A Thousand Peaceful Cities. Jerzy Pilch
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Mao!’” I call as gently as I can. “‘Comrade Chairman Mao, surrender, I beg you, comrade. Any further resistance is pointless. Stop, comrade, and surrender yourself peacefully into my hands. You have no other choice, Comrade Mao. I won’t give up, I won’t surrender, and I won’t renounce the execution of the assignment entrusted to me by mankind. Anyway, just consider, comrade, the forces and means that have been invested in your execution. After all, I alone, simple Mr. Trąba, have crossed all of Asia on my own two feet. I crossed borders illegally, I avoided patrols, I swam across the Volga, the Irtysh, the Yenisey, the Lena, the Amur, and the Huang Ho. At great risk, comrade Mao, at great risk have I made my way to you . . .’
“And in mid-flight, as if hearing and understanding my appeal, Mao slows down and stops. I slow down too. I approach him at a normal gait. Although terribly out of breath, I wish to say something conciliatory before I destroy him.
“‘The idea of universal happiness in Communism has perhaps a certain beauty as a literary notion, but brought to life it leads to crime and murder’—I am about to utter that hackneyed and ultimately false sentence. What beautiful idea are we talking about here? The idea itself was crime and murder. Guided, however, by the ritual gallantry that the executioner must maintain toward his victim, I am reconciled to the lie. Let it be a lie, if it will somehow sweeten his last moments. And with this argument I overcome the moral resistance I harbor for lies. I open my mouth, and I place my hand in conciliatory fashion on his shoulder, when suddenly he turns to face me with violent speed. He distorts his features in a hideous grimace. In a flash he thrusts a long tongue, pointy as the spear of a Ming dynasty warrior, out of his mouth, and he begins to scour the air with this tongue, which is coated with layers of green mold. The tongue of Chairman Mao writhes and creeps as if leading its own reptilian life. It writhes and creeps, and patently makes obscene and filthy gestures in my direction. ‘Down with Communism,’ I scream hoarsely. He produces yet another squeal, but this time an especially triumphant one, and he rushes to the next stage of flight. He flees to a dangerous distance. Once again, off I go; off I go on the track of that squeal. We fly through numerous corridors, deeper and deeper. Out of the corner of my eye I see pictures hanging on the walls, painted by ancient emperors depicting the garden of universal happiness. The flaps of the white bathrobe flutter and are clearly in the Chairman’s way, for he attempts on the run to throw off the garment that is hindering his movements. One sleeve, another, Mao slips off the snow-white vestment and throws it at me, but this missile of wadded silk presents no obstacle. On I rush through the more and more intricate labyrinths of the Palace of the All-Chinese Assembly of the People’s Representatives, while Chairman Mao flees before me, naked as a Turkish saint. Inevitably, we head toward the library in the subterranean vaults. Shelves appear on the walls; they’re filled with the yellowish papyri. Naked and hairless, with the lack of respect for tradition that is characteristic of revolutionaries, Mao makes a weapon out of these rolls, which are in fact reminiscent of huge sticks of dynamite. Time and again ancient Chinese epics, novels, treatises, and dynastic histories fly past me. As Mao Tse-tung throws them, they unroll in mid-air and glide at me like parchment dragons. Sharp papyri, hard as sheet metal, fill the corridor. The tide of classical manuscripts gradually rises. First it reaches my knees, then my waist. My movements become slower and slower, and my sight drowsier and drowsier, but this is the end now, the end of the adventures, the end of the labyrinth, and the end of Chairman Mao. I finally run him to ground in a bend in the corridor, in a small room that may be an abandoned guardroom, or perhaps an inoperative telephone exchange. I run him to ground. I see the sandy, Asiatic sweat on his shoulders. I run him to ground. I stick out my hands, and with my bare hands, with my bare hands, Chief, with my bare hands . . .” Mr. Trąba burst into sobs and awoke from his narrative trance.
This time I had guessed it. From the beginning I knew that the last word in Mr. Trąba’s monologue would be the word “hands.”
Chapter II
This time I had guessed it. From the beginning I knew that the last word in Mr. Trąba’s monologue would be the word “hands.” I had been divinely certain of it, and yet I didn’t feel the usual satisfaction that the world was falling into shape according to my plans, and that the tongues resounding in it said what I wanted them to say. I didn’t much care about the satisfaction. I sat in our kitchen, huge as the open heavens, and I waited for evening to fall and for the lights of the Rychter Department Store to be lit.
I didn’t much care about the lascivious secrets of the morphinistes, about the dying deeds of Mr. Trąba, or about mathematics. I continued to write, but in the depths of my heart I didn’t much care about the sentences I heard, and which I recorded mechanically in shorthand or noted at incredible speed in full graphic beauty.
That summer I was chasing after the angel of my first love, and except for those first transports I didn’t much care about anything. Actually, I wasn’t chasing the angel of my first love. All the later angels, granted—them I chased. But I didn’t so much chase the angel of my first love as attempt to establish any kind of contact with her whatsoever. I was like the village cloud-gazer who dreams of reaching the spheres beyond the stars.
True, the brick galaxy of the Rychter Department Store bordered upon our world, but the angel of my first love lived up high. Her floor was a thousand times further away than the attic of the morphinistes creaking just above our heads. Hounded by my lusts, I stared at the whitish planet of her window. My hands shook. I couldn’t keep the pen, with the Redis nib, in my hand. Black-green rivers of radio waves flowed gently through white and deserted centers of towns: Nice, London, Rome, Madrid . . .
WHY—I wrote in huge letters on the back of a piece of bristol board on which a few days ago I had drawn, for practice, the classic configuration of two concentric circles, the relationship of which creates a ring. WHY—I wrote in huge block letters. WHY DON’T YOU—I wrote, hoping that the size and contrast were sufficiently legible. WHY DON’T YOU SMILE?—I added a question mark, monstrous in its psychoanalytical depth. And then I thumbtacked the bristol board to the table. I pushed the table to the window. I turned the radio up to full volume. The black-green storms and deluges in the radio played for all they were worth. At any moment they would explode and reduce the bakelite and tubes of the Pioneer to dust.
But will this be enough? Will this explosion attract her attention? After a few, or perhaps after a dozen or so attempts, after a week, or perhaps after two weeks of strenuous labor—it came to pass. True, the radio didn’t turn to dust, nor did it fall to pieces, but even so, the worst came to pass. The angel of my first love appeared in the window and began to stare fixedly at the purely—as I hoped in the depths of my heart—rhetorical question written in giant letters on the bristol board. Jesus Christ, what to do? I found myself in an unusually uncomfortable position. Namely, I had pressed myself flat against the wall at the window, my face right up against the shutter. I was basically safe and invisible. Except that I’d forgotten that a significant part of my head must have been visible! It must have been visible, because it was protruding. It was protruding because, with my left eye (with the corner of my left eye), I was attempting to monitor the situation, and I kept checking to see whether the symphony of bedazzling sounds rising to the heavens would lure her, whether she would look at my window, whether she would look, whether she would notice, and whether she would read the inscription. And there you have it: it lured her, she looked, noticed, and began to read. I was determined not to budge, not to move even half an inch. After all, from that distance, considering the matter strictly and without cosmic poetry, she would still have to be looking in a straight line, and for quite a distance, several dozen yards at least. From that distance the fragment of my head could easily pass for a bulge in the window shutter that had been caused by moisture. Or for some accessory hanging on the wall (to tell the truth, that’s what I was, I was an accessory hanging on the wall)—some accessory hanging on the wall, a piece of which protruded. For example, an oval mirror in an oak frame. Why in the world, in this place, I tried to convince her telepathically, why shouldn’t there be an oval mirror in an oak frame, a piece of which was protruding, hanging here? After all, it is here, it is hanging, and it is protruding. Or, let’s say, a cloth bag for brushes sewn by a thrifty housewife . . . After all, in homes, especially in homes in the provinces, especially in Protestant homes in the provinces, you quite frequently see