My First Suicide. Jerzy Pilch

five-person brigade, I would set off following her, and I would attempt to strike up a conversation—masterfully, although fruitlessly. I reacted intensely to the strong bodies of the four female bricklayer’s assistants who worked with us, hidden though they were under overalls stiffened from lime. Thousands of temptations and licentious scenes swarmed in my head. The most important, however, was Gocha.

      Our love had erupted in the second year of the lyceum, lasted through the third and fourth, and now, after the matura and the entrance exams (Gocha had passed the exam for the school of dentistry), it not only lasted and lasted, but it exploded more and more forcefully, with a volcanic force unknown in our latitudes. Gocha. Gocha of Gochas. Gocha like the Lausanne Lyrics! Gocha like a flowering poem! Gocha like the Duino Elegies! Gocha like The Shadowy Drink! Almost every day I wrote letters full of quotations, plagiarisms, and every sort of amatory graphomania, and every weekend I rode up into the mountains to see her. Those trips, like everything in life, required me to deceive my folks.

      III

      Anno Domini 1971 was the nineteenth year of my life, and, in that year, telling my forty-year-old Mother and my forty-five-year-old Father that I went to see a girl on Saturdays and Sundays was out of the question. Even worse, I had to head off an attack on their part. For a few months by that time, my folks had been in possession of the first and—as it would later turn out—only car of their lives, and there was a permanent threat that they would drop by and make an unexpected visit. My old man was the worst driver in the world, but his pathological pride wouldn’t allow him to turn the driving over to Mother, to say nothing of me. By taking thousands of additional lessons, by paying thousands of złotys extra, and by practicing changing gears for hours at a time with dry runs, he passed the driving exam with the greatest difficulty. He hated driving, and he hated the car—a Fiat 125 purchased, with difficulty, using money borrowed from Pastor Kalinowski—and, it goes without saying, he drove with heroic perserverence. Reproofs of instruction are the way of life. Every trip was an inhuman torture and humiliation. In addition, every trip had to have some definite and edifying geographical goal. The possibility that one might drive a car solely for the purpose of improving their driving technique, and without a destinational, geographical, or, best of all, geo-historical reason, didn’t come into consideration. A Lutheran—even if he is driving solely for the purpose of perfecting his driving technique—must drive somewhere. And not just somewhere, but to some fundamental, or at any rate useful, place. To drive who knows where, to take who knows what turn—this is impossible. There is no such thing as a sudden hankering for a left or a right turn. Sudden, and unfounded hankerings are beyond the Lutheran anatomy.

      Before every training excursion, my old man pored over the road map of the Krakow environs, and he scrupulously laid out the route so that it would contain as many cognitively useful monuments as possible—ruins, churches, castles, or, at worst, factories, bridges, or tributaries of rivers. A drive to the little Austro-Hungarian town in which we were performing our Workers’ Traineeship was a dream route: on the numerous straight sections he had perfect opportunities to practice changing lanes; he could bring me the cake that Mother had baked; he could take my dirty laundry back home; and above all, he could propose to at least part of the brigade—all of them, unfortunately, would not fit—a drive around the environs.

      “Gentlemen, I propose a small expedition around the environs. I am at your service in the role of free driver and guide. And not entirely free, for if, after the trip, we make a rest stop at a certain well-known local confectioner’s, I will be counting on a large ice cream! Ha! Ha! Ha! I know that the gentlemen would prefer a large beer, but nothing doing today. We set forth without delay! Contrary to appearances, there are several things in the vicinity worth seeing! A young man, especially a freshly minted student of Polish literature, in other words, a man of letters in spe, should constantly be looking around in the world! You are certainly aware that the great Polish writer, the Nobel laureate Władysław Reymont, had a photographic memory! Whatever he saw was fixed in the head of that writer of realist epics, and with all the details! He had a great gift! And more importantly, he constantly perfected and developed it! Every gift, every talent must be perfected! Even the greatest perfect their gifts! Reymont perfected his! He instructed his memory and his gaze! We will take a trip together through the environs, and we will train the realism of our gazes! Reproofs of instruction are the way of life!”

      The closer the weekend came, the more severe the nightmare became, the more distinctly I heard the bombastic voice of my old man. Quite often I didn’t so much imagine as see, with terrifying realism, how he would barge into our billet, which was full of empty bottles and reeked of cigarettes; how he would pale and stand stock still from horror, but not betray any of this; how, full of pride in the art of self-control, which he had mastered to perfection, he would smother the spirit of fury, summon the spirit of gentlemanly courtesy and Lutheran humility, and get down to putting things in order; how he would hold a manly conversation with our landlady and request—categorically request—that she keep him up to date about everything that is going on, and to this end, he would leave certain funds to cover the costs of telephone calls. And I saw how he would return and get down to making the beds, to a highly ostentatious—like in the army—making of the beds, and I heard Wittenberg’s laugh, which was full of savage derision, and I saw the spirits of humility and courtesy evaporate like steam from Father, who became stupefied and as pale as paste, and I saw him attack my best friend with orgiastic relief, subject to the black spirit of a white-hot rage, and I saw Wittenberg, strong as a tiger and a judo expert, grab my old man and either first break his back and then smash his head against the wall, or the other way around. I couldn’t let it come to this. Before every weekend, I called home, and I said that I had an obligatory excursion to the dam in Porąbka, to the camp in Auschwitz, or to the Błędów Desert.

      IV

      When, not long ago at all, on the occasion of my folks’ sixtieth wedding anniversary, I delivered an embarrassing speech, into which—who knows why, probably at the instigation of the devil—I wove in those old lies, both of them, Mother and Father, stiffened.

      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