by Jerzy Pilch
*Actually, it was precisely the professor who could have had it—and even, as I think about it now—most certainly did.
**“He is!”—the ecstatic text on a license plate of a certain American automobile noted in an essay by Stanisław Barańczak. I like this phrase, and I use it rather frequently in various forms and with various intents.
***The first position is analogous to Aristotelian prote philosophia, first philosophy. Of course, it is possible to gain practice in the understanding and occupation of the first position without knowledge of Aristotle, but then the taste of corporal relations will be less substantial.
My First Suicide
This year I am celebrating the fortieth anniversary of my first suicide attempt. By my count, I have been attempting to kill myself for exactly four hundred seventy-nine months, and, on account of various bits of misfortune, I haven’t been having any luck. I was twelve years old when, for the first time, the black thoughts teeming in me took shape, to the extent that I attempted to jump off the sixth floor. It happened at night. My folks were sleeping in the other room, and the main problem was not the jump itself, but getting out onto the balcony so silently that they wouldn’t wake up. Especially Mother, since my old man always slept the unwaking sleep of the dead.
Mother slept incredibly lightly. Every slight vibration of air woke her. I don’t think she ever got used to the sounds of the city, even though we lived on an unusually quiet street; in fact, in the period I am talking about—in other words, during the sixties of the twentieth century—it was downright dead. Compared with what we have now, there wasn’t any traffic to speak of. Especially in Krakow. Especially on Syrokomla Street. Especially at night. Which was all the worse, since it seemed to me that, in the absolute silence, you could even hear when I lifted my bed cover. The main acoustic obstacle to going out onto the balcony was the drapes, which were hanging from metal curtain rods. At the least touch, the tin hooks to which they were attached made a crunching noise, like the tracks of an accelerating tank.
The idea of killing myself always came at night. At two or three in the morning, someone would sit at the side of my couch and try to convince me. In the thickening air there were more and more insects. The indistinctly pronounced arguments were irrefutable. I knew that one of these times their amorphous but inexorable logic would shove me out onto the balcony, and then off the balcony. It excited me. I knew I could do it. I was suicidally gifted. I was crazy about jumping to the cement from the sixth floor. I had a talent for suicide. But you have to work on your talents. Reproofs of instruction are the way of life.
As King Solomon says: “Reproofs of instruction are the way of life!” As King Solomon says: “Reproofs of instruction are the way of life!” As King Solomon says: “Reproofs of instruction are the way of life!” My old man shouted these words of wisdom so many times a day, and with such solemn dignity, that finally, if he did not become King Solomon in the strict sense, he certainly traded places with him for a bit. Full of majesty and dread, the shadow of the biblical monarch would attack his accounts book, and the thunderous voice would roar upon the heights. Reproofs of instruction are the way of life! This time he didn’t have to tell me twice. I was preparing myself intensely for the final match. Just like, if I may say so, a debutant preparing for the Olympics. Practically every day, when no one was at home, I doggedly practiced the silent opening of the drapes. And also the curtains, an otherwise easier matter. The hooks from which the curtains hung practically didn’t grate at all. After numerous attempts, I had worked out the following technique: you had to place a chair at the balcony window, stand on it, reach out your hand, and, once you had grasped either the hook itself or the drape at the point closest to the hook, you carefully manipulated it and moved it aside, very slowly—this is how it could be done in absolute silence. I was rather tall, even as a teenager, and standing on a stool I could easily reach the ceiling. The drapes parted more quietly each time. Reproofs of instruction were the way of my suicide.
I regret that first attempt to this day. There was no point in wasting time training for the silent opening of the drapes. I should just have gone out, simply, normally—since they were open during the day, and since my folks weren’t at home—onto the balcony and jumped. There was always plenty of free time between when I came home from school and when Mother returned from work. Even on Thursdays, when I had seven classes, there was always at least an hour. I was a contemplative child, and from my early days I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do it in a sudden, lightning-fast impulse, that I would not be able to leap over the balustrade in one bound before someone managed to hold me back. Sure, I wanted to kill myself, and to do it with dispatch, but I also wanted to be present for the act.
I knew from the teachings of Pastor Kalinowski what the other world would be like. But I hadn’t the faintest clue what the passage, what the passage itself from this world to that, might look like. When I asked Pastor Kalinowski about the path (and also about the time and speed) from earth to heaven, or to hell, he lied his way out with theological hermeticisms. I knew that I wouldn’t get clear and simple answers, but there must have been minor approximations, or some sort of (even the most distant) analogies.
Is it indiscernible, like the moment of falling asleep? Incomprehensible, like the flight of Sputnik? Breathtaking, like downhill skiing? Painful, like an inner-ear infection? Could it be that painful? Impossible. I had a high pain threshold. Practically nothing ever hurt. Nothing ever—with the exception of my inner ear. When I was five or six years old, my (inner) ear hurt so horribly that, after that time, at least for a year, because of the trauma and fear of it, I never even uttered the word “ear.” Even today, I remember Doctor Granada muttering over my head “inner ear, inner ear.” Even today, whenever I hear “inner ear,” I experience phantom pains, and even today I doubt that anything—even suicide—could cause more pain. Was that what I wanted to test back then? Was it because I had withstood every sort of pain, and I wanted to try out the pain of falling from the sixth floor? Very likely. At that time, I didn’t yet know Kirillov’s famous dictum about the pain that deters people from suicide. I read Demons for the first time in the lyceum, in other words at least three or four years after my first suicide. I was then, and I still am now, a great admirer of that book, but it had no influence whatsoever upon my various subsequent suicide attempts. Dostoevsky’s hero, and perhaps all literary heros in general, make a great fuss over their suicides—I don’t fuss. I just want to have peace and quiet.
Whatever the case, I wanted to examine everything precisely and calmly. Slowly. Very slowly. I’m phlegmatic by nature. Whatever I do, I do precisely, but slowly. I was one of the best competitors in playground pickup matches and on school teams, and at the same time one of the slowest. You can charge me with what you like, just not quickness. Even on the sports field. And so, as befitted a phlegmatic, I prepared myself phlegmatically for a phlegmatic suicide. I wanted to know at every minute, and even at every second, that I was just then in the process of killing myself.
The simplest move—going to sleep with the drapes opened—was out of the question. Mother guarded the opening of the drapes in the morning, and their closing in the evening, with Lutheran ferocity. In our parts, houses in which the drapes were closed during the day were the houses of the dead. And the houses in which the drapes were not closed at night were the houses of demons. At the break of dawn, in winter at six at the latest, five at the latest in summer, Grandma Pech would open the drapes, lest anyone should glance at our windows and get the idea that someone had died in the Pech household; or, what is worse, that the Pechs were still sleeping.
“Get up! Wake up! Don’t bring on a funeral!” She would burst into the back room, in which Uncle Ableger still couldn’t quite wake up after the previous night’s excesses. She would shake him by the shoulder and tear the yellow drapes from the window and, with lightning-fast movements, fold them into perfect squares and place them on the windowsill. “G
et up! Don’t lie about! Don’t tempt death!” Uncle would open his puffy eyes, glance in distress at the wall clock that was left over from the Germans, and stiffen in horror—it was already well after seven. He would jump out of bed and begin to look for his clothes in a panic. He, too, knew the sacred principle that windows that were left covered a bit longer, even if only until eight, augured death for the members of the household. And for the citizens of Wisła who were on their way to work, they signified death. One way or the other, you had to close and open the drapes at the appointed times, and with full orthodoxy.
Mother repeated that custom in Krakow, in a somewhat gentler version—in winter at seven at the latest, and in summer at six. This version was gentler as far as the times were concerned, but in its spirit it was infinitely more the deed of a hero, even that of a martyr. Everywhere around us, in the neighboring apartment blocks and townhouses on Ujejski, Włóczków, Smoleńsk Streets—everywhere, literally everywhere—there lived nothing but Catholics, who didn’t pay the least attention to covered or uncovered windows. During the first mornings I spent in Krakow, I was certain that plague ruled the city. Every day at least half the windows remained covered all the time—a sure sign that the number of victims was growing.
In our parts, a different light surrounded the house in which someone had died. You could see the covered windows all the more distinctly—even at dusk, even late in the evening, even at a distance. The members of the household who remained among the living would hasten to Pastor Kalinowski, the death notice would be posted at the parish house, and news of the death would pass through the valleys at lightning speed. The deceased would lie in the darkened chamber on a door that had been removed from its hinges and placed on stools. The soul-snatchers from Cieszyn would arrive late with the coffin. In the winter it wasn’t so bad. All you had to do was crack the covered window and make sure that no cat or weasel jumped in. In the summer you had to bring flowers, right away and all the time—as many as you could, whole buckets of them if possible. To this day I don’t like flowers, nor do I keep them at home. To this day, when I smell peonies, lilies-of-the-valley, phlox, dahlias, I catch the scent of deceased Lutherans.
Whoever, in turn, late in the evening or, God forbid, at night, neglected covering the windows and turning out the lights, did wrong, sinned, exposed himself—and, most certainly, succumbed—to Satan’s temptation. He was reveling, drinking, God knows what he was doing that was even worse. Nothing good, in any event. Working at night? There was no such excuse. He who works at night does wrong, since during the day he is unable to do what is needed. Work done at night was bad work by virtue of its nocturnal, which is to say demonic, nature. When the news got around that Szłapka, the cobbler—even though he was an outstanding cobbler and sewed fancy footwear to measure as late as the fifties—had the lights burning in his workshop late at night, that it was then he cut leather for soles, he began to lose orders, and in no time he was bankrupt. Explanations that he suffered from insomnia, and that he was incapable of lying idly in bed, were of no use. Granted, illness gave one the right to keep the lights burning at night, but it had to be a serious illness—flu, or pneumonia, or an attack of asthma; then, OK, then you could turn on the lights, but even then not all night—just for a moment, in order to give medicine to the patient, or tea, and then lights out! But Szłapka had the lights on all the time. What is more, you could see with the naked eye that there was nothing the matter with him. What sort of sickness is that—insomnia? What sort of sickness is that, when an allegedly sick man goes to his workshop and sets to work? No, Szłapka wasn’t sick; he was in the grasp of demons; it was the demons who didn’t allow him to sleep and drove him to nocturnal work. Who would want to wear shoes like that? Who would want to put on and take off shoes that had been sewn at night, at the instigation of demons? Nobody.
“In darkness Satan lays his snares; his are nocturnal lairs. / Into the light before him flee; there he’ll let you be.” This couplet of Angelus Silesius—I knew it in Mickiewicz’s translation (about which, of course, I had no idea at the time)—was a favorite of Pastor Kalinowski, and we heard it remarkably often from the pulpit in our church. Night was Satan’s time, and you had to cover the windows, turn out the lights, and go to sleep. To this day, when I set off for my parts—and often I arrive on a late train, and then I sit for a long time at night in an empty, ice-cold house—to this day, in the morning, our neighbor, Mrs. Szarzec, asks me: “So why, Mr. Piotr, were the lights burning so late in your house?” And I humble myself and make explanations, and, tormented by Lutheran phantoms, I suffer pangs of conscience, and I make constant excuses.
If only I could find a way to free myself from the gruelling ritual of opening and closing the curtains, I could manage it. But at that time I wasn’t aware that the green velvet shades were like the curtain in the sanctuary—they separate the holy from the most holy, and they part only once. You just had to do it. When the conditions were right, you just had to go out onto the balcony and jump. In the end, what difference did it make that I really didn’t much feel like it during the day? What I needed to do was sink my head more boldly during the day, too, into that insect cloud and force my swarming thoughts to more intense swarming. Nowadays, a person knows how to do it. On the other hand, it’s just as well, because I didn’t yet know the suicide handbooks (at that time they hadn’t been published—or even, I suppose, written; and even today, to tell the truth, I know of them only through hearsay), and I didn’t know that it was only a jump from at least the ninth floor that comes with a guarantee. Supposedly, it is only the ninth floor that provides absolute certainty. The eighth floor, according to the experts, is not a hundred-percent sure bet. And we lived on the sixth, and, to make matters worse, this was new (Gomułka-era) construction. In addition to the fact that it could be too low, I could have been too light: I was tall but frightfully skinny, and the energy of the fall—energy, as we all know, is mass (in this case 117 pounds) times its speed (in this case, on account of the insufficient height, of little momentum)—could have been too little. I might perish not entirely, but only partially. The cars standing beneath the apartment block—should I fall on one of them—could cushion the fall, and so forth, and so on. What’s the point of constant speculation if a person is going to go on living?
One way or another, the night of the first attempt had arrived. The day preceding it had been rather good. I had succeeded in not saying a single word to anyone for fourteen hours. When a day of complete silence occurs, when a person, let’s say, doesn’t open his yap to anyone from morning to night, doesn’t encounter anyone, when he takes pains not to exchange a word with any salesperson or mailman, doesn’t answer the telephone (calling anyone is out of the question), and doesn’t drown out this state of affairs by flipping on some radio or television set, then it starts to get interesting toward evening. The air that surrounds your head becomes thicker and thicker—it becomes an insect cloud. The insect cloud stiffens like glass. The insect glass (though it would be better to say: the glass of insects) becomes stiffer and stiffer and more and more opaque, as if an icy breath had settled on it. The dead silence becomes more and more deafening; you hear your own entrails more and more loudly—the blood flowing through the heart, the gasses gathering in the belly, the urine filtered by the kidneys. When I add to this the astonishment that I am eternally chained to my own body, that I will gaze for all time and at everything from the depths of my own skull, that everything I see, hear, and smell sinks somewhere in the brutish lump that has my legs and arms—then it is time to go out onto the balcony. It’s that way with me even today. Basically, I don’t know what gives me the bigger thrill—the thought that I am finally going to kill myself, or the absolute and breathtaking void of many hours after which one can kill oneself.