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My First Suicide

This year I am celebrating the fortieth anniversary of my first suicide attempt. By my count, I have been attempting to kill myself for exactly four hundred seventy-nine months, and, on account of various bits of misfortune, I haven’t been having any luck. I was twelve years old when, for the first time, the black thoughts teeming in me took shape, to the extent that I attempted to jump off the sixth floor. It happened at night. My folks were sleeping in the other room, and the main problem was not the jump itself, but getting out onto the balcony so silently that they wouldn’t wake up. Especially Mother, since my old man always slept the unwaking sleep of the dead.

Mother slept incredibly lightly. Every slight vibration of air woke her. I don’t think she ever got used to the sounds of the city, even though we lived on an unusually quiet street; in fact, in the period I am talking about—in other words, during the sixties of the twentieth century—it was downright dead. Compared with what we have now, there wasn’t any traffic to speak of. Especially in Krakow. Especially on Syrokomla Street. Especially at night. Which was all the worse, since it seemed to me that, in the absolute silence, you could even hear when I lifted my bed cover. The main acoustic obstacle to going out onto the balcony was the drapes, which were hanging from metal curtain rods. At the least touch, the tin hooks to which they were attached made a crunching noise, like the tracks of an accelerating tank.

The idea of killing myself always came at night. At two or three in the morning, someone would sit at the side of my couch and try to convince me. In the thickening air there were more and more insects. The indistinctly pronounced arguments were irrefutable. I knew that one of these times their amorphous but inexorable logic would shove me out onto the balcony, and then off the balcony. It excited me. I knew I could do it. I was suicidally gifted. I was crazy about jumping to the cement from the sixth floor. I had a talent for suicide. But you have to work on your talents. Reproofs of instruction are the way of life.

As King Solomon says: “Reproofs of instruction are the way of life!” As King Solomon says: “Reproofs of instruction are the way of life!” As King Solomon says: “Reproofs of instruction are the way of life!” My old man shouted these words of wisdom so many times a day, and with such solemn dignity, that finally, if he did not become King Solomon in the strict sense, he certainly traded places with him for a bit. Full of majesty and dread, the shadow of the biblical monarch would attack his accounts book, and the thunderous voice would roar upon the heights. Reproofs of instruction are the way of life! This time he didn’t have to tell me twice. I was preparing myself intensely for the final match. Just like, if I may say so, a debutant preparing for the Olympics. Practically every day, when no one was at home, I doggedly practiced the silent opening of the drapes. And also the curtains, an otherwise easier matter. The hooks from which the curtains hung practically didn’t grate at all. After numerous attempts, I had worked out the following technique: you had to place a chair at the balcony window, stand on it, reach out your hand, and, once you had grasped either the hook itself or the drape at the point closest to the hook, you carefully manipulated it and moved it aside, very slowly—this is how it could be done in absolute silence. I was rather tall, even as a teenager, and standing on a stool I could easily reach the ceiling. The drapes parted more quietly each time. Reproofs of instruction were the way of my suicide.

I regret that first attempt to this day. There was no point in wasting time training for the silent opening of the drapes. I should just have gone out, simply, normally—since they were open during the day, and since my folks weren’t at home—onto the balcony and jumped. There was always plenty of free time between when I came home from school and when Mother returned from work. Even on Thursdays, when I had seven classes, there was always at least an hour. I was a contemplative child, and from my early days I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do it in a sudden, lightning-fast impulse, that I would not be able to leap over the balustrade in one bound before someone managed to hold me back. Sure, I wanted to kill myself, and to do it with dispatch, but I also wanted to be present for the act.

I knew from the teachings of Pastor Kalinowski what the other world would be like. But I hadn’t the faintest clue what the passage, what the passage itself from this world to that, might look like. When I asked Pastor Kalinowski about the path (and also about the time and speed) from earth to heaven, or to hell, he lied his way out with theological hermeticisms. I knew that I wouldn’t get clear and simple answers, but there must have been minor approximations, or some sort of (even the most distant) analogies.

Is it indiscernible, like the moment of falling asleep? Incomprehensible, like the flight of Sputnik? Breathtaking, like downhill skiing? Painful, like an inner-ear infection? Could it be that painful? Impossible. I had a high pain threshold. Practically nothing ever hurt. Nothing ever—with the exception of my inner ear. When I was five or six years old, my (inner) ear hurt so horribly that, after that time, at least for a year, because of the trauma and fear of it, I never even uttered the word “ear.” Even today, I remember Doctor Granada muttering over my head “inner ear, inner ear.” Even today, whenever I hear “inner ear,” I experience phantom pains, and even today I doubt that anything—even suicide—could cause more pain. Was that what I wanted to test back then? Was it because I had withstood every sort of pain, and I wanted to try out the pain of falling from the sixth floor? Very likely. At that time, I didn’t yet know Kirillov’s famous dictum about the pain that deters people from suicide. I read Demons for the first time in the lyceum, in other words at least three or four years after my first suicide. I was then, and I still am now, a great admirer of that book, but it had no influence whatsoever upon my various subsequent suicide attempts. Dostoevsky’s hero, and perhaps all literary heros in general, make a great fuss over their suicides—I don’t fuss. I just want to have peace and quiet.

Whatever the case, I wanted to examine everything precisely and calmly. Slowly. Very slowly. I’m phlegmatic by nature. Whatever I do, I do precisely, but slowly. I was one of the best competitors in playground pickup matches and on school teams, and at the same time one of the slowest. You can charge me with what you like, just not quickness. Even on the sports field. And so, as befitted a phlegmatic, I prepared myself phlegmatically for a phlegmatic suicide. I wanted to know at every minute, and even at every second, that I was just then in the process of killing myself.

The simplest move—going to sleep with the drapes opened—was out of the question. Mother guarded the opening of the drapes in the morning, and their closing in the evening, with Lutheran ferocity. In our parts, houses in which the drapes were closed during the day were the houses of the dead. And the houses in which the drapes were not closed at night were the houses of demons. At the break of dawn, in winter at six at the latest, five at the latest in summer, Grandma Pech would open the drapes, lest anyone should glance at our windows and get the idea that someone had died in the Pech household; or, what is worse, that the Pechs were still sleeping.

“Get up! Wake up! Don’t bring on a funeral!” She would burst into the back room, in which Uncle Ableger still couldn’t quite wake up after the previous night’s excesses. She would shake him by the shoulder and tear the yellow drapes from the window and, with lightning-fast movements, fold them into perfect squares and place them on the windowsill. “Get up! Don’t lie about! Don’t tempt death!” Uncle would open his puffy eyes, glance in distress at the wall clock that was left over from the Germans, and stiffen in horror—it was already well after seven. He would jump out of bed and begin to look for his clothes in a panic. He, too, knew the sacred principle that windows that were left covered a bit longer, even if only until eight, augured death for the members of the household. And for the citizens of Wisła who were on their way to work, they signified death. One way or the other, you had to close and open the drapes at the appointed times, and with full orthodoxy.

Mother repeated that custom in Krakow, in a somewhat gentler version—in winter at seven at the latest, and in summer at six. This version was gentler as far as the times were concerned, but in its spirit it was infinitely more the deed of a hero, even that of a martyr. Everywhere around us, in the neighboring apartment blocks and townhouses on Ujejski, Włóczków, Smoleńsk Streets—everywhere, literally everywhere—there lived nothing but Catholics, who didn’t pay the least attention to covered or uncovered windows. During the first mornings I spent in Krakow, I was certain that plague ruled the city. Every day at least half the windows remained covered all the time—a sure sign that the number of victims was growing.

In our parts, a different light surrounded the house in which someone had died. You could see the covered windows all the more distinctly—even at dusk, even late in the evening, even at a distance. The members of the household who remained among the living would hasten to Pastor Kalinowski, the death notice would be posted at the parish house, and news of the death would pass through the valleys at lightning speed. The deceased would lie in the darkened chamber on a door that had been removed from its hinges and placed on stools. The soul-snatchers from Cieszyn would arrive late with the coffin. In the winter it wasn’t so bad. All you had to do was crack the covered window and make sure that no cat or weasel jumped in. In the summer you had to bring flowers, right away and all the time—as many as you could, whole buckets of them if possible. To this day I don’t like flowers, nor do I keep them at home. To this day, when I smell peonies, lilies-of-the-valley, phlox, dahlias, I catch the scent of deceased Lutherans.

Whoever, in turn, late in the evening or, God forbid, at night, neglected covering the windows and turning out the lights, did wrong, sinned, exposed himself—and, most certainly, succumbed—to Satan’s temptation. He was reveling, drinking, God knows what he was doing that was even worse. Nothing good, in any event. Working at night? There was no such excuse. He who works at night does wrong, since during the day he is unable to do what is needed. Work done at night was bad work by virtue of its nocturnal, which is to say demonic, nature. When the news got around that Szłapka, the cobbler—even though he was an outstanding cobbler and sewed fancy footwear to measure as late as the fifties—had the lights burning in his workshop late at night, that it was then he cut leather for soles, he began to lose orders, and in no time he was bankrupt. Explanations that he suffered from insomnia, and that he was incapable of lying idly in bed, were of no use. Granted, illness gave one the right to keep the lights burning at night, but it had to be a serious illness—flu, or pneumonia, or an attack of asthma; then, OK, then you could turn on the lights, but even then not all night—just for a moment, in order to give medicine to the patient, or tea, and then lights out! But Szłapka had the lights on all the time. What is more, you could see with the naked eye that there was nothing the matter with him. What sort of sickness is that—insomnia? What sort of sickness is that, when an allegedly sick man goes to his workshop and sets to work? No, Szłapka wasn’t sick; he was in the grasp of demons; it was the demons who didn’t allow him to sleep and drove him to nocturnal work. Who would want to wear shoes like that? Who would want to put on and take off shoes that had been sewn at night, at the instigation of demons? Nobody.

“In darkness Satan lays his snares; his are nocturnal lairs. / Into the light before him flee; there he’ll let you be.” This couplet of Angelus Silesius—I knew it in Mickiewicz’s translation (about which, of course, I had no idea at the time)—was a favorite of Pastor Kalinowski, and we heard it remarkably often from the pulpit in our church. Night was Satan’s time, and you had to cover the windows, turn out the lights, and go to sleep. To this day, when I set off for my parts—and often I arrive on a late train, and then I sit for a long time at night in an empty, ice-cold house—to this day, in the morning, our neighbor, Mrs. Szarzec, asks me: “So why, Mr. Piotr, were the lights burning so late in your house?” And I humble myself and make explanations, and, tormented by Lutheran phantoms, I suffer pangs of conscience, and I make constant excuses.

If only I could find a way to free myself from the gruelling ritual of opening and closing the curtains, I could manage it. But at that time I wasn’t aware that the green velvet shades were like the curtain in the sanctuary—they separate the holy from the most holy, and they part only once. You just had to do it. When the conditions were right, you just had to go out onto the balcony and jump. In the end, what difference did it make that I really didn’t much feel like it during the day? What I needed to do was sink my head more boldly during the day, too, into that insect cloud and force my swarming thoughts to more intense swarming. Nowadays, a person knows how to do it. On the other hand, it’s just as well, because I didn’t yet know the suicide handbooks (at that time they hadn’t been published—or even, I suppose, written; and even today, to tell the truth, I know of them only through hearsay), and I didn’t know that it was only a jump from at least the ninth floor that comes with a guarantee. Supposedly, it is only the ninth floor that provides absolute certainty. The eighth floor, according to the experts, is not a hundred-percent sure bet. And we lived on the sixth, and, to make matters worse, this was new (Gomułka-era) construction. In addition to the fact that it could be too low, I could have been too light: I was tall but frightfully skinny, and the energy of the fall—energy, as we all know, is mass (in this case 117 pounds) times its speed (in this case, on account of the insufficient height, of little momentum)—could have been too little. I might perish not entirely, but only partially. The cars standing beneath the apartment block—should I fall on one of them—could cushion the fall, and so forth, and so on. What’s the point of constant speculation if a person is going to go on living?

One way or another, the night of the first attempt had arrived. The day preceding it had been rather good. I had succeeded in not saying a single word to anyone for fourteen hours. When a day of complete silence occurs, when a person, let’s say, doesn’t open his yap to anyone from morning to night, doesn’t encounter anyone, when he takes pains not to exchange a word with any salesperson or mailman, doesn’t answer the telephone (calling anyone is out of the question), and doesn’t drown out this state of affairs by flipping on some radio or television set, then it starts to get interesting toward evening. The air that surrounds your head becomes thicker and thicker—it becomes an insect cloud. The insect cloud stiffens like glass. The insect glass (though it would be better to say: the glass of insects) becomes stiffer and stiffer and more and more opaque, as if an icy breath had settled on it. The dead silence becomes more and more deafening; you hear your own entrails more and more loudly—the blood flowing through the heart, the gasses gathering in the belly, the urine filtered by the kidneys. When I add to this the astonishment that I am eternally chained to my own body, that I will gaze for all time and at everything from the depths of my own skull, that everything I see, hear, and smell sinks somewhere in the brutish lump that has my legs and arms—then it is time to go out onto the balcony. It’s that way with me even today. Basically, I don’t know what gives me the bigger thrill—the thought that I am finally going to kill myself, or the absolute and breathtaking void of many hours after which one can kill oneself.

I had succeeded in not saying a single word to anyone because we were in the grip of a severe cold spell. For several days, I had been going to and coming from school through air that was stiffening with icy explosions. Minus-four-degree labyrinths were becoming ever longer, ever more intricate and stuffy. That day, when, having passed through the Square at the Ponds, Filarecka Street, the Commons, I finally made it to the North Pole, a document with seals affixed to it was hanging on the closed doors stating that, on account of atmospheric conditions that threaten to disturb the learning process, classes—by decision of the board of education—were cancelled. I remember that this didn’t particularly please me, or upset me. In general, school was a matter of indifference to me. Mrs. Prościutko, the handcrafts teacher, a heavily made up thirty-year-old, got me a little hot, but that was it. I had neither any particular troubles, nor any particular satisfactions. Now the only good thing was that I had been one of the first to read the flowery document announcing the sudden holiday. I always got to school very early. Nobody at all was there yet from my class. I didn’t have to pretend to participate in the cattle herd’s joy that school’s out!

I set off for home as quickly as possible. The labyrinths had gotten so thick by now that it seemed to me that I was climbing, as in a dream, higher and higher. Down below I saw the city submerged in a yellow crystal—black roofs, pigeons turned into ice, the dead and empty canals of the alleyways. My celestial roaming went on for a bit, but finally I dragged myself home. In the stairwell, with my heart in my throat, I passed by a famous local beggar. He had supposedly once been a commander in the White Army. And indeed, as he glided through the streets of Krakow, he had in him the majesty of a scorched and wasted galleon, which nonetheless still maintained its daring profile. At his sight, I usually took to my heels; now I heroically stepped over the crutches lying crosswise, blackened and covered with fossilized hoar-frost. He mumbled something, but in my hurry and panic I didn’t understand precisely what. Today I think that he said, The moonlit grass has overgrown the Bay of St. Susanna. You must prepare for the coming of the Lord of Surges. In any event, such are the sentences I hear when I recreate that day, pitilessly, minute by minute. The moonlit grass has overgrown the Bay of St. Susanna. You must prepare for the coming of the Lord of Surges. I opened the door with numb hands, and, frozen to death, slowly and systematically thawed myself out, so that in the evening I might be able to go out onto the balcony—efficiently and silently. I warmed my hands up particularly carefully; after all, I wouldn’t be able to manage it with stiff fingers. That was all—hot water and finger gymnastics—nothing more. I no longer practiced the silent opening of the drapes. As a future first-league soccer player and a representative of Poland, I knew the principle that in the final hours before the match you were not allowed to devote your time to practice, but only and exclusively to relaxation.

First, I read The Mysterious Island, probably for the hundredth time. Then I took some condoms from Father’s drawer, one of which I blew up, and I played a little soccer. The goal was between the dresser and the door to the little room; I made most of the goals with headers—I was Brazil, and I had won the World Cup. Then I made myself kogel-mogel. I couldn’t find powdered sugar, so I beat two egg yolks with regular sugar, sprinkled in some cocoa—it wasn’t bad. Then I wanted to play shove halfpenny on the windowsill, but I didn’t have time, because Mother had returned, and you couldn’t play shove halfpenny in her presence, because she thought it was a game of chance played for money, and—deaf to all persuasion—she positively forbade it. For obvious 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 possessed of the ability to compose in someone else’s voice, to be able 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 my shoulders with the same solicitude with which she touched the deceased Lutherans with cotton wool soaked in spirits. I was finally ready. I opened the sofa, made my bed, lay down. I kept constant vigil. I didn’t fall asleep. Time passed slowly, but it passed, and after at least two, and perhaps three penultimate hours, the final hour rang. I got up cautiously, brought the chair over, got on it, and began to move hook after hook to perfection. After moving the seventh, when in the first drape I had only four hooks left to the end, the light went on in my folks’ room. The door there opened abruptly, Father flashed through the hallway like a shot, then he fell into the bathroom like an exploding artillery shell, and immediately there resounded from that direction the sonorous rumble of bestial hurling.

I jumped down off the chair, put it back in its place, and returned to bed. I heard Mother’s delicate steps. She came into my room; she smelled of raw meat; from under half-shut eyes I saw that smile of hers, bizarre and not of this world. A streak of food, rubbed to a tawny mucous, cut across her cheek. She went up to the window in absolute somnambulistic absence and mechanically closed the drapes.

Only now do I understand that the history of my first suicide is also a story about how alcohol, for the first time in my life, deprived me of my freedom. I mean, of course, the alcohol that was making its presence known in my old man’s entrails. The poor guy puked almost to the break of dawn. He had a weak head.

****There isn’t.