I was supposed to be an Einstein or an Edison, and I was — in the best case scenario — a grotesque antagonist of Heraclitus, but I didn’t have a clue even about this. Oh, the bitterness!) The last state of man is worse than the first. And in the end — there remained the cutting out of gaskets. Gaskets, indeed—them I cut with virtuosity and to perfection. In the cutting of gaskets, if I am not an Einstein, I am certainly an Edison. Or the other way around. I was able to master this art only because my old man, occupied with his feverish search for raw materials, paid significantly less attention to me than usual. In those days, and in those faucets, gaskets blew one after the other, belts of the appropriate thickness were scarce. All of our pants belts were already either completely massacred, or they were shortened to the limits of caricature. But Father was an intrepid inventor, and once, without hesitation, he cut a gasket out of Mother’s practically new sandals. When she discovered this and made his life a hell, he responded by telling her to stop annoying him and to stop practicing mental monism. Because, after all, when you have a choice between sandals that are whole and a faucet that is leaky — and, as a consequence, a flood in the apartment — you have to make the proper choice and not practice mental monism. He had a weakness for foreign words. Once, he began to look through my stamp collection. With greater and greater disgust, he turned page after page, and finally he asked whether I was really amused by the practice of cognitive promiscuity and the collection of things that were as different as night and day. Wouldn’t it be better to stop practicing cognitive promiscuity and introduce some sort of order to this bedlam? After all, I don’t demand of you that you be a professional philatelist, but this at least should make some sense! From that time on, following his suggestion, I collected Polish stamps on exclusively historical topics and foreign stamps on exclusively sport topics. Anyway, my collecting was only so-so. The philatelist’s passion quickly died out in me. I don’t say that it was out of longing for cognitive promiscuity, but it did die out. These are my curses. I recently came to the conclusion that I buy too many classical music recordings on a whim. Not even silently did I utter the word promiscuity. I swear. I might think that I buy things as different as night and day, but the word promiscuity didn’t come up. I am sure of it. And I decided that, from then on, I would buy nothing but compositions for piano in Polish music, nothing but compositions for cello in foreign music, exclusively compositions for cello. But then I understood the structure and the nature of my decision, and I lost my desire for music. Repetition upon repetitions, and even more: imitation upon imitations. The father figure taken from a sneeringly venomous autobiography. Our Father, who art just as massacred in heaven as Thou were on earth. Unfortunately, we are not specialists in disinterested avant-garde crimes. We are specialists in well-justified crimes within the family. We don’t give a damn about other people. Although I can’t get the tramp from the Kotlarski Roundabout out of my head. I felt like killing him three years ago, and to this day I haven’t crossed him off the list. I would still be happy to kill him. At that time, I imagined that I would sink an eight-inch screwdriver, dripping with manure, under his diaphragm — this technology still suits me. He didn’t do anything to me. Entirely submerged in delirious darkness, he described perfect circles around me, muttered apologies under his breath. It seemed to me that I heard: The Siberian ice has frozen over the Bay of St. Susanna, but this was too little remorse. I caught the stench of shit macerated in denatured alcohol, or perhaps the other way around. No dark brown lightning bolts, no murky illuminations on that account. I don’t harbor any olfactory excessiveness. In general, I don’t harbor any sort of excessiveness. My tactile excessiveness does not belong to the realm of exceptions. It belongs to the realm of rules. I am a man of touch. Recording the names of those I would like to kill is not an example of excessiveness. Quite the opposite — it is the prevention of excessiveness. Criticism of a life does not have to be a praise of death, but it always comes out a bit that way. In my case, it comes out this way all the more, because I react to every attack of the world with the recording of a name. And since the world attacks ceaselessly, I ceaselessly record. With light blue ink. To write as in childhood with light blue ink. To write with the inks of by-gone days, in those smooth-paged “woodless-paper” notebooks, to describe those adventures, which at that time were not adventures at all, and now belong to the great Book of Canons. Objects that stand in my way. The light in the bathroom, which goes on and off according to its own rhythm, the eyeglasses, which are forever getting lost, the sofa bed, which falls apart every evening. The leaky radiator, which, if I could, I would blow to smithereens. The Coca-Cola spilled on the carpet, both it and the carpet, sticky from the sweetness — to be killed immediately. The late train — kill it. The broken cigarette lighter — kill it. A sudden rain — sudden death. Icy, yellow air over the city. Pigeons on the windowsill. A few times I took aim with my air rifle, I had them in my sights — and nothing. An absolute fiasco. Not only from the sniper’s point of view. Complete disaster. I couldn’t even risk a warning shot in the air. And what if a gray lump of fossilized lice takes flight and — there you have it — plonk! There was no question that I could survive the dull blow, the flying feathers, the trace of blood. As a matter of fact, I don’t even write down the spectral corpses. I write down reactions. I write them down just in case, just in case it should come to something. But, truth be told, what should come to what? Death to the living. The living to the grave. The grave to the wall. After age fifty, our libraries gain in spectrality. Whenever I can’t find some book, I start to write it. Every normal person, at least once in his life, feels like killing his father. I broadened that normality to the extent that I felt like killing him a few thousand times. He — me, hundreds of thousands of times. Mother — him, at least once a week. He — Mother, on a daily basis. We were a very loving family. The most ordinary family of monsters in the world. True, my folks would be reluctant to entertain the idea that they were monsters, and they wondered where such a monster like me had come from, but that is typical. All the monsters in the world wonder where their monstrous offspring have come from. Today both of them are already in the other world. I’ll say honestly that I prefer to imagine that world impersonally. If anything distinguished us from other monsters, it was the observance of Lutheran principles and the reading of the Bible. Yes, sir — the Gospel According to Matthew. Yes, sir: Matthew 6:23, Matthew 12:26, Matthew 12:43–45. Yes, sir — our favorite verses. Sometimes it seems to me that I have a large butterfly net thrown over my head. Images and spaces, sounds and smells sink into me. They are like remnants of shrouds overgrown with sand and yellow bandages. I drag them to my sack, fall asleep, dream the same things, though deformed and vanishing, as if instant acid had consumed them in my unconscious head. I awake, and everything repeats from the beginning. Critique of life does not have to be a praise of death. But the defense of life has to be a praise of despair. I strip naked, stick a rusty spoke in my heart, and all of you are no more. The good God removed our minds from our weary heads and replaced them with two or three quotations from Scripture. But the heart of the matter is — which? Which quotations? It’s not so bad if someone is allotted a tolerable phrase, but when someone gets a more — so to say — mysterious combination, it’s game over. I’m not saying that he will find himself in the clutches of infernal powers, but the fact remains: as early as the sixties, my old man brought back a plaster figurine of Mephistopheles from a business trip to the GDR. True, this likeness of Satan didn’t stand for long on the étagère. In the course of the very next squabble it went to smithereens, and not at all because there were any exorcisms in the house, but because Mother — it was she who hurled Mephistopheles at Father — didn’t have anything else handy at the moment. All the same: a statue of Satan stood in our home. Sure, it was little; sure, it was plaster; sure, it was there briefly — but there it stood. There it stood under our roof: a silver calf. There it stood upon our altar: Satan from the German Democratic Republic. That’s how it is in life. One person has