The Catholic Weekly! Fully a man of the world! Tadeusz Kantor himself attended receptions at the Przekrasickis! My old man couldn’t even dream that he would be in attendance there! He couldn’t dream that he would give the hostess of those sorts of banquets a roll in the hay! And at the very thought that maybe he might do so after all, and especially in the course of the thing, it seemed to him that glory after glory, honor after honor was flowing down upon him. And the very fact that Przekrasicka smoked drove Father mad! According to our Lutheran principles, the smoking woman was beyond all categories. Only a man could smoke, and that only under the condition that he had become addicted to tobacco in a concentration camp. Smoking because of toothache? Smoking because of — as St. Paul would say — burning of the body? Forget it. As far as women were concerned, there could be no justifications. Not even a concentration camp, not even the Gulag, not even death row was justification. Women didn’t smoke, and that was that. The only ones who smoked were basically no longer women: whores or creatures from another planet. Father rolled Mrs. Przekrasicka, and he had the impression that he was rolling a whore from another planet. Dwelling on such satisfactions caused him to forget the handkerchief in his pocket. That is, he didn’t forget, there was no way he forgot, but he was incapable of throwing it out. On his way home, he passed a thousand places where he could have done it, even if there weren’t any trash cans, even if there wasn’t a single can, which is possible, although not very likely, after all there were the Commons, the park, dark squares, the grates of street sewers, it would have been perfectly easy to be rid of the ill-fated handkerchief, but not my old man, he didn’t throw it away. He carried it home. Maybe he thought that he would quietly slip it into Mother’s laundry? I don’t know what he was thinking, even as an omniscient Lutheran narrator I don’t know what he was thinking, maybe he wasn’t thinking at all, because to think that it would be possible to slip something quietly into Mother’s laundry is the height of naïveté! That was a naïveté much greater than bringing the soiled handkerchief home. After all, before washing, and after washing but before drying, as well as after drying, Mother examined each thing under the light a thousand times, each set of knickers, each rag, each piece of tattered clothing! Nothing could go to waste! Damage! Rip! Wear out! You had to know when to sew! Patch! Darn! After washing? Or before? Or should you even risk washing? Will that shirt be suitable for going out any more? Or should you wear it only around the house? And why are those pants so grimy? And where? And when? And even if they are so grimy that they are no longer suitable for going out or wearing around the house, you still don’t throw them away, because they will be good if we have to paint the apartment, and if not, then they will be ideal for weather-stripping the windows in the winter. In this fashion, after decades of collecting rags, our apartment was filled and overgrown with rags, it became the world’s only rag museum, rag mausoleum, rag labyrinth. We were surrounded by such fortified rag walls that not even nuclear radiation could pass through them. When Chernobyl exploded, my folks’ apartment, so overgrown with rags, was the safest bunker in all of Europe. But to return to the main thread of the narration: on my word, I am probably maligning my own Father by ascribing to him the idea of slipping the handkerchief into the family wash. That was out of the question. So what, in that case, did he wish to do? Did he wish to wash and dry it himself on the sly? In our two rooms? In the face of Mother’s ceaseless presence and eternal bustling? That would be absolute and criminal idiocy. Was he suddenly aware just how low he had fallen and to what end he had come, and had he decided that — tough — what had happened had happened, he was not going to wade further into the bog, and he would no longer make the next step into the abyss — which would be to throw away a perfectly good handkerchief? Had the physical act with the director of personnel at the polytechnic, Mrs. Przekrasicka, swept out of his head all thoughts and remnants of the instinct for self-preservation, and therefore he especially heightened the old principle of not throwing anything away, and especially, God forbid, of not throwing away things that were perfectly good, and the handkerchief was not only perfectly good, it was almost new? Did he, having the choice between the risk of exposure and the certainty of breaking principles, decide not to break principles? Was he taking a risk? Having considered all the parameters and variations, was he taking a risk? Had he calculated the risk? Had he not calculated anything, because he was plunged in absolute chaos and helplessness? One way or the other, everything inexorably made its way toward a horror-filled finale. My old man entered the apartment, removed his overcoat in the entryway, and with the help of embarrassing theatrical gestures, he began to make it known that he was hungry as a wolf. The sight of Father — rubbing his belly with feigned grief, desperately smacking his lips and winking at me conspiratorially, as if to say that if I would support his efforts, Mommy Dearest would fry us up some up some pancakes — was unbearable. Today — when I am clearly aware that my old man rubbed his belly, pitifully smacked his lips, and pretended to be a hungry little boy less than an hour after the copulatory frenzy to which he had surrendered in the personnel department office of the polytechnic, which they had locked from within — I turn my attention with due consideration to human nature, full as it is of contradictions; but at that time, I was convulsed with desperately diabolical snickering. But the laughter, the snickering didn’t last long; almost immediately the great terror ensued. I don’t recall whether searching through the old man’s pockets was already one of Mother’s constant customs those days, or whether it arose precisely at that time. Besides, it isn’t so important whether Mother reached into the old man’s pockets as a matter of routine, or whether she was led by a sudden intuition — it is enough that she reached in there. She reached there immediately, and immediately she extracted a handkerchief embroidered with pearls, adorned with intricate needlework, no need to mention the name of the overcast stitching on the edges. An immediate reaching, immediate extraction, and an immediate leap for his throat. The flame of the panther’s coat rising in the air, and the beginning of the immortal aria: I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! The old man didn’t try to defend himself at all, he laid down his weapons and folded his wings, and for a good hour he was a corpse in the strict sense of the word. Only when he had recovered from the shock of being the culprit caught with the evident proof of guilt in his pocket did he begin to defend himself, aggressively and desperately; he stubbornly dug in his heels and insisted that Mother was engaging in trivial investigative inductionism. “Time to be done with trivial investigative inductionism!” he yelled. “Stop engaging in trivial investigative inductionism! We won’t get anywhere this way! Do I demand any sort of great things? I don’t demand any great things! I demand common understanding! Common human understanding!” Mother’s rage was, from the beginning, mighty and impotent. All the mightier and the more impotent because she, too, was incapable of throwing the disastrous handkerchief away, and what is more, she realized that sooner or later she would launder it herself by hand and iron it. True, she repeated in the depth of her soul—“What fault is this of the handkerchief? What fault, finally, is this of the handkerchief? What fault, finally is this, in the least, of this handkerchief?”—but those seemingly thoroughly rational questions didn’t extinguish her rage and pain, quite the opposite. That very evening, she moved into my room, to the green sofa bed for guests. For months on end they slept apart, got up in the morning, ate breakfast, went to work, returned home in the afternoon, rested a moment, and from early evening on, with voices horse from yelling, solemnly promised each other that they would kill each other during the night. “With this knife, with this very knife, I’ll slit your throat!” Mother would bellow and wave about a huge butcher’s blade that we had brought with us from our parts. “With this hammer, with this very hammer, I’ll smash your head in!” my old man would wheeze and show her the great bricklayer’s hammer that he had bought at the time of our move. “As soon as you fall asleep, you’re a goner!” “Sweet dreams, you won’t wake up anyway!” So tenderly did they part before falling asleep, and dead tired they fell into truly sound sleep. The notion that Mother would get up in the night and go, all the same, to butcher Father didn’t especially disturb me. But the notion that the old man would get up and come to my room and start to pound Mother’s head with a gigantic bricklayer’s hammer was unpleasant. I’m not saying that I imagined the sound of the cracking skull and the splash of the spraying brain, because I didn’t know such realities, but the possibility that the old man might bash me with the hammer as well really did come into consideration. Even if it was only because of normal momentum. And if it was not because of momentum, then it would be after giving it some thought, out of a desire to spare me the fate of being a half-orphan. Or with premeditation, wishing to liquidate me as an eye witness. This was relatively unlikely; I doubted on the whole that he would wish to liquidate me for precisely that reason. I supposed that, if it came to that, he would attempt to reach an agreement with me; still, you have to be prepared for all variations. Every evening, as the tragic opera was nearing its close, I played on the floor, as if casually, but in truth I was assembling a special alarm. It wasn’t difficult. I had all the necessary elements: I had “The Little Electrician,” and “The Little Engineer,” and “The Little Architect.” The construction of a simple system, which, with the slightest opening of the door, turned on a piercing bell, was truly childishly simple. Moreover, every day I perfected the construction. I had an innumerable quantity of toys, I had bells, lights, miniature motors, moving semaphores, fire trucks and ambulances with sirens, special flood lights, three electric trains, batteries, hundreds, perhaps thousands of useful objects. There was something to choose from and something to plot with. It came easily to me. I was a young Einstein and a budding Edison, or maybe the other way around, and I was overflowing with concepts. I was able to link the wires and set up the construction in such a way that, when the door was opened, the train was set in motion, the bell rang, the lights shone, the cars drove. I truly was able to do everything, and I truly had everything. How often — and with pride! — was Father wont to say that I had whatever my heart desired, and that I didn’t lack for any treats. The first state of man is worse than the last, and the other way around. The last is worse than the first. All our sentences and all our quotations go into darkness. The organists’ daughters. The pastors’ sons. Death playing chess. A scarf embroidered with pearls. The growing pile of dark writings. An Italian notebook. Seven seals. And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out?