My First Suicide. Jerzy Pilch

with some sort of joke—although I didn’t yet know what sort. But first I had to run to Father. I left Mother, who was still having difficulty—this was altogether odd—trying to get a good lament going, and in a sprint, skipping two, three steps, I flew to the garage.

      At first, I was horrified in good earnest, for it seemed that Father had gone utterly mad on my account. In canvas pants lowered to his knees, he stood next to an enormous oak table, which served him as a workbench, and he pounded—extremely methodically—an enormous steel nail into the table-top. He pounded it in methodically, but very shallowly—a half centimeter—then he tore it out, furiously and with superhuman effort, moved it over some three centimeters with incredible precision, and pounded it in again, and again tore it out, and again moved it over. Terrible was my horror, and equally great the relief, when I realized that my old man had not gone mad after all; rather, as normally as could be, with all precision and solidity, he was pounding extra holes in the pants belt that was lying on the table. I stood in the doorway. The table was high, and what is more it was outfitted on two sides with a slat that stuck up above the table-top, so that screws, nails, and all sorts of miniature elements wouldn’t fall on the ground, and quite simply—and my agitation was not without its significance here—at first I hadn’t noticed the belt carefully laid out on the table. “Papa,” I said in a panicky attempt to pretend at being matter of fact, “can I help you with anything? Or can I bring you something to drink?” Father stopped pounding extra holes and looked at me the way he was accustomed to look at all intruders and spongers who interrupt his work—motionlessly and heavily. The hammer hung in the raised hand equally motionlessly and equally heavily, while the belt, as if the spirit of a snake had entered it, began slowly, then ever more quickly, to slide off the table. With an elemental reflex, I jumped up. I was unable, however, to grab it in flight. It fell on the cement floor. I bent over to pick it up, and again I was unable to do it, for I felt a light—I emphasize—very light blow to my head.

      The fledgling singer claims to this day that she found me lying under the table, unconscious and covered with blood, but this is rather a schoolgirl’s and—if I may say so—non-ecumenical and typically Catholic hysteria. Father had tapped me very lightly also because, at his age, he was simply incapable of tapping forcefully. In addition to that, he was standing there—I remind you—with his pants down, and it is well known that a man with his pants down is totally self-conscious, and all his movements, including movements of the hands, are self-conscious and limited. (A man with his pants down—to forge a dazzling aphorism on the fly—has no other goal in life than to pull his pants up.) True, an insignificant splitting of the skin and some bleeding, incommensurately abundant for the small wound, had ensued, but all the further results—that is to say: the trip to the emergency room; the examination; the obstinacy of the mean-sprited doctor, who stubbornly insisted that, as a result of the blow to the head from a blunt instrument, I had received a concussion; the narrow-minded phone call to the police; the arrival of the policemen at home; Father’s arrest and detention at the police-station for forty-eight hours—these were all absolutely unnecessary things.

      Although, on the other hand, maybe they were necessary. In some non-superficial and—if I can put it this way—deeply familial and genuinely communal sense, perhaps they were downright indispensable. For after that, whenever I would meet with my parents, we would laugh ourselves to tears over those events. We especially split our sides over the memory of the guests, a portion of whom—upon hearing that Father had murdered me with a hammer in the garage—couldn’t measure up to the demands of Lutheran toughness and rushed into panicky flight. While the other portion—Father adored precisely that episode, and when he recalled it, he cried, in the strict sense, he cried from laughter; for the portion of the guests that didn’t rush into panicky flight, but rather remained at the post of Lutheran toughness, true, they did meet those demands, but—give me a break, for I myself will die laughing—they, in turn, did not meet the demands of the Lutheran ethos, as they all got blind drunk and came out looking like corpses. “Those corpses!” Father would laugh. “The corpses! One corpse in the garage! But in the dining room… ! In the dining room, so many corpses! Nothing but corpses lying like trophies of the chase. Mr. Trąba—a corpse! Young Messerschmidt—a corpse! Doctor Granada and Kohoutek—corpses! Master Sztwiertnia and Father Kalinowski—both corpses! Even Małgosia Snajperek—a corpsette!” Supposedly all of them truly—I wasn’t present for this, I lay with a bandaged head in the clinic—absolutely all of them had fallen fast asleep, and they slept not one, but many hours, until the break of dawn. “Instead of keeping watch and praying for the removal of suffering, we fell asleep like the Disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane,” said Father Kalinowski, when Mother finally managed to wake him at daybreak. “I myself, overcome with wine, fell asleep like Christ in the tomb, and if it weren’t for you, Mrs. Engineer, I would not have risen from the dead.” With lightning speed, according to Mother’s tale, he braced himself; to her horror, with a shameless motion, he reached for the unfinished bottle of cherry vodka that was standing on the table, and he took a hefty swig straight from the bottle. Then he fell into a pensive mood for a moment, and after a while, with a gesture well known from the pulpit, he raised up his hand and said: “But both the sleep of the Disciples in the Garden, and His sleep in the tomb—although they were needless events that to this day arouse opposition—would turn out to be, in fact, unusually necessary and, in God’s plan, irrefutably needful!”

      V

      In September of the year 1971, I knew perfectly well which events are, both in life and in God’s plan, irrefutably needful, and which are completely needless. Without giving it a second thought—especially, I would say, without giving it any theological thought—I would call up my folks, and I would tell them that our entire brigade had, on the coming weekend, an obligatory excursion to the camp in Auschwitz, to the Błędów Desert, or to the dam in Porąbka, and every weekend I would make the trip to see Gocha in the mountains, and those were unusual trips.

      First of all—crouching down the whole time and ready the whole time for the sudden drop that would render me invisible—I would take the local bus to Krakow. With my eye, with the corner of my eye, glued the whole time to the glass in utmost vigilance, looking to see whether my folks’ white Fiat wasn’t crawling along in the opposite direction like a tortoise. The attack had been forestalled, the telephone call had been placed, but there remained unforeseen circumstances to be foreseen. To tell the truth, when it had to do with my folks, you always had to—you had nothing else to do but—foresee unforeseen circumstances. It could always happen that my incredibly convincing story about an excursion to the dam in Porąbka, to the camp in Auschwitz, or to the Błędów Desert would seem to Mother somewhat odd. My folks could always come up with the idea that they would manage to drop off something to eat before my departure, if only a couple sandwiches with home-made butter, which strengthens the eyes. They could always come to the conclusion that I must have a cold, because I speak in such a dreadfully hoarse voice on the phone, and if I go on the excursion I will fix myself for good. They could always make the desperate attempt to drive over in the early morning with a note, written in advance in their own calligraphy, a justification of the absence of our son from the tourist activities. Always, always, always. I was never able to foresee everything. Beginning in the deepest depths of childhood, I practiced decoding the unpredictability of my folks. I was really not bad at this. I could foresee practically everything, but, all the same, they always managed to surprise me.

      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,