Jerzy Pilch

by A Thousand Peaceful Cities

  For a moment, all you could hear was the roar of the rain and the din of the river overflowing its bounds.

  “I’ve lost track of time,” said Mr. Trąba, looking at his watch nonchalantly. “Time for me to go,” he said, and he lifted himself from his spot for the first time in time immemorial.

  Mother’s face suddenly brightened with a radiance that was full of compassionate pity. She shook her head, not exactly with acceptance, nor with rebuke. And with the tone of the loved-one amusing herself with a wooer who is suffering agonies, fully conscious of her allure, she said:

  “You know, Józef, that if you leave now, I will never speak to you again?” And she repeated it, pausing distinctly between every word: “If–you–leave–now–I–will–never–speak–to–you–again.”

  Beyond the windows a stocky figure, protecting himself with a colorful ladies’ umbrella, flitted by. Knocks resounded at the door, and in the doorway stood Commandant Jeremiah, changed beyond recognition—his uniform had been altered by the rain storm into the uniform of some unknown unit. I hoped that his monstrous Bernardine, Bryś the Man-Eater, would slip into the kitchen with him. I hoped just for the sweetness of my own fear, but the Commandant was alone.

  “By a billion barrels of beer!” Mr. Trąba roared as if with amicable triumph, but in the final analysis it was ecstatic triumph in his voice. “By a billion barrels of beer! An officer, on duty, with a ladies’ umbrella in his hand!”

  “It’s raining, Comrade Trąba,” said Commandant Jeremiah with stoic calm. He took off his cap and placed his umbrella in the corner. It looked peculiar indeed in his hands—they were as big as loaves of bread.

  “Atmospheric disturbances are no reason for an on-duty officer to outfit himself with such homo accessories!” said Mr. Trąba, continuing to play the strict commander rebuking the insubordination of an inferior. Moreover, Mother’s recent tenderness had truly inspired his performance. Unfortunately, and as usual, he played his role alone.

  It was obvious that Commandant Jeremiah had no desire to enter into a discussion of the regulatory appropriateness of a ladies’ umbrella. He brought up a stool, sat down on it heavily, and, after a good moment, he said:

  “I greet you, madame comrade and comrades.”

  “Cheerio, cheerio,” replied Father and Mr. Trąba, one after the other, while Mother, in a carefully studied gesture, raised her head and eyes, turned away from the window, and glanced at the green-tiled kitchen stove.

  “You are most welcome, Commandant.” (I had only recently realized that Mother, in her ascetic role, was a much greater artist than Mr. Trąba, who didn’t shy away from the occasional buffoonery.) “You are most welcome, Commandant. Will you stay for dinner? Of course you’ll stay, won’t you? I was just about to fry some potato pancakes.”

  Only my masterfully penetrative and unprejudiced gaze noticed that Mother was not a woman who was concerned exclusively with cooking; rather, she was a captive who, in order to survive, pretended to be a woman who was concerned exclusively with cooking.

  “Comrades,” said Commandant Jeremiah, without a hint of emotion in his voice, “comrades, allow me to get right down to business. I have heard, comrades, that you are preparing to direct a pronouncement against the First Secretary of the Central Committee.”

  The Commandant stopped for a moment and gestured like a stump orator—indicating his essential approval, although with certain doubts and reservations.

  “Very good, comrades, very good. Criticism is always necessary to our Party. Criticism strengthens the power of our Party, cleanses its ranks. But you must—we must—remember, comrades, that it must be constructive criticism, that is to say, criticism that is, of course, criticizing, but, generally, approving . . .”

  The Commandant began to get tangled up. You could see with the naked eye that he wasn’t an expert in dialectical argument, nor did he possess sufficient agitational fervor.

  I was curious what polemical phrase Mr. Trąba would employ and how it would be constructed. “Complete approval,” I recorded in a flash in my notebook, for, according to my predictions, Mr. Trąba’s argument should conclude with precisely this phrase. But Mr. Trąba didn’t conclude his oration with the expression “complete approval,” nor with any other expression. He didn’t conclude his oration because he didn’t even begin it. He remained melancholy and silent the entire time.

  “I understand, Commandant,” Father spoke up unexpectedly, “I understand, Commandant, that news spreads like wild fire, but, as you know, speed is not always accompanied by precision. You see, I’m not certain whether our intentions were properly understood.”

  “Precisely,” said the Commandant, “precisely. Let me explain.”

  He extracted a small Orbis Travel Agency datebook from the side pocket of his uniform, and he began phlegmatically turning the empty pages, which contained only printed dates, saints’ names, and names of the days of the week. He finally reached a place where there were some illegible hieroglyphs and secret ciphers, which only functionaries of the secret services could decode—although I was looking over his shoulder, I couldn’t make out a thing. Jeremiah meditated for some time over the secret code, but then he began to mutter, as if to himself, and, slowly measuring out his words, he said:

  “Yes sir, this is all correct; a pronouncement directed against Comrade First Secretary, yes sir.”

  He energetically closed the datebook and covered it with his large hand, as if he wished to smother the fuses that were smoldering there, as if he wished to extinguish the gathering rebellion before it could flare up.

  “Comrades,” he said distinctly, “I have received a report that you comrades are planning an attempt on the life of Comrade First Secretary Władysław Gomułka.”

  I no longer remember whether Mother froze in the process of scouring the stovetop, or grating potatoes, or perhaps with a match in her hand over the hearth. Today I see her frozen in a succession of these poses. Father and Mr. Trąba exchanged the all-betraying glance of inept conspirators. In the meantime, I thought it might be worth my while to check out the room in the attic again; the morphinistes had abandoned it, and I wanted to see whether they had by any chance left anything else there, besides a ribbon, a mirror, and a nail file.

  “The comrades will excuse me, but since the report seemed to me—how should I put it?—only moderately plausible, I set to work in a roundabout manner. If the comrades do indeed harbor treacherous designs upon the head of state, then please, how to put it, forgive me that I subjected to doubt their, your, so to say, qualifications in this matter, but . . .”

  “Gomułka isn’t head of state,” Mr. Trąba, sounding bored, interrupted Jeremiah.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, Gomułka isn’t head of state. Gomułka is only the chief of the Party. The head of state is Zawadzki.”

  “So is it true after all?” he said almost triumphantly. “So is it true after all? No, no, no,” he reigned himself in. “Comrades, we have known each other for a long time. We have drunk an ocean of alcohol together. We have pronounced more than one risky opinion together. I can safely—both doing myself the honor, and telling the truth—I can safely call you comrades my tried-and-true friends, and meanwhile what do I hear? Meanwhile I discover that my tried-and-true friends are making an attempt, are ready to make an attempt, at a crime against majesty . . .

  “Please tell me,” the Commandant’s voice became slightly, though noticeably, more concentrated and icy, “please tell me what, in the name of God the Father, am I supposed to do with this sort of information? Please,” the Commandant suddenly pleaded, “please tell me what I am supposed to do? I’ve come here to see—to see to what extent this matter belongs to the realm of fiction, and to what extent to the realm of reality.”

  “I wish, I wish very much that my death might belong to the realm of fiction,” Mr. Trąba spoke up, “but those, I fear, are highly pious wishes.”

  “But after all, isn’t it finally a
question not of your death, but of fatal harm to Comrade Gomułka?”

  “Unfortunately, Mr. Commandant,” replied Mr. Trąba, “setting all my vanity aside, I must put my own person in the foreground and assure you that, above all, it is a question of me.” And Mr. Trąba expounded upon his deathbed ambitions in a few sentences, hiding nothing.

  Commandant Jeremiah listened carefully to Mr. Trąba’s implacably logical arguments.

  “If I understood you correctly, comrade, you expect a quick departure from this world, but in fact, what reason do you have to expect this departure?”

  “One general and seven particular reasons,” retorted Mr. Trąba, and he began to count on his fingers. “First, cirrhosis of the liver; second, a bursting pancreas; third, severe inefficiency of the kidneys; fourth, a weakening heart; fifth, stomach ulcers; sixth, delirium tremens; seventh, and the simplest, choking on my own vomit. These are seven good reasons, not subject to falsification, each of which individually, and all of them together, are identically effective, and all of them,” Mr. Trąba raised his index finger decisively in the air, “are already prepared. The seven beasts are already in readiness, seven chimeras already lie waiting to jump. Yes,” he bellowed suddenly, “the seven pillars of my death have already been erected!”

  “St. John of Damascus divides anger into gall, mania, and fury, and you, Comrade Trąba, you are most clearly in the phase of fury,” said Commandant Jeremiah, leaning backwards as if to avoid immediate danger.

  “I didn’t know they covered St. John of Damascus’s typology of anger in Marxism night-school. I approve. I approve, and I congratulate you. I, however—and now I will allow myself a polemical interpolation ad vocem—I am not in the phase of fury according to St. John of Damascus; rather, I am in the phase of anger with voice, according to St. Gregory of Nyssa. St. Gregory of Nyssa, as you know perfectly well, divides anger into anger without voice, anger with voice, and anger expressed in voice. One way or another I am—I often find myself—in the pre-delirious phase. Vodka-induced psychosis is already knocking with a finger that’s as transparent as a vodka glass; it’s already knocking on the brittle walls of my brain.”

  Mother placed the first portions of potato dough on the stove top. The fire roaring below and the streams of darkness beyond the window transported us beyond climates and beyond seasons. We sat in the circle of light, separated from what was further on, and further on were ice and darkness. The Commandant’s uniform steamed slowly. Jeremiah dried and glimmered, like a prodigal deserter returning to the ranks of his home unit.

  “And what would you think,” he said slowly, “what would you think about stopping and giving it up? . . . About reducing the volumetric reckoning a little. You’ve already drunk your life’s quota.”

  “Stop drinking?” Mr. Trąba neither quite asked, nor quite asserted, his voice colorless as water. “Stop drinking? Out of the question. Already in ’45 I said to myself: ‘Perhaps you will die of vodka, Józef Trąba, but if you don’t have a drink from time to time, you will certainly die.’ But now, after not quite twenty years, that paradoxical supposition has taken on a completed form. You know, Commandant,” Mr. Trąba came to life, clearly gathering narrational verve, “a man has only one good reason to stop drinking: namely, when he notices that as a result of drinking he is going stupid. Let me put it another way. A true man can die from drinking, but he doesn’t dare go stupid.”

  “In that case,” the Commandant spoke most carefully, “in that case, why do you put your lofty mind at risk, Comrade Trąba?”

  “You insult me, Commandant,” said Mr. Trąba with dignity. “Just why should a man live in stupidity?”

  “And carrying Gomułka off with you, carrying Gomułka off with you to the grave,” Jeremiah suddenly got angry, “and carrying First Secretary Gomułka off with you to the grave—this isn’t stupidity? This is colossal stupidity! Stupidity that is pointless and historically barren. Stupidity that leads nowhere and is intellectually empty.”

  “Terror is not the realm of speculation; terror is the realm of shock,” Mr. Trąba said gloomily.

  “What terror? What terror? What terror?” the Commandant roared with the greatest contempt.

  “Maybe our terror is not a great terror,” Mr. Trąba flared up, “but it’s still terror. Better that than nothing. Better a sparrow in the hand than Mao Tse-tung on the roof. Yes, OK, I intended to do something for humanity, but after all, if I do something for Poland, I will have done it for humanity too. Of course I would prefer a great deed on a global scale. Of course I would prefer, as I explained to you,” Mr. Trąba raised his shoulders, “of course I would prefer to tighten my tyrannicidal fingers around the neck of Mao Tse-tung. A person would get to see a little of China in the process. But we don’t have the resources for such a long journey,” Mr. Trąba sighed regretfully, “and a short trip is out of the question for reasons of ambition. You can’t expect me to humiliate myself with quasi-foreign trips around the block of the People’s Democracies. Oh no, not that, no. I certainly won’t go to Sofia to lie in ambush for Comrade Zhivkov. Nor to East Germany in order to administer justice to Walter Ulbricht. Please don’t even try to persuade me.”

  “And what about Khrushchev?” Mother unexpectedly spoke up, neither asking nor quite proposing, from above an already considerable stack of potato pancakes. “Have you considered Khrushchev?”

  “Khrushchev,” Mr. Trąba seemed to ignore the absolute astonishment with which Father and Commandant Jeremiah looked at Mother, “Khrushchev may be removed at any moment. It isn’t worth the effort. I go to Moscow, which, however you look at it, is also a good hike, and on the spot I discover that changes have just then taken place at the highest level of the CC CPSU, and I’ll look like a boob.”

  “And if, Comrade Trąba,” Comrade Jeremiah’s voice suddenly became warmer, “and if . . . of course these are absolutely not our methods,” he suddenly stipulated in a panic, “and if, and if it could be, we could even, not so much help, that’s too strong a word, but, let’s say, we could not know about certain things, uh, even a passport, any time—and if it could be the Bloody Dictator of Fascist Spain?”

  “Caudillo Bahamonde Franco is one of Europe’s greatest statesmen,” Mr. Trąba said with distinct pity. “I remind you: I wish to do something for humanity, not against it.”

  It might have seemed that it was not steam that was departing from the Commandant’s drying uniform, rather it was the furies departing from the man himself.

  “Never. We will never,” he panted heavily, “we will never come to terms, Comrade Trąba. Be my guest—kill, kill whomever you wish. Yes,” the Commandant suddenly seemed to discern a deeper meaning in what he was saying, “yes, kill whomever you wish. Kill anybody at all. After all, that too will bring the decline of your life into order. Go out into the street, kill whomever, and you’ll see in just what implacably logical scheme of events you’ll find yourself. You won’t do much for humanity, but you will do something for yourself. And after all, if you do something for yourself, it’s as if you’d also done something for humanity. Don’t you agree?”

  “What do you do for yourself by killing just anyone?” Father asked in a strangely high voice.

  “One’s life becomes definitively ordered, especially the disorderly life, and your life, comrade,” the Commandant stretched out his hand to Mr. Trąba in what was almost a welcoming gesture, “is an unusually disorderly life. A person kills, becomes a murderer, and by being a murderer he disperses doubts and does away with choices. Being a murderer is the guarantee of a highly stable identity. First, if you should decide to go into hiding, comrade, you’d be a murderer in hiding. Then, if they should arrest you, you’d be an arrested murderer, then a judged one, then a condemned one, and then,” the Commandant suddenly stopped, as if he had realized that he was about to say something tactless. He finished in a more peaceful voice, although it still vibrated with rage: “Let’s save our breath. Be my guest. Go ahead and kill, comrade, kil
l whomever you like.”

  “This is painful, painful to listen to,” Mr. Trąba said with a sadness that tore your heart to pieces. “Please, Mr. Commandant, don’t make me into the posthumous child of existentialism’s precursors. I wouldn’t even consider killing just anyone. I haven’t the least intention of joining that godless philosophical current. I intend to join the murky circle of the great tyrannicides of human history: Peter Pahlen, Gavrilo Princip, François Ravaillac, Jeronimo Caserio, Józef Trąba . . . Not a bad list of names,” he said, falling into dreaminess, but he immediately roused himself again.

  “And besides, what do you mean by ‘whomever?’ There aren’t any whomevers here. Whom am I supposed to kill? Małgosia Snyperek? Grand Master Swaczyna? Mrs. Rychter? Perhaps I’m supposed to raise my sacrilegious hand against Pastor Potraffke, or Station Master Ujejski? Sexton Messerschmidt? There aren’t any ‘whomevers’ here. There aren’t any accidental passersby here. Everybody knows each other here, and knows each other as intimately as, if I may say so, you and I, Commandant . . .”

  “In that case, why don’t you choose someone by lottery, or even better,” an almost genuine note of sudden desperation and readiness to bear the greatest sacrifices sounded in the Commandant’s voice, “or even better, why not me? Yes, why don’t you kill me?”

  “You? Absolutely not.”

  “Why? Why absolutely not me?” The Commandant was not able to check the reflexive disappointment and almost injured ambition in his voice. “Why absolutely not me?”

  “Because I don’t intend to acquire the reputation of an anti-Semite in my old age.”

  “Mr. Trąba . . .” The Commandant’s voice suddenly broke. Everything was now clear. It was as clear as day who would remain standing, who was already the victor in this seemingly evenly matched duel. Everything was so unyielding that I didn’t even feel like recording the final word, which would be declared any minute. I only formulated it in my thoughts.