“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