My First Suicide

by Jerzy Pilch

  I had succeeded in not saying a single word to anyone because we were in the grip of a severe cold spell. For several days, I had been going to and coming from school through air that was stiffening with icy explosions. Minus-four-degree labyrinths were becoming ever longer, ever more intricate and stuffy. That day, when, having passed through the Square at the Ponds, Filarecka Street, the Commons, I finally made it to the North Pole, a document with seals affixed to it was hanging on the closed doors stating that, on account of atmospheric conditions that threaten to disturb the learning process, classes—by decision of the board of education—were cancelled. I remember that this didn’t particularly please me, or upset me. In general, school was a matter of indifference to me. Mrs. Prościutko, the handcrafts teacher, a heavily made up thirty-year-old, got me a little hot, but that was it. I had neither any particular troubles, nor any particular satisfactions. Now the only good thing was that I had been one of the first to read the flowery document announcing the sudden holiday. I always got to school very early. Nobody at all was there yet from my class. I didn’t have to pretend to participate in the cattle herd’s joy that school’s out!

  I set off for home as quickly as possible. The labyrinths had gotten so thick by now that it seemed to me that I was climbing, as in a dream, higher and higher. Down below I saw the city submerged in a yellow crystal—black roofs, pigeons turned into ice, the dead and empty canals of the alleyways. My celestial roaming went on for a bit, but finally I dragged myself home. In the stairwell, with my heart in my throat, I passed by a famous local beggar. He had supposedly once been a commander in the White Army. And indeed, as he glided through the streets of Krakow, he had in him the majesty of a scorched and wasted galleon, which nonetheless still maintained its daring profile. At his sight, I usually took to my heels; now I heroically stepped over the crutches lying crosswise, blackened and covered with fossilized hoar-frost. He mumbled something, but in my hurry and panic I didn’t understand precisely what. Today I think that he said, The moonlit grass has overgrown the Bay of St. Susanna. You must prepare for the coming of the Lord of Surges. In any event, such are the sentences I hear when I recreate that day, pitilessly, minute by minute. The moonlit grass has overgrown the Bay of St. Susanna. You must prepare for the coming of the Lord of Surges. I opened the door with numb hands, and, frozen to death, slowly and systematically thawed myself out, so that in the evening I might be able to go out onto the balcony—efficiently and silently. I warmed my hands up particularly carefully; after all, I wouldn’t be able to manage it with stiff fingers. That was all—hot water and finger gymnastics—nothing more. I no longer practiced the silent opening of the drapes. As a future first-league soccer player and a representative of Poland, I knew the principle that in the final hours before the match you were not allowed to devote your time to practice, but only and exclusively to relaxation.

  First, I read The Mysterious Island, probably for the hundredth time. Then I took some condoms from Father’s drawer, one of which I blew up, and I played a little soccer. The goal was between the dresser and the door to the little room; I made most of the goals with headers—I was Brazil, and I had won the World Cup. Then I made myself kogel-mogel. I couldn’t find powdered sugar, so I beat two egg yolks with regular sugar, sprinkled in some cocoa—it wasn’t bad. Then I wanted to play shove halfpenny on the windowsill, but I didn’t have time, because Mother had returned, and you couldn’t play shove halfpenny in her presence, because she thought it was a game of chance played for money, and—deaf to all persuasion—she positively forbade it. For obvious reasons I gave it up right away. I didn’t want to get into sterile debates. I didn’t want to talk at all.

  Mother declared, in the doorway already, that my old man would most likely return late, since she was more dead than alive and full of premonitions. Moreover, she had had terrible dreams the night before, and her dreams and premonitions always came true. My prospects were looking up. Since Mother was more dead than alive and full of bad dreams and premonitions, she ceased speaking after a certain time. All indications were for a stiflingly quiet afternoon. Incidentally, even when her dreams and premonitions did not come true, she maintained that they had come true in a certain sense, that, at the worst, they would come true sooner or later. And besides, with time, the quantity and frequency of her bad dreams and premonitions grew; therefore, naturally, their accuracy also grew. If a person has evil premonitions on a daily basis, he experiences nothing but the expected evil.

  In any event, on the day of my first suicide attempt, my old man didn’t come home for a long time indeed, and there is no need to add that if he wasn’t there, he didn’t speak up. The insect glass (although one should say: the glass of insects) grew thicker. My kidneys began to hum a mournful little song. With a feeling of acute absurdity (I didn’t know at the time that I had a feeling of acute absurdity), I did my homework. I was aware that I was doing the last homework assignments of my life, and I took pains—as if I were sending them off on a final journey—that they be perfect. I did them with unusual care. Later I felt sorry for the calligraphic Polish essay, sorry for the perfectly solved mathematical problem, sorry for the lined notebook, and sorry for the quadrille notebook. I imagined that neither my homework nor my notebooks would find their way to school ever again. By morning, I would be dead, and my book bag would be lying next to the bookshelf, and nobody would look into it. Unless it was the police (at that time called the militia), in order to check whether I had left a farewell letter, or whether, in one of the notebooks, there were notes of some sort explaining my desperate step.

  I felt like crying, but my mood lifted at the thought that, in the morning, when my corpse would be lying at the bottom of the apartment block, our apartment would be swarming with uniformed functionaries. I knew that my old man would fear them like the devil. Not that he would have anything on his conscience, but just on account of his basic fearfulness. My old man went to pieces before every person of higher rank. He cracked before his bosses, the professors and directors of departments at the Academy; he cracked before officials in offices; he was even afraid of the custodian of our apartment block, Mr. Markiewicz, who was eternally tipsy and eternally cursed women and Communism. In a word, my old man was afraid of practically everyone, but in the face of all those who wore uniforms (including conductors on trains or trams—in those days there were still conductors on trams), he suffered from blind animal fear.

  To tell the truth, my old man—short, born in Cieszyn Silesia, a Lutheran, not very bright, but industrious as an ant; who had been drafted into the Wehrmacht during the war, and after the war became a Party member—had his reasons for having numerous complexes. I do not wish to suggest that he despaired in vain, and for all his life, that he was not born in Wilno, a tall non-Party Catholic, full of panache, of broad talents, who had served with Anders during the war, and embarked upon internal emigration after the war. I don’t wish to suggest this, but the poor devil unquestionably paid a price for being who he was.

  Once, I recall, I was riding with him in our Fiat 125, and a militiaman from the traffic patrol pulled us over on account of one or another of the most banal violations in the world—failure to use a turn signal, or something like that. Jesus Christ! What a scene that was! My old man! God the Father! The Patriarch! King Solomon! David and Goliath in one person! Jesus—now that I think of it—Christ!—shook with fear, was close to messing his pants, and tearfully explained himself to the twenty-year-old sergeant, who himself was embarrassed by the inhuman horror he had aroused in this—as his identity card made clear—engineer from the Academy of Mining and Metallurgy, who was more than twice his age.

  And what would it be like tomorrow morning! Not just one youngster from the traffic patrol, but a few higher officers from the criminal division would put the old man through the paces! And it would not be on account of neglecting to use the turn signal that they would put the screws to him, but on account of the corpse of a child! As God is my witness, i
t was a pity to kill yourself and not be around to watch the old man die of fear! But then again, to put this all in play, you had to kill yourself. One paradox, you might say, after another.

  After my suicide—my mood was getting better and better—my old man would have the biggest mess of it. Everybody would blame him. Mother would accuse him to the end of his days of tormenting me with biblical sayings, of forcing me to learn German and gymnastics, of barking at me, of tyrannizing me with the copying of notebooks, and of placing bans on watching television.

  Grandpa and Grandma would tell everyone to the end of their lives that it was all on account of him, that he was responsible, because he had insisted on moving to Krakow. Because he had forced, that’s right, forced Mother and me to abandon our Lutheran parts and move to Babylon! That’s right, Babylon! Krakow is Babylon! It’s even worse, because, 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 rectif
ied 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 a reverie and instinctively, as if he wished to check how it tasted, bit off 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.