Jerzy Pilch - My First Suicide

I bought it — in a men’s gift shop on Krucza Street — because it constantly seemed to me that a bizarre instability reigned over my usual chess set, on which I incessantly played the Tolstoyan game. I suppose I don’t have to emphasize, or even point out, that I set up the pieces as soon as I saw the photo. I examined them carefully, I played out successive variants, I returned to the starting point, etc. But with time — this lasted a good couple of months — I began to get the bizarre, though in this case perhaps only too justified, impression that something, someone, some sort of spirit or some other demon was changing the positions of the pawns and other figures, that they were gliding over the chessboard by themselves — the devil only knows.

The solution turned out to be highly disappointing. The Ukrainian woman who cleans for me once a week, and who is — incidentally — amazingly pedantic, wasn’t able to resist, and she dusted the chessboard as well. Once I figured out what was going on, I reprimanded her severely, and I absolutely forbade her to go anywhere near the chessboard. But as is usually the case with threats, I felt a lack of security, and so, with the goal of at least minimally strengthening the stability of the position, I bought the magnetic chess set.

True, as soon as I saw, while still in the store, the shocking English inscription on the box—“ Made without child labour ”—I hesitated for a moment. After all, as soon as a person of my generation hears that it is not true that we put children to work , there naturally appears a vision of millions of little, emaciated Chinese, hungry and cold, milling or even sculpting the pawns, bishops, and rooks. Such a vision presented itself to me, but it quickly vanished. I’ll say it honestly: it vanished before it appeared.

My third chess set is a present from a woman I would like to forget. Clearly, however, that wish is weaker than the desire of possession. I haven’t gotten rid of this souvenir, which is all the stranger in that it is a trashy curio to boot. Only — to vent ungentlemanly disdain — a calamitous woman, or rather, only a catastrophic woman, only a woman that catastrophic could hope that anyone would believe that the pseudo-Indian imitation of wood, marble, ivory, copper, ceramic — and whatever else have you — was imported from Bombay, when it was most certainly acquired in the underground passageway under Central Station. And that’s in the best case scenario.

As to literature about chess, I have an anthology of all the matches of Bobby Fischer, three volumes of the Biographical Dictionary of Polish Chess Players , an English-language monograph on the “Sicilian defense,” as well as a fundamental and, frankly speaking, totally insane work entitled With Chess Through the Ages and History . I haven’t read any of these titles even superficially, but then, the number of the books I put off for reading during more peaceful times is much more considerable and their topics wider. By more peaceful times, I mean days, nights, weeks, and months, the lion’s share of which will not be consumed by the passionate chasing of girls. When this happens, when I awake at dawn and begin to read some classic, I will read until the afternoon, and perhaps even — if I feel like it — until dusk. Something tells me I won’t live to see this epoch of peace and quiet, but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t collect books.

II

Someone might say that, by constantly emphasizing that I supposedly don’t know much about chess, I am being coy and am obscuring things, since it irrefutably follows from the story I am telling that I must be an entirely decent chess player. Well, without a shadow of a doubt and with deadly solemnity, I declare that I am a miserable chess player, not to say no player at all. And one fundamental detail disqualifies me: I don’t know, and I have never completely mastered, the art of chess description. I have mastered it only to the point where I can decode the notation of the newspaper chess riddle without making embarrassing errors, and this is truly little.***** The chessboard of my childhood was composed of wooden cream- and dark-brown-colored fields, called “white” and “black,” glued onto canvas; and the paradox of the terminology ended here for us. Not I, nor a single one of the house’s grandmasters, had the least inkling that there existed some sort of a7s, c5s, f3s. I wouldn’t bet my life on it that they could answer without consideration just how many fields and how many pieces there were. And if anyone should tell them that it is possible to play on a scrap of paper, they would be laughed at. Sensual pleasures weren’t their strong suit, but there was no point in playing without touching the pieces, without their leisurely or impetuous movement, without permanent staring at the position of the pieces, which slowly dissolves (and yet entrances to the end in its mysterious symmetries). Professional arguments — that if you haven’t mastered description, you will also have trouble with chess memory; that, granted, you will remember the position of the pieces, but a memory like that is not very capacious, because the pieces are spatial, and not very many of them will stick in your head — these professional arguments were not for us, and to this day they make no impression upon me.

Supposedly the mind of the professional chess player is filled with hundreds of thousands of combinations. I have only a couple of them in my head. Although, without a doubt, in the untangling of precisely this history, a few more might come in handy. Just a dozen, just a few tens, just a hundred.

Perhaps I wouldn’t stare for months and years at the position of the pieces on Tolstoy’s chessboard like there’s no tomorrow. Perhaps the position of the pieces itself would open up some sort of secret trap-door in my mind. But I stared, and I didn’t have a chance, since even if I had seen such a position at some point, I didn’t recall it. Even if I had heard this melody at some point, with my wretched ear for music, I didn’t have a chance of repeating it. A classic says: if you remember — you need only connect; but I couldn’t connect, because I didn’t remember. I didn’t have a clue what to connect with what.

Today, I see clearly that I was also afflicted with a peculiar blindness. I carefully examined every square millimeter of the photograph, but I didn’t see the stylish little table on which the chessboard was standing. No: it wasn’t that I didn’t notice, or I didn’t attach sufficient importance to it — I simply didn’t see. I had a bizarre, or perhaps not at all bizarre, but rather a well-justified block. I didn’t see what was in front of my nose, and I didn’t remember the first storyline. I pounded my blind head on the photo of Lev Tolstoy playing chess, as if on the Great Wall of China, or on the Berlin Wall. And I stood before that photograph, as if at the Wailing Wall or at the Iron Curtain. And nothing. No move, not a hand, nor a foot. Neither a bishop, nor a rook.

Until once, in one of my common and daily-experienced epiphanies; once, namely, after glimpsing, at the intersection of Krucza and Żurawia Streets, the most perfect suntan in the world; once — to put it more precisely — on a certain November afternoon, when I was just about to chase after the shoulders emerging from a lizard-green dress and opalescing like Nestlé milk chocolate; when I was already — I’ll say it honestly — chasing after them; when at any moment I was about to change my shape and state of concentration and become a drop of sweat on the withdrawing back of the super babe I had glimpsed by chance — it suddenly dawned on me. Suddenly I stood as if rooted in the ground, suddenly I gave up the chase, suddenly I became myself again. Suddenly the torment caused by this ill-fated photograph vanished; suddenly I realized whom the fellow playing chess with Tolstoy resembled.