My First Suicide. Jerzy Pilch

to hear that it is difficult, a terrible tragedy, that they would have to bear its burden all their lives, but that it cannot put a veil on life, for life goes on, and, after all, both are still young and strong, and they could still, and probably they even ought to, try to have a child…

      On the merits, and given their ages, it was possible. When I was born, Mother was twenty years old, and when I decided to kill myself the first time—it is easy to calculate—she had barely turned thirty. Thus, if I had succeeded that time in committing suicide, and if they had decided to have a new baby soon thereafter, there would not have been any contraindications.

      And yet, for Mother, driving my old man to guilt was a narcotic without which she did not know how to live. Her instinct to harass the poor wretch—who, as it was, lived with a constant feeling of guilt—was stronger than all her other instincts. In this, she had the diabolical gift of making exceptionally surprising and venomous retorts. I was certain that she would hear out the old man’s procreational arguments—in silence, and even with feigned goodwill—and then, with studied calm, making numerous and excessive pauses, she would say that this is all fine and good, but she is very curious about one thing, she is very curious, namely, whether, when they get a baby, she is exceedingly curious whether, when that baby grows up a bit, when it reaches the twelfth, or perhaps even the tenth year of its life, well, she is exceedingly curious whether Father would again drive it to commit suicide? Whether once again—by his habit of returning home late—he would kill it? She is very curious. Very.

      It was getting later and later. Mother bustled about the kitchen more and more zealously. The old man still wasn’t home, and now it wasn’t about his feeling of guilt, in any event, not only about his feeling guilty. Now it was already so late that all of life slipped through one’s hands and scattered to the winds. And Mother cooked, and she fried, and she baked everything that formed the rock upon which our house was built: mushroom soup with homemade noodles, breaded veal cutlets, Christmas Eve cabbage, potato pancakes, apple dumplings, vanilla pudding, crêpes with cheese. A house erected on a rock is lasting, but a house erected on a rock composed of Mother’s dishes will outlast everything. The crêpes were indeed timeless. Not even my imminent suicide was able to diminish their quality. I think I ate about eight of them. Then I didn’t wash—with absolute impunity—didn’t undress, didn’t go to bed. Running amuck in my freedom, I sat in the armchair and stared at the television. I could do whatever my heart desired. I could play shove halfpenny on the windowsill, I could take out the copy of The Biology of Love, which was hidden at the bottom of the cupboard, I could stare through binoculars at the neighboring apartment block. On television, a film for adults called The Small World of Sammy Lee was starting, and I had a good chance of seeing something forbidden before I died. Mother was in the kitchen getting ready to bake a three-layer cheesecake with icing, and she was pretending that she didn’t notice my debauchery. Everything, it goes without saying, within the framework of that same vengeful strategy. Everything so that she would be able to rebuke the old man, once he had returned, for leaving me prey to forbidden obscenities on television, when she doesn’t have the strength, she truly doesn’t have the strength, to look after everything, absolutely everything.

      Unfortunately, in those days there were very few forbidden obscenities on television, and in fact, on the evening preceding my first suicide, I had incredible fortune. Fortune, one could say, in misfortune, since, when the scene in The Small World of Sammy Lee began, in which the owner of the bar ordered the newly hired stripper to do a trial run, the doorbell rang in the hallway, the door opened, and there—stiff from the cold, and the vodka—staggered in Father.

      Mother and Father stood facing each other for a long time in total silence. Then the old man, rocking and giving off steaming clouds of hoarfrost and rectified spirits, managed to stammer out that, at the Academy of Mining and Metallurgy, they had held a ping-pong tournament, and that he had once again won. At that point Mother waited a good minute more. Then she grabbed the pot of mushroom soup with homemade noodles, which was standing on the table and had already cooled off somewhat, and she poured it all over my old man. Father reeled, but he didn’t fall down. He began, at first with uncoordinated motions, then more and more precisely, to remove handfuls of the homemade noodles with which he was plastered and to fling them at Mother, but she was already in the depths of the kitchen, beyond the reach of his feckless blows. She stood at the huge skillet full of breaded veal cutlets and aimed at his head in a great rage, and she hit her mark almost every time. The old man, like a wounded bear, trundled along in her direction. On the way, his splayed fingers happened upon a pot of something that, once he had emptied it, turned out to be Christmas Eve cabbage, and now Mother was like a sea monster overgrown with greenish scales. Time and again she reached for the potato pancakes piled up next to the now empty cutlet skillet, and she furiously placed them, one layer after another, on Father’s head. Then she poured portions of half-set pudding on him. He broke off a piece of apple dumpling and took aim at her, but before he threw it he fell into a reverie and instinctively, as if he wished to check how it tasted, bit off a little piece. Mother ruthlessly exploited this moment of inattention and attacked him with her whole body. The old man began to retreat. She dexterously opened the refrigerator and extracted a bunch of frankfurters, obtained by God knows what sort of miracle, and began to flog Father with them like a mad woman. He, in turn, raving with pain, blindly felt around for the jars of compote standing on the shelves in the hallway, grabbed one of them (it turned out to be greengage plums), and with an automatic motion, practiced during a thousand Sunday dinners, pulled the rubber seal, opened it, and poured it on her, as if in the hope that this would sober her up. But no, she went on flogging him. He shook the empty jar like a tambourine, or perhaps like the flag of defeat.

      In a more and more powerful and spasmodic clench, like a couple of avant-garde performers, or wrestlers of equal strength, they sailed through the hallway and rolled into the bedroom. The door, as if touched by an invisible force, closed behind them. For a moment you could still hear the lashing of frankfurters, then silence set in, then the lights went out.

The scene of the auditioning stripper had passed irrevocably. There wasn’t any point in comforting myself with the thought that, when I grew up, in addition to being a famous soccer player, I would also be the manager of a strip joint. I had to accept the more tragic truth: namely, that I would die without seeing a naked woman. That not even on the screen of a Nefryt television set would it be given unto me to verify whether there was even a grain of sense in Pastor Kalinowski’s exceptionally enchanting biblical metaphor of the roe-deer twins that feedeth amongst the lilies.****

      I did my best to bypass the warpath marked out by the shreds of frankfurters, pancakes, cutlets, and other minerals that formed the rock of our house. Once, twice, maybe three times, I made the leap back and forth, but I wasn’t drawn by this new Olympic discipline. There wasn’t any call for it, but in the face of the final prospect I made my way to the bathroom. I didn’t have a particularly keen awareness that I was washing a body that, in a few hours, would become the body of a corpse, but it could be that I was genetically burdened with that sort of awareness.

      For ages, Grandma Pech had been a well known Wisła virtuoso in the art of washing and dressing corpses. Tens, or perhaps hundreds, of the deceased passed through her hands in the strict sense of the phrase. In the next to last year of the First World War—when her mother and three of her brothers died from the Spanish flu almost simultaneously—my eleven-year-old Grandma was initiated into the arcana of the lightning-fast washing and dressing of corpses before they could grow stiff. For years and decades thereafter people sent for her from households with suddenly closed drapes. She never refused, she was always ready. She would get up in the middle of the night, put on the gray-black dress that was like her service uniform, pack a kitchen apron, a supply of flannel, cotton wool, and a bottle of rectified spirits into an oilcloth bag, and, either on foot or with the horses sent for her, she would hasten to the house surrounded by a different light, and she would wash and comb the bodies as they were losing softness, and wipe the faces with spirits. She would plait the tresses of the deceased women, and hundreds of times she would hear and see the signs left by the departing souls.

      The atavistic nature of the thing forced me to repeat her motions. I glided the sponge over