A Thousand Peaceful Cities. Jerzy Pilch
But don’t be afraid that I’m a state functionary who keeps an eavesdropping apparatus under her pillow. Or maybe, do be a little afraid. But now, to make it fair, I’ll tell you everything about me. Or rather, there is no question here of any sort of fairness. After all, you haven’t told me a thing, since you don’t say anything at all, and your silence, to tell the truth, is just as captivating as your shoulders. Men, Jerzyk, shouldn’t speak at all before forty, and even after forty—not very much. The infrequent exceptions confirm the rule. You do quite right, Jerzyk, by not speaking very much, by mostly attempting instead to record the sentences you hear. If, in addition, you could succeed in shaking off your inclination for lazy bodies (although I know you won’t manage it, you scoundrel), who knows, who knows—perhaps you could become a real man. Come here, we’ll rest a bit.”
And we sat down on a bench on the river bank. Behind us the lights were burning in the windows of the Sports Center. Our multiplied shadows were laid out upon the water. Time and again a single coin of radiance fell upon her restless knees. It turned out that what she had been squeezing under her arm was neither a purse, nor a document case, nor a teacher’s day planner. Although all my cognitive powers remained absolutely dominated by her, nonetheless this amazing bit of information managed to reach me. And so, I watched with the greatest amazement as the angel of my first love placed a small photo album on our contiguous thighs and turned sheet after sheet.
I glanced at photos of people I didn’t know with the aversion and disgust that a motionless crowd always arouses. It was as if random passersby suddenly stopped in their tracks, approached, and forced you to contemplate their repulsive randomness. To be sure, her face appeared in this crowd time and again, but every time it was altered, in other hairstyles and in other eras. She began speaking to me again. Her hand moved from photo to photo. She told me the story of her family, episodes from the life of closer and more distant acquaintances. I listened, and I looked attentively, but nothing here settled into a whole.
“Here I am, standing on the balcony. A bad picture, but in the background you can see a little bit of Żoliborz. Trusia lived in this house, my best girlfriend. Her picture is also here somewhere. She’s no longer living. What can I say? My grandparents on their way to Biały. They had struck up a friendship with a certain German, but you can’t see the German; he must have taken the picture. My father, but I’m not sure where. Look, he seems to be standing in the middle of a huge field with a bottle of beer in his hand. So much time has passed, but I still can’t figure out where, when, and by whom this picture of him was taken. He’s looking somewhere in the distance. He still had his sight then, poor fellow. He’s looking as if he wanted to take in the whole world, the plain and the grass. The entire family and everybody else laughing. This was truly a rarity. No one would ever have thought that that was me, and yet that’s me in the very middle. I’m even younger than you in this picture. Here I am during my apprenticeship at Mr. Mentzel’s drugstore. You see how beautiful I was, how well that white chiton became me. Aunt and Uncle Fiałkowski with little Tommie on a sleigh. To this day I don’t like him. Already as a child he had the eyes of a devil. With mother in the window. Do you know that the same curtain is hanging in my apartment to this day? My brother on vacation. With friends on the Cracow Market Square five minutes before such a downpour—I’ve never been so wet in my life. And this, Jerzyk, is my wedding photo. Just don’t be jealous. I had a green dress. Just imagine what went on. My handsome husband in a grey suit. Do you know how much he earns? Her earns a lot. In addition, he’s intelligent and good with children. He adores playing chess. I don’t love him, and I’ve probably never loved him. He’ll be coming here day after tomorrow, on Sunday. If you know how to play chess, come over and play a game with him. I beg you, Jerzyk. If he doesn’t have someone to play chess with, he plays by himself, and I am always afraid something terrible will happen then. Those are my children. That’s Jaś, and that’s Małgosia, and that’s me, Baba Yaga. No, not Yaga. Teresa. I keep my word. I always keep my word, because that’s just how I am. Understand? My name is Teresa. Teresa, and that’s it. No diminutives, distortions, transpositions, forms of endearment. I hate that. I hate that, because that’s just how I am. Understand? Just Teresa. No Terenia, Renia, Tereska, Kareska, no Tessa, Tereńka, Eśka, no Teresiuńka. Teresa. The whole story. Teresa at her high-school graduation. Teresa at the beach. Teresa in a ball gown. That one in the uniform is my husband’s boss. There’s a full vodka glass in the foreground, of course. You understand, Jerzyk, there is no joking with these gentlemen. They mostly don’t smile. Even if you were to tell them a delicious joke about an assassination attempt on the life of the First Secretary, I assure you—they won’t laugh. And that is mother and father half a year before their deaths. By the end of their lives they had come to hate each other so much that the one couldn’t live without the other, and Dad died six weeks after Mom. And half a year earlier they both had passport photos taken. This appalls me, Jerzyk. A horrible secret lurks here, a terrible mystery.”
And indeed, there was something peculiar in the seemingly normal passport photos of two old people. She had smiled at the camera, but it was a smile that was not so much artificial as stamped with some sort of desperate determination. In the widely gaping eyes of the blind man you felt the childish hope that in a moment he would see the flash of the magnesium cutting through the all-encompassing darkness.
“Neither of them ever went out of the house: not for the newspaper, not for bread, not to the neighbors. The fourth floor, without an elevator, on Francesco Nullo Street. Jerzyk, I was their doom. And those are photos made in the shop on Wiejska Street.” The angel of my first love spoke now in an entirely different manner. Her previous style of speaking had been a sovereign mastery over me and the world. She was ahead of both me and the world by several steps. She knew everything about us, about me and the world. But now her speaking was a desperate defense against utter capitulation. Now she didn’t know, wasn’t familiar with the secret. In vain she attempted to unravel the mystery. I, in turn, liberated from the shackles of her narrational domination, slowly began to surmise how her final, though absolutely and in-no-way parting words, would go.
“. . . Yes, in the photographer’s shop on Wiejska Street. When I first came upon those pictures, about a month after father’s funeral, I thought that perhaps someone had taken them at home, that they had set up an appointment by telephone, who knows with whom, with someone at any rate who knows how to make passport photos. But no, no way. Here, look, there is a plush curtain in the background. I checked, I was there. They made it there. They were there. Each of them had six passport photos taken in that place. I won’t even mention the fact that this must have been a sizable expenditure for them. They had to dress up. Look, father is in a tie, and mother is in the dress she wore the last time for Małgosia’s baptism. They had to go downstairs. She had to lead him, although she herself could barely move. Then they had to reach the corner and go down almost all of Frascati Street, and then a certain bit of Wiejska. How did they do it? And what for? What for? Why did they need those passport photos? Where did they want to go? On what dying trip did they wish to embark? Where did they wish to flee before they died? To America? To Australia? To warmer lands?”
The angel of my first love closed the album and stood up clumsily from the bench, and we set off back home through the park and through the playing field that was overgrown with white Asiatic grass. And when, after a few minutes, we stood again before the display window of the footwear section that was screened by a massive green grate, what ought to have happened didn’t happen. The angel of my first love didn’t take me by the hand, didn’t embrace me, nor did she say: “Come, Jerzyk. Come. I too am basically very, very lazy.” I was certain that was just how it would happen, but that is not how it happened. The angel of my first love once again extracted the album from under her arm and once again began to turn over sheet after sheet. At first I thought she wished to investigate the secret she hadn’t fully unravelled further, that suddenly some idea had come to her mind, and now she knew on what sort of expedition her infirm and dying parents had wished to embark. But this supposition was false too. My first love with the undiminutizable first name extracted a small scrap of paper from among the sheets of the album, and she handed it to me and said:
“Here’s my address, Jerzyk: Warsaw, 20 Francesco Nullo Street, apartment 23. You haven’t been to Warsaw yet, but some day you finally will be there, and then you must drop by, you must visit me. I’m giving you this address