My First Suicide. Jerzy Pilch
reasons I gave it up right away. I didn’t want to get into sterile debates. I didn’t want to talk at all.
Mother declared, in the doorway already, that my old man would most likely return late, since she was more dead than alive and full of premonitions. Moreover, she had had terrible dreams the night before, and her dreams and premonitions always came true. My prospects were looking up. Since Mother was more dead than alive and full of bad dreams and premonitions, she ceased speaking after a certain time. All indications were for a stiflingly quiet afternoon. Incidentally, even when her dreams and premonitions did not come true, she maintained that they had come true in a certain sense, that, at the worst, they would come true sooner or later. And besides, with time, the quantity and frequency of her bad dreams and premonitions grew; therefore, naturally, their accuracy also grew. If a person has evil premonitions on a daily basis, he experiences nothing but the expected evil.
In any event, on the day of my first suicide attempt, my old man didn’t come home for a long time indeed, and there is no need to add that if he wasn’t there, he didn’t speak up. The insect glass (although one should say: the glass of insects) grew thicker. My kidneys began to hum a mournful little song. With a feeling of acute absurdity (I didn’t know at the time that I had a feeling of acute absurdity), I did my homework. I was aware that I was doing the last homework assignments of my life, and I took pains—as if I were sending them off on a final journey—that they be perfect. I did them with unusual care. Later I felt sorry for the calligraphic Polish essay, sorry for the perfectly solved mathematical problem, sorry for the lined notebook, and sorry for the quadrille notebook. I imagined that neither my homework nor my notebooks would find their way to school ever again. By morning, I would be dead, and my book bag would be lying next to the bookshelf, and nobody would look into it. Unless it was the police (at that time called the militia), in order to check whether I had left a farewell letter, or whether, in one of the notebooks, there were notes of some sort explaining my desperate step.
I felt like crying, but my mood lifted at the thought that, in the morning, when my corpse would be lying at the bottom of the apartment block, our apartment would be swarming with uniformed functionaries. I knew that my old man would fear them like the devil. Not that he would have anything on his conscience, but just on account of his basic fearfulness. My old man went to pieces before every person of higher rank. He cracked before his bosses, the professors and directors of departments at the Academy; he cracked before officials in offices; he was even afraid of the custodian of our apartment block, Mr. Markiewicz, who was eternally tipsy and eternally cursed women and Communism. In a word, my old man was afraid of practically everyone, but in the face of all those who wore uniforms (including conductors on trains or trams—in those days there were still conductors on trams), he suffered from blind animal fear.
To tell the truth, my old man—short, born in Cieszyn Silesia, a Lutheran, not very bright, but industrious as an ant; who had been drafted into the Wehrmacht during the war, and after the war became a Party member—had his reasons for having numerous complexes. I do not wish to suggest that he despaired in vain, and for all his life, that he was not born in Wilno, a tall non-Party Catholic, full of panache, of broad talents, who had served with Anders during the war, and embarked upon internal emigration after the war. I don’t wish to suggest this, but the poor devil unquestionably paid a price for being who he was.
Once, I recall, I was riding with him in our Fiat 125, and a militiaman from the traffic patrol pulled us over on account of one or another of the most banal violations in the world—failure to use a turn signal, or something like that. Jesus Christ! What a scene that was! My old man! God the Father! The Patriarch! King Solomon! David and Goliath in one person! Jesus—now that I think of it—Christ!—shook with fear, was close to messing his pants, and tearfully explained himself to the twenty-year-old sergeant, who himself was embarrassed by the inhuman horror he had aroused in this—as his identity card made clear—engineer from the Academy of Mining and Metallurgy, who was more than twice his age.
And what would it be like tomorrow morning! Not just one youngster from the traffic patrol, but a few higher officers from the criminal division would put the old man through the paces! And it would not be on account of neglecting to use the turn signal that they would put the screws to him, but on account of the corpse of a child! As God is my witness, it was a pity to kill yourself and not be around to watch the old man die of fear! But then again, to put this all in play, you had to kill yourself. One paradox, you might say, after another.
After my suicide—my mood was getting better and better—my old man would have the biggest mess of it. Everybody would blame him. Mother would accuse him to the end of his days of tormenting me with biblical sayings, of forcing me to learn German and gymnastics, of barking at me, of tyrannizing me with the copying of notebooks, and of placing bans on watching television.
Grandpa and Grandma would tell everyone to the end of their lives that it was all on account of him, that he was responsible, because he had insisted on moving to Krakow. Because he had forced, that’s right, forced Mother and me to abandon our Lutheran parts and move to Babylon! That’s right, Babylon! Krakow is Babylon! It’s even worse, because, in the biblical Babylon, they didn’t use gas to heat the stoves and the baths, but in Krakow they do! In Krakow, at any moment everything might be blown sky high! They had warned, and they had cautioned! A thousand times they warned and cautioned! And the other dangers? Did they not caution against them? Did they not warn about the numerous cars, under which I could fall at any moment? About the bandits and murderers who could attack me at any moment? About the Catholics, who at any moment could plant confusion in my head? They cautioned and warned about a thousand—what thousand? a million!—yes, about a million other dangers that threatened me, the very potential presence of which my mind had most clearly been incapable of withstanding. Not bad. After my death, the world will not look bad at all.
As was always the case when my old man was late, Mother cranked up various domestic chores to full blast: she baked, she put wash into the washing machine, she got out the vacuum cleaner. The point was so that the old man, when he finally did come home, would find her in full domestic fervor and have even greater feelings of guilt over the fact that he was late, and drunk, and that there was so much to be done at home, and it was all on her shoulders. The complete innovation, the original embellishment, the genuine pearl of my suicide, was the thought that, this time, Mother would also be harshly punished for preying on my old man’s sense of guilt. After all, when I kill myself she, too, will have a terrible sense of guilt. All the more terrible in that it would begin with the simplest question in the world: How could she not have woken up? How could she not have woken up when I got up from the sofa bed at night? How could she not have woken up when I pulled back the drapes? How could she not have woken up when I went out onto the balcony in nothing but my pajamas? In nothing—during such a cold spell—but my pajamas! I am not saying that Mother, like the figure of a mother taken from a derisive autobiography, would have been significantly more horrified by my possibly taking cold than by the suicide I had committed. No. I am describing the situation in her categories. And in her categories, my going out onto the balcony in pajamas was the height of everything: recklessness, stupidity, crime, and nonsense. My jump from the balcony was beyond her categories, and even beyond her language.
I knew that she probably would not try to discover—because she would be incapable of doing it—why I had killed myself; but she would try, to her last breath, to discover why she hadn’t woken up. And that the question why she hadn’t woken up would be repeated many times, and answered in a thousand ways, so that the question why I had committed suicide could be pushed aside, and the answer to it hidden from sight. It was also certain that the odium would again fall upon my old man, for after all, if he had returned earlier, then he would have helped her out a little, and she would not have been so tired, and she would not have gone to sleep on her last legs, and she would not have slept the sleep of the dead, so exhausted and unconscious that she didn’t hear a thing.
When my old man, devastated and up to his neck in guilt, had roused a little and begun to come around, he would surely begin to console her with the prospect of another child. Maybe not from the first moment, maybe not on the day of my death, nor on the day of my funeral, but sooner or later—yes, he would do it. You didn’t have to be a prophet, or even a writer