Jerzy Pilch - My First Suicide

I tried to persuade myself that I was shaking from the cold, and I sprinted the last hundred meters to the unplastered villa in which we had our billet. I didn’t measure it, but my time must have gotten better with every week.

In the room rose the smell of an encampment, barracks, prison cells. In any event, such was the direction of the equally firm and subtle evolution of sensations: from dirty socks to foot cloths, from vodka and beer to moonshine, from brand-name cigarettes to ever meaner tobacco. And the profound slumber of my sleeping colleagues was ever deeper and ever more eloquent. During the first week, they slept the euphoric sleep of young poets who had everything ahead of them; during the second, you could detect the first disenchantment in their sleep; in the third — bitterness.

The number of books on Wittenberg’s bed grew; in the end, he slept under all seven volumes of Proust, under Eliot’s verses, under little volumes of Herbert, Grochowiak, and Szymborska, under a notebook with hand-copied Miłosz, under a copy of Trans-Atlantyk covered in The People’s Tribune , under Konwicki, Parnicki, Camus, Fromm, Freud, Jung, young Marx, late Mann, under Kołakowski’s Religious Consciousness and the Bond of the Church , under Michelet’s The Sorceress , under Frazer’s Golden Bough , under Bulgakov, Babel, Broch, Faulkner, under three one-hundred-page notebooks, in which he had the beginnings of two novels, full of the highest philosophical tension, and one poem, full of the highest linguistic temperament. And Wittenberg was covered with numerous other books, as with a blanket, or rather as with a net, for, from between the covers, his dark Levantine skin shined through. His right arm always hung from the bed, as if searching for the empty bottle that was standing there; the left rose in the direction of his head; his head rested in the proper place — in the center of the pillow — all around there were long, thick, curly locks, of which we were all madly envious. And with good cause. The hair style — a daring imitation and successful rival for the most expressive creations of Jimi Hendrix, who had been dead for a year at that time — exerted a magnetic attraction upon the girls’ gazes.

Unfortunately, it was as ineffective as it was magnetic. Everything indicated that on that weekend, too, the biblical/rock-and-roll magnetism of Wittenberg’s hair had attracted no Delilah. I didn’t have to look around too carefully to ascertain that the eternal hunger for a woman, felt not only by him, not only by us, not only during Workers’ Traineeship, but always and by all poets of the world, remained unsatisfied this time as well. In a room marked by each and every sort of transgression, once again all traces of any sort of female presence were lacking. Exclusively invisible muses were rising above the heads of the sleeping poets. No one from the Dressmakers’ Technical College had left a handkerchief, comb, lipstick, not to mention any more intimate sort of prop. There weren’t any extra cups, glasses, empty bottles of sweet wine. During the preceding evening, no girlish hand had cut elegant little wedges of yellow cheese on the copy of Literary Life that was spread out on the table. The nibbled pickle that was lying there, the hunk of bread, and the pyramid of cigarette butts created a sufficiently eloquent still life.

Clearly, not even the female bricklayer’s assistants, who were working with us, had been persuaded to join them. Already the week before, having grown impatient with standing around in vain outside the Dressmakers’ Technical College, we decided to approach our athletically built female comrades in labor and ask them: would they have a beer with us in Europa after work, and then we’ll see. We laughed at the idea, with alleged self-irony. With a vague sense of shame, we feared — as Wittenberg put it — loss of sexual caste. But in our heart of hearts, we rejoiced and were insanely excited. This seemed easy pickings, a sure thing, and — to tell the truth — ideal for our riotous and exclusively corporeal yearnings. And so, when the girls from the construction site reacted to our proposition unenthusiastically at first, and then began to try to wiggle out — saying that they probably couldn’t make it — we fell into a rather deep frustration. The girls from the clothiers’ school were almost entirely unattainable, and that, paradoxically wasn’t half bad: in the final analysis, we had no idea what we were missing. But here were walking, right under our noses, four female Titans, each carrying a sack of cement, as if it were a feather, on their Athenian shoulders, each in a blouse half-opened on statuesque breasts, each in canvas trousers draping a marble behind — painful and irreclaimable losses. In any event, the reclamation of four pairs of unbelievable tits dusted with lime powder, plus the rest, had not come about during my absence. I got undressed with the speed of lightning, I jumped into the marital bed, in the other part of which snored Wittenberg, overcome with vodka and literature, and I slept for three hours (which seemed like three seconds).

VIII

The next day, we sent our would-be mistresses first wistful, then scornful glances. They, as usual, carried cement and bricks, as usual they whispered to each other, as usual they giggled. Once we had knocked off work, we sat longer than usual in Europa . No one felt like going to the College. It was clear by now that nothing was going to happen. The traineeship was ending in three days, and with graphomaniac zeal we attempted to kindle the nostalgic mood of taking leave of the little Austro-Hungarian town, where, no doubt, none of us would again set foot for the rest of our lives . One of the seven indistinguishable local alcoholics (it’s quite a different matter that, in those days, unaware of the nightmare that awaited me, I behaved like a racist toward alcoholics: I made no distinctions among them, and I considered them half corpses, half animals) joined our table and began to spin the next version of the tale about the vampire. There was no reason to marvel at the abundance and vitality of this topic. The vampire (in those days the term “serial murderer,” to say nothing of “ serial killer ,” was unknown) had been murdering for years. Every few weeks — in the high grass, next to the path to the stream — the bodies of the next victims would be found, their combined number already allegedly reaching into the hundreds.

This time — if I may put it this way — it was the Party version. “All the stories about the vampire that the gentlemen students have heard up to now are not worth a hill of beans,” one of the seven indistinguishable alcoholics skillfully suspended his voice and performed the four ritual acts that the entire seven would repeat with identical precision during their own narrations: he adjusted his beret, drank a tiny sip of beer, wiped his lips with the back of his blackened hand, and lit up a Sport. “All the stories you know about the vampire are false; the true one is the one that I know. It is, if it please the gentlemen students, kept strictly secret for political reasons.”

One of the seven indistinguishable alcoholics exaggerated his own revelation. Either one of his brethren, or perhaps even he himself, had already, at least two or three times — at this same laminate table top always drenched with beer, in the same cadaverous glare of the fluorescent lamp hanging over our heads — told the version that asserted that the Silesian vampire was the deranged son of a Party secretary, that he has special protection, that the office of the Secret Police helps him pick out his victims, that the father, depraved by the exercise of power, but also desperate and broken-hearted, even in spite of the pressures exerted by Moscow, is unable to make the decision to have the degenerate locked up, and that, because of this, the blood-thirsty secretarovich will murder and rape who knows how long, perhaps even to the end of his life.