by Jerzy Pilch
Right off, Grandma will warm up the rest of the cabbage, which she had left in the pantry for New Year’s. They will sit down to the table, say a prayer, share the Host with each other, and sing: “The time of joy and cheer to this world has arisen! For a Savior, a Redeemer, to sinful man is given!” And then Grandpa, in a surge of euphoric spirits, which he hadn’t felt for years, will grab the round stool and head off toward the clocks. He hadn’t wound them for God knows how long. Already the year before—even after lugging a painter’s ladder into the house and climbing up on it as high as he could—instead of clock faces he saw blurry white spots. Now, on Christmas Eve, he didn’t regain his sight, but, so it seems, he counts on a more spectacular miracle.
He winds one after the other, he turns the key with youthful verve, he moves the hands by intuition, which is to say—blindly. The last clock in the last room hangs directly across from the portrait of Gustaw Branny. Granted, in his all-embracing euphoria, Grandpa does not come to the sudden conclusion that the old photograph fits in here quite nicely, that perhaps it is an even better decoration than the faded tableau from ages ago; the entire burden did not disappear from his heart, but he shrugs it off as a mere trifle: one has other truly important matters to deal with! He winds the last clock and, weary from his high-wire stunts, he returns to the kitchen and waits for the new hour. And the minutes drag on, as in sleepless nights, and finally it is nine, and at first, for a long time, for a very long time, nothing happens, and nothing but an even more dramatic ticking is to be heard. Then—as if someone were taking an endlessly deep breath, as if someone in the depths of the house were pushing on a door handle, as if a dropped ten-złoty coin were rolling endlessly long across the floor—the slowly gathering racket of the springs, finally one clock, with the greatest difficulty, tolls three times, another not at all, the third rasps and wheezes, like a patient attempting in vain to come around from general anesthesia, the fourth begins to toll feverishly and ceaselessly, as if it were announcing fire or war, the fifth is carried away with the volcanic cough of the dying consumptive. Grandma hides her head in her arms, she has a terrible desire to laugh, but she doesn’t want to hurt Grandpa with her laughter; she leans over the table and doesn’t see that he, too, more and more heartily, and more and more proudly, smiles to himself.
VIII
She died nine years after his death, and she behaved dreadfully at the time. Not as dreadfully as Pospiszil, but, nonetheless, as if she didn’t believe in God at all. She didn’t want the pastor. In the end, it was only after long persuasion and urging that, not even so much with reluctance as with hostility, she received communion. Then for three days she howled and shouted; we weren’t certain whether it was in delirium. I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, she repeated with a voice so hoarse it seemed absolutely not hers. From her leg flowed puss mixed with blood, as if from an open faucet. Before her very last breath, she livened up so much that it seemed that her strength had really returned, as if she had recovered and arisen from the dead. Then she collapsed somehow strangely into the depths of the damp sheets. It was clear that this was the end. The end, but not quite. Suddenly, with yet another strangely energetic motion, she reached her hand out in our direction, and with a bent finger she indicated that someone should follow her. She wanted to take someone with her. There’s no point in trying to hide it: everyone had real shivers going up and down their spines. Father died a year later. Death never ends. As we were burying him, a black tropical storm passed over one half of the cemetery. Ten yards away there was still sun, but over his grave it poured so much that it seemed that any moment his coffin would float to the top.
The rocking chair is still like new. No one has sat in it for thirty years. Once it suddenly rocked in the void. As if a powerful draft had passed through the closed doors and windows. As if someone nearby had spread their wings darkened by the damp.
A Chapter about a Figure Sitting Motionless
I
Anka Chow Chow was crazy about girls, and the pipe dream of the majority of men—to find themselves in an intimate situation with two young women who have a thing for each other—was within reach.
It took a few months, however, before I realized what sort of chance was standing before me. I was approaching fifty at a dizzying pace, and for two years I had become less and less successful at hiding an unpleasant fact: namely, that I was becoming obtuse at an equally galloping tempo. Above all, I wasn’t able to hide it from myself under any circumstances.
I didn’t recall the family names of people I knew perfectly well. I would forget the first names of my closest friends. I would ask someone a question, and a minute later I would repeat it, convinced that I was asking it for the first time. Keys, glasses, IDs, watch, money, telephone—everything was constantly vanishing without a trace. Every morning I took fortifying vitamins and pills that are supposed to enhance the working of the brain, but by around noon I was never a hundred percent certain whether I had already taken the redemptive tablets, or not yet. Plans I had made to meet with people slipped my mind. Telephone numbers I had known by heart for years—as if drowned in my bodily fluids—blurred and couldn’t be recreated. I had to check the day’s date a hundred times. A few times, while filling out various forms, I had to really concentrate in order to recall my own address. Forget about family names. A year ago, maybe half a year, for a good quarter of an hour, I wasn’t able to recall the first name of John Paul II.
In such a pitiful state, it wasn’t so much that I didn’t even understand Anka Chow Chow’s hints for a long time—just as perverse as they were subtle—as that they completely escaped my attention. She was always the first to notice the super misses on the street. She subtly sketched breathtaking scenes, she tempted with the skill of the seasoned habitué, and I didn’t have a clue about what was going on. It’s quite another matter that a deception had taken place at the beginning, which excuses me a little, although it adds no finesse to the affair. In any event: at the dawning there was a deception, which lulled me to sleep.
Namely, when, on the first night, I poured a hailstorm of typical male questions upon Anka, she answered them all in the negative. Or, at best, hesitantly. No. Never. Don’t know. Maybe. When? What do you mean when? When was your first time? Don’t know. At the university? No. In the lyceum? No. Grade school? No. Well, when then? Never. You were never with a guy? No. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing? No, it doesn’t. If it wasn’t with a guy, then maybe with a girl? No. Listen, I don’t want to be indiscrete, but whom were you with finally? Nobody. Nobody? Nobody. He was a nobody? No. He turned out to be a nobody? He didn’t exist at all. You don’t want to talk about him? No. He was a nobody, because you don’t know who it was? No. No one? Don’t know. You don’t know by what miracle it happened? Don’t know. You suddenly found yourself at a risqué party? Maybe. You got drunk, and you don’t remember anything? I’ve never been drunk in my life. If you weren’t drunk, you have to remember. Don’t have to. Have to. I’m the specialist on memory losses in this story. You have to remember. You can’t remember something that didn’t happen. I’m not sure we are understanding each other: I’m not asking how many times you went with whom, or whether you were engaged; I’m asking who it was you slept with. I didn’t sleep with anyone. Are you sure? Yes.
Anka Chow Chow had never slept with anyone, and not so much that piece of news in itself, as the laborious road of questioning to get there, so exhausted my cognitive facilities that along the way I didn’t notice how she shuddered and swallowed hard when the question came about the girlfriends. She denied it, but she shuddered and swallowed hard.
She was twenty-three years old, and she was a virgin. I didn’t get excessively excited about this. In times of excesses, you come across excesses like this one, too. For instance, these days, among the thoroughly purebred aristocracy, the snobbism of the old-style wedding night is supposedly spreading. True, Anka didn’t look like a purebred aristocrat—or any other so
rt of melancholic who isn’t in a hurry to go to bed with you—but that was without significance. The reasons why she remained pure to such a ripe old age—whatever they were—were not sensational. Anka’s virginity was not in and of itself sensational. What was sensational was the fact that, in spite of having slept with me, she desperately maintained that she remained intact.
Daybreak was approaching, and she was still intact! A bloody, icy sun was rising over the horizon, and she dug in her heels, insisting that nothing had changed! After a night spent in my arms, she was still intact! And that was after a night without sleep! After an active night! Exceptionally active! Without any miracles, because never, not even in my glory days, did I perform miracles, nor did I promise them, and now—it goes without saying—all the more so; or rather—all the less so. After all, I am growing weaker not only in the brain. Last week, for example, I did five deep knee bends on the balcony, the result of which was that I sustained a painful contusion of the calf muscle. And so, I repeat, without any miracles and without acrobatics. But what was supposed to happen, happened. But I was in you, wasn’t I? Yes, you, were, but not entirely. I’m not completely typical.
In fact, her architecture was atypical, and although her long (five feet, eleven and a half inches) serpentine body performed remarkable contortions, it wasn’t easy to slither into her. But for God’s sake! I did it! And not just once that night! And not just superficially, but profoundly! I have gone dull-witted, perhaps I have hardening of the arteries, the beginnings of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, but, after all, it isn’t the case that half an hour ago I hadn’t had a woman, and now I am dreaming that I slid into her to the full length. If it were the other way around—that I had had her half an hour ago, but now the fact had completely slipped my mind—I would be quicker to agree. But this? Although, on the whole? Who knows? There is no way to be sure. The sex maniac always overestimates his possibilities. And the sex maniac who is aging and showing signs of dementia? Forget about it. I decided to stick to the facts. I decided to recreate the events step by step, and even to record the facts.
II
Half a year ago, I was abandoned by the last in a series of women with whom I had intended to live in a house eternally buried in snow, watch films on HBO in the evenings, drink tea with raspberry juice, etc. I will answer the question whether that was the fledgling singer in a lizard-green dress with a warning: never get involved with fledgling artists. If they begin to develop—art will, perhaps, be a winner, but life (especially yours) will be the loser. And if they don’t begin to develop—well, forget about it.
However this may be, feeling an ever more painful void and despair, I plunged once again into the whirlwind of casual comforts. Each time, the desperation of such doings was greater, and their effect—ever more pathetic. I tried to pick up waitresses in bars, saleswomen in stores, I sought out girls sitting alone in movie theaters. With lonely female swimmers on the brain, I began to go to the pool. In a search of rash manicurists, I became a regular client of beauty salons. Since it is much easier to find a vegetarian on her own than a carnivorous single, I forced myself to eat the grassy fodder, and I started frequenting vegan bars. I responded to even the riskiest of invitations, and I wandered around what were often completely hopeless vernissages, launchings, and premières. I went to shopping centers. It has long been well known that, in the heat of shopping, some young ladies grow weak and bare their souls in risqué fashion. Almost every day, I spent some time at Central Station, and, in the shoals of female travelers ceaselessly swimming through the underground passageways, I sought out those who quite obviously were not in any special hurry. By some miracle, I refrained from the street pick-up, but I considered completely seriously listing a matrimonial classified in the newspaper.
I placed great hopes in Empik bookstores and music shops. For a guy past fifty, who is afflicted with mental deconcentration, these were not bad spots. After all, I was unlikely to penetrate discotheques, cult bars, or enthusiastically engage in clubbing. And it wasn’t a matter of my old gray head, which could arouse panic and embarrassment in such company. I could handle that with ease. I’ve gotten through much greater moments of shame in my life. For me, for motor reasons, there can be no question of any form whatsoever of late-evening, to say nothing of night life. In the evening—I’ll say something shocking now—I’m often sleepy. After watching “The Facts” and the main broadcast of “The Evening News,” my day is basically done. I’ll look the newspaper over once again in the armchair, glance again at the book I’ve been reading for a week, but my head is getting heavy, my eyelids are drooping. In that sense, the bookstores or other newsstands that are open until 10 p.m. are night clubs as far as I am concerned, and at that late hour I didn’t even go there.
I would drop by in the early afternoons and make a solemn inspection of the candidates. Only those who sat in the armchairs and read serious literature came into question, or who listened to classical music with cosmic headphones perched on their heads. Readers of magazines and those listening to rock I eliminated a priori—this is, by the nature of things, a shaky selection pool. I put my bets on connoisseurs of Beethoven and Tolstoy: communing with the classics usually guarantees quite decent perversions. Besides, it is clear that if they sit for a long time—reading carefully or listening at the store—they’ve got time. What is more, since they read and listen at the store, they quite clearly don’t have a penny to their names. They clearly don’t have enough cash to buy a book or a CD and take it home with them. Poverty is never especially required, but in this case it isn’t bad. It is always easier to persuade, and to lure into harlotry, a poor one than a wealthy one. Finally, spying on what they are just then reading or listening to facilitates striking up the conversation remarkably.
But the matter is, I never did strike up a conversation. In practically none of the places mentioned did I once successfully strike up a conversation. I managed a few futile wheezings, but let’s pull the curtains on all that. My agony was intense. I chased after them like a madman, and I set off like a lunatic, but I had no certainty, and the uncertainty weakened the beauty of the madness and the impertinence of the lunacy. Sensing that I didn’t have a chance anyway with the conspicuous super babes, I placed my bets on the middling ones. But before I could approach the middling-gal I had singled out, I was seized by embarrassment over taking the easy way out, and I gave it up. Falling from one extreme into another, I now raised the bar to the maximum, and I desperately swore that from now on I would penetrate nothing but masterpieces. But whenever any miracle of nature appeared, I lacked reflexes and courage. As a result, the one and the other, and basically all of them, slipped by right under my nose. I would return home, and the mistakes I had made, the capitulations and the bad estimations, made my head burst. Suddenly, I became starkly aware what treasures had slipped through my fingers that afternoon. In my imagination, I replayed all the episodes one more time, corrected the mistakes, I was quick and decisive; now everything was a success, everything came true, the specter of the beauty seen an hour before took me by the arm, set her hair and her shoulder strap in order, and the pain was unbearable.
At the same time, I tried to keep a tight rein on myself. I didn’t spend entire days searching for the next woman of my life. In the mornings, I worked as before, although somewhat more nervously. Toward evening, as usual, I would drop by Yellow Dream for a grapefruit juice. Every two or three weeks, I would make the trip to watch Cracovia matches. Somehow I got by. Somehow, with the greatest difficulty, I continued to breathe.
III
I don’t rule out the possibility that I traveled to Cracovia matches in order to liberate myself, even briefly, from apparitions. While I was still on the express train to Krakow, I would check to see what sort of female travel companions were sitting in the adjoining compartments—but just as a matter of habit and reflex, without translation to reality. Whoever travels knows that there are always at least a few intriguing female travelers in ever
y express train between Krakow and Warsaw. But the fact that I left them alone was not a question of choice. By getting on the train at Central Station, in a certain sense I was abandoning myself. I left my Warsaw solitude, which was unbearable and without which I couldn’t live, and, together with that solitude, I left the despair of warding it off.
I hope this is clear. Although it is entirely clear only to those who wake up alone, turn on the radio, take a shower, and are not even in the worst of moods. Who knows? Maybe they will meet somebody today.
It is completely clear only for those who eat their dinner alone in an almost empty café and lose their sense of taste. Even when they daringly order the most expensive frutti di mare, their sense of taste is gone—the whole time, it seems to them that, besides them, no one eats alone. Besides them, no one ever eats alone—the entire city sees this, and everybody is staring at them. How many times can you look at your watch and let the audience know that you have dropped by just in order to have a bite as quickly as possible, since in a moment—thank you very much!—you have an incredible date, perhaps it will last until the crack of dawn. So how are you supposed to perform the bite as quickly as possible, when you feel like sitting a bit, even with a leaden heart; and everyone knows that it was only after leaving that the lead would become all consuming.
It is completely clear only for those who wake up in the night, and their throats go numb because they are alone; they have no one to embrace or to cover up, they have no one to bring a glass of juice from the kitchen, and in the morning they won’t have anyone with whom to listen to the radio, read the paper, eat breakfast.
