! They had warned, and they had cautioned! A thousand times they warned and cautioned! And the other dangers? Did they not caution against them? Did they not warn about the numerous cars, under which I could fall at any moment? About the bandits and murderers who could attack me at any moment? About the Catholics, who at any moment could plant confusion in my head? They cautioned and warned about a thousand—what thousand? a million!—yes, about a million other dangers that threatened me, the very potential presence of which my mind had most clearly been incapable of withstanding. Not bad. After my death, the world will not look bad at all.

      As was always the case when my old man was late, Mother cranked up various domestic chores to full blast: she baked, she put wash into the washing machine, she got out the vacuum cleaner. The point was so that the old man, when he finally did come home, would find her in full domestic fervor and have even greater feelings of guilt over the fact that he was late, and drunk, and that there was so much to be done at home, and it was all on her shoulders. The complete innovation, the original embellishment, the genuine pearl of my suicide, was the thought that, this time, Mother would also be harshly punished for preying on my old man’s sense of guilt. After all, when I kill myself she, too, will have a terrible sense of guilt. All the more terrible in that it would begin with the simplest question in the world: How could she not have woken up? How could she not have woken up when I got up from the sofa bed at night? How could she not have woken up when I pulled back the drapes? How could she not have woken up when I went out onto the balcony in nothing but my pajamas? In nothing—during such a cold spell—but my pajamas! I am not saying that Mother, like the figure of a mother taken from a derisive autobiography, would have been significantly more horrified by my possibly taking cold than by the suicide I had committed. No. I am describing the situation in her categories. And in her categories, my going out onto the balcony in pajamas was the height of everything: recklessness, stupidity, crime, and nonsense. My jump from the balcony was beyond her categories, and even beyond her language.

      I knew that she probably would not try to discover—because she would be incapable of doing it—why I had killed myself; but she would try, to her last breath, to discover why she hadn’t woken up. And that the question why she hadn’t woken up would be repeated many times, and answered in a thousand ways, so that the question why I had committed suicide could be pushed aside, and the answer to it hidden from sight. It was also certain that the odium would again fall upon my old man, for after all, if he had returned earlier, then he would have helped her out a little, and she would not have been so tired, and she would not have gone to sleep on her last legs, and she would not have slept the sleep of the dead, so exhausted and unconscious that she didn’t hear a thing.

      When my old man, devastated and up to his neck in guilt, had roused a little and begun to come around, he would surely begin to console her with the prospect of another child. Maybe not from the first moment, maybe not on the day of my death, nor on the day of my funeral, but sooner or later—yes, he would do it. You didn’t have to be a prophet, or even a writer possessed of the ability to compose in someone else’s voice, to be able to hear that it is difficult, a terrible tragedy, that they would have to bear its burden all their lives, but that it cannot put a veil on life, for life goes on, and, after all, both are still young and strong, and they could still, and probably they even ought to, try to have a child…

      On the merits, and given their ages, it was possible. When I was born, Mother was twenty years old, and when I decided to kill myself the first time—it is easy to calculate—she had barely turned thirty. Thus, if I had succeeded that time in committing suicide, and if they had decided to have a new baby soon thereafter, there would not have been any contraindications.

      And yet, for Mother, driving my old man to guilt was a narcotic without which she did not know how to live. Her instinct to harass the poor wretch—who, as it was, lived with a constant feeling of guilt—was stronger than all her other instincts. In this, she had the diabolical gift of making exceptionally surprising and venomous retorts. I was certain that she would hear out the old man’s procreational arguments—in silence, and even with feigned goodwill—and then, with studied calm, making numerous and excessive pauses, she would say that this is all fine and good, but she is very curious about one thing, she is very curious, namely, whether, when they get a baby, she is exceedingly curious whether, when that baby grows up a bit, when it reaches the twelfth, or perhaps even the tenth year of its life, well, she is exceedingly curious whether Father would again drive it to commit suicide? Whether once again—by his habit of returning home late—he would kill it? She is very curious. Very.

      It was getting later and later. Mother bustled about the kitchen more and more zealously. The old man still wasn’t home, and now it wasn’t about his feeling of guilt, in any event, not only about his feeling guilty. Now it was already so late that all of life slipped through one’s hands and scattered to the winds. And Mother cooked, and she fried, and she baked everything that formed the rock upon which our house was built: mushroom soup with homemade noodles, breaded veal cutlets, Christmas Eve cabbage, potato pancakes, apple dumplings, vanilla pudding, crêpes with cheese. A house erected on a rock is lasting, but a house erected on a rock composed of Mother’s dishes will outlast everything. The crêpes were indeed timeless. Not even my imminent suicide was able to diminish their quality. I think I ate about eight of them. Then I didn’t wash—with absolute impunity—didn’t undress, didn’t go to bed. Running amuck in my freedom, I sat in the armchair and stared at the television. I could do whatever my heart desired. I could play shove halfpenny on the windowsill, I could take out the copy of The Biology of Love, which was hidden at the bottom of the cupboard, I could stare through binoculars at the neighboring apartment block. On television, a film for adults called The Small World of Sammy Lee was starting, and I had a good chance of seeing something forbidden before I died. Mother was in the kitchen getting ready to bake a three-layer cheesecake with icing, and she was pretending that she didn’t notice my debauchery. Everything, it goes without saying, within the framework of that same vengeful strategy. Everything so that she would be able to rebuke the old man, once he had returned, for leaving me prey to forbidden obscenities on television, when she doesn’t have the strength, she truly doesn’t have the strength, to look after everything, absolutely everything.

      Unfortunately, in those days there were very few forbidden obscenities on television, and in fact, on the evening preceding my first suicide, I had incredible fortune. Fortune, one could say, in misfortune, since, when the scene in The Small World of Sammy Lee began, in which the owner of the bar ordered the newly hired stripper to do a trial run, the doorbell rang in the hallway, the door opened, and there—stiff from the cold, and the vodka—staggered in Father.

      Mother and Father stood facing each other for a long time in total silence. Then the old man, rocking and giving off steaming clouds of hoarfrost and rectified spirits, managed to stammer out that, at the Academy of Mining and Metallurgy, they had held a ping-pong tournament, and that he had once again won. At that point Mother waited a good minute more. Then she grabbed the pot of mushroom soup with homemade noodles, which was standing on the table and had already cooled off somewhat, and she poured it all over my old man. Father reeled, but he didn’t fall down. He began, at first with uncoordinated motions, then more and more precisely, to remove handfuls of the homemade noodles with which he was plastered and to fling them at Mother, but she was already in the depths of the kitchen, beyond the reach of his feckless blows. She stood at the huge skillet full of breaded veal cutlets and aimed at his head in a great rage, and she hit her mark almost every time. The old man, like a wounded bear, trundled along in her direction. On the way, his splayed fingers happened upon a pot of something that, once he had emptied it, turned out to be Christmas Eve cabbage, and now Mother was like a sea monster overgrown with greenish scales. Time and again she reached for the potato pancakes piled up next to the now empty cutlet skillet, and she furiously placed them, one layer after another, on Father’s head. Then she poured portions of half-set pudding on him. He broke off a piece of apple dumpling and took aim at her, but before he threw it he fell into СКАЧАТЬ