# Read the first page of A Thousand Peaceful Cities by Jerzy Pilch

Read the opening of A Thousand Peaceful Cities by Jerzy Pilch free, no signup. A drunken plot to assassinate Poland's leader, 1963.

- Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/a-thousand-peaceful-cities-jerzy-pilch
- Genre: Literary satire
- Year: 2010
- ISBN: 9781934824276
- Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781934824276&s=read-page
- Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781934824276
- Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781934824276

## The opening

When Father and Mr. Trąba decided to kill First Secretary Władysław Gomułka, we were in the grip of an unending heat wave, the earth was bursting at the seams, and the anguish of my youth was just beginning.

The morphinistes were living in the attic, and there was no way to bring them under control. The stairway creaked; first came the vanguard of the odors, then the odors themselves: cocoa butter and something else that I couldn't identify, but which must have been the odor of morphine and immoderation. Every morning—just like everybody else—they went out to sunbathe. They took along baskets of food, drinks, air mattresses, sunshades, bathing suits. Were they really no different from us terrestrials? Quite the opposite! They were radically different. Everyone else went to the real beach; everyone headed for pure radiance, grassy banks, and the babbling current. But they went in the other direction, into the depths of the deepest brush, to the very heart of the drought, right to the fuses of the still inactive machinery of conflagration. In short, everyone else went to the swimming pool or to the banks of the Vistula, but they went to the forests on Buffalo Mountain.

“There’s really nothing strange here,” Mr. Trąba rubbed his hands venomously, “there’s really nothing strange. It’s a well known fact that the Prince of Darkness feels A-OK in stuffy copses in the heat of July. It’s a well known fact that he is mad about the sulfur hour: twelve noon. A well known fact . . . a well known fact . . . a well known fact.”
Mr. Trąba unexpectedly lost the thread of his infallible argument.
“We know irrefutably, Chief,” he addressed Father, “we know irrefutably that they associate with the Antichrist, but we don’t know the operational details, and that worries us. Of what use to them, by a billion barrels of beer, of what use to them is that Babylonian blanket?”

Nobody knew why the morphinistes needed that truly Babylonian blanket, which they lugged along with them, in addition to their swimsuits, baskets, and air mattresses. The wildest expanses of unbridled speculation opened up in our puritanical heads. The blanket was great and luxuriant, like the canopy of a deployed parachute, crimson on one side, gold on the other. Crimson and gold like the outside and inside of a royal mantle, like the shimmering surfaces of two holy rivers traversing an empire, crimson like blood and gold like a suntan. There was no such princely covering in the entire house, to say nothing of the room they had rented in the attic. None of us had ever even seen such licentious bedding.

“No army in the world,” Mr. Trąba’s voice rose to a desperate pitch, “no army in the world has ever strapped such monstrous plunder to its saddle. Not even the victorious Red Army. By the way, Chief, do you remember how the victorious Red Army grazed in my yard toward the end of the war? Do you remember in what satins, brocades, and cloths of gold they were wrapped?”

“I don’t remember,” Father said coldly, “I don’t remember, because as a soldier of the Wehrmacht I sat in Russky bondage toward the end of the war in Serpukhov, near Moscow.”

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