A Thousand Peaceful Cities. Jerzy Pilch

appreciate the beauty and nobility of the idea of living tomorrow like today or yesterday, but that sort of beauty and that sort of nobility have nothing to do with me. From birth, Chief, I have lived my life under constant pressure for change. For as long as I can remember, I have promised myself that tomorrow would be different from yesterday, next week different from the past. For as long as I can remember, my today is always supposed to be a caesura between the old and the new life. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying, every day, to change something. And now, when an unavoidable change is approaching, when my presence will quickly change into my absence, I intend to do something for the world as long as I’m still here, something which—I won’t hide the fact—will relieve the monotony of the final act of my existence on this vale of tears, with respect to both form and content.”

      “What exactly will you do, Mr. Trąba?”

      “Well, what can you do, when nothing is to be done, when it’s clear that I won’t build a house, I won’t establish a family, I won’t raise a child, I won’t put my opinions in order and write them down, I won’t render the proper respect to my forebears, and I won’t even give up my addictions? What can you do, when a terrible lack, a void, a road drowning in Asiatic grasses, a precipitous bank, nothingness, and nausea suddenly declare themselves? What remains, when nothing remains? . . . Kill somebody—that remains.”

      Father impatiently shrugged it off.

      “A pathetic joke, Mr. Trąba, and if it isn’t a joke, then you really must be suffering significant losses in the lateral occipital lobes.”

      But Mr. Trąba had plunged wholeheartedly into the inexorable logic of his own deduction.

      “Kill somebody—that remains. Kill somebody, whose killing will be for the good of mankind. Who? Obviously one of the great tyrants of mankind. As of today, the situation with the great tyrants of mankind looks as follows: Adolf Hitler—passé, Joseph Stalin—passé. Who remains? There remains, irrefutably, Chairman Mao Tse-tung.”

      Father exploded in artificial, affected, overly ecstatic laughter.

      “I hope, Chief, that your laughter is not derisive laughter, but rather the laughter of a person enchanted . . . no, the laughter of the demiurge enchanted with his own deed, the laughter of God. After all, everybody is different, but you of all people, Chief, will appreciate the dark beauty of the idea of killing Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Weren’t you debased by Moscow? Yes, or no? You were debased,” Mr. Trąba answered his own question, “you were irrevocably debased in the morals department. And since morality has gone by the board irrevocably, let’s at least go into raptures over the pure beauty of our demise. ‘Enough has been given to morality; now comes the turn of Taste and the Fine Arts,’ as a certain criminal Englishman said in his disquisition On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. Yes, Chief, the murder of Chairman Mao can be fine art, and this is irrefutable reasoning. The expedition to the Middle Kingdom itself will be a source of unparalleled aesthetic experiences. Just consider the hypothetical path of this murderous journey.”

      Mr. Trąba began to trace the map of the continent in the air, with sure and frequently practiced motions.

      “It would be simplest, of course, to travel to Vladivostok by the Transsiberian Railroad. There, in the vicinity of Vladivostok, to cross the Chinese border, retreat a little to Harbin in order to gain the support of the local Polish emigration—mostly I am thinking of dry rations, but also of moral support—and then, from Harbin, like a flash, through rice fields, avoiding Changchun, Mukden, and Anshan, to reach the capital of the Peoples’ Republic of China. Without a doubt this would be the most economic variant, at least as far as time is concerned. I am, however, in possession of precise information that, in reaction to flagrant intrusion upon Soviet territory from the Chinese side, the border in the vicinity of Vladivostok is so carefully guarded that a Chinese fly cannot fly over it, a Soviet mouse cannot scurry across it. And so we ought rather first go to Moscow, then from Moscow, by trains and busses, through Kazan, Chelyabinsk, Petropavlovsk, Novokuznetsk, finally to Irkutsk, and further by foot in the direction of the Mongolian border. It will be best, as I have discovered, to cross the Russian-Mongolian border around Kyakhta, and then to proceed from there by horse and cart to Ulan Bator, and then all the way through the steppes, the steppes, to Peking itself.”

      “Through the steppes to Peking, you say,” Father repeated, in venomous simulation of deep thought, “through the steppes to Peking . . . And in Peking? And in Peking—then what?”

      “What do you mean ‘In Peking—then what?’” said Mr. Trąba, suddenly angry. “You will forgive me, Chief, but sometimes I have to treat you like a small child. What do you mean ‘In Peking—then what?’ In Peking we will have to take a look around.”

      “As I understand it, we will have to look around for Chairman Mao. But when we catch sight of him, when the Chairman turns up, when he himself comes into our grasp in some Peking alleyway, then . . .” and Father moved his hand across his throat in the classic gesture.

      “We will have to look around,” now it was Mr. Trąba’s turn for venomous simulation of Stoic calm, “we will have to look around for the road leading to the Palace of the All-Chinese Assembly of the People’s Representatives. It is somewhere in the very heart of Peking, between the Eternal City and the Imperial City, right in the vicinity of the Forbidden City.”

      “Yes, and then what? We reach the Palace of the All-Chinese Assembly of the People’s Representatives, and then what?” Father said ostentatiously, with the tone of the cynical psychiatrist conversing with his agitated patient.

      “Then we find out whether the Chairman is inside, and if he is in a nearby teashop, we wait for nightfall. Mao, like the majority of despots, leads a nocturnal life, which means that it is more difficult to catch him sleeping, since he sleeps during the day. And besides, as you know, Chief, there’s no honor in killing a sleeping man.”

      •

      “Oh, I’ve seen this scene, Chief, perhaps a thousand, perhaps even two thousand times. I’ve seen it in my delirious dreams, and I’ve seen it in my hungover waking. I’ve seen it in malignant fever and in unimpaired consciousness. The swallows, the barn swallows gathered and carried in their beaks a giant screen on which I saw myself—how I deceive the guards, how in the deepest Peking night I suddenly find myself in the Palace of the All-Chinese Assembly of the People’s Representatives, an edifice carpeted with unbelievable rugs. I look into the successive offices furnished with Far Eastern ostentation. Nowhere is there a living soul, although you can hear the tapping of a typewriter. Behind one of the successive doors I see the astonished face of a Chinese secretary or guard, perhaps it’s even Mao’s concubine. She’s wearing a dark skirt, a white blouse, and a red scarf carelessly tied at her neck. That nonchalant carelessness testifies clearly to the intimacy that must connect her with the Chairman, who—I smell this with the unfailing nose of the hunter of despots—who is now near. He is behind the doors that are covered with scales of cracked varnish. I press the brass handle. I enter a cave filled with the murmur of his dragon breath. An identical secretary, guard, concubine, in an identical blouse and skirt, with an identical scarf carelessly wrapped around her neck. She is handing him a crystal chalice filled with, I don’t know, perhaps it’s just milk. Mao, dressed in a white bathrobe, is sitting on a low stool upholstered with a special satin. In both hands he holds the scroll of an ancient Chinese papyrus. He raises his head in the direction of the servant woman bending over him, and he notices me, the black-winged angel of execution, and immediately, in the twinkling of an eye, he understands the entire situation. He knows that I, Mr. Trąba, am a delegate who has come to the Forbidden City in order, in the name of humanity, to do what must be done. And that massive, fat, seventy-year-old Chinese rushes with a hideous squeal into panicked flight. I chase him, I fly after him, I take flight with the lightness that occurs in rare dreams. The white flaps of his bathrobe flutter. His inhuman and inarticulate squeal, inarticulate even in Chinese, guides me. We fly through one corridor, a second, a third. Behind me I hear the patter of pumps on flat heels. Secretaries, guards, and concubines hurry to his aid. I come nearer and nearer. He looks back at me. In his slanted eyes, always full of lavish Bolshevik arrogance, I see black despair, and in normal