Jerzy Pilch - My First Suicide

“You two take a rest, have real holidays for once in your lives, I’ll take care of everything,” their daughter practically choked with joy at the prospect of the first Christmas Eve in the new house . Everything she said was indisputable, and yet you had the impression that she was talking nonsense — the nature of the world is unfathomable. Please yourself. Peace be to this house. You can have a chair that rocks, a machine that washes dishes, verily I say unto you: you can even have, brothers and sisters, a toilet that will wipe your rear for you. But they agreed, because how could they not agree. Before long, they would be sitting at the Christmas Eve table by themselves.

So Mother got down to resting . She began to rest with a vengeance. Every year it was a horror from morning to night: cleaning, sweeping, putting things in order, but now it seemed that she would jump out of her skin. She scrubbed the runners and the rugs on both sides. She totally emptied all the wardrobes, and she laundered every blouse, skirt, shirt. The same thing with the sideboard: she washed and polished sets of silver that hadn’t been used since the war, she lined shelves with parchment paper, she brought every knife, every fork, every spoon to a jeweler’s sheen. She wiped the hobs on the kitchen stove with an emery cloth. She went through the attic. She almost tackled the store, which is practically impossible to enter by now. She almost set out upon the impassable ocean of objects. Luckily, she gave up. But now she scrubbed every lamp — not just every lamp — she unscrewed and scrubbed every bulb from every lamp. She washed the walls, which were covered with oil paint. She dug out from under the benches old ugly shoes that no one would ever again put on a foot, and she gave them a good shine. It isn’t worth talking about waxing the floors, washing the windows, laundering the drapes and the curtains, that was a constant — now, it goes without saying, the variants increased infinitely. His blood boiled, he did his best to restrain her, but she didn’t respond. After one of the times, when, on the verge of apoplexy, he roared for the hundredth time—“Woman, verily I say unto thee: cease thy labor!”—she raised her head and said with a colorless, tired voice: “A person has lost everything in life, and now even the holidays are gone.”

What was he supposed to do? He helped as much as he could, although by evening he was barely alive and could hardly see anything. And when, two days before Christmas Eve, he finally went in the late evening into the back room and began to prepare himself for bed, and he glanced at the wall, and he saw what he saw — he thought at first that this was finally the last straw and that his eyes had entirely given out from the stress. True, he hadn’t gone completely blind, he wasn’t plunged into eternal darkness, but from that time forth, he would see only apparitions. From today, only terrible visions would present themselves to him. The first of them was this: that, on the wall over the bed, in the place where, ever since his fiftieth birthday, the golden-silver tableau had been hanging, there now hangs the portrait of Gustaw Branny.

He remembered that portrait from before the war. For a while yet, after their wedding, that likeness of Mother’s first fellow had been hanging in the icehouse. Whether it was there until the deaths of the old Brannys, he wasn’t sure. But after their deaths, for certain after the war, it had been taken down and carried off to the store, and it had vanished for the ages in the avalanche of junk. Perhaps it had even gone up in flames one winter in the stove? But it is unlikely that Mother cast it into the fire, and he would most likely have remembered such a distinctive action as burning the portrait of his predecessor. And he thought that he was not now seeing the portrait of the Gustaw who was killed on the motorbike, but rather his prewar specter; that everything had gotten mixed up in his head and that, instead of the genuine one, the prewar wall was presenting itself to his half-blind eyes, and the wall from another room to boot. I won’t believe it until I touch it. So he touched it. And still he didn’t believe.

The dawn of the next day came nonetheless, and in the snowy bright it was impossible — either through tricks of sight or through losses in the field of vision — to avoid the painful truth: that Mother, in the fervor of her cleaning, had introduced a new order. No illusions. She had taken the little homemade birthday greeting down from the wall and hung Gustaw’s portrait in its place. He had never been jealous of him. Never did he harbor in his heart even a hint of despicable male sorrow that he hadn’t been the first. Perhaps even on the contrary. Perhaps he was so happy that the other one had gotten himself killed that he had understanding for him even in this? All the joy the guy experienced in his short life was during that year after his wedding. And what could his joy have been, when Death was circling around him the entire time? Perhaps he even knew that a sudden end had been allotted him? Perhaps he had heard or seen signs? What is there to envy in this? God protect us against everything that Gustaw Branny had in life.

Nor was he jealous of anyone later on. It was more likely Mother — a far sight more likely that it was Mother — who could have been jealous of various female postal clerks. And she was jealous. And she had reasons for it. And what reasons they were! Jesus Christ! I was nine years old, Grandpa Pech often took me along to the post office, and at least three girls in tight-fitting navy blue smocks awakened mad desires in me. I stared at them greedily, and I was absolutely certain that at least two of them were reciprocating my gazes. I was ready for everything, and they were ready for everything. In any case, at least one of them was most certainly ready.

Someone will try to explain to me now, with psychoanalytic erudition, that, in the postal pinafores that highlighted their shapes, they looked like thoroughly mature versions of my female classmates, and that is why they turned me on so much. That’s right. That was precisely their appearance — thoroughly mature fourth-graders. And what of it? This doesn’t change the tension they aroused in me, and I in them. And the tension Grandpa aroused in them? Mr. Chief? Who had passed his matura before the war? A romantic lover, the strength of whose feelings was so great that it blew his rival off a speeding motorcycle as if he were a feather? A man whose fervent prayers were answered for the return to him of a woman betrothed to another? The hero, for that reason, of local ballads and incredible love stories? A lieutenant from the September campaign? A well-built man in the prime of life? A believer, and yet intelligent? A drinker, and yet refined? Born here, but speaking like a Varsovian? A connoisseur of the Bible, and of chess? That’s right: my Grandpa Andrzej Pech was a man of panache and eroticism. In my parts, to this day, these are exotic attributes. My parts are not the land of panache and eroticism. My parts are the land of divine signs, suppressed passions, and photographs of young boys in Wehrmacht uniforms hidden away in secret drawers.

No two ways about it. Grandma Pech, even if nothing ever happened, had countless reasons to be jealous. He didn’t have any. But now, when the portrait of Gustaw had appeared over his bed, he realized that for several decades in his wife’s life there had existed a stream about which he hadn’t had a clue and about which he hadn’t guessed in the least. A story long ago finished — it turns out — wasn’t finished at all.

The thought never crossed his mind that Mother, who was in cahoots with dead people, had some sort of particular contact with her deceased husband. He hadn’t connected the one with the other. In his jealousy over otherworldly signals, there wasn’t a hint of jealousy over Gustaw. But now there appeared not the hint, but the jealousy itself, painful to boot, the sort of jealousy that is aroused not by trysts, but by letters written in a hidden and secret cipher. Were they engaged in some sort of spiritualistic correspondence? In some sort of occult communication? Was he speaking from the other world? Was he making some sort of signs? Maybe all that constant knocking of various dead people, or of those preparing for death, was a smoke screen covering uninterrupted signals and signs? Had the deceased Gustaw Branny been pounding on the kitchen window since before the war? Was he assuring her of a love that had outlasted death? Was he whispering to her, telling her what to do? Now, in the course of the holiday cleaning, had he tapped out the request to return his portrait to its place over the bed? Lord God, forgive the short temper, but this version of life beyond the grave, this version of repenting souls, or even this version of the resurrection of the body— this is out of the question. Entirely out of the question. In any case, he certainly didn’t hear anything. He didn’t hear anything, but he certainly sees the portrait over the bed. Until yesterday his birthday tableau had been hanging there, and now it was the portrait of the other one. Now it was over the other one that the Guardian Angel was keeping watch. At least Mother didn’t clear the bed away. Verily, woman, I render you grateful obeisance that you didn’t take my marriage bed from me! A marriage bed, moreover, that is not my marriage bed, but the bed of your first betrothed, from almost half a century ago! Jesus Christ! You have to stop thinking. Life has already passed, and there is no point in recreating it anew in one’s thoughts. Especially if it was different than you thought. You have to stop thinking. You have to go to your daughter’s for Christmas Eve.