by Jerzy Pilch
In the first moment, they didn’t even notice the crack, because the base and the table top were incredibly strongly and intricately bound with twine, and it seemed that those pieces of twine still came from the packing, that the innumerable layers of The Worker’s Tribune had been removed, but the pieces of twine had been left. Only later did it turn out that he must have spent the entire three days that he had been in the field attempting every which way to put the severed table back together.
Master Sztwiertnia’s masterpiece had been precisely—absolutely precisely—split in two, as if from the blow of a blade that was incredibly forceful and precise. On the split chessboard: a greasy paper that had once contained the cutlets, a gnawed-at apple, a partly burned scrap of The Worker’s Tribune. Besides, everywhere around there were burnt pages of The Worker’s Tribune—was he sending signals with the lit newspapers, or what? Of Tolstoy’s son-in-law—it goes without saying—not a trace, which perhaps was only for the better.
Suddenly, it was swarming, the local inhabitants were running through the fields, the militia Nyska drove up with bravado, a firetruck with the siren going, with its crew ready to act, neared from the horizon, from the nearest cottage a woman was bringing bread and milk, the heavens were parting.
The keys—left behind by Tolstoy’s son-in-law, as it turned out—were in the ignition. With the exception of the burnt tarp, the vehicle was lacking nothing; the things were completely untouched by the fire, even the ties and the reinforcements were still there; there would be no problem in setting off for Krakow with everything. With a parade, to the accompaniment of car horns, escorted by the highway patrol, volunteer escort cars at the front. The triumphal entry upon the Dębnicki Bridge was in preparation. With everything, perhaps even with an orchestra. With everything, with the exception of the little chess table, which had been split in two and was tied up with pieces of twine.
XI
What cataclysms had come upon them? What storms? What apocalypses? What was their sequence? Had Tolstoy’s son-in-law suddenly felt faint and decided to take a bit of a nap on the shoulder of the road? Had the earth opened up beneath him? Had he dashed off for the next, this time irrevocable, cold lemonade? Had they decided to arrange an eccentric picnic with cutlets and chess pieces in a meadow at the side of the road? Had a phenomenal Syrena with shining arms suddenly appeared before their hood and lead them astray? Had the Star caught fire out of the blue, and, in the panic of the flames, had they turned off the road wherever they could? Had the mysterious driver set off for help, but hell had swallowed him up somewhere on the way? Had a lightning bolt of mysterious vengeance fallen out of the sky and sliced the chess table in half? All these possibilities and all these events mixed up together at once?
Father remained silent. “You’ll never find out,” he would answer Mother’s pesterings, which went on for years. “You’ll never find out. By my word, never.” And indeed—he never breathed even a word.
Then, in the middle of the road, in the middle of life, beyond the yellow hill—when it came to the little chess table, what to do with it, whether to take it to Krakow, or rather have Master Sztwiertnia take it back with him to Wisła and try to salvage it—not so much did he not say anything as, simply, he couldn’t say anything. Even when he wanted to, he couldn’t get a word out—his throat had entirely stiffened. Was he crying?
Moreover, the Master was not inclined to attempt to salvage it. He didn’t like this story. He examined the suspiciously even break—it looked as if it had been made by a scroll saw—he studied it precisely, and he shook his head with a sense of the absolutely unfathomable. He glanced at the sky, as if only up there could there be saws that cut so diabolically.
He agreed to take it back with him, he brought it back, but that was that—it is no problem to fit a little chess table into a terrain vehicle. Especially in two pieces. He brought it back, but he didn’t take it to his workshop. He didn’t hasten to start gluing or to make any other repair. He most clearly didn’t wish to engage the forces that could work so thunderously. He brought it back and placed it on a spot next to the shed, next to the specter of an ancient coach. Wait, wait a minute. Now’s not a good time for me. I’ll take it and repair it when the right moment comes. Nine years later, Master Sztwiertnia died. The great funeral procession went through all of Wisła, from the church to Gróniczek. Over the grave we sang to him of eternal light: “Dear light, dear light, that scatters the malevolent blight…” We sang beautifully, and from the depths of our hearts, for it was clear that Master Sztwiertnia was in God’s lights.
The little table leaning against the wall slowly turned into who knows what. Over the next decades it became overgrown with a crust of bird excrement, woody roots, and fossilized dust. Anyone who didn’t know would never guess the sense of its formlessness.
Sometimes, in my dreams, I see the great Star turning into the dark field. The tarp on it is burning, and in the yellow glow Father is setting up chess pieces on the most beautiful chessboard in the world. He begins to play with someone, but I don’t know with whom, because the other one is in darkness.
XII
After writing this story, I couldn’t resist giving in to sentimentalism: I collected the remains that had been consumed by heat waves, frosts, and bark beetles; I brought them to Warsaw, and I took them for renovation to famous masters from the gallery of old furniture on Ząbkowska Street. Last week—once the construction had regained its former radiance and splendor, once it had again become beautiful like music (more beautiful, because music ages beautifully), and once I had placed it with great pomp in the large room on Sienna Street—I discovered two pawns in the drawer, one white and one black. I was certain that they hadn’t been there. I call the masters: “Where’d the pawns come from. They certainly weren’t there before.” “They were there, but immovable and almost invisible, sunk into the mass of the wood, overgrown with fossilized cobweb.”
Two dead pawns. The beginning of every chess match. The beginning of every match in the world. The beginning of Lev Tolstoy’s match with his son-in-law. In the photograph you can clearly see that they had just begun. They have behind them the first exchange of pawns. The white pawn in the drawer, and the black pawn in the drawer. From here on, everything is possible. The game can go in any direction.
*****It is little, but it is intense. If you know Zweig’s Chess Story, and you must know it, you will understand: I always was, and am, on the side of Czentowic.
Manuscripts of a Person from My Parts
In the name of the Most Holy Trinity—Amen. If Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand? If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness? Once fanatical prophets start writing you, the ball is over. Once gloomy psychopaths start writing, it begins to be unpleasant. For the last two, maybe three years I have been receiving more and more letters that are—to put it delicately—odd. Supposedly, this is a sign and the price of genuine popularity. The measure of genuine fame is not the number of female admirers and fans. The measure of genuine fame is the number of enemies and the presence of loonies. As soon as a dragnet of hate-filled people begins observing your every move, and as soon as even a small cortège of hebephreniacs begins to follow you, only then do you mean something—or so a certain, now deceased, but highly insightful friend used to say. Without a doubt, he knew what he was talking about: for quite a few years he was famous, even very famous. Psychopaths conducted copious correspondence with him. I don’t know. I’m unable to assess my own situation. Just today I see the following aphorism on the wall calendar: “Popularity—the punishment that looks like an award” (Ingmar Bergman). It seems that hundreds of similar aphorisms have been composed on this topic. Basically, it’s a trifle. But I realize that Bergman’s old man was a pastor, and I begin to feel a little awkward. Within reasonable limits, it goes without saying. Let’s not go overboard here about any sort of psychoses, obsessions, fears. I’m not saying that now I c
ut open each envelope with my heart in my mouth, but the time of envelopes containing nothing but letters from enraptured owners of yellow dresses; from passionate male and female admirers of cats; from faithful fans who, although they have regard for me, will still never be able to understand how I could move from magical Krakow to soulless Warsaw; and even the time of incoherent epistles from failed poets with whom I supposedly once drank vodka—all this has past. The time has dawned for bloody exhibitionists who are fond of paradoxes: “Do you know that if I stick my tampon in too shallowly, it presses on the notorious G spot, and I wander about aroused all day long, although I basically don’t realize it?” The time has dawned for bigoted aunties who are imbued with a will for converting people to faith in Jesus: “Do you know what Jesus gives to man? Wouldn’t you like to taste how good Jesus is? Jesus tastes better than all the cutlets in the world! Jesus tastes better than all the cheesecakes, poppy-seed cakes, and tortes of this Earth!” The time has dawned for female gymnasium students who insightfully analyze domestic toxicities: “I interrupt my writing for today. Father has just thrown me out of the room, because he suddenly felt like screwing Mother. Believe me, nothing so discourages me from sex as my folks. I understand perfectly well that my folks are not there to encourage me to have sex, but mine don’t spare me their sexuality. In our two rooms, they are in a difficult situation, all the more reason they shouldn’t approach the matter frivolously and routinely.” The time has dawned for risk-taking historiosophists who don’t shun blackmail: “Perhaps someone in Poland could finally show some courage and praise the Partitions? After all, the Partitions were a splendid time—the economy was developing, we spoke foreign languages fluently, and our literature produced the greatest masterpieces of its history, and that was not just in the Emigration, but also precisely here at home. I am thinking, of course, of Bolesław Prus’s unsurpassable The Doll.” The time has dawned for metaphysical fundamentalists, who are truly worthy of considerable attention: “The single task of the writer, my dear sir, is to conduct a fictional proof for the existence of God; and what is more—only the writer (not the mathematician or the philosopher) can be effective here.” The time has dawned for troublesome mistresses sending sepia photographs from the seventies, which they provide with tender dedications. The time has dawned for detox clinic brethren who live in their imaginations, and the time for Lutheran co-confessionals with liberated minds. The time for murky propositions, the time for troublesome requests, and the time for heavy insults. The time for madmen has dawned, wild like never-mown yellow grass. “Every normal person feels like killing someone once in a while. In my case that normalcy went further: in a special notebook, I keep a running list of persons whom I would be happy to kill,” writes a guy who—as he assures me—is connected to me by a million bonds. Supposedly he comes from my parts, supposedly he is a Lutheran, supposedly my age. Sometimes he says that he is the omniscient Protestant narrator, and this does not seem to be a rhetorical device, but genuine mania. Sometimes he pretends to be a woman. Using feminine personal forms is one of the ritual dodges of internauts. I don’t know whether he belongs to that tribe. His correspondence arrives by normal mail. The bulky envelopes contain constantly updated Xerox copies of lists of persons he would like to kill, as well as extensive, pathological “justifications of sentences,” full of diverse digressions. The disgustingly familiar tone, full of pledges of brotherhood, is insufferable.****** Just like you, I like to have a drink, and I’m crazy about the girls. Just like you, I was battered by my sainted, I supposed accursed, family home, and in the best moments of life I am, at best, a female convalescent. “The father’s home is a true paradise?” Did I hit the bull’s eye? “Even if you were to travel the entire world, you won’t find one more beautiful.” You don’t have to write back, we both know that I hit the bull’s eye. We both know what we have in our minds. We wake up at the same time, and we get up at the same time. Do I exaggerate? Even if I exaggerate, it isn’t by much. When did we get up last Thursday? I got up at seven past seven. I woke at seven past seven, and until half past seven, in other words for twenty-three whole minutes, I listened raptly to the solitude of my kidneys, my liver, and my heart. The previous evening, the spiritually twisted daughter of an organist from our parts had been at my place. The dusky body of a thirty-something discus thrower with an epic genotype. Even dressed, it took your breath away with its vastnesses; undressed, it drove you mad. My lonely and desolate hands are feverish even now. At half past seven, I drew back the Australian Merino bed cover and impulsively arranged the objects lying on the other side of the couch: a pencil, a notebook, the Bible, a box of chocolate-covered marshmallows, a pack of cigarettes (Davidoff Light), a cigarette lighter, a can of beer (Żywiec), a watch (Omega), a book (Cancer Ward), all four remote controls (TV, radio, DVD, Canal+), both cell phones, and the receiver from the home phone. On the whole, I don’t eat, drink, smoke, write, talk on the phone, watch television, or even read in bed (once I begin to read, I fall asleep immediately)—but I like to have everything within reach. I checked the cell phone to see whether there were any messages—and sure enough: at dawn two strophes of love and longing had flowed onto the mysterious machinery. The first was from The Greatest Love of My Life; the second, from an unknown author. The number of idealists—who do not consider it fitting to sign their missives, since they are absolutely convinced that not only do I have their numbers registered in my phone, but also etched on my heart—is significant. God be with you. Every morning when I find the received messages, it seems to me that I slept like a log. An absurd illusion (at night I put it on “silent”), but irresistible. SMSes, silent like moths, deepen the nocturnal peace, such that—recalling the times when we used to write poetry—I express the matter in the form of a poetic aphorism. Long ago, I noticed that the first messages arrive around five in the morning. Completely as if the most virulent letter senders had, at that hour, their preliminary versions ready. After intoxicating and prolonged excesses with the organist’s daughter—deliberately not leading to fulfillment and thereby always a bit destructive—I slept, perhaps not like a log (I got up once to go to the can), but quite well. I didn’t have any nightmares, no deranged telephone call ripped me from my sleep (I don’t unplug the home phone at night), no betrayed husband called to make threats, not a one of my abandoned girlfriends woke me up in a fit of hysteria. Nor were there any silent or ecstatic calls from old drinking buddies, no madman or murdered passerby howled on the street under my windows. The night hadn’t been bad; so, too, the awakening. The sheets smelled of the sprinter’s sweat of the organist’s daughter. I didn’t enter her name in the register. There wasn’t any reason. For the moment there isn’t any reason. She didn’t do anything to make me angry. She didn’t smoke in bed. She didn’t jabber on the phone for hours on end. She didn’t puff like a steam engine, she didn’t bare her saliva covered teeth, and she didn’t make any silly faces during orgasm. After which, she didn’t cuddle spasmodically and devotedly. She quickly went to the bathroom and didn’t sit there long. She didn’t speak up very often. When she picked up the Bible, she didn’t wink at me in a sign of Lutheran brotherhood. She glanced at Cancer Ward, but in her glance there wasn’t any of the usual cognitive obtuseness indicating that this was the first time in her life she had seen that medical textbook. On the contrary—she knew what the book was. She stood for a long time facing the wall with the bookshelves—a risky venture in itself—but it didn’t end in any whimpering. High marks! Whenever I hear whimpering—can I borrow this or that for a few days—I don’t know myself what infuriates me more: the whimpering, the borrowing, or the assumption that our intoxicating acquaintance might last that long. Woman! After all, in a few more days you might—as far as I’m concerned—no longer be living. On the spot, now, immediately, I feel like killing you, and on the spot, now, immediately, I will frivolously enter your name in the register! In a few days! She would give it back in a few days! Or maybe in a week? Or in two weeks? Who will
give it back? You? More likely your two-week old corpse with a rusty spoke still not removed from your aorta. We can’t stand lending anything. Lending is the worst. When you are from the tribe of nut jobs who always have all their pairs of shoes polished, and all their pencils always sharpened—well, it’s clear. All objects impeccable and in their place. A loaned object = a lost object. The principle that you don’t lend objects of personal use arose, I think, in a kolkhoz. All objects are of personal use. Everybody touches objects in his own way, and in his own way prostitutes and thwarts them by his touch. People don’t notice and don’t discern that the neighbor who returns a borrowed umbrella returns an umbrella that is deformed and defiled. There are objects that are more and less prone to deformation and defilement. Books are unusually susceptible to such massacres. Just being picked up, just being read by someone else, defiles them, and then they also open them up, fold them back, make notes in the margin, flip the pages, close them, glance through them, check, look for the page, bring them closer to the eyes, shove them under somebody’s nose, set them aside, etc. The manner of touching a book as an object contains an entire arsenal of gropings, defilements, and sullyings. Reading a borrowed book is like taking a paid woman. Except that taking a paid woman is better, to the extent that it is quick. Quick reading makes practically no sense. That is why I never have any borrowed books. Paid women—certainly. Because I treat literature with deadly seriousness, I go to the brothel, not to the library. Of the two evils, I would prefer to give someone a book than to lend it. My library isn’t large, slightly more than one thousand five hundred titles. Predominately history, classics, dictionaries and encyclopedias, a lot of poetry. None of our holy books. No old hymnals or prewar Protestant almanacs. Luther’s Postil, Kubala, Sr.’s How to Protect Against the Deviltry of Daily Life, as well as the Illustrated History of the Protestant Church in Granatowe Góry—they’re on the bookshelf of specters. And way back, at that. I don’t need to add that everything, especially the specters, are arranged in orderly fashion, according to size. The organist’s daughter stood for a long time near that harmony, but she didn’t disturb it. She didn’t even take a volume off the shelf. She settled for communing with the spines. This is a commendable form of communing with a library—to tell the truth, for outsiders, even for young Lutheran girls, the only acceptable form. In a word, the organist’s daughter didn’t betray her spiritual poverty in this, or that, or any other manner. Which doesn’t mean that I had come upon some sort of ideal. Not at all! She has a huge, cardinal defect, except that for now that defect looks like a virtue. For now. For now I don’t feel like killing her. In what does that defect, which looks like a virtue, consist? Let’s not pretend we don’t know! Let’s not make up stories! What’s this all about? Haven’t we had any Protestant girls? Haven’t we cast a greedy eye on virginal confirmation class girls? Haven’t we tried to put one over on charming pastors’ wives? Haven’t we analyzed the cut of Lutheran thongs? Hasty female parishioners haven’t bickered with you sweetly that they won’t kneel, because that’s Catholic? So what defect, which looks like a virtue, did the organist’s daughter have? Why, she had this defect, which looks like a virtue: that, in giving herself to a Lutheran from our parts, she did this with peculiar delight, because she felt that she was doing what was pleasing to Lord Jesus. And also to the Apostle Paul, all four evangelists, and—of course—our Reformer, Dr. Martin Luther. As likewise to the organist, the organist’s wife, the bishop, and all our pastors, and all our brethren. All of them surrounded our sack, and gave their blessing, and encouraged us to get to it. And I took that Protestant body—although, as far as its anatomic perfection was concerned, it was remarkably supraconfessional—and I saw the signs of the cross made over us by the Apostles, and I heard Luther as he cheered me on with his classic and original phrase: Der alt böse Feind mit Ernst er’s jetzt meint! “Go to it, son!” shouted the blissful organist. “Come, my betrothed,” whispered his daughter. And I won’t try to hide it: this grabbed me and made me hot. In any case—for the time being. For the time being, I didn’t enter her name. But that doesn’t mean that I was idle. The massive Italian notebook, which was the main register of those I had condemned, the mother of the lists of all my victims, was in action. Every normal person feels like killing someone from time to time. But I developed this normalcy creatively—using an exquisite notebook, in which I record (and also cross out) the names of those I feel like killing. Today I entered the name of the female drug addict who accosted me on Sienna Street, I crossed out The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, I added Father Kalinowski (we all used to play cards—two walking skeletons, a certain female corpsette, Father Kalinowski, and I), I crossed out great-grandfather on Father’s side (on the whole, he is blameless), and for the hundredth time I added and for the hundredth time I crossed out The Greatest Love of My Life. That’s how it is. There is no begging for mercy here. Trouble is brewing on every page. I am constantly adding someone, crossing someone out, some appear for a few hours—when, in a surge of sudden frenzy, I enter the name, and when, in a moment, in a surge of equally sudden relief, I cross it out. Two weeks ago, in the twinkling of an eye, I entered and crossed out—and, to all intents and purposes, I crossed it out before I had time to enter it—the name of a certain, seemingly not bad, student of archeology. That’s why I had made a date with her. I made a date with her because she seemed not bad. Anyway, it’s all the same why I made a date—the affair was typical in its disastrousness. You know the pain I am talking about: the young lady, who seems not bad, turns out five minutes into the conversation to be as thick as a plank, which, if it automatically spelled the end, wouldn’t be so bad. Unfortunately, she fiercely sought another date, made persistent attempts, sent sensuous SMSes. And so, once she had finally shown up, it was impossible to leave after ten minutes. You have to play the gentleman. You have to do your time. You have to put in at least an hour. I did my time, but after doing it, I was in such a fury that I didn’t have a shadow of a doubt: immediately upon my return home, a bloody entry would follow! Very bloody! Executed venomously, with a purple felt-tip pen! But before I got home—and for me it was a bit of a hike, since the seemingly not bad student of archeology, instead of accepting my conditions and appearing either at the Dezerter, or at Guliwer on Bracka Street, insisted on Singer in the Kazimierz district, and I, guided by the obvious intentions, servilely agreed to this as well—and so, by the time I dragged myself home from that Singer located on the outskirts, my anger had passed. I smiled meditatively upon my own stupidity and upon my own unbridled sex drive, and I simply wrote the hinney off. First she was, then she wasn’t, and she was there so briefly that it was as if she had never been. I didn’t even have time to imagine ripping off her jeans, blouse, bra, and packing the first spoke that comes to hand into her heart. I don’t rape, don’t grope, but I do undress them before I kill them. It’s good to undress the future corpse. Chiefly for the sake of polemical convenience. As a philosopher we revere likes to say: “In a dispute between the naked and the clothed, the naked will never be right.” And if someone is never right, it is easier to get rid of him. Annihilating someone’s shame and pathetic bodily shell—in places it is yellowish, in places a bit fatty, in places hairy, in places congested—is not such a big deal. It can be a favor. She trembles, her tits shake. Her tits aren’t bad. I know the details. I know the details, because I am an omniscient Lutheran narrator. A Lutheran narrator, by the way, can be no other. He can only be omniscient, omnipotent, and chosen by Our Lord the One in the Trinity, Amen. Amen, Amen, Amen, Jesus Christ is Lord! She trembles, her tits shake, her tits aren’t bad, but for a moment, before entering her name in the register, this loses its significance. Besides, her tits are no longer not bad. Her tits weren’t bad until she opened her yap in Singer. As soon as she opened her yap and began to blather, her not-bad tits immediately went flabby, her shapely legs immediately became crooked, cellulitis immediately began to cover her smooth ass, pustules began to erupt on h
er silken skin, the luxuriant shock of hair began to become oily. And she sweats, and she goes in her panties, and she is standing in a puddle of her own excrement, and, as quickly as possible I must shorten her, and especially my, horrible shame. And so, I produce the rusty spoke from my breast pocket, and poof! in her neck, and poof!—just in case—in the liver, and the seemingly not bad student of archeology is no more. Poof! in the aorta and poof! in the artery, and no more—the tramp from the Kotlarski Roundabout is no more. Poof! in the ear and poof! in the eye, and no more—The Most Beautiful Woman in the World is no more. Poof! in the spleen and poof! in the pancreas, and alcoholic auntie is no more. Poof! in the snout and poof! in the noodle, and Father, Mother, and the neighbor lady are no more. Poof! in the belly and poof! in the jelly, and The Greatest Love of My Life is no more. Poof! in the broom and poof! in the womb, and Viola Caracas is no more. Poof. Poof. Poof. Someone inhumanly tired and with a grave injury to the heart is running a thousand-kilometer obstacle course. Over the orange track there fall icy nights. Then the unending winter of the century. Women lying in the snow, in the ice, in the frosty grass, on the banks and the shoulders of the roads. Their patterned dresses, navy blue scarfs, and sunglasses. A lot of women. There is no point in trying to hide it: there are many, very many women on the list of persons I feel like killing. If I were to kill even half the people on my list, I would have decent chances at becoming the serial killer of the millennium. Hunger. Hunger and once again hunger. Insatiable hunger. Hunger that is there for one’s whole life. Hunger for the body. Evening. Vacations after passing the matura. The short, violent, northern summer. The stuffy room in the wooden attic. The pain of sunburn. The rumble of the river. Hunger. All the women in the world. All of them from the beginning of history. All who died before us. Their buried skeletons and bodies, now eaten by the clay, which once were covered by skin created for our touch. All of them. Invented. Fantastic. To the end of your life you will regret that you didn’t touch the woman created by Saul Bellow who was named Renata; that the mistress of the Frenchman was not your mistress; that you didn’t take Kitty away from Levin; that you didn’t undress Singer’s sensuous Jewesses; Kundera’s eccentric Czech women; Solzhenitsyn’s labor camp prisoners, gaunt like models; Márquez’s golden-skinned mulattoes; Bunin’s impoverished gentrywomen; Kafka’s pencil-pushers dressed in white blouses. Personally—I must confess—I even feel affection for the most frequently used of all the literary asses: Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and Clavdia Chauchat. I regret that I didn’t unbutton the first one’s corset; that I didn’t treat the second with all the brutality she deserves; that the third didn’t come to my room on New Year’s Eve. OK, I’ll say it frankly and bluntly, although at the same time thoroughly metaphorically: I regret that Isolde didn’t blow me, that I didn’t have anal sex with Shakespeare’s Julia. And I even regret that it wasn’t me, but Leverkühn, whom the mythic whore infected with syphilis. We have the same curse and dreadful fate: that, at the sight of bared shoulders in a summer dress, a daring décolletage in an evening gown, dark hair pulled back from the forehead, and a thousand other scenes and views, we will always lose consciousness. We will suffocate on account of the lack, we will be ready to strip off our own skin in order to be able to touch. Without that touch—death in agonies. The desire to kill is deeply justified in this context. When one feels like screwing ideal beings, it’s no wonder that one feels like killing beings made of flesh and blood. But wait! Wait! Wait! There hasn’t been anyone for a long time. I didn’t enter the name of the student of archeology, and my charts, at which I am just now glancing with curiosity, show clearly that the last babe I wanted to kill, and had noted in the register, was Viola Caracas. What do you know! The number of cows that a person feels like clubbing to death is diminishing at a terrifying rate. Apparently we are getting old. The acquaintance with Viola Caracas began in the manner typical for our times—through the Internet. She sent frequent emails, not badly written, although exceptionally vague. Almost no details about herself. This agreed, however, with her key confession, repeated in various versions, that, you know what, I don’t feel too well in this world, because I generally spend my time in the sphere of ideal beings. I underestimated the danger of this admission, and I even, rashly, found it appealing. In addition to this, granted, there were almost no details about herself, but one essential detail finally came out: namely, the year of her birth. It was recent. Even—I would say—shockingly recent. I made a date with her. Seemingly interesting: a dainty little doll with the face of a Venezuelan whore. Hence the nickname—of little sophistication in its simplicity—Caracas. Well-groomed, tidy, scrubbed, coiffed, dressed inordinately perfectly. For such a young age—an excessive perfection, smelling of premature spinsterhood. There was no question, for example, that she would ever drop in on me right after classes. After classes, she always returned first to the student dorm on Piastowska Street, where she tarted herself up for at least two hours, and finally, in a New Year’s Eve blouse, sizzling-hot make-up, and a fantastic hair-do, she would make her way to my place. It goes without saying: ideal beings. What she thought about during preparations was equally important to her as the actual next installments. The actual next installments with Viola Caracas were, as a matter of fact, not bad—really not bad. She had splendid—writers of old would write—alabaster skin and a truly Latin temperament. Unfortunately, she also had a certain insurmountable vice. She didn’t speak up at all. There is no reason to laugh here. We know perfectly well that the silent woman is the ideal. But it depends on the quality of the silence. There is favorable silence, and there is hostile silence. To formulate the matter more precisely: Women who don’t speak up are divided into those who don’t speak up favorably and those who don’t speak up hostilely. Viola didn’t speak up—let’s put it this way—in order to play to a draw. Not hostilely, but also not favorably. She kept silent and stared intensely and greedily, and her pitch-black eyes burned like the windows of the Miraflores Palace during a New Year’s Eve ball. On more or less the third date, I understood that she was a victim of her own imagination. Her mind spent its time, indeed, in spheres so ideal that she was not capable of stammering out even one concrete sentence. In time—not even one concrete word. The acquaintance—you could say—melted into mists devoid of absolutely anything concrete. To put the matter precisely, one thing remained concrete: her name on the list. OK, I’ll say it. I’ll say it, although at first I didn’t admit it. It was about something else. We entered Viola Caracas on the list, but our first impulse was to hide the genuine reason. Actually, it concerned contact lenses. This seemed petty to us. What nobility! What self-restraint! But such is the truth: ever since babes began, on a mass scale, to take out their contact lenses before going to bed, the enthusiasm has diminished. Immeasurably diminished. Sure, not all wear them, and thus not all of them remove contact lenses before they go to bed, but there are so many of them, and the ritual has become so distinctive, that its shadow is cast upon all the rest. I lie on the sheets, and even if I know for a certainty that the miss for whom I am waiting doesn’t wear contact lenses, I have the traumatic sense that I will immediately hear the rattle of lenses coming from the bathroom. And Viola Caracas was probably the seventh babe in a row to wear contact lenses. Seventh! The seventh in a row! Three out of six of her predecessors were allowed to spend the night, and they rattled their contact lenses in the bathroom! She herself didn’t stay for the night and didn’t rattle, but she had them, she wore them, and that was enough. The trauma—God forbid—is not a matter of an aversion to nearsighted girls. Not at all! Quite the opposite! We love four-eyed girls! We have a thing for four-eyed girls! Our pathetic fetishism was born and shaped in the pediatric ophthalmalogy sanatorium in Witkowice. It couldn’t be avoided, since there were no babes there other than those who wore glasses. To put it precisely, there weren’t any other babes there than those who had just had their crossed-eye operations. That had its good sides. The oldest—the half-blind fourteen- and fif
teen-year-olds (there was even a sixteen-year-old, but she was flat as a board), eyes plastered after the operation, pupils dilated from atropine—were in no position to notice that we were ogling them, and they changed clothes in the gigantic multi-bed rooms with exquisite slowness, practically feeling their way in and out of them; they bathed under showers in bathrooms as huge as factory floors; on scorching days, they lay down in the Austro-Hungarian garden, overgrown with Asiatic grasses, and, as if in a dream, not seeing and not knowing that all bounds had long ago been crossed, they rolled up their skirts and opened their blouses. It goes without saying that we, too, wore glasses; we, too, had just had operations to cure our crossed eyes; we, too, had gummed-up eyes and vision blurry from drops and creams. We were completely unfit for the role of voyeurs. All the more fervently, then, did we turn our countenances toward the light shining through our dressings. The foremost angels of our childhood were nearsighted. They all wore glasses. The first girls I saw undress in my life took off everything but their glasses. In any case—the glasses came at the end. After the panties. The indomitable subconsciousness that glasses are a natural element of the female anatomy stems from those times in Witkowice. To recapitulate: we are dealing here with fundamental matters, two fundamental doubts. First: contact lenses lead to the extermination of glasses-wearing women. After all, you almost don’t see any women, especially young women, in glasses any more! Nowadays, a super babe in glasses is a deviant, brothel request! I’m serious. Nowadays, if you want to have a super babe in glasses, you have to set off for a super brothel, in which super secret desires are realized. And even there, if you say that you want a four-eyes, the personnel, well versed in excess, will look at you scandalized by the knowledge that such deviants still walk the earth. A four-eyes removes her glasses and most charmingly squints her nearsighted eyes! Oh, how irrevocably has such an enchanting sight vanished! Thousands of other scenes have vanished! The four-eyes have died off! The perversely narrowed eyelids buried in clay! When I think that I could have had glasses seven times in a row, and yet I had contact lenses seven times in a row, it makes my blood boil! That’s it! That’s absolutely it! I enter all the pieces of tail wearing contact lenses on the list en bloc! All of them! The great quantifications are to me like blood brothers. And just what do you think—as Friedrich Nietzsche would say—and just what do you think? That you have taken off your glasses, and so you will escape with impunity? You won’t escape. Digging around in one’s own innards will not go unpunished. And that’s the second question. The breaking of a taboo. For the time being, it’s OK. Seemingly OK. After all, removing contact lenses for the night differs in no way from removing an artificial jaw—I understand that this can be OK. Barely, but it can be OK. For the time being, no sign of danger. For the time being. I’m not exaggerating. I’m not exaggerating in the least. You yourselves will see. You will see what you will live to see. And you will live to see women who, for the purpose of elevating their hygiene, will remove their wombs for the night. You will see it. You will live to see it. You. Not us. Just so that everything is clear: there is no conservatism here as far as the development of bodily embellishments is concerned. We know perfectly well that there is no need to improve on the Lord God, and that Katharina von Bora didn’t depilate her legs particularly carefully. We know this perfectly well, but we couldn’t care less. At the current stage, we are in favor of depilation. We are in favor of depilation in its most inventive places and patterns. We say yes to the most radical make-ups, tattoos, hair streaks. Rivets, studs, fake nails, wigs, hair extensions, body painting—by all means. Even an artificial tan—if it really has to be—well, OK. Even slight surgical corrections, if they are of the superficial sort, are acceptable in a pinch. But going beneath the surface? Crossing through the gates that lead to the center of the body? Of course, once you have shaved, tattooed, shortened, lengthened, painted, enlarged, diminished, sealed up, trimmed, pierced, bedecked everything that is on the surface with jewelry; of course, once you have done everything possible and impossible on the surface, the reflex is to go below. Once you have done cosmetic operations upon everything that is on the outside, why not correct the profile of your liver? Do what you like. I don’t reach any deeper than to the depth of contact lenses, and even so—I drown in that depth. I am lying on the sheets, waiting for her, and I can’t get rid of the ghastly impression that I am about to embrace, and that for the whole night I will be embracing, a body composed of fewer elements than an hour ago. My hands glide apprehensively along her skin, as if in the fear that any moment they will come upon a ghastly gap or expanse—like the hole in a tortoise shell. The decided majority of my potential victims are ephemerids, meteors, may flies. They flash and vanish like the seemingly not bad student of archeology. The world is now marching full speed ahead, and there practically isn’t a day when one doesn’t feel like killing somebody. Somebody new, of course. Because I also have a group of highly distinguished veterans, who have been waiting for execution for a long time. There is even a certain record-holder—his name, once entered and never deleted. My poor old man—indefatigable in his striving for perfection. Be ye perfect, even as your Lord which is in heaven is perfect. Not long ago, when the faucet in my kitchen broke, and when, almost involuntarily, I cut out a leather gasket from the end of an old belt, I realized that the invention of the leather gasket—truly much more durable than a rubber one—and the art of changing it, is the single thing he taught me. He tried to teach me probably all the arts known to man. In all of these skills, which were to be mastered by the path of exercises and grueling effort, I was supposed to be, if not the best in the world, then decidedly better than all my peers. Nobody is an Einstein or an Edison, but if you adhere to Lutheran principles—who knows? During breakfast yesterday I came upon an article in the newspaper about one of this year’s outstanding Polish lyceum graduates, who had learned to read and do sums when he was four years old, and from then on school went like clockwork. He won competitions and contests, he wrote works of scholarship, he had perfect mastery of five foreign languages, foreign schools were interested in him, and now he was setting off to study at a select university in America. The roll stuck in my throat, the coffee burned my mouth, I read with a twinge in my heart. A gray old fart, heading toward sixty—I read in growing panic, I looked around, and I felt the reflex to destroy and conceal the article, so that it not, by chance, fall into my old man’s mitts. Boy, what fortune you’re no longer alive. You can strive for perfection in every situation. Instruction is the way of life. We would be traveling—let’s say—wherever. We would be traveling—let’s say—by PKS Bus to Wąwóz, to some pious auntie. We would be traveling—let’s say—with this or that velocity, the road to be taken—let’s say—was known, the time—let’s say—was this or that. How many operations and calculations was it possible to perform on the basis of even such elementary parameters! And variations! And eventualities! And likelihoods! And what would happen if the bus moved at a uniformly accelerating pace? And, purely abstractly, let’s suppose that, on the way to Wąwóz, we pass from the first to the second cosmic velocity; then how, in terms of the laws of physics, would the course of such an intellectual experiment look? It wouldn’t be so bad if it were just those five kilometers to Wąwóz. But what about once the ritual roundtrips between Krakow and Granatowe Góry had begun, and it had become 145 kilometers one way? We made this journey a million, perhaps a billion times, and to this day I don’t know its roadside sights, because the entire time I was solving the problems dictated by my indefatigable old man. And when, God forbid, it was raining, and there weren’t any sights, then the real nightmare began. Then I had to determine which motions and which velocities gave the resultant that was the motion of the drops of rain gliding diagonally across the windowpane of the bus. And often it rained the whole way—and, with the PKS buses of those days, this was more than three hours. Poland is a rainy country. By the end, my head was thumping, I couldn’t understand a thing, I wasn’t able
to solve the simplest operation. “Do I demand that you become an Edison or Einstein?” my old man seethed in a furious whisper. “Do I demand that you be a genius? No! The only thing I want is that you understand the basic things in the world around you!” Unfortunately, the world was in constant motion. Everything around me was moving. A dog of a specific mass ran with a specific velocity across a meadow with a specific surface area, trees swayed like a pendulum, clouds scudded according to vectors, the stone that had been cast sank, submitting to the force of gravity, even the seemingly motionless tea in the glass had a specific surface tension—the world was a ceaseless assignment for calculation and execution. I passionately cursed every movement of a reality that was in ceaseless flux. (I was supposed to be an Einstein or an Edison, and I was—in the best case scenario—a grotesque antagonist of Heraclitus, but I didn’t have a clue even about this. Oh, the bitterness!) The last state of man is worse than the first. And in the end—there remained the cutting out of gaskets. Gaskets, indeed—them I cut with virtuosity and to perfection. In the cutting of gaskets, if I am not an Einstein, I am certainly an Edison. Or the other way around. I was able to master this art only because my old man, occupied with his feverish search for raw materials, paid significantly less attention to me than usual. In those days, and in those faucets, gaskets blew one after the other, belts of the appropriate thickness were scarce. All of our pants belts were already either completely massacred, or they were shortened to the limits of caricature. But Father was an intrepid inventor, and once, without hesitation, he cut a gasket out of Mother’s practically new sandals. When she discovered this and made his life a hell, he responded by telling her to stop annoying him and to stop practicing mental monism. Because, after all, when you have a choice between sandals that are whole and a faucet that is leaky—and, as a consequence, a flood in the apartment—you have to make the proper choice and not practice mental monism. He had a weakness for foreign words. Once, he began to look through my stamp collection. With greater and greater disgust, he turned page after page, and finally he asked whether I was really amused by the practice of cognitive promiscuity and the collection of things that were as different as night and day. Wouldn’t it be better to stop practicing cognitive promiscuity and introduce some sort of order to this bedlam? After all, I don’t demand of you that you be a professional philatelist, but this at least should make some sense! From that time on, following his suggestion, I collected Polish stamps on exclusively historical topics and foreign stamps on exclusively sport topics. Anyway, my collecting was only so-so. The philatelist’s passion quickly died out in me. I don’t say that it was out of longing for cognitive promiscuity, but it did die out. These are my curses. I recently came to the conclusion that I buy too many classical music recordings on a whim. Not even silently did I utter the word promiscuity. I swear. I might think that I buy things as different as night and day, but the word promiscuity didn’t come up. I am sure of it. And I decided that, from then on, I would buy nothing but compositions for piano in Polish music, nothing but compositions for cello in foreign music, exclusively compositions for cello. But then I understood the structure and the nature of my decision, and I lost my desire for music. Repetition upon repetitions, and even more: imitation upon imitations. The father figure taken from a sneeringly venomous autobiography. Our Father, who art just as massacred in heaven as Thou were on earth. Unfortunately, we are not specialists in disinterested avant-garde crimes. We are specialists in well-justified crimes within the family. We don’t give a damn about other people. Although I can’t get the tramp from the Kotlarski Roundabout out of my head. I felt like killing him three years ago, and to this day I haven’t crossed him off the list. I would still be happy to kill him. At that time, I imagined that I would sink an eight-inch screwdriver, dripping with manure, under his diaphragm—this technology still suits me. He didn’t do anything to me. Entirely submerged in delirious darkness, he described perfect circles around me, muttered apologies under his breath. It seemed to me that I heard: The Siberian ice has frozen over the Bay of St. Susanna, but this was too little remorse. I caught the stench of shit macerated in denatured alcohol, or perhaps the other way around. No dark brown lightning bolts, no murky illuminations on that account. I don’t harbor any olfactory excessiveness. In general, I don’t harbor any sort of excessiveness. My tactile excessiveness does not belong to the realm of exceptions. It belongs to the realm of rules. I am a man of touch. Recording the names of those I would like to kill is not an example of excessiveness. Quite the opposite—it is the prevention of excessiveness. Criticism of a life does not have to be a praise of death, but it always comes out a bit that way. In my case, it comes out this way all the more, because I react to every attack of the world with the recording of a name. And since the world attacks ceaselessly, I ceaselessly record. With light blue ink. To write as in childhood with light blue ink. To write with the inks of by-gone days, in those smooth-paged “woodless-paper” notebooks, to describe those adventures, which at that time were not adventures at all, and now belong to the great Book of Canons. Objects that stand in my way. The light in the bathroom, which goes on and off according to its own rhythm, the eyeglasses, which are forever getting lost, the sofa bed, which falls apart every evening. The leaky radiator, which, if I could, I would blow to smithereens. The Coca-Cola spilled on the carpet, both it and the carpet, sticky from the sweetness—to be killed immediately. The late train—kill it. The broken cigarette lighter—kill it. A sudden rain—sudden death. Icy, yellow air over the city. Pigeons on the windowsill. A few times I took aim with my air rifle, I had them in my sights—and nothing. An absolute fiasco. Not only from the sniper’s point of view. Complete disaster. I couldn’t even risk a warning shot in the air. And what if a gray lump of fossilized lice takes flight and—there you have it—plonk! There was no question that I could survive the dull blow, the flying feathers, the trace of blood. As a matter of fact, I don’t even write down the spectral corpses. I write down reactions. I write them down just in case, just in case it should come to something. But, truth be told, what should come to what? Death to the living. The living to the grave. The grave to the wall. After age fifty, our libraries gain in spectrality. Whenever I can’t find some book, I start to write it. Every normal person, at least once in his life, feels like killing his father. I broadened that normality to the extent that I felt like killing him a few thousand times. He—me, hundreds of thousands of times. Mother—him, at least once a week. He—Mother, on a daily basis. We were a very loving family. The most ordinary family of monsters in the world. True, my folks would be reluctant to entertain the idea that they were monsters, and they wondered where such a monster like me had come from, but that is typical. All the monsters in the world wonder where their monstrous offspring have come from. Today both of them are already in the other world. I’ll say honestly that I prefer to imagine that world impersonally. If anything distinguished us from other monsters, it was the observance of Lutheran principles and the reading of the Bible. Yes, sir—the Gospel According to Matthew. Yes, sir: Matthew 6:23, Matthew 12:26, Matthew 12:43–45. Yes, sir—our favorite verses. Sometimes it seems to me that I have a large butterfly net thrown over my head. Images and spaces, sounds and smells sink into me. They are like remnants of shrouds overgrown with sand and yellow bandages. I drag them to my sack, fall asleep, dream the same things, though deformed and vanishing, as if instant acid had consumed them in my unconscious head. I awake, and everything repeats from the beginning. Critique of life does not have to be a praise of death. But the defense of life has to be a praise of despair. I strip naked, stick a rusty spoke in my heart, and all of you are no more. The good God removed our minds from our weary heads and replaced them with two or three quotations from Scripture. But the heart of the matter is—which? Which quotations? It’s not so bad if someone is allotted a tolerable phrase, but when someone gets a more—so to say—mysterious combination, it’s game over. I’m not saying that he will find hi
mself in the clutches of infernal powers, but the fact remains: as early as the sixties, my old man brought back a plaster figurine of Mephistopheles from a business trip to the GDR. True, this likeness of Satan didn’t stand for long on the étagère. In the course of the very next squabble it went to smithereens, and not at all because there were any exorcisms in the house, but because Mother—it was she who hurled Mephistopheles at Father—didn’t have anything else handy at the moment. All the same: a statue of Satan stood in our home. Sure, it was little; sure, it was plaster; sure, it was there briefly—but there it stood. There it stood under our roof: a silver calf. There it stood upon our altar: Satan from the German Democratic Republic. That’s how it is in life. One person has Doctor Faustus on his shelf, the other a plaster devil. One knows Leverkühn’s conversation with the Prince of Darkness in the original, the other has the dust of a pathetic copy on his collar. One is mine, the other yours. One in a book, the other on the shelf. One is plaster, the other paper. Each has the one he fears. Do we understand each other, my curse? Our Satan was everywhere. He was in hard candies. He was in lemonade. He was in vanilla ice cream. He was in soccer, in chewing gum, and in music. In the radio and in the television set. There isn’t any point in talking about cigarettes, beer, and short skirts—they were all his work. In the summer, he sunbathed at the swimming pool and swam in the river. In the evenings, he showed films in the summer movie theater. He played the electronic organ at the band shell. He danced at parties in the House of the Spa. He removed the chiffon blouses from the Czech strippers. At night, he rummaged through pieces of junk in the attic. He slept in the bogs. He lay in the empty, ice-cold entryway. He ran along the railway embankment. He stood on the bridge and brushed snow from his overcoat. The yellow light of his flashlight wandered along the dark blue slopes. On winter evenings, he gave us things to read that we were unable to put down. He would shove a pencil into our hands and tempt us to record random thoughts. Luther did battle with him his whole life and often lost. But in the final analysis Luther was a colossus. Luther stood in the same rank with the Prophets, with the Evangelists, he was near Lord Jesus Himself. He wished to marry Katharina von Bora—so he made a schism. And us? What were we supposed to do? What sort of schism were we supposed to make so that, without fear of the fires of hell, we might buy a bottle of lemonade or go to the movies? The matters of the world are simple. If you risked hell over a lemonade, then—let’s party!—seven lemonades for me, please! If nothing but greedy (in the original: lustful) gazing upon a suntanned female vacationer is already adultery, then only a sucker would stop at gazing. If the devil is everywhere, that means that he doesn’t exist at all, or, at best, he is made of plaster and comes from the GDR. If we blather on about Satan, over and over, and without cease, then there is no Satan—there is only blather. What were we supposed to do? For want of anything better, you could start up a soccer game on the grounds that it is supposedly good for your health. For want of anything better, music might praise God. The TV could spread knowledge about the world, and whoever lived to see the epoch of unpunished reception of foreign stations could watch them under the pretext of learning foreign languages. Toward the end, my folks were a pair of barely moving oldsters. All day long they tottered and rustled about the house, thought up for themselves some sort of absurd, but seemingly useful occupations: Mother ironed scarfs that had never been worn, Father punched additional holes into his pants belt; finally, as evening came, they would sit, dead tired, in front of the TV; they sat, however, with shame and in deliberately uncomfortable and fleeting poses, so that it would seem that they had sat down only for a moment and by chance; and once they had settled in for good, they would turn on SAT1 or CNN. They weren’t watching TV, they weren’t going easy on Satan: they were learning foreign languages. In daily life, Satan and Lutheran principles are sufficient. Father had significantly greater difficulty with this than Mother. Throughout all his life. He would take me to Cracovia matches, and he always had a toothache during those matches. Not metaphorically, on account of the pathetic play. It was in the strict sense that he would have tooth attacks during Cracovia matches, and he would light up a cigarette in order to soothe them. He would ask someone he knew, or didn’t know, in any case, someone nearby who was smoking, and in those days, almost every fan smoked, so it wasn’t a problem. My old man would ask them to give him one, or even two, because his teeth were hurting him horribly, and—pretending to inhale smoke especially intensively on the sore spots—he would smoke away. It seems to me that eventually, just in case of a sudden toothache, he started carrying with him a package of mentholated Giewonts. It really didn’t happen soon, and in fact it was quite late, even very late, that I understood what was going on here. Quite another matter that the thing was, for the brain of a ten-year-old, quite complicated. My old man smoked, which was deviltry, and so, wishing to neutralize the deviltry, and even to rein it in entirely, through the observance of Lutheran principles, he pretended that his teeth ached, and that he smoked for the pain, which was a lie, in other words heightened deviltry. The truth was different, and this was the seven-fold deviltry, because my old man smoked out of fascination with the director of the personnel department at the polytechnic, Mrs. Przekrasicka. She smoked, but he wanted to give her a roll in the hay. When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first. The steadfastness of Lutheran principles lies in their exclusivity. Beyond them there is nothing. There are, to put it succinctly, situations in which the observance of Lutheran principles turns out to be absolutely fatal. Father’s undoing was the fact that, finally having given the director of the personnel department at the polytechnic, Mrs. Przekrasicka, a roll in the hay, he was incapable—once it was all over—of getting rid of the handkerchief, which had been soiled during the amatory frenzy. In a word, his undoing was the Lutheran principle that nothing is ever to be thrown away. I know what I’ll hear now—that the principle of never throwing anything away is not only a Lutheran principle, that it is a supraconfessional principle, and even supracultural. Very well. But when the principle of never throwing anything away becomes a Lutheran principle, it takes on a special shape and and a special terror. Once he had given the director of the personnel department at the polytechnic, Mrs. Przekrasicka, a roll in the hay, my old man folded the handkerchief carefully, put it in his pocket, and set off for home. I know the details. I know the details, because I am an omniscient Lutheran narrator. A Lutheran narrator can be no other. Even when the narrator is a Lutheran child, then it, too, is omnipotent, omniscient, and chosen by Our Lord, the One in the Trinity, Amen. Father was intoxicated by his amorous success. He was especially intoxicated by the class aspect of his amorous success. Przekrasicka—this wasn’t just anything! And it absolutely wasn’t a matter of the fact that she was the director of personnel at the polytechnic. The position, of course, was important and key, but it was nonetheless in the administrative sector. Father, as a researcher, a doctoral student, lecturer, etc., etc., was, in this regard, of infinitely higher standing. But Przekrasicka was a well known Krakow name! Her husband, Mr. Przekrasicki—he was a well known Krakow figure! To tell the truth, an artist! In a certain sense, a painter! A poet, who had his verses printed in The Catholic Weekly! Fully a man of the world! Tadeusz Kantor himself attended receptions at the Przekrasickis! My old man couldn’t even dream that he would be in attendance there! He couldn’t dream that he would give the hostess of those sorts of banquets a roll in the hay! And at the very thought that maybe he might do so after all, and especially in the course of the thing, it seemed to him that glory after glory, honor after honor was flowing down upon him. And the very fact that Przekrasicka smoked drove Father m
ad! According to our Lutheran principles, the smoking woman was beyond all categories. Only a man could smoke, and that only under the condition that he had become addicted to tobacco in a concentration camp. Smoking because of toothache? Smoking because of—as St. Paul would say—burning of the body? Forget it. As far as women were concerned, there could be no justifications. Not even a concentration camp, not even the Gulag, not even death row was justification. Women didn’t smoke, and that was that. The only ones who smoked were basically no longer women: whores or creatures from another planet. Father rolled Mrs. Przekrasicka, and he had the impression that he was rolling a whore from another planet. Dwelling on such satisfactions caused him to forget the handkerchief in his pocket. That is, he didn’t forget, there was no way he forgot, but he was incapable of throwing it out. On his way home, he passed a thousand places where he could have done it, even if there weren’t any trash cans, even if there wasn’t a single can, which is possible, although not very likely, after all there were the Commons, the park, dark squares, the grates of street sewers, it would have been perfectly easy to be rid of the ill-fated handkerchief, but not my old man, he didn’t throw it away. He carried it home. Maybe he thought that he would quietly slip it into Mother’s laundry? I don’t know what he was thinking, even as an omniscient Lutheran narrator I don’t know what he was thinking, maybe he wasn’t thinking at all, because to think that it would be possible to slip something quietly into Mother’s laundry is the height of naïveté! That was a naïveté much greater than bringing the soiled handkerchief home. After all, before washing, and after washing but before drying, as well as after drying, Mother examined each thing under the light a thousand times, each set of knickers, each rag, each piece of tattered clothing! Nothing could go to waste! Damage! Rip! Wear out! You had to know when to sew! Patch! Darn! After washing? Or before? Or should you even risk washing? Will that shirt be suitable for going out any more? Or should you wear it only around the house? And why are those pants so grimy? And where? And when? And even if they are so grimy that they are no longer suitable for going out or wearing around the house, you still don’t throw them away, because they will be good if we have to paint the apartment, and if not, then they will be ideal for weather-stripping the windows in the winter. In this fashion, after decades of collecting rags, our apartment was filled and overgrown with rags, it became the world’s only rag museum, rag mausoleum, rag labyrinth. We were surrounded by such fortified rag walls that not even nuclear radiation could pass through them. When Chernobyl exploded, my folks’ apartment, so overgrown with rags, was the safest bunker in all of Europe. But to return to the main thread of the narration: on my word, I am probably maligning my own Father by ascribing to him the idea of slipping the handkerchief into the family wash. That was out of the question. So what, in that case, did he wish to do? Did he wish to wash and dry it himself on the sly? In our two rooms? In the face of Mother’s ceaseless presence and eternal bustling? That would be absolute and criminal idiocy. Was he suddenly aware just how low he had fallen and to what end he had come, and had he decided that—tough—what had happened had happened, he was not going to wade further into the bog, and he would no longer make the next step into the abyss—which would be to throw away a perfectly good handkerchief? Had the physical act with the director of personnel at the polytechnic, Mrs. Przekrasicka, swept out of his head all thoughts and remnants of the instinct for self-preservation, and therefore he especially heightened the old principle of not throwing anything away, and especially, God forbid, of not throwing away things that were perfectly good, and the handkerchief was not only perfectly good, it was almost new? Did he, having the choice between the risk of exposure and the certainty of breaking principles, decide not to break principles? Was he taking a risk? Having considered all the parameters and variations, was he taking a risk? Had he calculated the risk? Had he not calculated anything, because he was plunged in absolute chaos and helplessness? One way or the other, everything inexorably made its way toward a horror-filled finale. My old man entered the apartment, removed his overcoat in the entryway, and with the help of embarrassing theatrical gestures, he began to make it known that he was hungry as a wolf. The sight of Father—rubbing his belly with feigned grief, desperately smacking his lips and winking at me conspiratorially, as if to say that if I would support his efforts, Mommy Dearest would fry us up some up some pancakes—was unbearable. Today—when I am clearly aware that my old man rubbed his belly, pitifully smacked his lips, and pretended to be a hungry little boy less than an hour after the copulatory frenzy to which he had surrendered in the personnel department office of the polytechnic, which they had locked from within—I turn my attention with due consideration to human nature, full as it is of contradictions; but at that time, I was convulsed with desperately diabolical snickering. But the laughter, the snickering didn’t last long; almost immediately the great terror ensued. I don’t recall whether searching through the old man’s pockets was already one of Mother’s constant customs those days, or whether it arose precisely at that time. Besides, it isn’t so important whether Mother reached into the old man’s pockets as a matter of routine, or whether she was led by a sudden intuition—it is enough that she reached in there. She reached there immediately, and immediately she extracted a handkerchief embroidered with pearls, adorned with intricate needlework, no need to mention the name of the overcast stitching on the edges. An immediate reaching, immediate extraction, and an immediate leap for his throat. The flame of the panther’s coat rising in the air, and the beginning of the immortal aria: I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! The old man didn’t try to defend himself at all, he laid down his weapons and folded his wings, and for a good hour he was a corpse in the strict sense of the word. Only when he had recovered from the shock of being the culprit caught with the evident proof of guilt in his pocket did he begin to defend himself, aggressively and desperately; he stubbornly dug in his heels and insisted that Mother was engaging in trivial investigative inductionism. “Time to be done with trivial investigative inductionism!” he yelled. “Stop engaging in trivial investigative inductionism! We won’t get anywhere this way! Do I demand any sort of great things? I don’t demand any great things! I demand common understanding! Common human understanding!” Mother’s rage was, from the beginning, mighty and impotent. All the mightier and the more impotent because she, too, was incapable of throwing the disastrous handkerchief away, and what is more, she realized that sooner or later she would launder it herself by hand and iron it. True, she repeated in the depth of her soul—“What fault is this of the handkerchief? What fault, finally, is this of the handkerchief? What fault, finally is this, in the least, of this handkerchief?”—but those seemingly thoroughly rational questions didn’t extinguish her rage and pain, quite the opposite. That very evening, she moved into my room, to the green sofa bed for guests. For months on end they slept apart, got up in the morning, ate breakfast, went to work, returned home in the afternoon, rested a moment, and from early evening on, with voices horse from yelling, solemnly promised each other that they would kill each other during the night. “With this knife, with this very knife, I’ll slit your throat!” Mother would bellow and wave about a huge butcher’s blade that we had brought with us from our parts. “With this hammer, with this very hammer, I’ll smash your head in!” my old man would wheeze and show her the great bricklayer’s hammer that he had bought at the time of our move. “As soon as you fall asleep, you’re a goner!” “Sweet dreams, you won’t wake up anyway!” So tenderly did they part before falling asleep, and dead tired they fell into truly sound sleep. The notion that Mother would get up in the night and go, all the same, to butcher Father didn’t especially disturb me. But the notion that the old man would get up and come to my room and start to pound Mother’s head with a gigantic bricklayer’s hammer was unpleasant. I’m not saying that I imagined the sound of the cracking skull and the splash of the spraying brain, because I didn’t know such realities,
but the possibility that the old man might bash me with the hammer as well really did come into consideration. Even if it was only because of normal momentum. And if it was not because of momentum, then it would be after giving it some thought, out of a desire to spare me the fate of being a half-orphan. Or with premeditation, wishing to liquidate me as an eye witness. This was relatively unlikely; I doubted on the whole that he would wish to liquidate me for precisely that reason. I supposed that, if it came to that, he would attempt to reach an agreement with me; still, you have to be prepared for all variations. Every evening, as the tragic opera was nearing its close, I played on the floor, as if casually, but in truth I was assembling a special alarm. It wasn’t difficult. I had all the necessary elements: I had “The Little Electrician,” and “The Little Engineer,” and “The Little Architect.” The construction of a simple system, which, with the slightest opening of the door, turned on a piercing bell, was truly childishly simple. Moreover, every day I perfected the construction. I had an innumerable quantity of toys, I had bells, lights, miniature motors, moving semaphores, fire trucks and ambulances with sirens, special flood lights, three electric trains, batteries, hundreds, perhaps thousands of useful objects. There was something to choose from and something to plot with. It came easily to me. I was a young Einstein and a budding Edison, or maybe the other way around, and I was overflowing with concepts. I was able to link the wires and set up the construction in such a way that, when the door was opened, the train was set in motion, the bell rang, the lights shone, the cars drove. I truly was able to do everything, and I truly had everything. How often—and with pride!—was Father wont to say that I had whatever my heart desired, and that I didn’t lack for any treats. The first state of man is worse than the last, and the other way around. The last is worse than the first. All our sentences and all our quotations go into darkness. The organists’ daughters. The pastors’ sons. Death playing chess. A scarf embroidered with pearls. The growing pile of dark writings. An Italian notebook. Seven seals. And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out?
