by Jerzy Pilch
Icy, black January arrived, after that an even icier and blacker February. He would get up with Mother in the darkness, light the fire under the kitchen stove, put on his postal clerk’s jacket, tie the cornflower blue tie of the Postal Chief, eat breakfast, and walk slowly through the gray center of town to the office. He would return for lunch, Mother would serve a thick and almost brown chicken broth with noodles, he would eat, then lie down for a bit, close his eyes, listen to the absolutely undisturbed five-fold ticking. Today I think that he also kept watch over the clocks so that their brittle, earthly ticking might stand up to the unearthly rattlings.
March was brighter. Whenever they had to go anywhere a bit further away, Fuks would now be harnessed to the cart, not the sleigh. In April, they stopped heating the rooms, even the coldest air was lined with the scent of the grasses’ stormy onset, larks began to appear over Partecznik. By the beginning of May, summer uniforms were the rule at the post office, the winter ones landed in storage. The underwater city was covered with successive layers of postal uniforms. In June, heat waves smelling of hay burst forth, the first female vacationers were sunbathing on the river bank. In July, carters brought coal for the winter, and wood was cut; then came the rains and the floods. In August, the air in the kitchen became as thick as quince syrup; Mila would come and help Mother with the compotes, pickles, and plum jams. In September, there were occasional blades of grass whitened by the first light frosts. In October, the smoke that backed up from the cold stoves filled the house like tear gas.
His birthday was on the twenty-seventh of November. The postal workers would take up their seats at the table. Mother served everything she had—chicken broth, cutlets, potato pancakes. A gallon jar of marinated mushrooms went from hand to hand and seemed to diminish like a rapidly melting, huge, red-brown candle. For his fiftieth they gave him a tableau beautifully executed by an artist from Ustroń. Gold letters proclaimed the glory of Mr. Chief, inserted among which, wrapped in gleaming ribbons, were the photos of all the female clerks and the postmen, then he himself in the middle, suitably enlarged. All of it in a cherry wood frame, which on the next day came to hang next to the likeness of the Guardian Angel in the back room.
How many Novembers have passed since that time? Ten? More than ten, because at his sixtieth he still saw very well, glaucoma wasn’t yet blinding him, and Mother was also still in good form. Her legs hurt, and a sore under her knee just wouldn’t heal, but she was still in good form. They didn’t put on birthday parties any more, because they didn’t have the energy for such things, and their pension wasn’t enough for it, but they were still in good form. So more than ten Novembers have passed. Fourteen, maybe fifteen.
When December came, Mother would always turn the house upside down in preparation for the holidays, but this time she turned it upside down and back again, a hundred times over. She must have done it to spite him—after all, they were supposed to go to their daughter’s for Christmas Eve. “Woman, verily I say unto thee: cease thy labor”—whenever he got boiling mad, the language of the Bible would take possession of him. The greater his fury, the more solemn the rhetoric. In the depth of his heart, Christmas Eve at their daughter’s suited him even less than it suited Mother, but of what significance is the depth of one’s heart? In the depth of his heart, even the son-in-law who had joined the Party was pious.
In the new house, which he had built at the foot of Jarzębata Mountain, there was enough room to put up eight Christmas Eve tables and eight Christmas trees. You could have Christmas Eve in the dining room, Christmas Eve in the hearth room, Christmas Eve in the salon downstairs, you could have Christmas Eve everywhere. And there was half—and maybe even an eighth—of the work with the cooking and the baking, because there were also eight burners and ovens in the kitchen, and maybe eighty-eight. And you don’t have to wash the dishes, because there is a machine that washes them for you. They have amazing things there: all the furniture in the world, even a rocking chair.
“You two take a rest, have real holidays for once in your lives, I’ll take care of everything,” their daughter practically choked with joy at the prospect of the first Christmas Eve in the new house. Everything she said was indisputable, and yet you had the impression that she was talking nonsense—the nature of the world is unfathomable. Please yourself. Peace be to this house. You can have a chair that rocks, a machine that washes dishes, verily I say unto you: you can even have, brothers and sisters, a toilet that will wipe your rear for you. But they agreed, because how could they not agree. Before long, they would be sitting at the Christmas Eve table by themselves.
So Mother got down to resting. She began to rest with a vengeance. Every year it was a horror from morning to night: cleaning, sweeping, putting things in order, but now it seemed that she would jump out of her skin. She scrubbed the runners and the rugs on both sides. She totally emptied all the wardrobes, and she laundered every blouse, skirt, shirt. The same thing with the sideboard: she washed and polished sets of silver that hadn’t been used since the war, she lined shelves with parchment paper, she brought every knife, every fork, every spoon to a jeweler’s sheen. She wiped the hobs on the kitchen stove with an emery cloth. She went through the attic. She almost tackled the store, which is practically impossible to enter by now. She almost set out upon the impassable ocean of objects. Luckily, she gave up. But now she scrubbed every lamp—not just every lamp—she unscrewed and scrubbed every bulb from every lamp. She washed the walls, which were covered with oil paint. She dug out from under the benches old ugly shoes that no one would ever again put on a foot, and she gave them a good shine. It isn’t worth talking about waxing the floors, washing the windows, laundering the drapes and the curtains, that was a constant—now, it goes without saying, the variants increased infinitely. His blood boiled, he did his best to restrain her, but she didn’t respond. After one of the times, when, on the verge of apoplexy, he roared for the hundredth time—“Woman, verily I say unto thee: cease thy labor!”—she raised her head and said with a colorless, tired voice: “A person has lost everything in life, and now even the holidays are gone.”
What was he supposed to do? He helped as much as he could, although by evening he was barely alive and could hardly see anything. And when, two days before Christmas Eve, he finally went in the late evening into the back room and began to prepare himself for bed, and he glanced at the wall, and he saw what he saw—he thought at first that this was finally the last straw and that his eyes had entirely given out from the stress. True, he hadn’t gone completely blind, he wasn’t plunged into eternal darkness, but from that time forth, he would see only apparitions. From today, only terrible visions would present themselves to him. The first of them was this: that, on the wall over the bed, in the place where, ever since his fiftieth birthday, the golden-silver tableau had been hanging, there now hangs the portrait of Gustaw Branny.
He remembered that portrait from before the war. For a while yet, after their wedding, that likeness of Mother’s first fellow had been hanging in the icehouse. Whether it was there until the deaths of the old Brannys, he wasn’t sure. But after their deaths, for certain after the war, it had been taken down and carried off to the store, and it had vanished for the ages in the avalanche of junk. Perhaps it had even gone up in flames one winter in the stove? But it is unlikely that Mother cast it into the fire, and he would most likely have remembered such a distinctive action as burning the portrait of his predecessor. And he thought that he was not now seeing the portrait of the Gustaw who was killed on the motorbike, but rather his prewar specter; that everything had gotten mixed up in his head and that, instead of the genuine one, the prewar wall was presenting itself to his half-blind eyes, and the wall from another room to boot. I won’t believe it until I touch it. So he touched it. And still he didn’t believe.
The dawn of the next day came nonetheless, and in the snowy bright it was impossible—either through tricks of sight or through losses in the field of vision—to avoid the
painful truth: that Mother, in the fervor of her cleaning, had introduced a new order. No illusions. She had taken the little homemade birthday greeting down from the wall and hung Gustaw’s portrait in its place. He had never been jealous of him. Never did he harbor in his heart even a hint of despicable male sorrow that he hadn’t been the first. Perhaps even on the contrary. Perhaps he was so happy that the other one had gotten himself killed that he had understanding for him even in this? All the joy the guy experienced in his short life was during that year after his wedding. And what could his joy have been, when Death was circling around him the entire time? Perhaps he even knew that a sudden end had been allotted him? Perhaps he had heard or seen signs? What is there to envy in this? God protect us against everything that Gustaw Branny had in life.
Nor was he jealous of anyone later on. It was more likely Mother—a far sight more likely that it was Mother—who could have been jealous of various female postal clerks. And she was jealous. And she had reasons for it. And what reasons they were! Jesus Christ! I was nine years old, Grandpa Pech often took me along to the post office, and at least three girls in tight-fitting navy blue smocks awakened mad desires in me. I stared at them greedily, and I was absolutely certain that at least two of them were reciprocating my gazes. I was ready for everything, and they were ready for everything. In any case, at least one of them was most certainly ready.
Someone will try to explain to me now, with psychoanalytic erudition, that, in the postal pinafores that highlighted their shapes, they looked like thoroughly mature versions of my female classmates, and that is why they turned me on so much. That’s right. That was precisely their appearance—thoroughly mature fourth-graders. And what of it? This doesn’t change the tension they aroused in me, and I in them. And the tension Grandpa aroused in them? Mr. Chief? Who had passed his matura before the war? A romantic lover, the strength of whose feelings was so great that it blew his rival off a speeding motorcycle as if he were a feather? A man whose fervent prayers were answered for the return to him of a woman betrothed to another? The hero, for that reason, of local ballads and incredible love stories? A lieutenant from the September campaign? A well-built man in the prime of life? A believer, and yet intelligent? A drinker, and yet refined? Born here, but speaking like a Varsovian? A connoisseur of the Bible, and of chess? That’s right: my Grandpa Andrzej Pech was a man of panache and eroticism. In my parts, to this day, these are exotic attributes. My parts are not the land of panache and eroticism. My parts are the land of divine signs, suppressed passions, and photographs of young boys in Wehrmacht uniforms hidden away in secret drawers.
No two ways about it. Grandma Pech, even if nothing ever happened, had countless reasons to be jealous. He didn’t have any. But now, when the portrait of Gustaw had appeared over his bed, he realized that for several decades in his wife’s life there had existed a stream about which he hadn’t had a clue and about which he hadn’t guessed in the least. A story long ago finished—it turns out—wasn’t finished at all.
The thought never crossed his mind that Mother, who was in cahoots with dead people, had some sort of particular contact with her deceased husband. He hadn’t connected the one with the other. In his jealousy over otherworldly signals, there wasn’t a hint of jealousy over Gustaw. But now there appeared not the hint, but the jealousy itself, painful to boot, the sort of jealousy that is aroused not by trysts, but by letters written in a hidden and secret cipher. Were they engaged in some sort of spiritualistic correspondence? In some sort of occult communication? Was he speaking from the other world? Was he making some sort of signs? Maybe all that constant knocking of various dead people, or of those preparing for death, was a smoke screen covering uninterrupted signals and signs? Had the deceased Gustaw Branny been pounding on the kitchen window since before the war? Was he assuring her of a love that had outlasted death? Was he whispering to her, telling her what to do? Now, in the course of the holiday cleaning, had he tapped out the request to return his portrait to its place over the bed? Lord God, forgive the short temper, but this version of life beyond the grave, this version of repenting souls, or even this version of the resurrection of the body—this is out of the question. Entirely out of the question. In any case, he certainly didn’t hear anything. He didn’t hear anything, but he certainly sees the portrait over the bed. Until yesterday his birthday tableau had been hanging there, and now it was the portrait of the other one. Now it was over the other one that the Guardian Angel was keeping watch. At least Mother didn’t clear the bed away. Verily, woman, I render you grateful obeisance that you didn’t take my marriage bed from me! A marriage bed, moreover, that is not my marriage bed, but the bed of your first betrothed, from almost half a century ago! Jesus Christ! You have to stop thinking. Life has already passed, and there is no point in recreating it anew in one’s thoughts. Especially if it was different than you thought. You have to stop thinking. You have to go to your daughter’s for Christmas Eve.
VII
Across the bridge, around the sports center, then right and a little bit more toward Partecznik, and there you are. The whole time, a level, straight road, only later, just before the house, does it get steep, but also not for more than twenty yards. On Christmas Eve itself, it snowed the entire afternoon, but the ploughs were out driving like God knows what. It was probably because some Party mandarin in the little castle on Kubalonka was putting on a Christmas Eve fête, and the whole vicinity was on alert. They dressed up as was fitting, they strapped to the sled the net with the presents and the great pot of cabbage that Mother cooks every year for Christmas, and giddy-up! Giddy-up to Jarzębata Mountain! They went, and all the time it seemed to them that this wasn’t Christmas Eve, because, after all, on Christmas Eve you don’t budge from the house. Even in thirty-nine, in order to get home in time for Christmas Eve, Grandpa Pech had made a run for it from a German transport. And he got there on time. But now they are leaving home, and, wrapped in thick blankets up to their ears, like a couple of vagrants, they drag the sled with the bundles behind them.
They don’t know the word unreality; on the contrary, everything they pass on the way—that was their world. The park, the Monument to the Silesian Woman, the bridge, the mill buried up to its roof, the completely frozen Mill Stream, the Stawarczyks’ house and the Mitręgas’ cottage, the prewar villa of Professor Gawlas, the footbridge over the stream, the turn toward Partecznik. The lights at the house of Janek from Wymowa were on, probably he is already sitting down to supper with Hela. Then another bit, as if through a gigantic corridor of snow; finally, the white wall of the forest and the dark silhouettes—ours are already waiting for us.
But no one runs out to meet them, they stand as if frozen, from close up they all also look strange and uncomfortable. What, in the name of God the Father, has happened on this Christmas Eve? Nothing has happened. Nothing big has happened. It was just that the snowplow hadn’t removed the snow right up to the house, because it is too steep, and now it wasn’t clear how Mama would make it up there. Grandpa would somehow manage, but Grandma—with those legs of hers? She can manage on level ground, even uphill, but not in snow like that. Somehow we’ll manage. But how? Maybe we should take the bundles off the sled and come up with some way to slide her up there on the sled? Out of the question. She would sink and be suffocated, on Christmas Eve to boot. So how? No idea. We’ve got to come up with something, because everyone will freeze to death here; they were forecasting minus twenty-five degrees for that night. My Christmas Eve story is silence full of helpless shame. Grandma Pech’s story about Gustaw’s death was a single-sentence. In my Christmas Eve story there is no room for even one sentence.
Suddenly an absolute idea flashes in my head, suddenly I feel like the writer who, finally, after a long silence, has composed a phrase that is not only beautiful, but also thoroughly true, and who knows that after that phrase others would follow, equally beautiful and true. Suddenly, he feels the pride of the group leader, the ship captain, the troop chief, p
erhaps even the pride of the family father, who, with one gesture and one thought, finds the way out of a stalemate. And so I say, with hasty enthusiasm, that it would be best and safest for Grandma to force a safe passage through the snow on the wicker rocking chair, which is standing by the fireplace. We’ll seat her comfortably and, as if on a throne with runners, as if on a royal sleigh, we’ll haul her right up to the threshold. And I’m already half turned, at a half run, already as if on angel’s wings, I fly to get the rocking chair, which will immediately become a novelistic vehicle, and I hear how Father and Mother suddenly begin spasmodically to shout each other down: Out of the question! The chair will be destroyed! Absolutely out of the question! The new piece of furniture will be destroyed! Out of the question. And I freeze, and everyone freezes, as if the whole frost forecast for that night, and even a frost two hundred degrees colder, had come falling down from the heavens at precisely that moment.
My aunt, the pious bigot, explains that perhaps there wouldn’t be great damage, and perhaps none at all—after all, the snow was fresh, and as clean as a whistle to boot. But what are you talking about! You have to have air for brains to say such reckless things! Who wastes things that were acquired with the sweat of one’s brow? Who? What is more, everything, every little thing was wangled through connections! Where are you going to find a chair like that now? Where? Nowhere! And everyone understands, and Grandma Pech understands, and Grandpa Pech understands, and he says: Peace be to this house! And with a firm motion he takes Grandma by the arm, and off they go.
They move decisively, and they walk quickly. The way now seems shorter, the sky full of stars, the snow crunches under their feet. It is as if Grandpa even sees a bit better, and her leg—miracle of miracles!—hurts less. She has a bit of a guilty conscience that she has made such a muddle, but she feels his hand, he feels her arm, and he knows that this is the arm of the woman of his life. The closer they get to home, the more sprightly their expressions, the more their moods improve. It is good to return home for Christmas Eve.