My First Suicide

by Jerzy Pilch

  I sat in the bus, crouching and ready to drop, and I quailed at the sight of every white Fiat, and at the sight of a white Fiat that was traveling somewhat more slowly than the rest—my heart stopped beating. Two times or so, I was certain it was them. On the first Friday one, on the second Friday a second white Fiat barreled along in the opposite direction on the deserted chalky road at wheelchair velocity. In hallucinogenic panic, I saw the silhouettes of my folks inside: Father frozen in a catatonic stupor over the steering wheel, Mother thrashing about with incessant exhortations to slow down. I knew that as soon as they got there, and didn’t find me, they would set out in hot pursuit. First, it goes without saying, by requests, threats, force, money, whatever they could muster, they would extort, that’s right, they would extort—even from Wittenberg, they would extort—a confession of where I was, and immediately thereafter they would set out in hot pursuit. I looked around me for some time to see whether, from behind, from beyond a white hill, from beyond a sandy turn, they would appear with lights and sirens blazing, but these were already much too surrealistic visions.

  The closer I got to Krakow, the more the apparitions faded, and once I got there, at the bus terminal, they vanished completely. A biblical throng teemed there. The voice of God, roaring as on Mount Sinai, announced the next departures. An azure pillar of exhaust fumes rose to the heavens like the sign of an accepted offering. I didn’t have any luggage, and probably that advantage allowed me to make my way through the throng every time. God knows by what miracle, standing on one leg, in an exceptionally reckless position, but every time, suddenly I would find myself on the regional bus to Zakopane—crammed beyond human endurance—and my soul sang. Actually, I know by what miracle. In a couple hours, my body would be clinging to Gocha’s dusky body, and on the face of the entire earth there wasn’t a bus so crammed full that I wouldn’t get on it in order to reach her.

  Over the Zakopane High Road, the September air grew dark. Not even for a moment did I forget that I was a young poet, and with all my might I watched for the moment when the low clouds would turn into high mountains. I never managed it. Just as in childhood I attempted to grasp the moment of falling asleep, and I always fell into a dark sleep as into a deep well, so now, always, after the next glance at the horizon, the clouds were already gone, and there were the Tatras.

  In the darkness I would reach the gigantic garden that had gone wild like a desert island, which surrounded the pension that Gocha’s parents rented out. I would sit on a bench hidden in the hazel groves. I would light a cigarette and wait for the moment when, in the second window from the left, a sepia-toned light would flash, and a supple, long-haired shadow would appear. The shadow would appear, Gocha would open the window, look around, disappear for a moment, then she would appear again and give the sign. Off I went. The massive, and, at the same time, light house designed by Witkiewicz père had to it something of the sailboat scudding over the waves, and something of the fortified castle. I swam across moats, I climbed over walls, I confused the guards. Well, no need to exaggerate here about the guards—Gocha’s parents were quite advanced in years and lived as if in a half-sleep. It sometimes even seemed to me that they had died long ago, and it was their indistinct specters that were wandering about the pension, but most of the time just sitting in wicker chairs on the veranda.

  Sometimes the impression that one is dealing with the dead, or that the dead are still living in their former apartments, which are now deserted or have been occupied by others, is as disabling as an attack of madness. When it comes over me, it often seems to me that I myself have been dead for some time, and that, in the empty apartment on Sienna Street, the traces and scents left by me take on my shape, the shadow of my shape. Or, for instance, I am absolutely certain that my folks, even though they haven’t been there for a long time, continue their spectral vegetation in the two rooms on Syrokomla Street. Through the smudged window, which probably hasn’t been washed in a year, you can see Mother, in the pleated skirt, now worn and frayed, which she had once bought in Cepelia, cooking mushroom soup with home-made noodles in the icy kitchen; Father, in a track suit that is as transparent as a spider web, assembling on the ruined balcony a system for watering flowers based on the principle of communicating vessels.

  Gocha’s parents could be specters, spirits, phantoms—fine by me. The main thing was that they not notice how, in the late evening, I flit through the lobby illumined by the cadaverous gleam of the television, and then climb the creaking steps and slip into their daughter’s room. For some time, I had fancy thoughts that they noticed me, but that they took me for a specter. Today, I think that they noticed me—and that they just shrugged it all off. Perhaps they weren’t the only specters in the pension. Perhaps this was, in general, a pension of specters. I never left the room. I had a heightened sense of the oneiric quality of what was going on beyond the walls. It seemed to me that the waitresses gliding along the corridor, the chamber maids, the cleaning women—that all of them move extremely somnolently, that they speak indistinctly as if they are asleep, and that they are constantly surprised at something, as if they had been rudely awakened.

  Even Hela, who was friends with Gocha and privy to our affairs, and who brought me dinners from the kitchen—in spite of the fact that she carried out a conspiratorial assignment that demanded quick wits and physical dexterity—made the impression of a somnolent ghost.

  She was pretty, white-skinned, white-haired, and most certainly soft, very soft, to the touch. As soon as she had flitted from the kitchen to our room with an abundantly laden tray, the hurry was gone. She would sit drowsily on the bed, her carelessly braided tress would come undone, the carelessly buttoned sky blue blouse would come open. Gocha would sit next to her and say something in an undertone. I would eat in silence, and quickly—I wanted Hela to take the dishes and go away as soon as possible. But when I had finished, when I hastily drank the rest of the compote, and even when I demonstratively gathered up the plates and utensils—nothing changed. Hela would sit there, Gocha whispered, I waited. As time passed—and I have a great desire to write that such siestas lasted for hours—Hela would sit there more and more drowsily, with now, I suppose, hair completely unbraided and blouse completely unbuttoned. As time passed, Gocha would whisper more and more tenderly and quietly. As time passed, I didn’t know what was happening, and maybe I wasn’t there at all. Finally, Hela would get up with complete indifference, without consent—but also without objection—to the fact that she had to get up. Just as women do after amatory frenzies, she would stand before the mirror, button up her blouse, put her hair in order. With a perfectly neutral voice, without a hint of irony or ambiguity, she would ask me whether it had been to my liking, and she would collect the tray with the dinnerware. Gocha would see her to the door and stroke her back in farewell.

  We would then remain alone, the air over the mountains would lighten and darken, we practically didn’t sleep at all, we would embrace until the last spasms, to the last drop of sweat, to the first pain. Our bodies and our voices said much to each other, not a word was ever uttered on the topic of Hela. Nor did I ever notice later on that Gocha would see any girl to the door and tenderly stroke her back in farewell.

  VI

  On Sunday, I would set off on the return trip in a night bus that was usually entirely empty. The Jelcz, so corroded that it was as if it had been moulded out of rust, drove along unknown dirt and side roads. Frequently, it seemed that it flew straight across the hill tops. Sometimes it would halt at strange stops, in secret places, doubtless agreed upon in advance. Someone perfectly well known to the driver would get on or off the bus there. Time and again we would arrive at village courtyards, as if they were important stations, at which peculiar nocturnal commotions were in progress—wedding feasts, festivities, hog-slaughterings. The band was playing, campfires were glowing, drunken girls in stained wedding dresses knocked on the pane over which my unconscious head rolled—take me with you, they would whisper.
With a flash of the headlights and a wail of the horn, we would set off further. Except for the camp-fire circles, an absolute silence reigned. Black forests, brown, unmown grain, mouldering haystacks, God knows where the road led. And yet, I would awake unexpectedly from the next slumber, filled with a scent as thick as slime, in the very heart of the little Austro-Hungarian town. The driver would smile broadly, say that he hadn’t even gone that far out of his way. Every week, I would search for some small change; every week, it seemed too little to me. He would count the coins scrupulously, and always at the end, with a consciousness of the aphoristic gravity, he would say: “It isn’t a lot, but sometimes that’s everything.”

  VII

  The road from the station to the billet led through the center of town, then across the castle hill—on both sides, forests and darkness. Every week I attempted to believe that I felt upon me a wild, phosphorescent glance—bull crap. Surely he could be lying in wait among the trees, in the high grass, along the path leading to the stream. It was there, in any case, that the bodies of his victims were most often found. But I couldn’t fully believe in his presence. I was sort of afraid, but I didn’t believe. Fear without belief counts for little. On the other hand, in the high grass itself, but nearer, significantly nearer, I imagined every time that I saw a longish, dark, coffin-like shape. On every return I saw the same body lying on the side of the path, the white shirt it had on was darker each time, the pillar of flies droning over the ripped throat thicker and thicker, the spread arms were arranged slightly differently each time. And the smell—the smell of a stuffy chamber full of flowers.

  I tried to persuade myself that I was shaking from the cold, and I sprinted the last hundred meters to the unplastered villa in which we had our billet. I didn’t measure it, but my time must have gotten better with every week.

  In the room rose the smell of an encampment, barracks, prison cells. In any event, such was the direction of the equally firm and subtle evolution of sensations: from dirty socks to foot cloths, from vodka and beer to moonshine, from brand-name cigarettes to ever meaner tobacco. And the profound slumber of my sleeping colleagues was ever deeper and ever more eloquent. During the first week, they slept the euphoric sleep of young poets who had everything ahead of them; during the second, you could detect the first disenchantment in their sleep; in the third—bitterness.

  The number of books on Wittenberg’s bed grew; in the end, he slept under all seven volumes of Proust, under Eliot’s verses, under little volumes of Herbert, Grochowiak, and Szymborska, under a notebook with hand-copied Miłosz, under a copy of Trans-Atlantyk covered in The People’s Tribune, under Konwicki, Parnicki, Camus, Fromm, Freud, Jung, young Marx, late Mann, under Kołakowski’s Religious Consciousness and the Bond of the Church, under Michelet’s The Sorceress, under Frazer’s Golden Bough, under Bulgakov, Babel, Broch, Faulkner, under three one-hundred-page notebooks, in which he had the beginnings of two novels, full of the highest philosophical tension, and one poem, full of the highest linguistic temperament. And Wittenberg was covered with numerous other books, as with a blanket, or rather as with a net, for, from between the covers, his dark Levantine skin shined through. His right arm always hung from the bed, as if searching for the empty bottle that was standing there; the left rose in the direction of his head; his head rested in the proper place—in the center of the pillow—all around there were long, thick, curly locks, of which we were all madly envious. And with good cause. The hair style—a daring imitation and successful rival for the most expressive creations of Jimi Hendrix, who had been dead for a year at that time—exerted a magnetic attraction upon the girls’ gazes.

  Unfortunately, it was as ineffective as it was magnetic. Everything indicated that on that weekend, too, the biblical/rock-and-roll magnetism of Wittenberg’s hair had attracted no Delilah. I didn’t have to look around too carefully to ascertain that the eternal hunger for a woman, felt not only by him, not only by us, not only during Workers’ Traineeship, but always and by all poets of the world, remained unsatisfied this time as well. In a room marked by each and every sort of transgression, once again all traces of any sort of female presence were lacking. Exclusively invisible muses were rising above the heads of the sleeping poets. No one from the Dressmakers’ Technical College had left a handkerchief, comb, lipstick, not to mention any more intimate sort of prop. There weren’t any extra cups, glasses, empty bottles of sweet wine. During the preceding evening, no girlish hand had cut elegant little wedges of yellow cheese on the copy of Literary Life that was spread out on the table. The nibbled pickle that was lying there, the hunk of bread, and the pyramid of cigarette butts created a sufficiently eloquent still life.

  Clearly, not even the female bricklayer’s assistants, who were working with us, had been persuaded to join them. Already the week before, having grown impatient with standing around in vain outside the Dressmakers’ Technical College, we decided to approach our athletically built female comrades in labor and ask them: would they have a beer with us in Europa after work, and then we’ll see. We laughed at the idea, with alleged self-irony. With a vague sense of shame, we feared—as Wittenberg put it—loss of sexual caste. But in our heart of hearts, we rejoiced and were insanely excited. This seemed easy pickings, a sure thing, and—to tell the truth—ideal for our riotous and exclusively corporeal yearnings. And so, when the girls from the construction site reacted to our proposition unenthusiastically at first, and then began to try to wiggle out—saying that they probably couldn’t make it—we fell into a rather deep frustration. The girls from the clothiers’ school were almost entirely unattainable, and that, paradoxically wasn’t half bad: in the final analysis, we had no idea what we were missing. But here were walking, right under our noses, four female Titans, each carrying a sack of cement, as if it were a feather, on their Athenian shoulders, each in a blouse half-opened on statuesque breasts, each in canvas trousers draping a marble behind—painful and irreclaimable losses. In any event, the reclamation of four pairs of unbelievable tits dusted with lime powder, plus the rest, had not come about during my absence. I got undressed with the speed of lightning, I jumped into the marital bed, in the other part of which snored Wittenberg, overcome with vodka and literature, and I slept for three hours (which seemed like three seconds).

  VIII

  The next day, we sent our would-be mistresses first wistful, then scornful glances. They, as usual, carried cement and bricks, as usual they whispered to each other, as usual they giggled. Once we had knocked off work, we sat longer than usual in Europa. No one felt like going to the College. It was clear by now that nothing was going to happen. The traineeship was ending in three days, and with graphomaniac zeal we attempted to kindle the nostalgic mood of taking leave of the little Austro-Hungarian town, where, no doubt, none of us would again set foot for the rest of our lives. One of the seven indistinguishable local alcoholics (it’s quite a different matter that, in those days, unaware of the nightmare that awaited me, I behaved like a racist toward alcoholics: I made no distinctions among them, and I considered them half corpses, half animals) joined our table and began to spin the next version of the tale about the vampire. There was no reason to marvel at the abundance and vitality of this topic. The vampire (in those days the term “serial murderer,” to say nothing of “serial killer,” was unknown) had been murdering for years. Every few weeks—in the high grass, next to the path to the stream—the bodies of the next victims would be found, their combined number already allegedly reaching into the hundreds.

  This time—if I may put it this way—it was the Party version. “All the stories about the vampire that the gentlemen students have heard up to now are not worth a hill of beans,” one of the seven indistinguishable alcoholics skillfully suspended his voice and performed the four ritual acts that the entire seven would repeat with identical precision during their own narrations: he adjusted his beret, drank a tiny sip of beer, wiped his lips with the back of his blackened hand, and lit up a Sport. “Al
l the stories you know about the vampire are false; the true one is the one that I know. It is, if it please the gentlemen students, kept strictly secret for political reasons.”

  One of the seven indistinguishable alcoholics exaggerated his own revelation. Either one of his brethren, or perhaps even he himself, had already, at least two or three times—at this same laminate table top always drenched with beer, in the same cadaverous glare of the fluorescent lamp hanging over our heads—told the version that asserted that the Silesian vampire was the deranged son of a Party secretary, that he has special protection, that the office of the Secret Police helps him pick out his victims, that the father, depraved by the exercise of power, but also desperate and broken-hearted, even in spite of the pressures exerted by Moscow, is unable to make the decision to have the degenerate locked up, and that, because of this, the blood-thirsty secretarovich will murder and rape who knows how long, perhaps even to the end of his life.