Jerzy Pilch - A Thousand Peaceful Cities

Father Pastor Potraffke finished his furious, though ever quieter and ever calmer, reading from the Book of Judges, sat down heavily, and cast his careful gaze with unwaning fury across everyone sitting at the table, and then he said out of the blue:

“Nothing in the world, nothing will bring me to grant you confirmation. Dirt. Dirt. Poland. Poland.”

“Poland,” Mr. Trąba repeated after him as if an echo.

“Poland,” Grand Master Swaczyna repeated as if it were the response to a password.

“Poland, goal,” said Father.

“Poland, Poland, Poland,” said Mother, the Pastor’s Wife, and Małgosia Snyperek.

“Poland, Poland, Poland,” we began to repeat, one after another, to chant in unison “Poland, Poland,” like fans sitting in the same section of a stadium.

And the choralists, who were still standing on the podium and were still singing Czech songs to the accompaniment of the missionary orchestra, finally heard our “Poland, Poland,” for they finally fell silent for a moment, and not at all surprised, not even directing astounded glances in our direction, they immediately sang in Polish, with that same strong voice:

“Time to go home, it’s time. They already call us.

The bell from the tower to devotions,

Mother from the doorway to supper.

They already call, it’s time to go home, time.”

And we had to admit, and we always admitted later, and with genuine fervor, that the the morphinistes’ Czech boyfriends sang that old Polish song so skillfully that none of us heard even a hint of a foreign accent in their singing.

I felt the rocking of the assassins’ postal ambulance car as it glided slowly along the tracks through the muddy plains. I awoke and fell asleep, again and again. I breathed in the smell of packing paper, hemp twine, and wax seals. In the darkness I saw pyramids of packages and parcels. Mr. Trąba, Father, and the postal guards sat in the middle of those pyramids. I heard the murmur of their conversations. They spoke of women: love stories, like the dark fields, stations, and lights we passed along the way, followed one after the other.

I listened to tales about women with fluent mastery of the pen, and I listened to stories about women with fluent mastery of foreign languages. I heard about romances with overworked widows and romances with lazy young ladies. I listened to complaints full of bitterness and longings full of despair. Here were the poetic landscapes of first encounters, detailed descriptions of apartments of extreme raptures, and curt sketches of the places of shameful separations. I listened to imprecations, admonitions, and aphorisms full of paradoxical wisdom about the power of women, or pamphlet-like treatises on the art of wearing a brassiere.

I listened to adventures full of arousing plot developments, but I wasn’t able to distinguish the voices, to say who told which story. Even Mr. Trąba’s theatrical whisper was difficult to distinguish. I don’t think Father spoke up at all. Maybe he was speaking just as I would fall off to sleep, or maybe I would fall off to sleep whenever he began to speak. I don’t remember.

•

I don’t remember a thousand scenes in which he took part. I don’t remember him playing soccer with me in the rocky courtyard. I don’t remember the gesture with which he would adjust his glasses. I don’t remember outings to Buffalo Mountain during which he would teach me the names of the trees and the birds. I don’t remember the way he would turn the huge sheets of the newspapers he read. I don’t remember his daily return from the post office. To tell the truth, I don’t really know very well what he did all those years after he took early retirement. I described the scene, but I don’t really remember whether Father ran with the other men through the high Asiatic grass in the direction of the morphinistes at the edge of the glade that evening. Or whether he walked with a very quick step. Or was it perhaps the opposite? That he didn’t budge from the spot?

Even today, it seems to me that although I remember every word of his unending disputes with Mr. Trąba, I don’t remember certain gestures, poses, his gait. I don’t remember how he sat on a chair. I remember him, but I don’t see him. Or is it perhaps the opposite: I see him all the time in one and the same scene, which repeats endlessly but is over in a moment?

Could it be that, in its quotidian obtrusiveness, that one, peculiar, although characteristic, picture has forced out and obscured all the others? It goes like this: Father sits at the table in our kitchen, which is as gigantic as a Greek amphitheater. Mr. Trąba says something to him. Father gets up, walks over to the sideboard, takes out a bottle, returns, and puts it on the table. That scene, repeating itself in my memory with absolute inevitability for the hundredth, thousandth, millionth time, slowly becomes monstrous. Father’s movements become more and more violent, as if they were shaped by internal spasms and resistance. The interior of the kitchen grows dark. Under the empty space an invisible fire burns. Ash falls from above. It is as if Mr. Trąba really did command Father, throughout his whole life and a hundred times a day: get up from the table, walk over to the sideboard, take out the bottle, get up from the table, walk over to the sideboard, take out the bottle, get up from the table, walk over to the sideboard, take out the bottle.

Perhaps I don’t remember anything more because, in a certain sense, I had my back turned to him my whole life. He would do something, bustle about, adjust something, rustle the newspapers, read, type at the typewriter, listen to Radio Free Europe. Perhaps he ran after me, but I, with my ruthless, perhaps even inhuman pig-headedness, went my own false and mad way.

When, after forty years, I finally looked around, I caught sight of four stools standing in the middle of our kitchen. On the stools lay the basement door, which had been removed from its hinges. On the door, dressed in his postal chief’s uniform, lay Father. Mother was lighting funeral candles. Mr. Trąba stood by the window. I went up to him. For a moment we looked at the pallbearers walking through the yard. On their shoulders, the lid and bottom of the coffin looked like the wings of an airplane, crashed long ago, that had just now been found in the grass.

“I know that people always say this, and in every latitude on the globe, but the Chief looks like he’s sleeping,” said Mr. Trąba.

•

That very day Mother and I began to put Father’s death in order, to seek out the internal logic in it, and to look for the signs of its approach in the last days of his life. With fierce meticulousness we began to gather and remind each other of the facts and circumstances that could have brought the undying order of death into play. Hour by hour, minute by minute, we reconstructed the final days and weeks of Father’s life, describing precisely, attesting, emphasizing, laying out, and bringing to the surface all the seemingly accidental events, gestures, and objects in which the portent of his death might have been rooted. We collected specimens indefatigably, and, imperceptibly, our harmonious collaboration was transformed into fierce competition. I had discovered a broken shelf in the basement, while Mother, more or less at the same time, some two weeks before his death, had encountered a macabre customer in a clothing store who had tried on nothing but black things. In my opinion, the broken shelf was a clearer sign, for the oak plank had snapped as if cut by an unearthly power. The preserves had come crashing down from on high, and — what do you know? — not a single jar had broken.

The encounter in the clothing store with the woman trying on mourning clothes made a more accidental impression, but you had to admit that Mother told the story suggestively, the story of the shiver of terror that pierced her when she stood right next to this woman. She felt a cold breath coming from those black blouses, scarves, jackets, gloves, and hats, darker than all the mourning clothes in the world. And the woman herself, as tall as a basketball player, skinny, bony, with glowing sulfurous eyes — no two ways about it: she looked like death itself.