Jerzy Pilch

by A Thousand Peaceful Cities

  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.

  Mother also told how, exactly a week before his death—exactly a week, since he died on a Wednesday, and that was also a Wednesday—Father first saw Mr. Trąba off as far as the gate, which was strange in itself, since he did that very rarely. And he didn’t return for the longest time. He walked around the garden, examined the apple and plum trees, touched an old cherry tree, bent over, as if he were picking something up from the grass, and then he dawdled about the house, until Mother got irritated that he was dawdling and dawdling—didn’t that bother him, she wondered? But then he went up into the attic, down to the basement, wandered through all the rooms, rummaged about as if he were looking for something, but really he was saying goodbye, just saying goodbye to everything.

  And Bryś the Man-Eater, I suddenly recalled, do you remember how Bryś the Man-Eater fled from him? That was about a month earlier, six weeks before his death. Of course, Mother said, the first signs always appear six weeks before someone’s death. Commandant Jeremiah was taking Bryś on a walk. They stopped by our gate. They didn’t even come inside. Mother exchanged some meaningless pleasantries about the weather with the Commandant. Bryś the Man-Eater obediently crouched by his leg. But as soon as he saw Father standing on the porch he began to howl desperately and heart-wrenchingly, and he rushed into awkward, disorderly flight. We laughed at him, that he’d completely gone off his head in his old age. The oldest dog in the world (after all, as the Commandant explained, he is fifty years old) has a right to stranger whims than that. We laughed at the moribund old geezer, but he knew what he was doing. He howled, and he tried so desperately to flee, as if he felt the unearthly smell of death coming from Father, as as if he saw that somebody invisible was standing next to Father, someone who strikes fear into all creation.

  In silence, in complete silence, without a word, Mother showed me Father’s watch, which she had taken off his wrist. The watch had stopped precisely with his last breath at 3:20. And then she showed me her watch, the hands of which had also stopped at 3:20, and then she pointed to both second-hands, both equally and identically immobilized on the 12, and then she recalled that in the last week of his life Father had gotten it into his head that he had to go to Warsaw on some urgent business. She was at wit’s end. He insisted furiously, as if something had taken po
ssession of him. Finally she was able to convince him, and he stayed home. He stayed, and he died at home. That too, after all, is a sign of God’s grace, for, be that as it may, at least he didn’t keel over somewhere out in the world.

  And so, we reminded each other of signs, and we made signs. We investigated whether Father’s death was accidental, whether it was inevitable, whether it was foreordained, or whether he was to blame for it, whether he could have avoided it, and whether he had wanted to avoid it, or whether, on the contrary, he had consciously gone to meet it. We placed question marks, and we summoned for help the watch hand, the fleeing dog, and all the objects that the deceased had touched. We attempted to penetrate the darkness. We did all that, and yet, after all, we also knew that he had long suffered serious heart problems, and that a year before he died the doctors had given him at most a year to live.

  •

  Ambulance. In Father and Mr. Trąba’s conversations, the word “ambulance” appeared very frequently. It appeared so frequently and persistently that the game of foreseeing its constant presence was boring and sterile. “No problem for me, I’ll take the ambulance,” Father would say. “I’ll send that by the ambulance,” “The ambulance will take us there,” “Everything we need can be put on the ambulance.” Ambulance, ambulance, ambulance—I pondered the movement, darkness, and roundness of that word, and I sensed the smell of wax seals. Then, imperceptibly, “ambulance” disappeared from our household, perhaps it disappeared entirely from the Polish language. With all certainty, in none of the hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of sentences I have read in the meantime has the word ambulance appeared. I would have noticed it without fail and with all intensity, just as right away, with Proustian, madeleine-inspired intensity, I noticed it in Father’s posthumous papers. I was looking through those yellowed petitions to the Ministry of Communication and the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications. I read the dim typescripts Father had laboriously tapped out on the old English “Everest” typewriter. I read accusations and notifications of the initiation of proceedings printed on the official forms of the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications.

  Disciplinary proceedings have been initiated against you on account of your infringement of official responsibilities, whereby, while employed in the position of Chief of an Office of the Post and Telecommunications, over the course of the year 1959 you exploited your position and sent private packages containing veal by postal ambulance, and at the same time you prevailed upon the personnel to transport those packages to the addresses of certain employees of the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications.

  I read findings of punishment, composed with no little stylistic virtuosity, and comprehensive justifications for the findings of punishment.

  Since the above-cited proofs confirm irrefutably the commission by the accused of the deeds mentioned in the content of the accusation, to wit: the sending of private packages containing veal by postal ambulance, and the pressure put upon the personnel of the ambulances to transport said packages, I recommend the administration of severe disciplinary punishment. Disciplinary Spokesman for the District Office of the Post and Telecommunication, Okoński, M.A.

  With an aching heart, my throat choking up, I deciphered barely legible copies of desperate explanatory letters and plaintive petitions. I read applications and negative replies to applications, requests and interventions and negative replies to requests and interventions. Line by line I studied that black-and-white record of Father’s dialogue with a Postal Service that was as vast as nothingness.

  I explain as follows: In the year 1959, in the area of Katowice, there occurred a passing, although serious, lack of meat products, above all veal. In view of this, knowing that, in the area of Wisła and its neighboring Istebna, there existed the possibility of acquiring veal, some employees of the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications in Katowice turned to me with the request that I buy meat and send it to them by the ambulance. I saw to this matter as a courtesy and without personal profit. I turn to you with the humble request for intervention in the matter of my removal from the position of Chief of the OPT and prejudicial transferal to the OPT in Cieszyn.

  In reference to your letter, the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications informs you that, regarding the initiation of disciplinary action against you in the matter of the transportation by postal ambulance of private packages containing veal, the decision to transfer you remains in effect.

  In view of the above, I once again ask for help and intervention. In view of my illness, the commute to work of nearly three hours in each direction is unusually onerous, and in winter practically impossible.

  Regarding your letter concerning the matter of the prejudicial transferal, a final answer will be conveyed to you at a later date.

  This is to inform you that your request concerning the granting of a two-month unpaid leave is postponed until the disciplinary hearing has taken place.

  Regarding the initiation of disciplinary proceedings against me in the matter of transporting private packages containing veal by postal ambulance, I humbly request to be informed what stage my case has now reached. Eight months have already passed since the initiation of proceedings.

  The Secretariat of the Ministry informs you that the disciplinary hearing against you concerning allegations by the Spokesman for Disciplinary Matters in the matter of your transportation by postal ambulance of private packages containing veal will be conducted by the Disciplinary Commission at the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications in Cracow. Attached is a finding for punishment as well as a list of the members of the full adjudicating assembly. You are informed herewith that the appointed time for the hearing has been set for 27 July of the current year at nine o’clock A.M. The hearing will take place in the auditorium of the Trade Union of Communications Employees in Cracow, Librowszczyzna Street 1. You are required to appear at the hearing in person.

  Adjudication by the Disciplinary Commission of the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications in Cracow. The object of the adjudication: accused . . . born . . . employed . . . previously unpunished disciplinarily, accused of infringement of official duties committed by exploiting his position as the Chief of the Office of the Post and Telecommunications, that, using employees subordinate to himself, he did transport by postal ambulance private packages containing veal to the addresses of certain employees of the District Office of the Post and Telecommunications, is, after the conclusion of an oral hearing, declared innocent and exonerated of the above-mentioned charges. The citizen is declared innocent on account of lack of evidence of official transgression in the deeds charged against him.

  •

  “You were debased by Moscow, Chief, debased through and through, and you will forgive me if I don’t share your premature joy.” Mr. Trąba seemed absolutely immune to Father’s enthusiasm that day.

  “From the beginning I knew that justice would be done,” Father triumphed, “from the very beginning. And when I learned that Cracow had been designated as the place of the hearing, I no longer had a hint of fear or doubt. Cracow is Cracow! There were only prewar chiefs, gentleman chiefs, on the board of the adjudicating commission.” Father choked on his own saliva. “Chief Czyż, Chief Holeksa, Chief Kozłowski, every inch the gentlemen, suits, good manners, broad horizons. . .”

  “I see that you, Chief, have developed a taste for disciplinary hearings,” Mr. Trąba allowed himself an almost openly contemptuous tone.

  “If you only knew, Mr. Trąba, if you only knew. It is worth meeting people like Chief Kozłowski under any circumstance.” Father swaggered at the table and sought, however unsuccessfully, to pose like a victorious sailor who had just returned from a dangerous expedition.

  I well remember Father’s return, not simply declared innocent and exonerated, but quite triumphant. I remember not only the words, but also the gestures, for that day abounded in particularly frequent risings from the table,
walks over to the sideboard, and removals from it of successive, very successive, bottles.

  “What fairytales are you trying to tell me, Chief? You can’t have become that Bolshevized! I understand that you spent some time in Russky bondage and that you have a right to certain complexes, but—by a billion barrels of beer—you aren’t a young poet who needs to base his entire life on traumatic events! The very fact that a proceeding was initiated against you was a crime.”

  “To tell the truth, what I did wasn’t entirely in order.” Father now attempted to speak in a sort of boldly canny manner.

  “Chief, don’t fall prey to any illusions, and don’t make yourself into some sort of capo of the meat mafia who not only ran afoul of the organs of justice but even hoodwinked them. What did you do? You did nothing. Once a week you sent a little bit of veal by train so that your so-called friends wouldn’t croak from hunger. That’s what you did. And for that you were debased.”

  “I was declared innocent, and exonerated,” Father answered with puffed up dignity.

  “Do you know, Chief, what’s the most terrible thing about Moscow? The most terrible thing is the fact that, in her omnipotence, Moscow wishes to imitate God, that it is the Antichrist.”

  “You exaggerate, Mr. Trąba, as usual you exaggerate.” Sunk in an absolute state of bliss, intoxicated with his evanescent relief, and, quite simply, already pretty well potted, Father wouldn’t hear any arguments. He didn’t realize that all of Mr. Trąba’s admonitions and ominous suppositions would be fulfilled to the letter, that they had already begun to come true.