My First Suicide

by Jerzy Pilch

  We knew this tale, and we listened wearily to the irrefutable pieces of evidence: that, namely, if the Party secretary looks bad when he appears on television and delivers a speech full of pessimism and veiled threats toward Moscow, this is an infallible sign that his son is again demanding victims, that he can’t hold out any longer, that any time now he will escape, that the members of the Secret Police who are watching over him, if they won’t help him, then they will certainly turn a blind eye, and that in a few days, in a week, two at the most, next to the path leading from the Castle Hill to the stream, the corpse of a girl will again be found.

  At this moment—precisely at this moment, when the words “corpse of a girl” were uttered, and when one of the seven indistinguishable narrators made a pause and adjusted his beret, and drank a tiny sip of beer, and wiped his lips with the back of his blackened hand, and lit up a Sport—at precisely this moment, the doors of Europa opened, and there appeared not the corpse of a girl, but a living, flesh-and-blood girl in a yellow bouclé blouse and a sky blue Perlon miniskirt, and she crossed the threshold. And after her, there appeared a second and a third and a fourth. And all of them crossed the threshold, and all of them walked in our direction, and all of them sat down at our table, and all of them—amused by our absolute dumbfoundedness—each and every one of them, ordered a small beer with raspberry juice.

  “The entire matter is a political game of the Party,” one of the seven indistinguishable alcoholics continued his tale, but by then we were entirely uninterested in listening, or rather—now reconstructing those events and moods precisely—we began to listen with a delight that invalidated what we were listening to, for the delight that seized us—that, after all, the girls from the construction site had come, and not only had they come, but they had come decked out in their best, sexiest outfits; that they had put on their shortest skirts and their tightest blouses—the delight that seized us at their sight was so all-encompassing, that we listened, delighted, to the next installment of the story about the vampire. We were simply delighted by the fact that an irrefutable link between the bad appearance of the Party secretary and the later attacks of the vampire—always one, at most two, weeks later—had been established. We were in seventh heaven over the fact that the Party faction that was opposed to the secretary was spreading rumors that his son was a serial murderer. It pleased us no end that the faction that favored the secretary didn’t deny that, granted, his son is mentally ill and dangerous, but the secretary did not succumb to the pressures from Moscow and did not have him locked up in the loony bin; what is more, the one and the other thing are provocations of former members of the NKVD. We were fired with enthusiasm for the former members of the NKVD. We bought the narrator—who was amazed at our unexpected applause—beer after beer. We ourselves lost all sense of moderation. Nor was it necessary to try to persuade the girls—the small beer with juice was a thing of the past. They put it away like they really did have some sort of Dionysian genes, they laughed at our every word, a constant neon light arrested the turning of the earth.

  Just as delicately as could be, I glided my hand along the thigh of the Goddess of Large-Slab Construction who was sitting next to me, I felt the hint of lime dust that inhered in her skin, I plunged my mouth into hair that smelled of sweet flag and hop shampoo. If at that moment someone should have made me choose between Gocha and her, I would probably have chosen Gocha, but I would have been in a quandary. I would have chosen Gocha, but it wouldn’t have been easy for me. I would have chosen Gocha, but with a heavy heart.

  To this day, I have a hard time distinguishing—or rather, to tell the truth, I simply don’t distinguish at all—between eroticism and love, let along back then. When I finally write a Dictionary of Erotic Superstitions, the superstition about the necessity of distinguishing sex from love will occupy a prominent position. There is no such thing. Sex without love makes no sense and is—at least in my case—impossible. Sex without love is an unnecessary event. And don’t let anyone try to tell me that I simply ennoble copulation in a comic and naïve fashion. As far as I am concerned, there is no copulation that is not noble. Copulation is love. Love can last for years, and it can be like a lightning flash, and let no one remain in the delusion that the first is worth more than the second. All the more because it is usually the other way around. Ergo, you must love all the women with whom you wish to go to bed. You must fall in love with them, and you must make them fall in love with you. Whoever should have all the women in the world, but have not love, will be as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. Even if you want to have a paid tart, you still have to love her, and it is no phony high-mindedness that speaks through me, rather a knowledge of the force of experiences.

  Minute by minute, I was falling in love with the beautiful lady bricklayer sitting next to me. After an hour, two, or perhaps three—on the one hand, it is impossible to say precisely, since, as is well known, love stops, or perhaps even cancels time (after all, in writing metaphorically that the dead light of a dirty neon had stopped the turning of the Earth, I had already taken note of this fact); on the other hand, I think that I had fallen in love after more or less an hour—after two hours, that heroine of socialist labor was reciprocating my feelings; after three, we began to search for some secluded place. Actually, we didn’t have to make any decisions. Our feverish bodies and our intoxicated souls knew perfectly well by themselves that the most discrete place would be next to the path to the stream. The corpse that had been lying there for weeks had dissolved entirely and been eaten by the earth. Zero visibility, grass as high as a wall. Trembling bodies flowed into the depths of their own depths. The sky darkened over the dark brown globe, a red star flew in our direction, I felt the shiver of cold. “We lost so much time,” I said in a low voice, since, in spite of all, a whisper seemed to me too sentimental, “we lost so much time. The entire traineeship has passed… Why didn’t you want to go on a date with us earlier?” “We were afraid,” she said, smothering a laugh, and she hugged me by the neck, and she began, panting and laughing, to whisper into my ear. As she whispered to me, I recalled the beginning of the story, the first sentence, and the first day of the traineeship. We were driving to the construction site on an open truck. A fantastic, still summery day was rising. They sat across from us in a strange sort of tension, not saying a word. It was the beginning of a spectral September. In the environs of the little Austro-Hungarian town in which we performed our Workers’ Traineeship, a Silesian vampire was prowling, and at first the four female bricklayer’s assistants looked upon us with fear. Supposedly, of our entire five-some, the one who most looked like a vampire was Wittenberg (1953–1979).

  The Double of Tolstoy’s Son-in-Law

  I

  When, in the autumn of 2002, I came upon a reproduction in the newspaper of an old photograph showing Lev Tolstoy playing chess, I had the feeling that something just wasn’t right. It is easy to say now that the icy shaft of a mystery had run through me, or that the goddess of incomprehensible coincidences had placed a significant kiss upon my brow, or that the sulfurous wings of the angel of darkness had brushed me—or something like that. Today it is easy, exceedingly easy, and, given my stylistic impulses, shockingly easy to say so. But at that time, none of these far reaching metaphors came to my mind. Every sepia-toned millimeter was exceedingly intense, but intensity is too little for a mystery.

  As if for fear that I might disturb some sort of integrity, I didn’t cut the picture out; instead, I kept the entire newspaper. I put it into the drawer in which I keep the shot for my air rifle, and from time to time—decidedly too often—I would take it out and stare at it with fascination, and I would study it through a magnifying glass, and I looked at it under the light, and I probed the texture with my fingers, and I considered entirely seriously how to get to the laboratories where they could take an X-ray of it, magnify it to unparalleled graininess, out of which a secret sign would loom and establish the crucial, all-revealing DNA of the paper o
n which it was printed.

  At all costs, and in vain, I attempted to decode the sudden and obsessive presence of Tolstoy’s chessboard in my brain.

  You all know such situations: an inconceivably distinct detail of a distant landscape; a strange light, nobody knows from where; a house, seen from the window of a train, toward which someone is running along a sandy path; the shadow of the suddenly turned head of a passer-by; the arrangement of objects on a table—someone, something, nobody knows what, suddenly comes to mind and gives you no peace.

  The photograph of Tolstoy playing chess gave me no peace for three years. To this day, I don’t have total peace, perhaps even quite the contrary, but at least I have been able to formulate certain suppositions. If I were the narrator of a detective novel, I would say that I have established the direction of the investigation.

  I suppose it would not be beside the point to emphasize that I am not an especially ardent fan—either of chess or of Tolstoy. There is nothing frivolous in this confession. Especially as far as Tolstoy is concerned. I admire the author of War and Peace. I admire him inordinately and devoutly. Perhaps even, if someone were to force me to name the greatest novelist in history—a little bit shooting in the dark, but with inexorable intuition—I would name him. After all, if a novel is supposed to create a world—or even a universe—he was the most fully successful at it. I say that I am not an ardent fan, only because I don’t know him well. You can’t be an ardent fan of something you don’t know inside and out. Fanaticism presupposes cognitive perfection. And I know well, I even know very well, only one of his texts. Most certainly, I can confess with a pure conscience that I am an ardent fan of that one text. I’m an ardent fan of “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” I consider this story the masterpiece of all masterpieces, the limit of human possibilities in the art of narration. All Tolstoy’s other things I esteem and admire. I esteem and admire, but—please understand me well—I don’t catch their scent.

  Truly great, truly near, and truly intense writers have a scent. Nabokov smells of sea salt, Erofeev of honeysuckle, Márquez of saltpeter, Zweig of a November sky. Iwaszkiewicz of pine needles. Broch of glacial waters flowing down into a valley, Platonov of a burning-hot smithy.

  Tolstoy doesn’t have a smell. Unless prose has the smell of dying, and death is like air.

  A few years ago I bought a fourteen-volume edition of his works in a used book store; of course, I didn’t read everything, but I read War and Peace once, Anna Karenina and Resurrection twice, “Kreutzer Sonata” three, or perhaps even four times. I return to “Ilych” frequently, and always, as I read the last sentence—about “the death that is finished”—I get goosebumps. But I never had any sort of “Tolstoy phase,” some sort of Tolstoyan preoccupation or obsession. And it is not a matter of common platitudes: that the adoration of a great genius whose works have been published in the form of “Collected Works” is always marked by a certain coolness; that, granted, one admires Shakespeare, Goethe, or Dante, but that one doesn’t go mad over them; and even—to tell the truth—that one rarely reads them before going to sleep. Such bullshit doesn’t apply to me. I read the classics before going to sleep. Or rather at dawn, for in the evening, whatever I pick up, whatever classic, whatever Flaubert, whatever Dickens, before I get to the end of the first page—I fall asleep. But I awake at dawn, and then I read the classics. With admiration and without any madness. Apparently, once a person is of an age when he reads only at dawn, and only classics, it is too late for great obsessions. Even the obsession—and it was an obsession—with the picture in the newspaper, in which Tolstoy plays chess, didn’t incline me to obsessive reading of his collected works.

  The caption under the photograph declared that in his old age his favorite game was chess; but if this was the case, did he write even one sentence about chess? It seemed, more or less, that, in the cosmos created by him, there ought also to be a place for chess, but where should one look for it? It seems to me that neither in Karenina, nor in Resurrection, and absolutely not in “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” is there a single word about chess. Granted, the idea of thoroughly studying his remaining works—from the point of view of the presence of chess motifs—occurred to me, but nothing more. That intriguing idea did not become deed in the least. Of course, when you can’t establish something, you have to invent it. That’s what experiencing the world through literature is about. The foolishly beautiful idea that I myself might compose a mysterious story about the unknown chess episode in the life of Tolstoy was, however, entirely beyond my reach.

  I didn’t have even a preliminary intuition whether the magnetism that drew me to this picture was hidden in the writer himself, who was bent over the chessboard, or in his opponent, who was dressed in the fashion of the landed gentry (and whose face, incidentally, seemed to me strangely familiar), or in the members of the household, gathered in great numbers around them, who were seemingly cheering on one or the other, but who were actually posing for the photograph. (Although Sophia Tolstoy seems to have been genuinely cheering—in any case, she is looking intently at the black figures with which her husband is playing.)

  Finally, I made the effort, and with the help of a certain petite, but inordinately enterprising Russianist, vintage 1968, I established who is who on the daguerreotype. Incidentally, the petite, but inordinately enterprising Russianist, vintage 1968, who, at first, thought I had come up with a subtle pretext for you-know-what, then, that I was a maniacal nutcase, finally herself became excited about the topic and assembled an extensive group of materials proving that, after all, chess played no trivial role in Tolstoy’s life. She even obtained a special book from Moscow, published in the sixties, entitled Tolstoy i shakhmaty [Tolstoy and Chess]. I looked everything over carefully, I made notes, but I knew from the beginning that these were only formal activities, which would by no means push anything forward. And indeed—they did not.

  The secret was probably in chess itself. But—to repeat—I’m a mediocre chess player. Of course, it is possible to speak here of more intense emotions and greater proficiency. The fact, however, that I know more about chess than about the life and works of Lev Tolstoy does not mean that I know a lot about chess. Granted, I used to have a few strong opening moves. Now it is up and down. Now, even that ability, if it’s not fading, certainly doesn’t show any sparks; but I used to have a few strong opening moves. Perhaps even excellent. Nothing but grandmasters were my teachers. That’s right. Each was a grandmaster, and each had his own distinct and unforgettable style of play: Grandpa Pech—bawdy renaissance style; Grandma Pech—fierce style; Uncle Ableger—lightning fast style; Uncle Paweł—devout style. With the exception of Mother, all the members of the household played chess.

  The chessboard, which we would place on the table covered with a sky blue oilcloth in our gigantic kitchen, was similar to Tolstoy’s. I don’t wish to say anything by this. Nor do I multiply cheap effects, nor do I make second-rate jokes. I simply state that our chess set in the old house in Wisła originated—like the chess set they played on in Yasnaya Polyana—in those mythic epochs when the chessboard and the box were separate. Granted, the genius who came up with the idea that the box, after it was opened out, could become the chessboard, had made his discovery. And in fact—as is evident from old prints, at the least—he had made his discovery ages ago. But luckily this discovery hadn’t made it to Cieszyn Silesia by the fifties of the twentieth century. And if it had made it to Cieszyn Silesia, it hadn’t made it to Wisła. And if it had made it to Wisła, it hadn’t made it to our house.

  An atavistic-sentimental antipathy, stemming from those times, toward the box that becomes a chessboard once it is unfolded, does not—of course—keep me awake at night. I am not consumed day and night by that hatred, but it equals my antipathy to magnetic chess pieces. On the whole, I try to fight my own neuroses. But that one I cultivate.

  First (first!) you have to lay out the chessboard. Then (then!) pour out the chess pieces from the box. Pour them out o
n the chessboard! Not onto the table! No pouring out onto the table! And while placing the pieces, and while putting the pieces away, the chessboard must be in place! Before play, the pieces are to be in the box; during play, on the chessboard. Outside the chessboard stand only dead chess pieces!

  Father must have had the same phobias. That’s why he insisted on the drawer, and at first even on two drawers. He played pretty well. Not as lightning fast as Uncle Ableger, who adored playing tournament chess and imposed a frightful tempo, drove his opponent on, and—I have to admit—mostly won, although sometimes in his frantic rush he committed blunders you wouldn’t believe. And not as fiercely as Grandma Pech, who couldn’t stand to lose. And not as hedonistically and generously as Grandpa Pech, who, for the sake of beauty and amusement, forgot about results and, to a certain extent, specialized in losing. And not so prayerfully as Uncle Paweł, who thanked God after each successful move.

  Father didn’t play either so lightning fast, or so fiercely, or so sybaritically, or so piously—but efficiently and mercilessly enough. After all, chess is merciless by its very nature. In the art of moving chess pieces, there can be no mercy—at most, there can be an error in the art.

  I think that, as a child, I must truly have been not so bad. I must have been—because I don’t remember anything. And I remember all the ruined games: the crumbling dam we had made out of stones over the stream in Partecznik; a lost match with a IIc team; the disaster in the church trivia contest—when I said that it was Cain and Abel who were twins, rather than Jacob and Esau; lost points during ping-pong tournaments in the Lutheran Church House. I remember all the blocks in the evening games of dominoes; all the disturbed oars and boat-hooks in the pile of pick-up-sticks; all the un-cast sixes in games of Sorry! on holiday evenings; and all the unnamed mountains and rivers in States, Cities—but I don’t recall any lost chess games. In other words, I must have won. And won for real, because there was no custom of allowing a young person to win for encouragement—not in our house, nor in Lutheran houses in general. On the contrary—there was the principle of humiliating, from the very beginning, the young person’s every ability, grinding him down, kicking him in the ass. If he manages to cope, there is hope for him, if not—oh, well—the Lord God welcomes various sorts at His table.