Jerzy Pilch - My First Suicide

The motionless, green surface of water in the swimming pool, the triangulation tower on Czantoria excellently visible in the russet radiance, the ball turning dark from the wet grass on the soccer field Start , the smell of mown hay at the villa Almira , the dark radiance of the skin of the girl sitting in front of me at the movie theater, the air thickening in the afternoons like a magnifying glass — all of this was to be abandoned here forevermore, deprived of my presence, my glances, and my touch. My absence was punishment, and the punishing was sweet.

But in the evening, Chowderhead the cat would jump on my bed. I felt the beating of his heart, I petted his head, trustingly nestled in the eiderdown, and I bawled, and I howled from despair. It was perfectly clear that here, in the gigantic house with a garden and courtyard, it will be a million times better for him than in two rooms in Krakow, and it was perfectly clear that we would come for holidays and vacations; and I would be with him then to my heart’s content; and everything fell to pieces, and the entire incredible summer of the year 1962 was so distinct that it drew a curtain over my despair, and to this day I am certain that the entire evil of my life and all my ordeals are retribution for abandoning Chowderhead the cat. I am paying for his year of solitude with my ghastly and unbearable solitude. For the last year of his life — when he looked for me in empty rooms, when he would jump up onto cold sheets, when he would sniff abandoned objects, when, in the hope that, when he woke up, everything would be as before — he would go to sleep and wake up, and I still wasn’t there with him. The path of my life was recorded in the animal heart of Chowderhead the cat. I didn’t choose that path. Father went missing during the move — that was a sign of doom. But abandoning Chowderhead — this was the choice of doom.

VIII

The oddly dressed female vacationer walked in the direction of Oasis . With the light heart of the chosen one, I hastened after her. She turned toward the Dziechcinka; today she was wearing a violet, long-sleeved dress with gigantic, russet fern fronds. When she was under the viaduct, she disappeared; this time, more than usual, it appeared that she had vanished in thin air. I looked around for a while, without panic, and without great nervousness; her sudden disappearance belonged to the order of things. I returned home. In the courtyard stood a special truck with a special tarp.

Father had been announcing all summer long that a special truck from the Academy of Mining and Metallurgy, covered with a special tarp, driven by a special driver, would come to collect our belongings. It had finally arrived and — no big deal. I was disappointed. Not by the truck itself, for, after all, I knew my old man’s excesses well enough not to imagine some sort of heavenly chassis or golden tarps, but by the fact that the world had moved. The pieces of furniture, boxes, objects heaped under the shed had been more unusual in their immobility than they were now as — one after another — they were set in place under the tarp. All the men were working, but on the back of the truck stood a slovenly unshaved guy, with a high forehead that was verging on a bald spot, and he directed the work imperiously and with a false smile.

IX

It goes without saying that I didn’t have a clue that he was deceptively similar to someone with whom Lev Tolstoy had played chess more than half a century before. I didn’t have a shadow of any sort of forebodings, no divine intuitions whatsoever; no otherworldly missives reached me that the special driver of the special truck from the Academy of Mining and Metallurgy — who was bestowed with the inclinations of a leader, and who had just arrived from Krakow for our possessions — was similar to the son-in-law of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy.

It seems that I didn’t mention this yet, but the petite, and yet inordinately enterprising Russianist, vintage 1968, had in the end established irrefutably that, on the photograph that had so absorbed me, the author of Anna Karenina was playing chess with his son-in-law, Mikhail Sergeyevich Sukhotin. I couldn’t mention it, because when I began to write and to look into the matter, I didn’t know this yet. Now I know, and I am supplementing the data. A friend and disciple of Tolstoy, Vladimir Grigoryevich Chertkov, also came into question, since, as my Russianist claims, he likewise played chess with Tolstoy, and he, too, was photographed in the course of such a game.

But there is no doubt that in the photo, the story of which I have been telling all this time, it is the son-in-law. Arguments of a — I would say — spiritual nature also speak in favor of this: the guy at the chessboard has struck a submissive and flattering pose, as if he were apologizing for not losing straight-away, on the first move. Most likely, everyone who played with Tolstoy struck such a pose, but with the player for whom Tolstoy was also a father-in-law, such a pose could without a doubt be more distinct. After all, if you are rolling the daughter of the author of Resurrection , you have to show some humility. Something for something.

X

Neither I, nor Father, nor Grandpa, nor either uncle, nor the Nikandy boys, who were helping us load our sticks of furniture onto the truck — none of us knew that the guy was a double for Tolstoy’s son-in-law, but all of us could see only too well that something wasn’t right about him.

He rushed about the platform like a madman, shouted out commands in the most genuine fury, in a moment he would restrain himself and pretend that it was all jokes and playacting, that he viewed these incidents from an infinite distance. A second later the fury would possess him again, and he would rage, and he would go at it hammer and tongs, the virtuoso of every sort of packing, loading, and arranging of objects. It was absolutely clear that he was giving us stupid commands and superfluous orders, that he was pretending to be God knows who, and he sweated atrociously while doing it. “ Wet as a drowned rat, and there he goes giving commands ,” Uncle Ableger finally said under his breath, and as is usual in such situations, a silly, coarse, perhaps even vulgar sentence — after all, it wasn’t entirely clear what it meant — defused the situation and, at the same time, took on the characteristic of some sort of aphorism, or perhaps incantation. “ Wet as a drowned rat, and there he goes giving commands ,” we repeated, lifting boxes, and we split our sides laughing. “ Wet as a drowned rat, and there he goes giving commands! ” Tolstoy’s son-in-law — helpless in the face of our laughter and wishing to use the classic method to blur the lines of our laughter — laughed along with us. The results were ghastly, since he laughed with the zeal of the class dunce who was pretending that he best understood the joke he didn’t get. But also, slowly, both his and our laughter died down. Slowly we neared the grand finale — everything was already under the tarp, arranged with the more or less alleged perfection, secured, tied down, wedged in. The little chess table, wrapped in so many layers of The Worker’s Tribune that it looked like a miniature Orthodox church or an atomic mushroom cloud, stood — I remember — almost in the middle, tightly fortified by boxes. Grandma Pech still gave them a bag of apples. She still ran across the courtyard with a package of cutlets for the entire week, wrapped in paper that was already beginning to leak grease. Still, at the last minute, I came to the decision that I would pardon its laziness, and that, after all, I would take The Mysterious Island with me to Krakow, and I threw it into the truck, and — Bombs Away! The final chapter of The Book of Exodus had been composed.