Jerzy Pilch

by A Thousand Peaceful Cities

  “It’s easier to kill from a distance from the moral point of view, harder from a technical point of view.” Father very rarely formulated such general maxims.

  “Chief,” Mr. Trąba shouted enthusiastically, “I am madly envious of the accuracy of that formulation. I’m madly envious, and at the same time I reward you.”

  Mr. Trąba filled the glasses—mine, however, he filled only half way, which hurt me terribly. The venomous thought of desertion and betrayal immediately flashed through my mind.

  “One way or another, the operation will have to involve a sniper,” said Mr. Trąba. “Unfortunately the use of firearms is out of the question. It’s out of the question for a thousand various reasons, among which, however, one seems sufficient to me: namely, I don’t know how to use a firearm. Yes,” Mr. Trąba became gloomy, “on the list of my numerous inabilities, you will find this inability as well . . . And even if,” he continued, full of melancholy disgust for himself, “even if, by some miracle we were able to acquire, let’s say, a shotgun, all the same there’s too little time for me to master the art of marksmanship with the required precision. In a word, gentlemen,” Mr. Trąba’s voice again became the voice of the seasoned field officer, “in a word, gentlemen, there remains . . .”

  “In a word, gentlemen, there remains the bow.” Father’s voice vibrated with mad fury. “Mr Trąba, enough of these jokes. If this is what you want, I can say that I refuse obedience as of this moment, I leave the detachment, I refuse to carry out any orders whatsoever, I leave the army, I join civilian ranks. I can utter any one of these scurrilous formulas. And I utter,” it seemed to me that the light-blue glow on Father’s face lightened even further on account of his deathly paleness, “and I utter this formula, and I utter all these buffoonish formulas at once, and at the same time,” Father grabbed the bottle from the table, “I suspend in perpetuity all rewards for even the most breathtaking phrases . . . You go beyond the bounds of taste.” Father spoke a bit more quietly, but he didn’t calm down at all. On the contrary, the fury constantly growing in him now seemed to stifle his voice. “The very idea of an assassination attempt, the very idea of an assassination attempt is a risky one. This whole story constantly questions itself. But now we have the nail in the coffin of all plausibility . . . You, Mr. Trąba, offend this whole unhappy nation . . . Don’t you know how debased people are? Don’t you know that it really is necessary to kill him? And you? If you intend to kill him at all, before you get around to killing him, you’ll talk yourself to death. Don’t you understand this, or what?”

  “I understand it, I understand it well,” Mr. Trąba said with a hollow voice.

  “Since you understand it, why in the world do you mock us with your toys? By a billion barrels of beer! An assassin with a bow! A policeman with a ladies’ umbrella! Meanwhile people are being carted off to Siberia. Hi diddly dee, the bowman’s life for me.” Dots of foam appeared in the corners of Father’s mouth. “With a bow! Or how about a sling-shot! Or how about just like that!”

  And gathering monstrous momentum, Father threw the bottle with all his might. Whether the ostentatious gesture was inversely proportional to his strength, or whether the power of Mr. Trąba’s hypnotic and redeeming gaze, which never left the bottle, was so great, or whether this was a rare conjunction of various coincidences—whatever it was, nothing happened. If there was a target, the projectile missed its target. The bottle made a short and remarkably slow flight in the direction of the window. The blanket blacking out the window deadened the blow. Like a plane on approach, it slipped down along the gray surface and, bouncing off the bench under the window, landed safely on the ground, and it drowsily, with its final impulses, rolled in the direction of my feet. For a moment we stared at it in silence, perhaps in fear that at any moment it would explode all the same and be blown to pieces, flow away in glass mixed with juniper vodka; or perhaps in the hope that some sort of energy or force would enter into it and that, as if turned by someone’s invisible hand, it would twirl roguishly and illicitly? But nothing happened. It was quiet, and the bottle, filled with the feverish and silent tussling of light-blue lights, rested at my feet.

  “Chief,” Mr. Trąba’s voice had taken on an atypically realistic tone, “Chief, I really will kill him. Not with a simple bow, of course. I intend to shoot him with an arrow from a Chinese crossbow.”

  Chapter V

  WHEN I FINALLY understood my role in the attempt on the life of First Secretary Władysław Gomułka, black flames of betrayal and shame flared up within me. It was a sultry August morning. Through the open window you could hear the missionary orchestra. I put on my Sunday clothing in a fury. I hurried. I intended to become a turncoat before the worship service started. I slipped out of the house furtively, with the slippery step of the traitor.

  “My beautiful Jesus! Shining King of the world!” the members of the women’s chorus sang in the garden by the church, and they glanced at me with contempt. The missionary musicians pulled their trombones from their mouths and, looking in my direction in reproof, began to whisper something to each other.

  “Hallucinations, Jerzyk, those are hallucinations. Hallucinations caused by your panicky fear,” I whispered to myself. I crouched, my steps became heavier and heavier, the black foam of fear rocked in my entrails more and more dangerously, and right by the Lutheran church I had to stop. For the first time in my life I understood that if I weren’t given wings, I wouldn’t be able to go a step further. Later on that conviction was to become more and more frequent. The number of actions I was unable to carry out without wings grew. Finally, I was unable to do anything in life without wings. Even now I must constantly give myself wings in order to write this story.

  I looked around me, and although the selection was considerable for the beginning of the sixties, and although all the taverns—Piast and The House of the Spa and Café Orbis—all of them were already open, and although all three were within sight, the fact that I was a minor was an insurmountable obstacle. Manly shoulders are one thing, a manly voice is one thing, but there wasn’t the least chance that one of the three waitresses—that Helenka Morcinkówna (Piast), Krysia Kotulanka (The House of the Spa), or Marysia Jasiczek (Café Orbis)—would offer me schnapps. And so, led by something other than my own will, I turned left and hastened my step, and shortly after passing the Market Square I knocked at the gate of Mr. Trąba’s house, which was hidden in the shadow of the ski jump. No one answered. I pressed the door handle. The door gave way. From the depths, from the dark vestibule, came individual words stifled by feverish spasmodic breathing.

  Mr. Trąba lay on an iron bed, which was standing in the middle of a huge chamber that was even larger than our kitchen. Except for the bed, and the bottle that was standing by the bed, there were no pieces of furniture or any other objects, nothing. Just the numbed vastness of the waters, the castaway adrift in the middle, and a bottle full of disastrous news. Blood oozed from Mr. Trąba’s cut forehead. Saliva flowed from his lips as they parted again and again. The green army pants he wore were completely soaked. The room was in the grip of the deathbed odor of a body that was passively floating in all its substances, although it was, in fact, filled with only one substance. Mr. Trąba said something, whispered, gibbered nonsense, but at first I wasn’t able to catch even a single word, not even one intelligible sound. Still, I strained. I mobilized my secret talent for guessing words that had not yet been spoken, and after a moment—to tell the truth, after a very long moment—I knew more or less what it was about. The key word in Mr. Trąba’s delirious narration was the word “tea,” and the entire narration was about love. It was the sentimental complaint of a man lamenting the fact that he couldn’t drink tea at the side of his beloved, since she was drinking tea at the side of another. The whole thing abounded in innumerable digressions, unintentional interjections, and unintelligible ornaments. Perhaps the general thrust of the lament—that drinking tea at the side of one’s beloved was the single dream in the lif
e of a man—was a too-incessantly-repeated refrain, but, taking Mr. Trąba’s state into consideration, everything came out amazingly fluently. After all, it was as it always was with him: the sense of his story was the basic, and perhaps the only, tie linking him with the world. The beloved’s name didn’t come up even once. Perhaps I wasn’t able to guess it, or perhaps I didn’t want to guess it. I produced a white handkerchief from the pocket of my Sunday clothes. I poured a little vodka on it from the bottle standing by the bed. I applied the dressing made in this fashion to Mr. Trąba’s forehead, and I wiped the slowly drying blood.

  He fell silent for a moment. He opened his lips wider. A stream of tawny saliva flowed down over the gray growth on his cheek. He sighed and raised his lowered eyelids. He looked at me with an unconscious glance, and he half-whispered, half-wheezed:

  “You shouldn’t see me like this, Jerzyk. I am in both moral and physical decay.”

  And he reached out his trembling hand for the bottle I was still holding, and I bent over him. I carefully placed the bottle on his lips, and he drank. Then, having pulled himself together somewhat, he looked at me. In fact, you would have to say that he examined my intent most carefully. In a flash he understood the elementary goal of my visit, and he said:

  “Drink to my return to health, Jerzyk. Do this as quickly as possible, since I am expecting the arrival of the sister of mercy at any minute.”

  And indeed, the dose I drank didn’t even have time to reach my spiritual parts, when the massive figure of Mrs. Rychter—the widow of old Mr. Rychter, the owner of the department store—suddenly appeared in the room, as if out of thin air, dressed in a beautiful flowery dress.

  “Good day, good day,” she shouted, accenting the word “good” extravagantly and enunciating it theatrically. She immediately began to run around Mr. Trąba’s bed. She ran, waved her arms, and shouted “Good! Good! Good! Gut! Gut! Sehr Gut! Good life! Good life! To good life!”

  She ran, and time and again she raised and dropped her hands. She clasped and unclasped her hands. She thrashed the air with her arms. She also performed knee bends, full of unexpected stateliness and at full speed. She was like a mad gymnast who had decided to commit suicide by performing all the sequences of exercises known to her to her last breath.

  “Positive thinking! Positive thinking!” she roared at the top of her voice. “A well-disposed attitude to the world!” she screamed like a buffalo with its throat cut. “A well-disposed attitude toward the world works wonders. In the monthly America I read an interview with a man who, thanks to his well-disposed attitude toward the world, came back from prostate cancer! Prostate cancer!”

  •

  For a good while I had been withdrawing step by step. I had already crossed the dark entryway, and finally I felt warmth and light upon my manly shoulders. If it were not for the fact that I well remembered Mr. Trąba’s indubitable arguments about warmth and light as the indispensable attributes of Satan, perhaps it would have seemed to me that I was returning from hell to the earth. But since I remembered and—what is more—believed, I surveyed the demon-filled world without any illusions.

  Grand Master Swaczyna glided with a decisive gait through the empty and cleanly swept Market Square, dressed in a faultlessly tailored light-blue suit. I had received wings, and I was already prepared to commit an act of betrayal, but my enlightened mind now began to play for time and to consider the fundamental question of whether there was any need for committing an act of betrayal. I was enveloped by the smell of the world’s most expensive eau-de-cologne. I bowed. Grand Master Swaczyna politely returned my bow.

  “A beautiful day, Jerzy, my good man, as beautiful as, excuse the expression, five hundred new złotys,” he began the conversation with his perfect low voice.

  “The dearest day in the world,” I responded.

  Grand Master Swaczyna looked at me with his splendid blue eyes—to match them he chose the most expensive blue shirts and the most expensive blue suits in the world—and he sighed in relief.

  “Conversation with you, sir, my good Jerzy, is a true pleasure. If you don’t mind, if you have a little time, let’s look in on my shooting-gallery for a moment.”

  Grand Master Swaczyna winked perfectly, smiled dazzlingly, and added playfully:

  “My shooting-gallery worth all the money in the world. After you, sir,” and he offered his hand.

  I turned around, and I caught sight of a spanking-new Citroën in the shadow of an old spreading willow tree. The sky-blue body had in it the intensity of the heavens of August.

  “I brought it here from Warsaw yesterday. I crawled along all day long. I was afraid I would destroy the engine. I sold the Moskwicz for a small profit.”

  Grand Master Swaczyna jingled the keys. He opened the windows and doors. He wiped invisible dust from the dashboard with a chamois. He started the engine, and, with his head thrown back, like a director listening to the first notes of an orchestra, he listened to the music of the first revolutions. The interior of the car smelled of the eternal odor of nothingness delimited by matter. It was the odor of the most expensive bars, exclusive clubs, and elegant apartments, the odor of costly hotels, rare substances, and harmonious objects.

  We drove along the river. The first vacationers were taking off their dresses, rubbing suntan lotion onto their shoulders, and carefully spreading out gray blankets on the grassy banks. Grand Master Swaczyna nervously adjusted the collar of his deluxe shirt time and again.

  “More than one body worthy of attention will be brought to the light of day today. More than one, Jerzy.” His intonation misled me. I was certain that immediately thereafter he would add the necessary conclusion, or that he would offer me unambiguous advice about life. But he unexpectedly fell silent, and having lost my concentration and irritated at myself, I was no longer able to guess where he was headed, what he had in mind.

  “Is it true what people say about you?” I asked after a while.

  “It depends which of the numerous legends that circulate about me you mean. Just what do they say?”

  “They say,” I started stammering, although I had sworn that I wouldn’t stammer, “they say, that you are the richest man in the world.”

  Grand Master Swaczyna waved it off scornfully.

  “What do you mean?” he said with distaste and irritation. “What do you mean? Don’t believe every rumor you hear. The richest man in the world! That’s a good one!” Grand Master Swaczyna was enjoying his own scorn and irritation. “The richest man in the world! I’m not even in the top ten!” Now he spoke quickly and forcefully, with the bitter sarcasm of a man who was conscious of his defeats in life. “Come on, I’m not even in the top ten. It isn’t enough that I’m not there, I’m falling. To put it bluntly, I’m falling on my face. Last year I was number fifteen, but today I’m seventeen. That, among other things, was precisely what I wanted to check on in Warsaw. Do you realize, Jerzy, what it means to be number seventeen!? It means not to exist at all.”

  •

  Flakes of green paint were falling off the brittle walls of the shooting gallery. Through the crevices in the crooked boards and battered sheet metal arose straight streams of light. In the depths, in the thick green shadow, stood rows of glass tubes, paper flowers, and matches. Cigarettes hung on invisible threads. Black-and-white photos of film stars, petrified candies, above that shields full of shots, in the corner a monstrous doll no one could win—you had to have seventy-two points from six free-hand shots in order to win it, a result that even an Olympic champion could never achieve.

  Małgosia Snyperek sat on a stool outside that rickety pavilion, which, it seemed, would collapse with the least puff of air. She exposed her freckled little face to the sun. She had rolled up her sad little dress, which was sewn together from various mismatched fabrics, and you could see her paper-white thighs. She was startled at the sight of us, and putting her sackcloth gown and her indifferent hairstyle in order, she fled inside and attempted to lend an expression o
f business-like readiness to her happenstance features.

  “How’s business, Miss Małgorzata? How’s business today?” Mr. Swaczyna asked in a friendly, but at the same time thoroughly official, tone.

  “There hasn’t been anyone yet. There hasn’t been a single client.”

  “That’s not good.” Grand Master Swaczyna became concerned, and he put on such an air, executed such gestures, and spoke such that there was no way around it: Małgosia had no choice but to feel guilty. Even I felt guilty.

  “Maybe this afternoon,” I said without conviction, “maybe things will pick up a bit this afternoon, when people start to go to the summer festival.”

  “That’s not good.” Grand Master Swaczyna, immersed in his supposedly immense calculations, seemed to have heard nothing. “That’s not good. That’s not good at all. If things continue like this, I’ll be reduced to begging. In short, I don’t know what to do.” He suddenly turned to me and spoke as if he expected real advice. “In short, I don’t know what to do. Whether to sell the firm for a modest gain, or to remodel, or to lower prices . . . I don’t know . . . I’ll have to think about it. Today is not a day for final decisions.”

  In very carefully choreographed reverie, Grand Master Swaczyna slowly began to take off his jacket. He took it off, methodically folded it, and delicately placed it on a counter that had been worn shiny by the elbows of generations of shooters. Then, with equal calm, he began to roll up the sleeves of his shirt. He rolled them up, and he said with studied politeness:

  “Miss Małgorzata, a weapon and ammunition, if you please.”

  And when Małgosia Snyperek handed him an air-rifle and placed a can full of shot before him, he stood for a long time with the gun in his hand, with the barrel turned upwards, and with hateful reflection he examined the un-hittable army of matches, sticks, and glass tubes that paraded in the depths of the shooting gallery. And then, with uncanny accuracy, he began to decimate the rickety-legged detachments. Splinters and pieces of glass, scraps of paper floated about in the air. After each shot, Grand Master Swaczyna raised up the weapon with a melodious motion and shouted triumphantly: