“Chief,” Mr. Trąba’s voice had taken on an atypically realistic tone, “Chief, I really will kill him. Not with a simple bow, of course. I intend to shoot him with an arrow from a Chinese crossbow.”
Chapter V
When I finally understood my role in the attempt on the life of First Secretary Władysław Gomułka, black flames of betrayal and shame flared up within me. It was a sultry August morning. Through the open window you could hear the missionary orchestra. I put on my Sunday clothing in a fury. I hurried. I intended to become a turncoat before the worship service started. I slipped out of the house furtively, with the slippery step of the traitor.
“My beautiful Jesus! Shining King of the world!” the members of the women’s chorus sang in the garden by the church, and they glanced at me with contempt. The missionary musicians pulled their trombones from their mouths and, looking in my direction in reproof, began to whisper something to each other.
“Hallucinations, Jerzyk, those are hallucinations. Hallucinations caused by your panicky fear,” I whispered to myself. I crouched, my steps became heavier and heavier, the black foam of fear rocked in my entrails more and more dangerously, and right by the Lutheran church I had to stop. For the first time in my life I understood that if I weren’t given wings, I wouldn’t be able to go a step further. Later on that conviction was to become more and more frequent. The number of actions I was unable to carry out without wings grew. Finally, I was unable to do anything in life without wings. Even now I must constantly give myself wings in order to write this story.
I looked around me, and although the selection was considerable for the beginning of the sixties, and although all the taverns — Piast and The House of the Spa and Café Orbis — all of them were already open, and although all three were within sight, the fact that I was a minor was an insurmountable obstacle. Manly shoulders are one thing, a manly voice is one thing, but there wasn’t the least chance that one of the three waitresses — that Helenka Morcinkówna (Piast), Krysia Kotulanka (The House of the Spa), or Marysia Jasiczek (Café Orbis) — would offer me schnapps. And so, led by something other than my own will, I turned left and hastened my step, and shortly after passing the Market Square I knocked at the gate of Mr. Trąba’s house, which was hidden in the shadow of the ski jump. No one answered. I pressed the door handle. The door gave way. From the depths, from the dark vestibule, came individual words stifled by feverish spasmodic breathing.
Mr. Trąba lay on an iron bed, which was standing in the middle of a huge chamber that was even larger than our kitchen. Except for the bed, and the bottle that was standing by the bed, there were no pieces of furniture or any other objects, nothing. Just the numbed vastness of the waters, the castaway adrift in the middle, and a bottle full of disastrous news. Blood oozed from Mr. Trąba’s cut forehead. Saliva flowed from his lips as they parted again and again. The green army pants he wore were completely soaked. The room was in the grip of the deathbed odor of a body that was passively floating in all its substances, although it was, in fact, filled with only one substance. Mr. Trąba said something, whispered, gibbered nonsense, but at first I wasn’t able to catch even a single word, not even one intelligible sound. Still, I strained. I mobilized my secret talent for guessing words that had not yet been spoken, and after a moment — to tell the truth, after a very long moment — I knew more or less what it was about. The key word in Mr. Trąba’s delirious narration was the word “tea,” and the entire narration was about love. It was the sentimental complaint of a man lamenting the fact that he couldn’t drink tea at the side of his beloved, since she was drinking tea at the side of another. The whole thing abounded in innumerable digressions, unintentional interjections, and unintelligible ornaments. Perhaps the general thrust of the lament — that drinking tea at the side of one’s beloved was the single dream in the life of a man — was a too-incessantly-repeated refrain, but, taking Mr. Trąba’s state into consideration, everything came out amazingly fluently. After all, it was as it always was with him: the sense of his story was the basic, and perhaps the only, tie linking him with the world. The beloved’s name didn’t come up even once. Perhaps I wasn’t able to guess it, or perhaps I didn’t want to guess it. I produced a white handkerchief from the pocket of my Sunday clothes. I poured a little vodka on it from the bottle standing by the bed. I applied the dressing made in this fashion to Mr. Trąba’s forehead, and I wiped the slowly drying blood.
He fell silent for a moment. He opened his lips wider. A stream of tawny saliva flowed down over the gray growth on his cheek. He sighed and raised his lowered eyelids. He looked at me with an unconscious glance, and he half-whispered, half-wheezed:
“You shouldn’t see me like this, Jerzyk. I am in both moral and physical decay.”
And he reached out his trembling hand for the bottle I was still holding, and I bent over him. I carefully placed the bottle on his lips, and he drank. Then, having pulled himself together somewhat, he looked at me. In fact, you would have to say that he examined my intent most carefully. In a flash he understood the elementary goal of my visit, and he said:
“Drink to my return to health, Jerzyk. Do this as quickly as possible, since I am expecting the arrival of the sister of mercy at any minute.”
And indeed, the dose I drank didn’t even have time to reach my spiritual parts, when the massive figure of Mrs. Rychter — the widow of old Mr. Rychter, the owner of the department store — suddenly appeared in the room, as if out of thin air, dressed in a beautiful flowery dress.
“Good day, good day,” she shouted, accenting the word “good” extravagantly and enunciating it theatrically. She immediately began to run around Mr. Trąba’s bed. She ran, waved her arms, and shouted “Good! Good! Good! Gut! Gut! Sehr Gut! Good life! Good life! To good life!”
She ran, and time and again she raised and dropped her hands. She clasped and unclasped her hands. She thrashed the air with her arms. She also performed knee bends, full of unexpected stateliness and at full speed. She was like a mad gymnast who had decided to commit suicide by performing all the sequences of exercises known to her to her last breath.
“Positive thinking! Positive thinking!” she roared at the top of her voice. “A well-disposed attitude to the world!” she screamed like a buffalo with its throat cut. “A well-disposed attitude toward the world works wonders. In the monthly America I read an interview with a man who, thanks to his well-disposed attitude toward the world, came back from prostate cancer! Prostate cancer!”
•
For a good while I had been withdrawing step by step. I had already crossed the dark entryway, and finally I felt warmth and light upon my manly shoulders. If it were not for the fact that I well remembered Mr. Trąba’s indubitable arguments about warmth and light as the indispensable attributes of Satan, perhaps it would have seemed to me that I was returning from hell to the earth. But since I remembered and — what is more — believed, I surveyed the demon-filled world without any illusions.