My First Suicide. Jerzy Pilch

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I turned on the light in the room—there she was. She is.** Without taking off my shoes, without changing clothes (and without looking into the refrigerator), I approached, grasped, broke, loaded, and began to shoot.

      When a person becomes the owner of a weapon (even one—as some would claim—so childish as an air rifle), the image of the world changes. The world is transformed into a collection of targets. If you have a gun, you automatically begin to examine the world from the point of view of its usefulness for shooting at. In the infinite number of objects that create the surface of reality, only those that are good for shooting count. In this sense, the light bulb hanging from the ceiling ceases to be a light bulb and becomes a perfect and very tempting target. The pigeon on the windowsill is no longer only a pigeon, a tree stump ceases to be exclusively a tree stump, an empty cigarette pack only an empty cigarette pack, etc. In my case, the Coca-Cola bottle caps ceased, in an exceptionally radical manner, to be bottle caps per se and became dazzling and narcotic targets. I placed a cardboard box on my balcony sill, I pounded a pencil into the box, I hung a bottle cap from the pencil, and out of the depths of my living room—Aim! Fire! Aim! Fire! Aim! Fire! Since—I should add—I am addicted to Coca-Cola, I have a considerable reserve of bottle caps.

      Now, after the irrevocable loss—so it seemed—of The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, after the irrevocable loss of a chance at The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, I was as if in a trance. I was in a fever of despair. I was blasting away mercilessly, and not only could I not stop shooting, I also could not stop hitting the target. Between my eye, the rear sight, the muzzle sight, and the target hanging from the pencil ran an icy, steely, and inexorable line. The successive bottle caps—hit each time in the very heart—flew to pieces in hundreds of tiny, yellow, lightning flashes. When I ran out of bottle caps, I increased the distance twofold, and I scattered my entire stock of empty cigarette packages and matchboxes. Then came the time to set cigarettes on end. I had four unopened packages of Gauloises, which—like it or not—offer eighty hits in a row. Then I mowed down all my pencils. Then six empty lighters. Then I began to look for what might come next. I found three sticks left over from “Magnum” ice cream pops, five cartridges for a Parker ballpoint pen. I broke an old glasses frame into a series of tiny targets. I shot through a one-grosz coin that I had glued for good luck to a miniature calendar. I hit an antique mask that was prominently displayed on the cover of Literary Notebooks. I reduced to pulp the dried up lemon that had been wandering about the kitchen since time immemorial. Finally, I found a pack of playing cards from a Playboy jubilee issue, which soothed me for a moment, but only apparently. I was convinced that shooting at the playing-card likenesses of naked beauties would occupy me for the rest of the evening.

      I hung the card with the first naked beauty that came to hand on the pencil, took aim—and my hand shook. The first that came to hand—or if not the first one that came to hand, then one of ten, one of a hundred, one of a thousand of the first naked beauties that came to hand—looked a bit like The Most Beautiful Woman in the World. That same ideal outline of the shoulders, that same self-satisfied smile, that same motionless gaze.

      My hand shook. I lowered my weapon. I was near tears from helplessness and sorrow. I became keenly aware that even the most accurate shot at the effigy of the first naked beauty that came to hand would be a complete embarrassment. Some trashy, per procura, symbolic execution was about to take place in my head. There was no point in shooting. Neither at the substitute likenesses, nor at seemingly neutral targets. There was absolutely no point in shooting. I would have to bear the defeat like a man. Not surrender. To fight, to search, to obtain her coordinates at any cost—even at the cost of humiliation. To try to identify a trustworthy soul, and, in spite of everything, to ask heroically, paying no heed to adversity, for her cellphone number… Heroically, since, after all, even if I would be successful, there is no guarantee what would come next… Jesus Christ! So greatly did the recurrence of a recent nightmare batter me and make me white-hot with rage that I did it. Not in a trance, but in cold calculation. All of my trances—once the trance itself has already basically been strained away—have an icy finish (recall my stroll through the private apartments of the ambassador and his wife), and that’s how it was now, too. I did this in cold calculation, with complete calm, and, toward the end, not without amusement. I brought fourteen 50 ml bottles of stomach bitters from the refrigerator, placed them methodically at decent intervals on the edge of the balcony, and—this will come as no surprise to you—I used fourteen shots on them. It goes without saying that there were no delaying tactics of the sort: empty the fourteen bottles, pour the hooch out into a jug, shoot away at the empties, and then engage in a little private revelry on top of that. No question of any of that. First, whoever has shot at a full bottle and at an empty bottle knows the difference this makes. It is a fundamental difference. It is like the difference between I won’t say which one thing and that other one. Second, I finally needed the smell of blood. And the subtle cloud of stomach bitters coming from the balcony, from the fourteen shattered 50 ml bottles, was like the smell of wolf entrails, like the vapor of tropical swamps, like poison gas. I fell asleep intoxicated and unconscious.

      And when I woke up, and when, as usual, before getting out of bed I checked to see whether anyone had left some desperate message in the night, on the screen of my phone I found letters tapped out with the thumb of an angel: “I’m sorry that I disappeared so quickly, but I had to. In any case, I say yes. I say yes. Yes to the next installment of our conversation about life.” I got up, put on Vivaldi’s First Violin Concerto full blast and wrote back: “I say yes to our life.” “To our life together?” she replied three seconds later. “Yes,” I replied. “Do you think we will be happy?” she replied. “Yes,” I replied.

      IV

I am writing the first bedroom scene of my life, and here I commit the classic debutant’s error: instead of getting right down to business, instead of beginning right off the bat and describing the body of The Most Beautiful Woman in the World as it evaporates like a cloud, I enter upon intricate preambles and digressions. But once you have The Most Beautiful Woman in the World in your bed, you feel so intellectually energized that you think you have the right to formulate fundamental theses. You have the right to pose and to settle key questions. And so, I pose (and also immediately settle) the following key question: What, namely, is the key question in sex? I answer: The key question in sex is the opening position. Oh, of course, it isn’t a matter of any opening position in bed. I’m not providing pitiful technical counseling here—where to place the feet, under what to place the pillow, etc. I’m concerned with the opening position in the fundamental sense, about the first—I use this term in the classical philosophical sense—position.***

      To find the place to occupy the first position, and subsequently to occupy the first position—that is the fundamental question in sex. Fundamental, because it is the first. Without it, there are no further installments, and even if there are, they are chaotic and unharmonious. And chaos and lack of harmony are the extermination of sex. In short, it is a matter of sitting down in the proper place. The first position is always a sitting position. Schemes of the sort that would have us walk up to the window together, and at that window, or on the way back, have me embrace her; or the complete catastrophe that would have me lie in ambush for her on her return from the bathroom, and then romantically jump on her back—such schemes are disastrous because they are doomed to briefness. Just how long are you going to stand with her at that window? Just how long will the two of you rock back and forth in an amatory frenzy by the bathroom? Sooner or later you will have to loosen the passionate hold, and everything starts again from the beginning. Unless—God forbid!—seized by panic in such an ill-fated moment, you pick up the pace, thereby making matters worse. It is quite another matter that then at least you’ve gotten the thing over with. You’ve succumbed. You’re dead. Don’t try to tell me that death has only its bad sides.

      It is my deepest conviction that the thing to do is to sit down next СКАЧАТЬ