Jerzy Pilch - My First Suicide

Unfortunately, in those days there were very few forbidden obscenities on television, and in fact, on the evening preceding my first suicide, I had incredible fortune. Fortune, one could say, in misfortune, since, when the scene in The Small World of Sammy Lee began, in which the owner of the bar ordered the newly hired stripper to do a trial run, the doorbell rang in the hallway, the door opened, and there — stiff from the cold, and the vodka — staggered in Father.

Mother and Father stood facing each other for a long time in total silence. Then the old man, rocking and giving off steaming clouds of hoarfrost and rectified spirits, managed to stammer out that, at the Academy of Mining and Metallurgy, they had held a ping-pong tournament, and that he had once again won. At that point Mother waited a good minute more. Then she grabbed the pot of mushroom soup with homemade noodles, which was standing on the table and had already cooled off somewhat, and she poured it all over my old man. Father reeled, but he didn’t fall down. He began, at first with uncoordinated motions, then more and more precisely, to remove handfuls of the homemade noodles with which he was plastered and to fling them at Mother, but she was already in the depths of the kitchen, beyond the reach of his feckless blows. She stood at the huge skillet full of breaded veal cutlets and aimed at his head in a great rage, and she hit her mark almost every time. The old man, like a wounded bear, trundled along in her direction. On the way, his splayed fingers happened upon a pot of something that, once he had emptied it, turned out to be Christmas Eve cabbage, and now Mother was like a sea monster overgrown with greenish scales. Time and again she reached for the potato pancakes piled up next to the now empty cutlet skillet, and she furiously placed them, one layer after another, on Father’s head. Then she poured portions of half-set pudding on him. He broke off a piece of apple dumpling and took aim at her, but before he threw it he fell into a reverie and instinctively, as if he wished to check how it tasted, bit off a little piece. Mother ruthlessly exploited this moment of inattention and attacked him with her whole body. The old man began to retreat. She dexterously opened the refrigerator and extracted a bunch of frankfurters, obtained by God knows what sort of miracle, and began to flog Father with them like a mad woman. He, in turn, raving with pain, blindly felt around for the jars of compote standing on the shelves in the hallway, grabbed one of them (it turned out to be greengage plums), and with an automatic motion, practiced during a thousand Sunday dinners, pulled the rubber seal, opened it, and poured it on her, as if in the hope that this would sober her up. But no, she went on flogging him. He shook the empty jar like a tambourine, or perhaps like the flag of defeat.

In a more and more powerful and spasmodic clench, like a couple of avant-garde performers, or wrestlers of equal strength, they sailed through the hallway and rolled into the bedroom. The door, as if touched by an invisible force, closed behind them. For a moment you could still hear the lashing of frankfurters, then silence set in, then the lights went out.

The scene of the auditioning stripper had passed irrevocably. There wasn’t any point in comforting myself with the thought that, when I grew up, in addition to being a famous soccer player, I would also be the manager of a strip joint. I had to accept the more tragic truth: namely, that I would die without seeing a naked woman. That not even on the screen of a Nefryt television set would it be given unto me to verify whether there was even a grain of sense in Pastor Kalinowski’s exceptionally enchanting biblical metaphor of the roe-deer twins that feedeth amongst the lilies .****

I did my best to bypass the warpath marked out by the shreds of frankfurters, pancakes, cutlets, and other minerals that formed the rock of our house. Once, twice, maybe three times, I made the leap back and forth, but I wasn’t drawn by this new Olympic discipline. There wasn’t any call for it, but in the face of the final prospect I made my way to the bathroom. I didn’t have a particularly keen awareness that I was washing a body that, in a few hours, would become the body of a corpse, but it could be that I was genetically burdened with that sort of awareness.

For ages, Grandma Pech had been a well known Wisła virtuoso in the art of washing and dressing corpses. Tens, or perhaps hundreds, of the deceased passed through her hands in the strict sense of the phrase. In the next to last year of the First World War — when her mother and three of her brothers died from the Spanish flu almost simultaneously — my eleven-year-old Grandma was initiated into the arcana of the lightning-fast washing and dressing of corpses before they could grow stiff. For years and decades thereafter people sent for her from households with suddenly closed drapes. She never refused, she was always ready. She would get up in the middle of the night, put on the gray-black dress that was like her service uniform, pack a kitchen apron, a supply of flannel, cotton wool, and a bottle of rectified spirits into an oilcloth bag, and, either on foot or with the horses sent for her, she would hasten to the house surrounded by a different light, and she would wash and comb the bodies as they were losing softness, and wipe the faces with spirits. She would plait the tresses of the deceased women, and hundreds of times she would hear and see the signs left by the departing souls.

The atavistic nature of the thing forced me to repeat her motions. I glided the sponge over my shoulders with the same solicitude with which she touched the deceased Lutherans with cotton wool soaked in spirits. I was finally ready. I opened the sofa, made my bed, lay down. I kept constant vigil. I didn’t fall asleep. Time passed slowly, but it passed, and after at least two, and perhaps three penultimate hours, the final hour rang. I got up cautiously, brought the chair over, got on it, and began to move hook after hook to perfection. After moving the seventh, when in the first drape I had only four hooks left to the end, the light went on in my folks’ room. The door there opened abruptly, Father flashed through the hallway like a shot, then he fell into the bathroom like an exploding artillery shell, and immediately there resounded from that direction the sonorous rumble of bestial hurling.

I jumped down off the chair, put it back in its place, and returned to bed. I heard Mother’s delicate steps. She came into my room; she smelled of raw meat; from under half-shut eyes I saw that smile of hers, bizarre and not of this world. A streak of food, rubbed to a tawny mucous, cut across her cheek. She went up to the window in absolute somnambulistic absence and mechanically closed the drapes.

Only now do I understand that the history of my first suicide is also a story about how alcohol, for the first time in my life, deprived me of my freedom. I mean, of course, the alcohol that was making its presence known in my old man’s entrails. The poor guy puked almost to the break of dawn. He had a weak head.

****There isn’t.

I

In the environs of the little Austro-Hungarian town in which we performed our Socialist Student Workers’ Traineeship there prowled a Silesian vampire, and from the very beginning the girls from the local Dressmakers’ Technical College looked upon us with fear. They would turn tail, pick up the pace, respond badly to even the most sophisticated attempts at striking up a conversation. And we really knew how to strike up a conversation — not all of us, of course; not all of our five-man brigade knew how to strike up a conversation — but Wittenberg and I had an innate expertise. We strove for the maximal effect, elaborated on the plenitude of possibilities, turned cartwheels to construct tempting persuasions — all for nothing. The splendidly dressed misses from the clothiers’ school wouldn’t even pretend that they were making a date, that they would come for coffee, that they would say yes to an invitation to the dance. Not even as a form of good riddance would they say that they would see, they would make an effort, they would give it a try, and if they could find a moment, they would drop by.