by Jerzy Pilch
Theoretically, they had another reason to stiffen, since I had appeared at the celebration in the company of a certain fledgling singer who was dressed in a lizard-green dress with a daring décolletage—but my folks had been stiffening for those sorts of reasons for so long that they were by then almost nonchalant about it.
I just couldn’t resist, and I invited and brought to Wisła, for all of the most exalted of family events, each successive woman of my life. I always introduced them as ambitious television journalists, who were collecting material for a documentary film about Lutheran customs. Only such a fiction—uniting elements of work, mission, proselytizing, a laudable interest in our exceptionalism, and the hope for television fame that would satisfy Lutheran pride—gave them the chance of legitimization. On the whole, hand on my heart, I don’t know whether or how that worked. Supposedly everything was in order, supposedly my folks took note of it, supposedly they accepted it, but how it was in truth—I don’t know. Perhaps they were putting a brave face on it? Perhaps they expected that one of these times I would settle down, and they weren’t ruling out the chance? Perhaps they hoped that one of these Venuses would indeed turn out to be a reporter interested in the Lutheran life? Perhaps they took them for specters? Shrugged it all off? I don’t know.
My tragedy is the fact that I always nurture serious intentions. Granted, I like to have a woman near me, whose sight even Lutherans find breathtaking, but, after all, it is not because of such snobbery that I drag these unfortunates up to Ram Mountain. I take them because I love them. I want to be with them to the end of my life. I want to live with them in a house eternally buried in snow, feed dogs and cats, keep the stoves burning, watch movies in the evenings on HBO, drink tea with raspberry juice, etc.
And that is how it was this time as well. Everything went like clockwork. I introduced the fledgling singer in her lizard-green dress as an ambitious journalist who was collecting material about our customs, my folks put a brave face on it, took her for a specter, shrugged it off, or whatever. At her sight, the gathered Protestants had their breath taken away. She greeted everyone politely and modestly, she bowed and curtsied, which, given her décolletage, was something straight out of Babylon, but for my co-religionists a proper girl’s Kinderstube makes a thunderous impression, even if a tit surfaces in the process. Then my current love began to converse with this one and that one, and—so it seems to me—she didn’t even especially make a fool of herself through a lack of substance. True, I heard her ask Mr. Trąba, who was sitting next to her, whether Lutherans celebrate Christmas, and if so, when. But without any hysteria—this wasn’t any sort of exceptional or especially bloody faux pas. The majority of the alleged experts on, and enthusiasts of, Protestantism that I brought there posed similar questions.
Besides, Mr. Trąba began to answer, favorably inclined—in my opinion, excessively inclined. He began to answer eagerly, but chaotically, which was no wonder—the visible range of her solarium suntan shattered not only his concentration. Even Father Kalinowski had problems with the welcoming homily. At least he didn’t get tripped up on the Our Father.
The first hymn was sung, food served at the table, glasses filled. Eat and drink, and make merry, brothers and sisters! Quickly the company began to raise toasts based on cheerful biblical citations and deliver speeches composed on the model of sermons. I was delighted. I was delighted by the entire event. I was delighted by the speeches and the toasts. I was delighted by the fledgling singer in the lizard-green dress. I believed deeply that we would remain forever in my parts, and that in the evenings, in a house buried in snow, we would drink tea, watch films on HBO, etc. I was totally moved, and I was crazy about the absolute grandeur of the thing. When my turn came, or when I had the impression that my turn had come, I was close to tears from emotion. I tapped on my glass with the knife, I stood up, and I let ’er rip. It seemed to me that I was speaking incredibly fluently, that I was master of the form, and that I was faultlessly making my way to the conclusion, and I was simultaneously conscious that some force beyond my control was leading me astray, and that at any moment I would say something I shouldn’t, but which, at the prompting of the darknesses gathering in me, was becoming necessary.
At first, I told them some bullshit from my childhood. Then I began, with bootlicking servility, to assure everyone present that all my life I had emulated my folks, that I had striven to live as they do—according to God’s commandments. And even when it happened that I sinned, it was also—a paradox, but nonetheless—in emulation of them. And here I veered off into muddiness, or more precisely, I got carried away in absolute muddiness. I really must have heard Satan’s whisper, since I suddenly began to blather embarrassingly about how, after passing the matura, at the threshold of my university studies, I didn’t go to the dam in Porąbka, or to the camp in Auschwitz, or even to the Błędów Desert, but to my girlfriend at the time… to my girlfriend at the time… to my girlfriend at the time… I got flustered, since I sensed, after all, how terrible it was. I glanced in the direction of the fledgling singer, who was like a half-naked and emerald-winged angel among the Puritans enshrouded in their blacks; I glanced at her, and I didn’t want to say what I was just about to say; I didn’t want to say what I said, but my speech was now coming like a hemorrhage, as if I had been shot through the head. I didn’t go then to the dam in Porąbka, or to the camp in Auschwitz, or to the Błędów Desert, but to my girlfriend of the time, and my current wife. I added this unexpectedly, and I bowed in the direction of the fledgling singer, who sat quietly and didn’t even laugh; quite clearly she was thinking that it had to do with some Lutheran custom that was unknown to her—and my current wife, with whom I have been for nearly thirty years now, and with whom, I trust, I will live to see an anniversary like yours, dearest parents. Amen. God help me! God hear me! God forgive me!
I strove for grandeur, but I flew down into the depths of the abyss. I raised my glass, I turned toward the venerable celebrants, and, no amazement on my part, I saw a couple of elegantly dressed oldsters, frozen in horror (he in his best steel gray suit from the seventies, she in a fancy navy blue dress from the eighties), their heads hanging low, almost on the table cloth. Everyone, it goes without saying, grasped at once what a truly terrible gaffe I had committed, and no one—not even Father Kalinowski—hastened to smooth the situation over or to give me some sort of light-hearted support. I instantly understood what was going on. I returned to lucidity. I stood for another moment like the typical class dunce, who is still standing, although he ought to have taken his seat long ago. I stood for about another half a minute, and finally, in deathlike silence, I sat down on my chair. Copious sweat appeared on my forehead—I knew that I would have to suffer punishment.
The cooks brought in the second course, but the beef roulades and the veal cutlets were not salvation, they signified only a delay full of torment. Anyway, I didn’t have to wait long. My old man didn’t even try the second meat dish, he chewed a bit of the first (in other words, the roulade), stood up from the table, and went to change into his work clothes. A first, a second, a third slamming of doors reached us from the depths of the house, and after a moment the rhythmic pounding of a hammer resounded from the garage. The Lutherans, who were gathered around the table, relaxed a bit, began to glance at each other with recognition, and they smiled with pride: it is well known that when something bad happens, when the demons come, the best thing to do is to get to work. In spite of the horror of the situation, or perhaps on account of that horror, the question suddenly began to torment me: What sort of task had my old man set himself, and what was he so rabidly hammering?
Mother bustled over to the kitchen. I flew after her, I stood by the window, and I glanced at the snow-covered garden. “Mama,” I said quietly, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.” She turned toward me, a monstrous fury—all the more monstrous, because it was silent—contorted her face. She began to threaten me in silence, to make signs—toward the garage, in which my old
man might die any moment from overwork; toward the dining room, in which the guests now sat, left to themselves—and she threatened me with all her might. For a good two, three minutes she didn’t say a thing; in the end, however, she couldn’t stand the pressure of the silence; she stood on tiptoe, and she hissed: “How could you lie! How could you lie about going on an excursion to the dam in Porąbka, to the camp in Auschwitz, or to the Błędów Desert, when you went who knows where!” “Mama,” I said with a trembling voice, “that was more than thirty years ago.” “And what if something had happened to anyone, how were we supposed to let you know? Where were we supposed to look for you. What if someone had died? What then? Everybody at home is certain that you are at the dam in Porąbka, in the camp in Auschwitz, or in the Błędów Desert, and you are who knows where! Alone to boot! And what if something had happened to you? Where did you go? To the mountains? By bus? But we had a car! Father would have driven you everywhere! I would have been glad to go myself! But you, you arrogant egotist, preferred to go alone! By bus! In the crush! Paying money for it! Instead of comfortably and for free! An entire life of worry!”
Mother covered her face with her hands and tried to summon up tears of despair—she wasn’t having much luck. The hubbub in the dining room was increasing. I didn’t have to be there to know that the fledgling singer in the lizard-green dress was beginning to figure out that something wasn’t right, that she was getting up from her place, that the remaining guests were interpreting this gesture as a demonstrative desire to leave the dinner, and they are attempting to stop her almost by force, that the amber suntan of my current love is turning pale as paper, and suddenly the terrified girl begins to assure them spasmodically that she doesn’t know what is going on here, and that she doesn’t know where she is at all; or what it is about; and she doesn’t have a clue where, and to whom, I travelled after my matura, because it certainly wasn’t to her! Perhaps I didn’t travel to the dam in Porąbka, to the camp in Auschwitz, or to the Błędów Desert, but it wasn’t to her either, because she wasn’t even born then! And she hasn’t been with me for thirty years, because she is only twenty-four years old, and why these absurd lies? Lutheran customs are one thing, but absurd lies are quite another matter!
Through four, five, and perhaps even six walls you could hear that the fledgling singer in the lizard-green dress was beginning to cry, that the Protestants surrounding her in ever tighter circles are first seized by agitation, but they immediately begin to calm down, and they attempt to calm her, too, and they defend me with all their might. They assure her emphatically that I hadn’t lied, and that I’m not lying, because Lutherans never lie, but that I speak the truth, and I pray for the truth, because what I had said was a prayer for truth, the prayer of a person who had strayed in a moment of weakness from the path of truth but prays for a return to that path, and my prayer was heard, and it became the truth. And through the walls I heard my current love’s scream, full of animal fear, and, on my word, I absolutely intended to return there as quickly as possible, and to explain everything, perhaps even to defuse the situation with some sort of joke—although I didn’t yet know what sort. But first I had to run to Father. I left Mother, who was still having difficulty—this was altogether odd—trying to get a good lament going, and in a sprint, skipping two, three steps, I flew to the garage.
At first, I was horrified in good earnest, for it seemed that Father had gone utterly mad on my account. In canvas pants lowered to his knees, he stood next to an enormous oak table, which served him as a workbench, and he pounded—extremely methodically—an enormous steel nail into the table-top. He pounded it in methodically, but very shallowly—a half centimeter—then he tore it out, furiously and with superhuman effort, moved it over some three centimeters with incredible precision, and pounded it in again, and again tore it out, and again moved it over. Terrible was my horror, and equally great the relief, when I realized that my old man had not gone mad after all; rather, as normally as could be, with all precision and solidity, he was pounding extra holes in the pants belt that was lying on the table. I stood in the doorway. The table was high, and what is more it was outfitted on two sides with a slat that stuck up above the table-top, so that screws, nails, and all sorts of miniature elements wouldn’t fall on the ground, and quite simply—and my agitation was not without its significance here—at first I hadn’t noticed the belt carefully laid out on the table. “Papa,” I said in a panicky attempt to pretend at being matter of fact, “can I help you with anything? Or can I bring you something to drink?” Father stopped pounding extra holes and looked at me the way he was accustomed to look at all intruders and spongers who interrupt his work—motionlessly and heavily. The hammer hung in the raised hand equally motionlessly and equally heavily, while the belt, as if the spirit of a snake had entered it, began slowly, then ever more quickly, to slide off the table. With an elemental reflex, I jumped up. I was unable, however, to grab it in flight. It fell on the cement floor. I bent over to pick it up, and again I was unable to do it, for I felt a light—I emphasize—very light blow to my head.
The fledgling singer claims to this day that she found me lying under the table, unconscious and covered with blood, but this is rather a schoolgirl’s and—if I may say so—non-ecumenical and typically Catholic hysteria. Father had tapped me very lightly also because, at his age, he was simply incapable of tapping forcefully. In addition to that, he was standing there—I remind you—with his pants down, and it is well known that a man with his pants down is totally self-conscious, and all his movements, including movements of the hands, are self-conscious and limited. (A man with his pants down—to forge a dazzling aphorism on the fly—has no other goal in life than to pull his pants up.) True, an insignificant splitting of the skin and some bleeding, incommensurately abundant for the small wound, had ensued, but all the further results—that is to say: the trip to the emergency room; the examination; the obstinacy of the mean-sprited doctor, who stubbornly insisted that, as a result of the blow to the head from a blunt instrument, I had received a concussion; the narrow-minded phone call to the police; the arrival of the policemen at home; Father’s arrest and detention at the police-station for forty-eight hours—these were all absolutely unnecessary things.
Although, on the other hand, maybe they were necessary. In some non-superficial and—if I can put it this way—deeply familial and genuinely communal sense, perhaps they were downright indispensable. For after that, whenever I would meet with my parents, we would laugh ourselves to tears over those events. We especially split our sides over the memory of the guests, a portion of whom—upon hearing that Father had murdered me with a hammer in the garage—couldn’t measure up to the demands of Lutheran toughness and rushed into panicky flight. While the other portion—Father adored precisely that episode, and when he recalled it, he cried, in the strict sense, he cried from laughter; for the portion of the guests that didn’t rush into panicky flight, but rather remained at the post of Lutheran toughness, true, they did meet those demands, but—give me a break, for I myself will die laughing—they, in turn, did not meet the demands of the Lutheran ethos, as they all got blind drunk and came out looking like corpses. “Those corpses!” Father would laugh. “The corpses! One corpse in the garage! But in the dining room… ! In the dining room, so many corpses! Nothing but corpses lying like trophies of the chase. Mr. Trąba—a corpse! Young Messerschmidt—a corpse! Doctor Granada and Kohoutek—corpses! Master Sztwiertnia and Father Kalinowski—both corpses! Even Małgosia Snajperek—a corpsette!” Supposedly all of them truly—I wasn’t present for this, I lay with a bandaged head in the clinic—absolutely all of them had fallen fast asleep, and they slept not one, but many hours, until the break of dawn. “Instead of keeping watch and praying for the removal of suffering, we fell asleep like the Disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane,” said Father Kalinowski, when Mother finally managed to wake him at daybreak. “I myself, overcome with wine, fell asleep like Christ in the tomb, and if it w
eren’t for you, Mrs. Engineer, I would not have risen from the dead.” With lightning speed, according to Mother’s tale, he braced himself; to her horror, with a shameless motion, he reached for the unfinished bottle of cherry vodka that was standing on the table, and he took a hefty swig straight from the bottle. Then he fell into a pensive mood for a moment, and after a while, with a gesture well known from the pulpit, he raised up his hand and said: “But both the sleep of the Disciples in the Garden, and His sleep in the tomb—although they were needless events that to this day arouse opposition—would turn out to be, in fact, unusually necessary and, in God’s plan, irrefutably needful!”
V
In September of the year 1971, I knew perfectly well which events are, both in life and in God’s plan, irrefutably needful, and which are completely needless. Without giving it a second thought—especially, I would say, without giving it any theological thought—I would call up my folks, and I would tell them that our entire brigade had, on the coming weekend, an obligatory excursion to the camp in Auschwitz, to the Błędów Desert, or to the dam in Porąbka, and every weekend I would make the trip to see Gocha in the mountains, and those were unusual trips.
First of all—crouching down the whole time and ready the whole time for the sudden drop that would render me invisible—I would take the local bus to Krakow. With my eye, with the corner of my eye, glued the whole time to the glass in utmost vigilance, looking to see whether my folks’ white Fiat wasn’t crawling along in the opposite direction like a tortoise. The attack had been forestalled, the telephone call had been placed, but there remained unforeseen circumstances to be foreseen. To tell the truth, when it had to do with my folks, you always had to—you had nothing else to do but—foresee unforeseen circumstances. It could always happen that my incredibly convincing story about an excursion to the dam in Porąbka, to the camp in Auschwitz, or to the Błędów Desert would seem to Mother somewhat odd. My folks could always come up with the idea that they would manage to drop off something to eat before my departure, if only a couple sandwiches with home-made butter, which strengthens the eyes. They could always come to the conclusion that I must have a cold, because I speak in such a dreadfully hoarse voice on the phone, and if I go on the excursion I will fix myself for good. They could always make the desperate attempt to drive over in the early morning with a note, written in advance in their own calligraphy, a justification of the absence of our son from the tourist activities. Always, always, always. I was never able to foresee everything. Beginning in the deepest depths of childhood, I practiced decoding the unpredictability of my folks. I was really not bad at this. I could foresee practically everything, but, all the same, they always managed to surprise me.