Jerzy Pilch

The Mighty Angel

Chapter 1. The Yellow Dress

BEFORE THE MAFIOSI appeared in my apartment in the company of the dark-complexioned poetess Alberta Lulaj, before they wrenched me from my drunken sleep and set about demanding — first with dissembling pleas, then with ruthless threats — that I arrange for Alberta Lulaj’s poetry to be published in the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, before there began the tempestuous events I wish to recount, there was the eve of those events, there was the morning and the evening of the preceding day, and I, from the morning to the evening of the preceding day, had been drinking peach vodka. Yes indeed, I had been drinking peach vodka, brutishly longing for one last love before death, and immersed up to my ears in a life of dissolution.

Before midday nothing had happened; moderation, even a certain measured asceticism had held sway. Before midday I laid on the couch, read the newspapers, and listened to a record by the Czech tenor saxophonist Feliks Slovák. Yet around midday, of the broad range of melodies performed by Slovák one alone began to penetrate my consciousness; it was a composition by Karel Svoboda entitled “Where’ve you got your nest, little bird?” I listened and wondered to myself how it was in the original Czech: “Kde je tvoje hnízdo, ptáčátko?”, or “Kde je tvoje hnízdo, ptáčku?” I was, however, unable to determine which of the two diminutives—ptáčku, the weaker one, or ptáčátko, the stronger — sounded better and more appropriate, and thus with a feeling of linguistic helplessness (though still enraptured) I rose over and over again from the couch, went up to the record player, and kept playing the piece that had moved me to the core.

It was a beautiful July day; from the twelfth floor I had a clear view of the rim of hills surrounding the city and the level country beyond — the fields, the electricity pylons, the railroad tracks, the bright flowing waters of the river of consolation, the mountains on the horizon, the Vistula like a white pebble at the bottom of a coniferous valley, the Piast Inn and the garden outside that smelled like the first mowing, the swarms of bees and butterflies over mugs of beer. Doctor Swobodziczka’s graying Alsatian laps up its allotted portion from a tin cup; the doctor died a year ago, but the dog, faithful to its addiction, comes to the pub every day, and those who are still alive fill its cup with draft Żywiec poured equitably from a mug.

I saw it all clearly, as if I were there, and here, where I actually was, I saw everything too: the windows in the apartment buildings were open, the occasional car with an old-fashioned streamlined shape moved down some street, and at the ATM stood a woman in a yellow dress with spaghetti straps. From my position high above she seemed wise and beautiful. I suddenly had the certainty that she was the last love of my life. It was an all-embracing certainty; not only the drunken part of me but also the sober part of me, and all the other parts of my soul whose status with regard to intoxication was indeterminate — all seemed to share this conviction. I should immediately have flung on some clothes, splashed myself with cologne, and, without waiting for the elevator, rushed down the stairs and set off on her trail. For a moment I thought entirely seriously about doing just this, but the ATM, the ATM ruled out this love. If I ran down and set off on her trail, I would be acting as I had always acted: I would follow her with the energetic, unswerving step of a serial killer. I would follow her artfully and tenaciously; I would follow her for so long that she would notice me, she would acquire the alarming conviction that someone was inexorably tracking her. Then for a short while longer, already seen and noticed by her, I would continue the chase through the streets with the desperation of an unmasked criminal, until the moment when her unease, her fear, and her curiosity would begin to combine into an explosive substance. . Then — not allowing the explosion to take place — I would quicken my step, draw level with her, give a chivalrous bow and say in the deep voice of a true male:

“I’m terribly sorry, miss, I’m terribly sorry, I’ve been following you” (here my deep male voice would falter, as if from bashfulness), “I’ve been following you for so long that I’ve decided to come clean. .”

At this point she would burst out in rippling laughter, within which female satisfaction would be mingled with relief that the man pursuing her was not some vicious deviant pursuing her to satisfy his lust, but a seasoned connoisseur pursuing her for the sake of beauty.

“Why is it, tell me, why is it you’re chasing after me?” she would ask with an enchanting smile, though her voice would still betray a hint of nervousness.

“Is it really so terribly hard to understand?” I would reply glibly, and I would begin to speak to her with great vigor, and my speech would be like an epic poem of love that overwhelms the listener with the power of its rhythm and its imagery; I would sing for her a song of persuasion and after only a few verses she would be utterly persuaded, willing, compliant, mortally in love, mine already, mine forever, and I would lead her down the bright path of our life together.

But alas I could not do so, I could not apply the classic combination of moves at the appropriate moment. How could I follow on the heels of a woman who has just taken money from an ATM? How could I later explain to the police officer she would summon that my actions were driven not by a thief’s appetite for lucre, but by love at first sight? There was no point in even talking about it, there was no point in even trying; I gave a dismissive wave of the hand, capitulated, and looked lugubriously down from the twelfth floor as the woman who should have become my wife and the mother of my children walked away. With aching heart, I watched the last love of my life move away from the ATM, walk a little further down Jana Pawła, and turn forever, forever into Pańska. Once again in history profound sentiment had lost out to money. I was suddenly consumed with tremendous anger. I was angry at ATMs, which only a few years ago had not even existed. I was overcome by fury; I recalled the fall of the Berlin Wall and I was opposed to the fall of the Berlin Wall, for all those enthusiasts who had demolished the wall with their mason’s hammers had taken the brunette in the yellow dress from me. I was opposed to Solidarity, because Solidarity had taken the brunette in the yellow dress from me; and Lech Wałęsa had taken the brunette in the yellow dress from me, and John Paul II as he cried: “Descend, Holy Spirit,” had taken the brunette in the yellow dress from me, and the Holy Spirit, as it descended and altered the face of the earth, had taken the brunette in the yellow dress from me. My God, O Holy Spirit, I thought, if everything were now as it used to be, if communism hadn’t fallen, if there were no free market economy, if numerous transformations had not taken place in the part of Europe where I was born, there wouldn’t be any ATMs here now, and if there were no ATMs, everything would have worked out perfectly between me and the dark-haired beauty in the yellow dress.

No one, however, not even the Holy Spirit, could turn back the course of history; nothing and no one could turn back the brunette, who in all probability had reached the corner of Pańska and Żelazna. All that was left was suffering, pain, and the bitterness of parting from her dusky flesh enwrapped in the yellow dress. Yet I could not fail to notice that the pain and bitterness of parting intensified the beauty of all that was around me. Feliks Slovák’s tenor sax still sounded piercing and plaintive, perhaps even more piercing and more plaintive than it had before. I raised my eyes. A streetcar was passing through grass so high it could have hidden a horse along with its rider; closer by, in the imposing office buildings that overlooked the ONZ Circle, two uniformed security guards were moving from room to room, switching on the lights, switching them off again, and gazing at me through the Venetian blinds. A white cloud sailed over the rooftops and the antennas; it was a splendid day at the height of summer. It was the kind of day a person waits for all year, or maybe even for years at a stretch, the kind of day on which at any moment a person could give up drinking.

I turned away from the window and looked at the room, which was filled with the sounds of the saxophone. In the bottle that stood on the table there was still a goodly quantity of peach vodka; I went up, poured some out, drank it, and experienced illumination. My Lord, what illumination I experienced, and how it suited the extraordinary character of the day! My innards lit up with an even and benign light, my thoughts immediately formed themselves into ingenious sentences, and my gestures were unerring. I took a shower, washed my hair, dressed, splashed myself with cologne, and, without waiting for the elevator, I ran downstairs and set off on the trail of the beautiful and wise brunette in the yellow dress with spaghetti straps. I was prepared to walk the length of Pańska, Żelazna, Złota, Sienna, of every street, I was prepared to scour the entire city, to look into every entranceway, to ring the bell at every apartment — I knew I would find her. I knew I would find her on earth and not in heaven, in life and not after death, waking and not in dreams.

Chapter 2. The Dark-Skinned Wrestler

I DREAMED I WAS searching for objects on the floor of the ocean; I dreamed that, to the amusement of the rabble, a dark-skinned wrestler took a full mug of beer from under my nose. In the dream I didn’t know that he was a wrestler. I wanted to humiliate him, but in vain, in vain; it was he who humiliated me, and in the dream that had no end, and in the waking that had not begun, I was humiliated. The dreams of a drunkard are separated from the waking hours by a cardboard wall. At night the drunkard dreams of what he has lived through during the day, or rather: at night the drunkard’s daytime hallucinations appear to him. I was wading, swimming, drowning in a sea of 90-proof alcohol. I woke drenched in a brownish sweat. I checked the hour: it was four in the morning, and the face of the clock was steaming with bittersweet Żołądkowa Gorzka herb vodka.

Eighteen times I was on the alco ward; in the end Dr. Granada, in the majesty of his power and in the majesty of his athleticity, ordered that I should no longer be admitted. The fact that I was incurable was neither here nor there — no one is curable (the healthy in particular are incurable) — but I showed no promise, I lacked the will to get better, I did not want to not drink. From the tests, as complex as quantum physics, that the trembling patients were ordered to complete by soft-spoken she-therapists unbreakable in body and soul, it emerged that I had suicidal tendencies.

“Are you trying to drink yourself to death?” asked Dr. Granada.

“I can neither confirm nor deny it,” I responded, since I was incapable under any circumstances of forgoing a well-turned phrase. Too late it was that I came to understand this was not a gift but a curse. Every phone call I made became a novelistic dialogue, every greeting a poetic aphorism, every request for the time a theatrical speech. My tongue, thirsty for superiority, maybe even immortality, ruled me. I was ruled by my tongue. I was ruled by women. I was ruled by alcohol.

“Since you’re trying to drink yourself to death, why do you bother us with your allegedly desperate person? Why do you take up my staff’s time? Why on earth do you attend the talks and the discussion groups? Why on earth do you write drinking confessions and keep an emotional journal? Why the hell does Nurse Viola give you injections in your insect-like veins? For what reason do we pump hectoliters of life-giving drips through your wasted body, since you’re consciously aiming to distance yourself from all that is life-giving?”

“I’m not trying to die.”

“You know what, Mr. J.? That sounds a little too ambitious.”

“I’m not trying to drink myself to death, at least not just yet. To tell the truth, what I’d like most of all is to drink myself to death after a long and happy life.”

“You really do have the mentality of a child, and a rather slow-witted one at that.”

“Doctor, I’m aware, I really am fully aware, that it’s impossible, in my case especially it’s impossible, to live a long and happy life when you drink. But how can you live a long and happy life if you don’t drink?”

Generally speaking I enjoyed my conversations with Dr. Granada, though they occasionally turned into a nightmare of hollow form. The most painful state of reality: symptomless falsehood. Dr. Granada delivered intelligent, fluent, and seemingly convincing speeches worthy of the director of an alco ward, while I eagerly uttered unsophisticated paradoxes, as if I were striving to offer the clearest evidence that a portion of my brain cells had died and been replaced with the inactive connecting tissue known as neuroglia. We both failed to touch the essence of things. We both realized that we were failing to touch the essence of things. We were both tormented by the elusiveness of the essence of things. But a drunkard, and even a drunkard’s doctor, who wishes to touch the essence of things, finds himself in an extremely difficult situation. Shakespeare touched the essence of things. Newton touched the essence of things. Tolstoy touched the essence of things. Einstein touched the essence of things. But a drunkard? It’s always harder for a drunkard.

“How is it possible to live a long and happy life without drinking?” I uttered this sentence, brimming with barroom grandiloquence; my face assumed a roguish expression, and I immediately felt like spitting on the very core of my soul demoralized by booze. Of course I knew full well that it was possible; it was, yes, it was possible to live a long and happy life without drinking. I personally had known people who lived a long and happy life without drinking. And even if I didn’t know any personally (because, come to think of it, I’d never personally known anyone who was happy, and I wouldn’t even want to know them; whenever I heard people say: he’s a happy guy, that fellow’s doing well, he’s had a successful life, I ran away, I avoided such happy folk like the plague), even if I didn’t know any personally, other people did know some, and even if other people didn’t know any, there still have been happy people. There have been and there still are. I mean, let’s not make too much of a thing about drunkards — drunkards comprise a marginal group, the great majority of humanity doesn’t drink. Though when it comes down to it, it’s not really clear why. When it comes down to it, why does the great majority of humanity not drink? What are the reasons? This is one of the famous foundational questions. Knotty questions. Quaffing hard liquor is such a productive subject that at any moment some foundational question can arise. Wherever you turn your visage, whichever of the paths through the quagmire you should choose, in every place you can encounter an angel with a flaming sword, and the angel will speak unto you (and his voice will be as the voice of many waters), and he will ask: why do you not drink, my brother? And if you, my brother, answer that you do not drink because you have no need to, or that you do not drink because you don’t like the taste of vodka, or, God forfend, you answer that you do not drink because you have no need of artificial stimulants, or you say something equally foolish, for example you say that you do not drink because you manage perfectly well without alcohol, if you, you sinner, in your naïvety, yet also in your insolence, should say something like that, then know: a harsh punishment awaits you. As the Scriptures say: the wages of sin is death.

•

Eighteen times I was on the alco ward; faint scars of subcutaneous esperals adorn my body, the way needles adorn a conifer, and my liver possesses the unique smell of a combination of perfume, eau de cologne, and surgical spirit. Yet in my life there was once an unimaginable time when I too would say: I don’t drink, when my liver did not smell of perfume and when my skin was smooth. “Why on earth don’t you drink?” my brothers sitting at the bar would ask, and they were angry, and the ghost of Venedikt Erofeev hovered over their heads, and their volitionless tongues spoke with his tongue, and I wrote down a few lines under his influence and, having paid homage, I released myself from his influence. For between even the cleverest literature and the vehement simplicity of one’s own terror there is no choice. “Why do you not drink, my brother?” those sitting at the bar would ask. “I don’t drink,” I would reply, “because I don’t feel like it, because I don’t like the taste, I don’t need artificial stimulants, I manage perfectly well without alcohol.” That’s how I would answer, and it was true, but only for a time. Until the time when the hour of the fatal glassful began to strike. Until the time when I looked into the maw of the foundational bottle. In due course I will tell you the tale of the fatal glassful, the foundational bottle, and the still undrunk glass of liquor, heavy as a coffin lid. On the motionless surface there spins a little black umbrella stuck in a slice of lemon.

Chapter 3. Dr. Granada

“YOU KNOW, MR. J., I’m a hundred percent certain that not one of the several dozen eagles presently on my ward, nor any one of the handful of she-eagles, will ever rise into the air again. None of you will recover, none of you will stop drinking. Not your roommate Christopher Columbus the Explorer, not Simon Pure Goodness, nor Don Juan the Rib, nor the Sugar King, nor the Hero of Socialist Labor, whose living corpse returned to our establishment as recently as yesterday, nor the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, nor the Queen of Kent, nor Fanny Kapelmeister, nor Joanna, nor Marianna; it’s quite certain that none of you will stop drinking. Although it’s hardly necessary to speak of the venerable hall of fame whose names I just listed. Debutants have no chance here either, though even those who come to me for the first time are no longer debutants, they’re mostly seasoned artists; the real debutants, who right now are cracking open their first bottle on the little square outside their apartment building, never even imagine that one day they’ll become acknowledged masters.”

Dr. Granada gazed at the world through one eye; his second eye (or maybe his first? Which eye is first, and which second? Behold a classic example of a drunken concern; its every aspect can be explored with exceeding nicety as one drinks), his second, or perhaps his first eye, was covered with a leukoma, a problem that was rather superficial and could easily have been removed by some surgical colleague of his. Yet the Doctor rightly chose not only not to eradicate his one-eyedness, but, on the contrary, to cultivate it. It made him a charismatic leader: memories of childhood books about pirates stirred in our addled minds, while the nurses reacted to their director’s cyclopism swooningly — I have long observed that a distinct asymmetry in the male physique enhances the languishing receptivity of women. The mystery of this aberration cannot be unlocked, however, without drunken hypotheses, and for the moment I set it aside.

Dr. Granada reminded me of Dr. Swobodziczka of the town of Wisła: the same scent of archaic eau de cologne, a similarity in physical appearance, the palpable analogy of memorable last names, a similarly supercilious attitude to the world (“I speak to you from on high”), a similar, perhaps even identical, resonant, stentorian voice, a shared fondness for florid yet, at the same time, pointed paradoxes, an identical one-eyedness. The left eye of one was covered with a white film, while the other had a glass prosthesis in his right socket. I’m delirious, though I don’t know what it means to be delirious. I have a terrible fever. I’m lying in my parents’ bed, which is as vast as a transatlantic liner; the bedside lamp goes on and off, and the one-eyed doctor is leaning over me.

•

“But there is within them a sort of delusion; some of them, at any rate, surrender with all their might to the power of their own hallucinations.” The blue in Dr. Granada’s one eye intensified, like frozen Absolut. “Even now they believe they won’t drink any more; they are profoundly convinced they’ll never drink another glass in their lives. They promise themselves this in all honesty. Naturally they’re incapable of it; sooner or later the talons of the addiction tighten around their thirsty throats. Now, after their treatment, they’re total abstainers, or at least let’s say quasi-abstainers; they’re fully aware that it is good not to drink, and if they don’t die the first time they go on a bender again, for a time at least they’ll remember how they were sober in the hospital and for a short while after they got out. They’ll struggle, they’ll struggle in vain between drinking and not drinking, but at least that futile battle will be the sign of a fight, even when it ends in defeat; it’ll indicate some kind of movement. They’ll be whipped, but they’ll go out onto the playing field. While you, Mr. J., will no longer go out onto the playing field. You’re immobile; you’ve come to a stop in the bottle like a fly in amber. You’re all burned out inside. You’re filled with cinders, and they are cold cinders. The fire has been thoroughly extinguished by torrential rains. It would seem that you’re sitting here in my office, that you’re saying something; one might even at moments have the erroneous impression that you’re saying something sensible. You’re still wearing hospital pajamas, but in reality you’re no longer here: you’re already elegantly dressed in your street clothes, sitting on a high stool — you’re already drinking, Mr. J. Toward the end of the week you’ll walk out of here in fine shape, pumped full of vitamins and with your magnesium deficiency more or less replenished, fortified with fortifying substances and tranquilized with tranquilizing medicines, you’ll walk out of here on your own two feet, because we have put you for the umpteenth time back on your feet, and where will you, unerringly, direct your steps? Do I need to ask? Do I have to bother with an interrogative intonation? You will head with all speed for the nearest pub or the nearest liquor store.”

Dr. Granada was absolutely correct. Always, after I left the alco ward I would direct my steps to the nearest pub or the nearest liquor store. To be exact, I would first head for the pub; in the interests of further exactitude I must state that it was not the nearest pub, or rather, it was the pub nearest my apartment, which my wives had abandoned, on the ONZ Circle. That’s right, I would leave the alco ward, head for the nearest cab stand, and take a cab to the immediate vicinity of my apartment building. I probably felt safer in my own neighborhood; anywhere is good, but there’s no place like home. And I would enter the pub called “The Mighty Angel” and with the goal of putting my experiences in order I would drink four double shots. Then, in the nearby store I would buy a bottle of vodka and go and face up to the hurly-burly of physical objects. For in a state of sobriety I was incapable of dealing with the disarray that constantly accumulated in the apartment my wives had abandoned, though I did so tenaciously — I have an exceedingly pedantic nature.

Chapter 4. The Fifty-Zloty Bill

IN THE ALCO WARD a dispute had broken out over plagiarism. Incidentally, when I arrived there for the first time I did not have the slightest notion that I was crossing the threshold of a creative writing program, that I was entering a community of people of the pen, of writers who were incessantly creating their alcoholic autobiographies, recording their innermost feelings in cheap sixty-page notebooks that were called emotional journals, laboriously assembling their drunkards’ confessions. In the early and late mornings the alcos either wrote or, awaiting inspiration, for hours on end roamed the hallways with their manuscripts, which grew ever thicker during the course of their stay in the clinic, tucked under their arms. In the afternoon they had therapeutic conversations with the she-therapists, with Dr. Granada, or with the male therapist Moses Alias I Alcohol, and they listened to talks and took part in discussion groups. In the evenings they attended public readings, after which fierce debates erupted. During one such exchange the sizeable gathering put before the alco Marianna the charge that the drinking confession she had just presented to them was eerily reminiscent of the confession of the alco Joanna they had listened to the week before. Since both sides defended themselves with the aid of mutual accusations, the matter of whether the alco Marianna had copied the description of her drunken night from the alco Joanna or vice versa could not easily be resolved. The community of alcos unanimously insisted that the next day there be a showdown in which the two women would read their work; after, there would be a discussion, followed by a vote, in which a verdict would be determined.

The piece by the alco Marianna went roughly as follows: “It was December 21st, 1985. I woke up in the middle of the night. I had an awful hangover; I was sweating and shaking all over. I didn’t have a penny. I knew my husband, who was asleep in the next room, had money. I crept in, went through his clothes and found his wallet in the back pocket of his pants. I took out fifty zloties, then I got dressed quietly and went out to the all-night store, which was close by. In the store I bought a bottle of champagne, which I took home. In the kitchen, without turning on the light — it was bright enough in there as it was, since we live on the first floor and there’s a neon street lamp right outside the window — in the kitchen, then, I opened the champagne, though the whole time I was afraid that the cork would pop out and the sound would wake my husband. But I managed to open the bottle without making a noise, and in half an hour I’d finished it all. I felt a lot better. I had the usual rush of courage, and, no longer exercising any caution and even daring to turn the hall light on, I boldly left the building to throw the bottle into the dumpster. On the way, however, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to have some supplies for the rest of the night, and since I still had some money, I went back to the all-night store and bought a quarter-liter of regular vodka. This time, after I got back home I went into the kitchen again, but I no longer intended to drink there. From the cupboard I took a half-liter bottle of raspberry juice, which, by the way, I had made myself in the summer with raspberries grown on our allotment. I poured half the contents of the bottle of juice down the sink, then I took a funnel and poured the quarter-liter of vodka from the all-night store into the half-empty juice bottle. Actually, it wasn’t even a whole quarter-liter — I started feeling sad while I was pouring the juice down the sink, and so I took a sizeable swig straight from the bottle before I made the mixture. I gave the bottle several good shakes, both to make sure the vodka and the juice were properly mixed together and to make sure the bottle looked as if it simply contained juice; I planned to take it to my room and drink it in bed. I knew it would help and that I’d sleep well, and that if I woke up I’d be able to have a drink whenever I wanted, which would help me. But I took into consideration the fact that I might fall soundly asleep, and just in case my husband woke up before me in the morning and saw the bottle standing by my bed, I wanted him to think it was just regular juice. I didn’t take the empty quarter-liter bottle out to the trash chute, but instead hid it behind the couch. I went to bed, and although I woke up from time to time, when I did I took a drink and the whole time I felt fine. In the morning, though my husband didn’t notice either the bottles or the fact that I’d gone out in the middle of the night to buy alcohol and drink it, he did notice that fifty zloties were missing from his wallet and he began shouting at me. Since I had another really bad hangover, this time with an element of aggression, I made a huge scene, got dressed, packed some things, and that was the beginning of my wanderings around the country, which in reality were nothing more than one gigantic drunken binge.”

Marianna read her composition in a faltering voice, continually wiping away supposed or perhaps genuine tears; with every means available to her she gave her listeners to understand that it was she who had been robbed, that it was her work which had been copied by Joanna.

“I’m really hurt,” she said at the end, “that I’ve been robbed of my life. In a moment I’m going to hear what was stolen from me and I don’t know if I can take it.” This time her voice faltered uncontrollably, and this time, beyond a shadow of a doubt, she burst out crying in an absolutely genuine fashion.

But her adversary acted in exactly the same way.

“It was me who was robbed of my life,” said Joanna, “and when a moment ago I heard someone else brazenly reading about my own life, that they stole, I thought I’d die.” And Joanna read her drinking confession exactly as Marianna had; her voice faltered in exactly the same manner, and with exactly the same gestures she wiped away exactly the same supposed or genuine tears. Furthermore, to underline the grotesque symmetry, they both wiped away their tears with identical pale pink lace handkerchiefs.

Joanna’s version went roughly as follows:

“It was the middle of November, 1997. I woke up at three o’clock in the night and I was in an awful state. My hangover was terrible, which was hardly surprising since I’d been drinking the whole of the previous day. I was trembling and soaked in perspiration. I knew that I had no money whatsoever. At the time I was living with my sister and her husband, and I felt in my bones that my brother-in-law would have some money. My brother-in-law hardly drank at all and always had money.

“Cautiously, so as not to wake them, I opened the door to their room and tiptoed in. My brother-in-law always hung his clothes neatly in the wardrobe, and I knew that that was where I needed to look. I was afraid the wardrobe door would creak as I was opening it and would wake either my sister or her husband, or both of them together. But I was lucky, and the wardrobe door opened without a sound. I felt my brother-in-law’s wallet in the pocket of one of his jackets. Without removing it from the pocket I took out a bill at random. I didn’t know what kind of bill it was, and I was afraid it would turn out to be of too low a denomination. When I got back to my room and checked, however, it turned out that I’d managed to take a whole hundred zloties. I was pleased, but also scared: I actually had more than enough money, but at the same time there was the worry that my brother-in-law would notice such a large sum missing. Yet my dilemma didn’t last very long; I didn’t even consider the possibility of returning to their bedroom and putting the hundred-zloty bill back in my brother-in-law’s wallet and trying to find some smaller amount. I got dressed quietly, left the apartment, and took the elevator downstairs, because it so happens there’s an all-night store on the first floor of our building. I went into it and bought a bottle of champagne. Since my thirst for alcohol was so terrible, and since I was afraid that as I was opening the champagne at home the cork would pop and wake people up in the apartment, I opened the champagne by the door of the elevator. My fears were uncalled-for: the cork did not pop. I got in the elevator and pressed all twelve buttons, as we live on the twelfth floor. Thanks to this the elevator kept stopping, and the whole ride I kept drinking the champagne. I must have been knocking it back a bit too greedily, however, because when the elevator eventually reached the twelfth floor it turned out there was very little champagne left in the bottle. Since I still had a lot of money, and the bubbles I’d drunk had made me pretty lively, I decided to make some additional purchases. I rode downstairs once again and went back to the all-night store.

“This time I bought two quarter-liter bottles of regular vodka. One of them I intended to stash away for a rainy day, and the other I meant to mix with Coca-Cola, of which I also bought a half-liter bottle. After I got back home I continued to exercise caution, though I was also a lot more at ease. I drank some of the Coca-Cola and poured some of it down the sink; I tried to arrange it so that exactly half the contents were left in the bottle, and I was entirely successful. To the quarter-liter of Coca-Cola I added a quarter-liter of vodka, so that it looked as though I were drinking straight Coke. I hid the empty quarter-liter bottle behind the refrigerator. The supposed Coke, which I planned to leave by the head of my sofa bed and drink through the night, looked a little watery, but this didn’t worry me. My brother-in-law was a health-food freak; he never drank carbonated drinks and he certainly wasn’t familiar with the exact color and taste of real Coke. I wasn’t afraid of my sister; I knew that if push came to shove she would take my side or at least would cover for me. I went to bed and, taking a drink whenever I woke up for a moment, I slept well practically the whole night. In the morning it turned out that my brother-in-law had not noticed either the hundred-zloty bill missing from his wallet or the altered color of the Coke, very little of which was actually left; but my sister started an argument for no reason at all. Without a word I packed up my things and left the apartment, where they had such a bad attitude towards me. I was calm; I still had about forty zloties, while at the bottom of my bag lay the other quarter-liter of vodka.

“I don’t know where my travels led me. I don’t know how long my drinking binge lasted. I don’t know how I ended up here. In any case, at the present time I very much want to give up drinking.”

I listened to the discussion following the readings by the two authors — which, contrary to expectations, unfolded sluggishly — with bated breath. The Most Wanted Terrorist in the World took Joanna’s side, the Queen of Kent, Marianna’s. Nurse Viola emphasized the futility from a therapeutic point of view, and the dangers from an ethical perspective, of copying one another’s work. Christopher Columbus the Explorer asserted that, though copying truly was a bad thing, this bad thing was tempered with something good, namely good will (albeit unintentionally), since it was not inconceivable that the two writers recognized in each other’s work a certain close similarity of events and shared fortunes. Dr. Granada and the therapist Moses Alias I Alcohol were silent.

“In 1985 no one could have bought any kind of bottle for fifty zloties,” Don Juan the Rib finally pronounced from his seat by the wall, seemingly resolving the dispute in favor of Joanna.

I listened to the verdict with bated breath and did not say a single word, though I should have, I indubitably should have, in every respect I should have spoken up; after all, I was the author of both contested pieces of writing.

When I was brought to the alco ward I was wearing a shirt that stank of vomit and a pair of pants fit only to be burned in the boiler-room incinerator. I did not have a penny on me, not a single cigarette; I had no underwear, no soap, no toothbrush, nothing. And yet after only a week, or at the very most two, I began to wallow in possessions. Now, after six months (not counting the breaks after which I returned here unconscious), I am wearing a stylish grass-green track suit. Five-zloty coins jingle in the breast pocket of the jacket; on my nightstand there are piles of bananas, oranges, chocolate candies, and other edibles. When I open the drawer, I see utterly endless supplies of cigarettes. Every chocolate, every five-zloty coin, every pack of Camels, every tin of pineapple compote represents at least one drinking confession or one emotional journal that I have written.

When the news went round the ward (and it went round, if not at the speed of lightning, then at least at the speed of a speeding arrow) that in civilian life I was a writer, the alcos, who had little proficiency in that department, collectively began to turn to me for help, not of a disinterested kind of course. I helped them, though, with a clear conscience. I didn’t write for them so much as commit their speech to paper. (Of course there were cases where it was necessary to alter something on someone else’s behalf — for example on behalf of the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World everything had to be written from A to Z — but usually I just wrote down what they recounted. They told me stories from their lives, while I, introducing only minor stylistic improvements, in practical terms recorded their speech word for word.) After all, it’s no great literary or existential secret that everyone knows how to talk, whereas very few people are able to write down what they say. True, I sometimes adapted their overly smooth language to give it a necessary, and thus believable, unevenness of style; but if those adaptations had any meaning for anyone, and if they had an influence on anyone, that person was me and not them.

Thus, I was not a writer creating fictions which were then signed with other people’s names. I was the secretary of their minds. Both Joanna and Marianna had dictated their nightmares to me, while I — of this I am certain — had transcribed both nightmares literally. And I am also certain that Marianna had spoken with great feeling, with great certainty, and still with great fear of the fifty-zloty bill she had taken from her husband’s pocket.

Chapter 5. Prolegomena to Ideal Order

IT’S SAID THAT AN excessive fondness for order indicates a poor condition of the nerves, and in my case this is in fact true: I have an excessive fondness for order and my nerves are in a state of utter disintegration. Physical objects are continually on the offensive, and they need to be opposed. Sooner or later this battle turns into a futile tilting at windmills, but for a while, in the modest confines of five hundred and twenty square feet (two rooms and a kitchen), objects can be tamed. In addition, a person quite simply forgets, forgets where things were put. In saying this I am not presenting some smug argumentation, I’m not puffing myself up like a third-rate thespian and announcing that for a mind preoccupied with inquiries of the greatest significance it is harmful to be thinking constantly of trivialities — this I am not saying, though it may be the truth, this I am not saying, though it almost certainly is not the truth. Take the apple that fell on Sir Isaac Newton’s head — was it or was it not a triviality? A cosmic triviality? There is no other kind of triviality than the cosmic kind. But, by a hundred thousand truckloads of beer! There’s no need to invoke the principles of the universe in defense of perpetually disappearing cigarette lighters, coin purses, documents, fountain pens and ball-point pens, manuscripts, typescripts, books, socks, ashtrays, scarves, gloves, et cetera. Just as there is no need to adduce in this matter, the matter of the disarray of objects, an argument concerning “inquiries of the greatest significance.” Constant attention to trivialities needn’t always disturb “inquiries of the greatest significance,” it’s enough for it to disturb everyday inquiries, and it does disturb them, it disturbs them calamitously, if one conducts one’s inquiries in complete sentences. I, for example, conduct my inquiries in complete sentences. More: with desperate obstinacy I keep myself alive by thinking in complete sentences. And this is no graphomaniac literary workout, though thinking in whole sentences is of prime significance for literature. It is with an acute sense of distress that I imagine the moment when the last paragraphs, sentences, and fragments of sentences will vanish from my head and the only thing left there will be illegible manuscripts, phantoms of names, specters, nothing more. The heroic-comic choice between dementia and death does not amuse me in the slightest.

When one thinks in whole sentences, then, however isolated, simple, and underdeveloped they may be, it is quite impossible to be thinking constantly about trivialities, about where one put one’s keys. One’s keys should always be where they are supposed to be. It may be that the constant formulation of sentences about lost keys would constitute a remarkable form of literature for the chosen few, but remarkable forms of literature for the chosen few need to be produced in moderation. Keys should be where they’re supposed to be. Keys should be where they’re supposed to be? Dear Lord, dear Lord, you who do everything for me, dear Lord, it that the reason I’m composing this treatise on my despair? Is it for this that I fritter away hours of my time with pen in hand? So my addled brain can discover the Newtonian truth that keys should be where they’re supposed to be? It’s for such a truth that I’ve wasted my life? It’s for such a truth that my hands shake and my liver horripilates? It’s for such a truth that I’ve descended to the bottom of the abyss? On the other hand, keys should be where they’re supposed to be. If Joanna Catastrophe had kept her keys where they were supposed to be, I would have loved her, she would have been the love of my life, the love of the evening of my life; we would have been together.

Chapter 6. Joanna Catastrophe

JOANNA CATASTROPHE WAS beautiful, wise, and tall. Nothing but pluses. Besides — something that for me is of first-rate importance — she wore first-rate clothes and used first-rate cosmetics. But Joanna Catastrophe would come into my apartment and plop down her coat, plop down her pumps, and plop down her handbag. After fifteen minutes of Joanna Catastrophe on my territory (the territory she herself inhabited — her girlhood room in a suburban dwelling — is beyond description), my territory would start to resemble. . My first instinct was to write: the apocalypse, but no. First of all, to my ear that would sound too comical: the apocalypse after the arrival of the catastrophe; second, it would not be the truth, since it was not the beginning of an apocalypse but the beginning of a carnival, which incidentally was a hundred times worse than an apocalypse — after an apocalypse there would be little left to tidy up, whereas after Joanna Catastrophe I and the objects that belonged to me took the longest time to regain our composure.

Plop went the muffler, plop went the headscarf, plop went the coffee cup, plop went the blouse, plop went the newspaper, plop went the book, plop went the skirt. “Joanna,” I explained patiently, “freedom isn’t about leaving your best moccasins in the middle of the room.”

Had this disorder simply been a token of voracious sensuality, it wouldn’t have mattered so much. Our bodies fling themselves on one another hungrily, tear off their clothing, and, like in a French or American romantic movie, shoes, dress, panty hose, shirt, black jeans, frilly undies, and boxer shorts form a path across the thick emerald-green carpet to the Hollwoodesque bed. Joanna, however, didn’t create chaos around herself only on the way to bed. On the way to bed, as it happened, she (we) created the least chaos; our sensuality was indeed voracious, but we were both familiar with the principles of the art and in the interests of intensifying its sensuality we moderated its voracity (principle number one: never hurry). In any case, for the whole of the day, that is to say the whole of eternity, Joanna’s best moccasins would lie in the middle of the room. Along with a buckle, an ashtray, an antique milk bottle, a pen, a bottle of Palmolive shampoo, yesterday’s Gazeta Wyborcza, an empty Milka chocolate bar wrapper, an empty packet of potato chips, empty packets of everything, and every other object imaginable.

Oh, Joanna Catastrophe was far from stupid, and she was well aware that freedom was not a matter of leaving one’s best moccasins in the middle of the room. With Joanna one could have long and fascinating conversations about the concept of freedom, and about other concepts too. Joanna was studying economics and fine arts, and she came from a very good home. Her father was the principal of an elite grammar school; he possessed a degree in history and, as it transpired after the fall of communism, a number of apartment buildings and acreages of land. Her mother was a dentist with a long-standing practice in the heart of the old town, a sophisticated, well-groomed lady who was oppressively enticing in her over-ripeness.

I did not have a clean conscience during my one and only Sunday lunch at the suburban residence of the Catastrophe family. What am I saying: it was not that I did not have a clean conscience, it was that I had a thoroughly unclean conscience; I was unclean as a hog, and I was hungry as a wolf. I wolfed down my food and stared wolfishly at my future never-to-be mother-in-law. She was clad in a flowing yellow gown, and yellow gowns always bring me to my knees. I ate meatballs in broth, veal tongue in jelly, veal roast game style, fruit salad, and ice cream; I ate and at the same time restrained the debauched song that was springing up within me. At the time I was in excellent form. I wasn’t drinking at all; I drank nothing but non-carbonated mineral water (under communism there was no non-carbonated mineral water), I didn’t drink so much as a drop of wine over lunch, I didn’t drink so much as a thimbleful of liqueur over dessert, I didn’t even wet my lips on the brandy served with the coffee, and later in the afternoon, it goes without saying, I also did not drink the glass of Jack Daniel’s offered me by the man of the house. I didn’t drink at all and not drinking did not bother me in the slightest. I was on top form; I listened, I spoke, and I held in check the detailed story-line of the pornographic tale that was forming in my head about enjoying both mother and daughter at the same time — I didn’t hold it so firmly in check that it would be completely suppressed, only so it would not dominate and merely smoldered in the background. I took an active part in the conversation and listened with genuine curiosity to the hosts’ divagations on the subject of their literary tastes, which as it happens were rather broad. For Mr. Catastrophe it was German-language literature, with a special interest in Austrian writers of the twentieth century; Mrs. Catastrophe liked Latin American literature, with no particular special interest; with Joanna it was Russian and American literature, with a special interest in Vladimir Nabokov. I listened, I spoke, and on the subject of Nabokov I delivered the daring (given my situation) opinion that he was a writer whose dark, infernal inquisitiveness and precise mastery of icy form predestined him perfectly to write a novel that was a study in addiction. “Alas,” I added with flippant erudition, “the rumors of the author’s profound alcoholism proved untrue.” I listened, I spoke, I confessed my own literary tastes, and then at dusk I found myself in Joanna’s girlhood room.

“Look how nicely I tidied up,” whispered Joanna. “I did it for you, I cleaned it for you.”

Indeed, the room was marked by a disquieting symmetry which was at odds not only with Joanna’s nature but with human nature in general; one could see at first glance that what had been introduced here was a superficial, Potemkinesque monument to perfect order that could come crashing down at any moment.

“Joanna, I love you in chaos, I love you among all your scattered things.”

But Joanna, evidently given wings by the newly discovered art of the harmonious arrangement of objects, paid no attention, perhaps failing to comprehend the poetic depths of my declaration.

“Even my keys,” she whispered with childlike enthusiasm, “now I even put my keys where they’re supposed to be. And this morning, can you imagine, I couldn’t find them, I couldn’t find my keys, because I’d forgotten I put them where they’re supposed to be.”

I could feel my throat stiffening with emotion; I was moved by the sudden certainty that I would spend the rest of my life with Joanna Catastrophe.

“I love you,” I repeated, “I love you regardless of where you put your keys.”

“Come with me,” said Joanna, and she took me by the hand, and led me up the stairs to the upper floor of the residence, and brought me down a long hallway, and at the end of the hallway she opened a door. I beheld an as yet unfurnished room with white walls; it was well lit and cosy. Outside the window was a view that would have been the dream of any scribbler. Down below was the cooling city; over it, masses of hot air were gathering, while the China grass of darkness was taking over the alleyways and the first lights were coming on in the distant windows.

“You’ll have your own armchair here, your bookcases, your books, and your desk, you’ll be able to write here,” said Joanna, while I realized that the great irrevocable change I had waited for for so many years and whose arrival after all those years I had begun to doubt — that this change had finally come after all. I realized that my life would change and improve, and gently, as if I were embracing a soul that was giving me new life, gently I took Joanna in my arms.

•

And then, very late in the evening, when all the grownups were long asleep, and many lights on our part of Earth had already been turned out, I phoned for a cab (under communism it wasn’t possible to phone for a cab). Joanna yawned sweetly as she walked me across the garden; at the gate the promised white Mercedes was already waiting, sleep well, Joanna. The taxi drove through the dark outskirts of the city, empty fields on either side, fragile walls of houses; I was filled with an appreciation of the entire world, and I even liked the fact that the cab that had come for me was a white Mercedes.

I sprawled comfortably on the back seat and looked for lighted windows. I’d always been struck by windows which are lit up late at night — someone was reading the book of their life all night long, someone was dying, someone was coughing so hard they choked, someone was waking with a cry from a nightmare, someone was taking someone else in their arms, someone was taking something to calm their nerves, someone was weeping from longing, someone was going to the bathroom. I looked at my watch; it was 3 A.M., and the constellations overhead moved like shifting sands. We stopped for a moment by an all-night store, and a moment later we were again driving down a deserted parkway. In my dark building no one was up, no one was dying, no one was reading an enthralling book, but these were the last moments in which everybody would be asleep — in a short while a light would come on on the twelfth floor. And a light came on on the twelfth floor, and it stayed on without a break for forty days and nights; for forty days and nights I drank without a break. The light bulb shone above my insensate body; dawns rose and evenings fell, my insensate hand reached for the bottle and poured vodka into my insensate throat, my bedding and my skin acquired a corneous exoskeleton of dried puke, destruction followed destruction across my apartment. Dear Lord, the mess that Joanna Catastrophe created was exemplary order compared with what I left behind me when I writhed about on all fours in search of the bottle that had been hidden away for a rainy day (and had long ago been consumed by my numbed innards, as the rainy day had long since come and gone, and all the days that followed were also rainy, each one rainier than the next), or when, in a viscous glimmer of lucidity, I crawled to the telephone to phone in my ritual shopping order: Two bottles of Premium peach-favored vodka and a liter of Coke, please. I give the address. Under communism there was no shopping by phone.

Chapter 7. The Very Beginning

THE BEGINNING, THE very beginning, the beginning told in such huge close-up that the image becomes grainy, the beginning of this or, truth be told, any other drinking bout, the beginning, then, of the universal drinking bout, the beginning of the timeless drinking bout, the beginning of the total drinking bout, the beginning of the Book of Genesis of drinking is then as follows: The earth was without form and the spirit moved upon the face of the waters, and I paid the cab driver, and I got out of the cab, and I checked whether my bag was safely on my shoulder a hundred times on the way to the elevator, and I took the elevator to the twelfth floor, and I turned the key in the lock, and I flipped on the light. According to the clock on the wall it was seventeen minutes past three. All at once I quickened my pace, that’s right, I crossed the two rooms with kitchen at a rapid walk. I was in a great haste and all my movements were rapid; it was not that there was little time, there was enough time, but in a visible and suffocating way my hesitation was intensifying. I won’t enhance the visual impact of the story with an effect that is not far from the truth, I will not say that demons of hesitation were crawling out of the corners, no, things weren’t quite that bad, but all around it was undeniably denser, darker, and also somehow more yellow, yes, all around it was denser, darker, and yellower; after all even abstainers know the term “a stifling aura,” after all even abstainers sometimes get short of air and start to hyperventilate, performing spasmodic motions, as if they were trying to break out of a noose that was tightening around them, as if they were trying to gather their failing powers of concentration. In the final seconds of my not-drinking something analogous occurred, but a thousand times more painful. I was not short of breath, but actually choking. I did not perform sudden and panic-stricken movements — I thrashed about like a madman. Though even that is inaccurate. I acted logically; in my madness there was cold, calculated method; the speed of all my movements was mad, I acted with the rapidity of a madman, nevertheless I placed my bag on the desk with scrupulous care, opening it and removing what was inside, I prepared glasses and an ashtray, I changed swiftly into a warm and comfortable track suit — still, still at this moment it would have been possible to douse the fire, which was already burning strongly, still it would have been possible to pour the two bottles I’d purchased in the all-night store down the drain, throw them into the trash chute, or even fling them out of the window, and it was this very possibility, the shadow of this possibility, that lent unutterable drama to the situation, for it was not a matter of there still existing a genuine choice between drinking and not drinking, no, such a choice had ceased to exist long ago (frankly speaking, such a choice had not existed for at least twenty years), yet it was still possible to pretend that the choice existed, to put on a poorly acted show of indecision, to not waver between drinking and not drinking, but to nevertheless self-sacrificially prolong, knowing that in essence I had stopped not drinking, the road to drinking. I thrashed about, and, truly, I thought about not drinking like a man who in the absolute certainty that he will not commit suicide thinks about suicide: the vividness of the imagination has nothing to do with reality. You can think often about suicide, you can see all kinds of details clearly, you can relentlessly picture your own corpse hanging from a roof beam, yet in the depths of your heart you know you won’t go through with it. That’s how things are. In the depths of my heart I knew I would not go through with it. If I had, if, God forfend, I had poured both bottles I’d purchased at the all-night store down the drain or thrown them out of the window, what outcome could I have achieved by this illicit and hypocritical act? None whatsoever. I would have had to take off the warm and comfortable track suit, I would have had to get dressed again, put back on the shoes and the fancy clothes I had worn to the Catastrophes’, return on foot or by cab to the all-night store or to another one, and from then on things would have been even worse. Out of rage at myself, out of rage at having been carried away by my illicit and hypocritical act, and as a consequence having become embroiled in spurious goings-on, out of rage at the mendacity surrounding me on every side, I would have bought not two but four bottles of vodka, and then, checking a hundred times to make sure that my bag, now twice as heavy, was safely on my shoulder, I would have gone back home on foot or by cab, taken the elevator to the twelfth floor, turned the key in the lock, and flipped on the light. The game of possibilities that were seemingly multiple yet in fact absolutely precluded could have gone on into infinity; now I might have poured all four bottles down the drain or thrown them out of the window and repeated the entire sequence step by step, and again, and once again. This nightmarish asininity had to be finally brought to a stop, the truth had to be looked manfully in the eye, and the truth was not pouring vodka down the drain or throwing bottles out of the window; the truth was drinking. I moved with uncommon swiftness because it was a question of pouring the first dose of truth into myself as swiftly as possible and terminating the exhausting rhetoric. It was necessary to put an end to the conscious literature of perpetual doubts as swiftly as possible and to choose unwavering, insensate life.

Chapter 8. Christopher Columbus the Explorer

TOWARD THE END OF each stay on the alco ward I had always managed to manufacture around myself a certain order; even if it was the order of a closed ward it was still order, and the transition from the order of a closed ward to the disorder of the open world, or, to put it in plain terms, the return home from the hospital, was impossible for me without fortifying myself with a couple of stiff ones.

“Classic exit stress,” Dr. Granada would have said. “You’re unable to handle the exit stress. You look as if you’re exiting in good shape, but you’re unable to handle the exit stress.”

It was true, I was incapable of handling the exit stress, and so I would reduce the exit stress to a minimum. The cab ride from the alco ward took about twenty minutes, then afterwards, after the torment of the cab ride, after drinking four stabilizing doubles and equipping myself with a bottle of vodka, I would cease suffering from exit stress, I would cease suffering from stress in general, and if I started to feel a little worse, I would have a drink and feel better, and that was all, that was the entire philosophy, the entire philosophy of drinking.

“There is no philosophy of drinking.” Christopher Columbus the Explorer, my roommate, would repeat with the professional intonation of an impatient lecturer while turning around on his bed, taking off his eyeglasses, and setting his French translation of the New Testament on his bedside table: “There is no philosophy of drinking, there’s only the technique of drinking.”

Christopher Columbus the Explorer had been sailing across a sea of darkness for at least twenty years; when he accidentally swallowed even a single shot of the boundless expanse of oceanic waters, he invariably descended into a murderous unending jag. Two weeks earlier he had been brought in in his death throes, not to the alco ward even, but to the Intensive Care Unit on the floor below; he had been laboriously treated for, and miraculously restored from, first delirium and then epilepsy. By now he was more or less himself. During the day he would go for a walk down the hallway with the French translation of the New Testament under his arm, and through his words and actions he would convey the fact that he was mightily disappointed with conditions at the boarding house, to which he had repaired for the purpose of restoring his overtaxed nerves.

At night, however, his helpless body was incapable of assuming any position; the muscles of his arms and legs, purged entirely of magnesium, kept seizing up in spasms. Though I was knocked out with powerful doses of hemineurin, I would be jolted awake. Columbus the Explorer would be twitching on his bed in a manner that was entirely devoid of style; if there was any style whatsoever in his convulsions, it was the style of death throes. I was convinced he was dying, at least that was what it looked like, and it even looked worse — the spasms of death throes are surely gentler.

I would call the doctor and the nurse. Nurse Viola would administer an injection of magnesium and various other minerals and provide vitamins and sedatives, and Dr. Granada would lean over Columbus the Explorer as the latter strove in vain to subdue the trembling of his own body, and he would say:

“How are you feeling, professor?”

•

In civilian life, when he was sober, aside from his incarnation as a drunkard, aside from his role as a conscript of liquor, aside from his alcoholic calling (ah, what ingenious pyramids of extraordinary drinking metaphors you are capable of erecting, my addicted tongue!), Columbus the Explorer in normal life was a tenured professor of the social sciences. He had climbed every rung of the university career, he had taught abroad for several years, he spoke foreign languages, and, with the full rationality of an enlightened scholar and all the adherence to principle of a person who for years has spoken ex cathedra, he asserted that he did not have the slightest problem with drinking.

“How are you feeling, professor?”

“Fine, fine,” gibbered Columbus the Explorer, “fine, there’s nothing wrong with me, it’s just a momentary weakness.”

“And where do you think the weakness comes from, what caused it?”

“I honestly haven’t the faintest idea. Maybe I’m overworked, exhausted — I’ve been so busy lately.”

Nurse Viola, still sleepy after having been wrenched from her shallow doze on duty, though already icily and professionally efficient, still had about her the allure of a just-woken woman. The imperceptible shadow of a smile, or perhaps of a look of repugnance, flitted across her magnificent cheekbones.

“Do you not think, professor”—in Dr. Granada’s voice there wasn’t a hint of irony or double meaning—“do you not think, professor, that your condition might reasonably be connected to a certain, so to speak, overuse of alcohol by yourself?”

“Out of the question, that’s absolutely impossible. I hardly drink at all; sometimes a toast on special occasions, or a glass of decent beer over dinner. .”

“In any case, if I understand correctly”—in the bright skies of Dr. Granada’s voice dark clouds would slowly be starting to gather—“if I understand correctly, your stay in the hospital, your feeling unwell, is not in any way connected with alcohol?”

“Not in any way,” Columbus the Explorer would eagerly concur, though he was already speaking more hesitantly. “Not in any way,” he would repeat after seeming to reflect; he paused, attempting with the lines of his face to imitate an unexpected consideration—“although, although, now I think of it. .” His body was gradually freeing itself of convulsions, and his entire figure conveyed an ever more distinct willingness to make small concessions.

“Now you think of what, professor?”

“That’s right, now that I think of it, it’s possible that at the last family celebration I may indeed have had one glass too many.”

“Your diagnosis staggers me in its accuracy,” Dr. Granada would say calmly; then he would instantly burst out in a furious roar: “One glass too many! He had one glass too many! This walking pail of liquor had one glass too many! He admits he may have gone a little too far!”

In a smooth movement, practiced on thousands of recovered patients, Nurse Viola took the doctor’s arm in one hand, put the other around his waist, and led him toward the door, while he continued to bellow like a madman:

“He had one glass too many! An absolute sensation! He’s discovered America! Christopher Columbus the Explorer has discovered America!”

Chapter 9. The Principles of Elusiveness

I WAS NOT BOTHERED by Christopher Columbus’s drunken self-deception. One cannot properly drink without self-deception: the lips have to deny the liquor that just passed down the throat. It was surely for the relief of drunkards that the Lord God did not write upon the stone tablets the commandment: thou shalt not lie. The word has to deny the addiction. Among the tribe of alcoholics, lying is a badge of honor — the truth is first an indiscretion, later an affront, and finally a source of despair. If you truly drink, you have to announce to all and sundry that you do not drink; if you admit you drink, that means you do not truly drink. True all-out drinking has to be concealed; anyone who reveals it is giving in, confessing to helplessness, and all that remains for him is weeping, the gnashing of teeth, and the twelve-step program.

Whenever I tell you that I’ve stopped drinking, that I don’t drink, that after all these decades I’ve sobered up for good, that I’ve regained my sense of time, that I spent weeks recovering in an ice-cold house in the mountains — you can always calmly disbelieve me. Truly, you shouldn’t believe a single word I say. The word is my stimulant, my narcotic, and I’ve acquired a taste for overdosing. Language is my second — what am I saying, second — language is my first addiction.

Regardless of whether I’m talking sober or talking drunk, whether I say that from morning to night I’ve been drinking peach vodka, or that for a hundred and sixteen days not a single drop has passed my lips — regardless of what I say, in my talking I am elusive even to myself. Just as in my drinking I am elusive to myself and to the entire world.

How often is it, for example, that I’ve been striding down Szewska Street in Kraków sober as an angel, and I’ve not gone twenty yards, not twenty seconds have gone by, I’ve only gone sixteen yards and only sixteen seconds have passed, I enter the Market Square and in the blink of an eye, entering the Market Square, first of all, I myself render my angelhood human, then subsequently my humanity undergoes a rapid bestialization of its own accord, and in the blink of an eye, entering the Market Square, I’m as drunk as a beast. What has happened? Has the silver turret of my soul disintegrated into rubble? Has a black wind appeared to hurl me into the abyss and sit me on a high stool? What has happened? I don’t know. My not drinking on Szewska eludes me, and my drinking on the Market Square eludes me too.

I am the prince of elusiveness. When I say I do not drink, it is certainly the case that this is not true, but when I say I drink, I could equally be lying through my teeth. Don’t believe me, don’t believe me. A drunkard is ashamed to drink, but a drunkard has an even greater source of shame — he’s ashamed not to drink. What kind of drunkard doesn’t drink? The lousy kind. And what’s better: lousy or not lousy? What is superior: lousiness or not-lousiness? And besides — when one’s drunken destiny is about to be fulfilled, it’s not only futile but also indelicate, and even dishonorable, to try and get the better of that destiny.

When the Hero of Socialist Labor, a venerable foundry worker from the Sendzimir (formerly Lenin) Steel Mill, finally understood his own helplessness during one of his stays on the alco ward — when he understood that his drunken destiny had been fulfilled and had closed over him like a mound of earth over a mass grave — he was stupefied, and spent days on end standing outside the men’s bathroom, tears perpetually flowing down the gray stubble that covered his cheeks. He stood there outside the can like a monument to stupefaction and kept repeating:

“How can you not drink when everyone drinks? How can you not drink when everyone drinks? How can you not drink when everyone drinks? How can you not drink?”

And the poor fellow would have stood there till the Day of Judgment, he would have stood there till the day he was discharged from the alco ward, he would have stood there and wept, had Dr. Granada not called him into his office at a certain particularly desperate moment, sat him down in an armchair, and addressed him in more or less the following words:

“Soon you’ll be leaving here, Mr. Hero, and after you leave, if you manage not to drink, then don’t drink, with all your strength don’t drink, but announce to all and sundry that you’re drinking. That way you’ll avoid a great deal of stress that will push you to drink, you’ll avoid a great deal of pain, unpleasantness, indignation even. You’ll avoid glances filled with disappointment and expectations of the worst. You worked hard to earn your drunkard’s role, Mr. Hero, and right now it’ll be better both for you and your weakened health if you don’t unnecessarily complicate your own image. You entered our doors as a drunkard and for your own psychological well-being and the peace of mind of your closest friends you’ll leave here as the same drunkard, yet in reality you’ll merely be wearing the costume of a drunkard. You should not drink and you should assert openly, or give others to understand with plain hints, that you drink. Lie as long and as persistently as you’re able about drinking, especially since sooner or later you’ll start anyway.”

And the tears instantly dried on the gray stubble that covered the cheeks of the Hero of Socialist Labor, and a great weight was lifted from his heart, and he left Dr. Granada’s office with brightened visage, and after he left the office his visage shone more brightly still upon the rest of us.

Chapter 10. The River of Tranquility

I WAS NOT BOTHERED by Christopher Columbus the Explorer’s self-deception. I was not even bothered by his peremptory tone, that was tiresome in its dogmatism; I was inexpressibly bothered by the fact that certain of his arguments were irrefutable.

“There is no philosophy of drinking,” he would repeat, “there’s only the technique of drinking. There does, however, exist,” he would say, raising a finger in an unconsciously schoolmaster-like fashion, “there does, however, exist a philosophy of poor state of mind. In general, the meaning of human existence can be reduced to a never-ending struggle to improve one’s state of mind. This may for example involve ideology, religion, technological advances, or material goods; it may also involve drinking, or, to be precise, a competent application of the technique of drinking. In other words, life is a matter of adjusting one’s poor state of mind by means of the right technique of drinking. It can go wrong. When a person’s state of mind deteriorates to the point where no technique of drinking can help, or when the technique of drinking grows sloppy and instead of improving one’s state of mind it worsens it, then indeed problems can occur. I myself do not have such problems,” he would add emphatically, replacing his eyeglasses on his nose, reaching for his French translation of the New Testament, and seemingly beginning to read.

He was irritatingly, incontrovertibly, and terrifyingly right. When matters (I find it hard to use the casual term “technique of drinking” at this juncture), when matters, then, grow sloppy, the ever darker and ever deeper waters of the river on whose banks you are seeking solace will sooner or later start to yield up cadaverous limbs.

But for the moment the waters would be clear, they would flow like breathing; I had left the alco ward, behind me I had a twenty-minute cab ride and four stabilizing doubles, at my side I had an open bottle, the bright river of tranquility would be following its discreet course, I was in good shape, the technique of drinking invariably promotes a good state of mind, in any case there was no hysteria, no rapid movements, no drinking straight out of the bottle. I would drink methodically from a glass, in small, precisely measured, single-shot sips, and equally methodically I would be working. I would fill the bathtub with hot water, pour in an over-generous quantity of Omo-Color washing powder, and get ready to do my laundry. My washing machine had stopped working even before the fall of communism and the failure of both my marriages.

Chapter 11. Alberta Lulaj

I HOWLED. I DIDN’T hear my own howling, but I believe I actually howled — in any case they told me my howling was truly, truly horrible. They moved about the apartment; there weren’t many of them, but still I was in no condition to count them. I was in no condition to count to three. Where had they come from? Had they stepped out of the pages of literature? Had they emerged from The Trial or Humboldt’s Gift? Had they come from the represented world of a novel in which there’s a scene involving a search or an arrest? I raised my leaden eyelids and, I confess frankly, I was afraid they were an alcoholic dream filled with references to the classics, I was afraid the season of amorphous literary specters was still in progress, but one of them leaned over me and straightened my pillow, I caught the leathery smell of his jacket and the spicy smell of his aftershave, and I was overcome by such a terrible wave of thirst that I would have been prepared to lick off all his aftershave to bring myself relief. Maybe I’d manage to gather a single drop mixed in with my saliva; a single drop never brings relief, but there’s always the moment of delusion while one is waiting for relief, and for the duration of that moment the dread is a little less. I smelled the smells and realized my alcoholic suspicions were unfounded, literature was decidedly out of the picture, someone was, without question, actually in my apartment. I turned my head — next to the mattress there ought to have been a bottle with a trusty something left, and even a couple of somethings. Once, I remember, in a comparable state I turned my head and I saw that the bottle was half full. Dear Lord, it was like a Mozart aria, it was like Leibnitz writing about the perfection of God. But not this time, this time there was nothing, there was not even an empty bottle at the head of my bed. I reached out a hand, or rather my tremulous hand began of its own accord to dart about in lizard-like fashion; it groped around in as broad an area as it could, but still there was nothing. The man who had straightened my pillow sat on the edge of the bed and pulled a bottle of Becherovka from under his arm. The sight alone of that legendary green glass, I must say, didn’t so much fortify me as cause my attention to be fortified, and now I could see quite clearly: two steps away there stood someone else, while on the other side of the room, in the armchair in the corner, sat a third person. Let me emphasize once again: these were not hallucinations (though after forty, or maybe a hundred and forty, days I had not only a right, but a duty to have hallucinations), these were not phantasms. Now too, as I am describing the whole situation, I want to avoid at all costs any kind of literary game, the sort of cheap trick of suggesting it’s unclear whether it really happened or the narrator merely imagined it. No. In my living room there actually were three people, though the third figure did in fact have something of the specter about them, dressed as it was in a curious outfit that I could not figure out, its head swathed in a hood.

“You’ll get half a glass of Becherovka in just a moment”—the voice I heard was also incontrovertibly real, nor did it contain any ambiguous tonality, any ruffianly harshness or high-pitched devilry; it was the deep, agreeable voice of a reputable physician. The materiality of this almost-baritone brought nearly as much relief as the promise it had uttered. That’s right, with a drunkard’s obstinacy I repeat once again: the materiality of the situation was a relief to me, for I had been excessively tormented by an incessant onslaught of fictitiousness.

“You’ll get half a glass of Becherovka in just a moment. I’m sure there’s no need to remind such a seasoned master of the art of imbibition that you have to drink cautiously and very slowly, otherwise you’ll bring about what in Old Poland they used to call an ignoble vomitation, and that would be, first, an irreparable disgrace in the presence of a lady, and second, the permanent loss of a significant quantity of life-giving substance.”

It was true, there was no need for him to instruct me. Knowing that in a few minutes a subtle reconstruction of body and soul awaited me, I raised myself to a sitting position; with the greatest caution (not devoid of an element of worship) I took in both hands the glass that had been promised and that, in accordance with said promise, was indeed half full, and I set about moistening my lips and wetting my throat, and, restraining my need for immediate salvation, I settled for a salvation that was gradual. And slowly, slowly the unbearable burden lifted from my heart, my dark thoughts brightened, and my soul was cheered.

“Is that better?” asked my savior, and I, like a receptive apprentice instantly grasping the teachings of the master, replied:

“That’s better.”

After a few minutes, when I was sufficiently improved that I could finally discontinue the hysterical overuse of biblical phraseology to myself, I looked at them all with absolute lucidity and asked the most natural and thoroughly sober question in the world:

“Pardon me, gentlemen, but to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit? Where in heaven’s name did you come from, and how did you get in?”

“It’s better, but that doesn’t mean it’s good,” said the one who seemed to be my only interlocutor, a matter-of-fact solicitude in his voice. “First of all, it’s not only gentlemen. Actually, it’s very odd that you of all people, with your reputation as a supposed connoisseur of the fair sex, haven’t noticed there’s a girl present. Alberta, show the gentleman your femininity.”

The most spectral member of the trio rose wordlessly from the armchair and with the unhurried movements of an experienced stripper started unbuttoning the mysterious garment — upon closer inspection it lost much of its mystery and turned out to be something between a light coat and a heavy gown with a hood. In a moment there stood before me a beautiful, graceful, tall brunette in a melodramatically scornful pose; she was wearing a yellow dress with spaghetti straps.

“Alberta Lulaj, poetess,” came the introduction, though who the speaker actually was I could not figure out. The chief intruder? Master of an inscrutable ceremony? My benefactor? Or maybe some reprobate wanted by the police?

“We’re here about her, about her under-appreciated poems. As for the other matters, first, we entered with the aid of the key that you in your drunken abandon left in the lock, and second, we’re old acquaintances. That is, you may not recognize us, you’re entitled not to remember, but I recognize you and I remember. The name’s Józef Cieślar and once, once, forty years ago or more, we were at Sunday School together. I hardly need add that after we left Sunday School our paths diverged. You went to the big city and got an intellectual education, while I stayed in our native region and earned a living in various occupations, none of them of an intellectual character.”

At this juncture it would have been beautiful if a gate, overgrown with dark weeds of forgetfulness, had opened up in my mind, if I had suddenly remembered flaxen-haired Józef Cieślar, who was incapable for love or money of memorizing even the shortest Lutheran psalm — it would have been not just a beautiful but also a classic scene. I, however, I confess frankly, drew a blank. I looked at this alleged Józef Cieślar and no gate opened in my mind, I did not remember anything, nor did I recognize him in the slightest, to the point that everything he said seemed to me a manifest pack of lies serving a purpose that for the moment remained hidden but was without a doubt of a criminal nature. As it happened this impostor, this stealer of biographies, evidently knew rather a lot about me; he even seemed to know certain details of my soul. He evidently knew, for instance, that when I heard about Sunday School I’d be sure to get all emotional in my drunkenness, that I might even burst out in drunken tears. Yet I kept my emotions in check and did not burst out crying; I gave no sign of what I was feeling, while he too did not intensify the incitement he had begun, he did not look at me expectantly, and he continued his introductions with an unchanging matter-of-factness.

“My associate, on the other hand”—with an almost elegant gesture of his hand he indicated the second gangster, who was standing a few feet away—“my associate, on the other hand, doesn’t know you personally but is a great admirer of yours. He read your article in the newspaper.”

My alleged admirer nodded and with feigned eagerness confirmed this:

“That’s right, I’m not someone who is generally inclined to fascination, but in this case I was fascinated.”

I decided to probe the matter more deeply and, partly out of cunning, partly out of vanity, I asked:

“I’m most curious — that is, I’m flattered, but at the same time I’m most curious — which of my pieces made such a very favorable impression on you?”

The other man shrugged his shoulders in a familiar gesture of helplessness and said with a straightforwardness that was equally familiar:

“I don’t remember what it was about, but I remember I almost split my sides laughing.”

I flinched as if struck by a whip. The chief intruder gave me a sympathetic look, the poetess Alberta Lulaj pretended to be absorbed by an over-tight or perhaps over-loose spaghetti strap, and there was an embarrassing silence. When the embarrassing silence passed, the cordial voice sounded once again.

“You continue to impress me with the extent of your ruination; you ought to know you should never quiz your readers on their knowledge of your work, you should be pleased at even the most general existence of readers, and leave it at that. Though that’s not important. Let’s get back, or rather let’s get down, to the heart of the matter. Before you stands the beautiful and wise Alberta. Not only is she standing before you; over the next few hours, and if need be over the next few days, she will remain with you. My associate and I will withdraw in literally a minute; aside from everything else, as usual we have urgent business in town. We are going, Alberta is staying. I’m leaving you the bottle too. That’s right,” repeated the purported Józef Cieślar with emphasis, “I’m leaving you the bottle. In other words”—here he raised a finger in a meaningful, schoolmasterly gesture that was uncannily reminiscent of Christopher Columbus the Explorer—“in other words, you are being left with a woman and a bottle; observe that it’s as if you had entered paradise without remotely deserving it. Later on Alberta will help you recover yourself; she’ll soothe your troubled nerves, make you some nourishing broth, feed you fruit juice rich in vitamins, and in the last resort will pop down to the store for the last two life-saving beers. You in return. .”

“What in return? What in return?” I interrupted, on the one hand overwhelmed by the excessive number of fairy-tale kindnesses and, on the other hand, terrified at the inner certainty that in my present state I was incapable, utterly incapable, of doing anything whatsoever in return, and would have no way of repaying my unsavory benefactors.

“I’m about to tell you. In return you really don’t have to do very much at all. All you need to do is listen to Alberta’s poems. Naturally I have no wish to influence you in advance, but in my modest opinion Alberta not only writes beautiful poems but also recites them beautifully, it’s as if she were singing; just listening should calm your nerves. After you’ve heard them, you’ll carry out an in-depth analysis and an honest appraisal, after which, making use of your extensive network of contacts, you’ll enable Alberta to publish her work, preferably in the Catholic intellectual weekly Tygodnik Powszechny.”

“But it’s been years since I wrote for Tygodnik Powszechny,” I said, or rather whined quietly. I whined not because I felt a sudden drunken nostalgia for Tygodnik Powszechny; I whined because in the depths of my soul I knew that all my reluctance and resistance was a sham. I whined because I knew I’d agree to everything.

“That doesn’t matter, you still have contacts there. Besides, it doesn’t have to be Tygodnik Powszechny, it could be some other influential and prestigious publication, Polityka or Gazeta Wyborcza. Though Tygodnik Powszechny would be best. Do you know why?”

“Yes, I know why,” I muttered unwillingly.

“You know?”

“I know.”

“What do you know?”

“I know what I need to know,” I retorted wearily, because in this case I actually did know.

“If you know, then say it”—there was something undeniably childish in his insistence (a lingering vestige of Sunday School?).

“It’s because Tygodnik Powzechny is read by the Pope.”

“Excellent! Bravo!” beamed the alleged companion of my childhood Bible lessons. “I can see I underestimated you. I took you for an unhinged virtuoso of the word, but you’re quite the cunning fox. You understand what it would mean: John Paul II reads Alberta Lulaj’s poetry in Tygodnik Powszechny, the profoundly metaphysical nature of the poems makes a huge impression on the Holy Father, he sends Alberta a momentous letter or even a papal bull, and the world, the whole world is ours. I’m sure you understand that’s the only thing that interests us, only that: playing for the highest stakes. So Tygodnik Powszechny would be best, but if it can’t be done, never mind, it can be done somewhere else. In the end it makes no difference, you know everyone, you’ve drunk with everyone, and when you recover yourself you’ll think of something. The girl deserves to be helped; she writes wonderful things that, because of the intellectual and personal inertia which, as you well know, dominates those circles, don’t get published. Yes, the woman needs to be enabled to publish her work, because having her hopes unjustly thwarted could cause her to take to whoring. When you hear Alberta’s poems you’ll understand that they have to see the light of day. All right, there’s nothing more that needs to be said. You can surely do this much for an old Sunday School friend.”

He had given himself away, he had given himself away beyond the shadow of a doubt — no one who ever attended Sunday School would have called the Pope “Holy Father.” Not even the worst Lutheran would say such a thing. He was unmasked, but since he did not know he was unmasked he went diligently on with his job. He removed the empty glass from my hand, took it into the kitchen, came back, and placed the scarcely touched bottle of Becherovka at my bedside. Then he dug around in the pockets of his leather jacket and took out a small, thick-sided shot glass wrapped in a scrap of newspaper.

“Alberta will measure it out for you,” he said. “Alberta will measure it out for you, and you’ll drink slowly, in small sips, from this glass. Come to your senses, my friend”—his voice took on the tone of a full-scale admonition—“you’re one of the biggest drunkards in the world, and you haven’t had a shot glass in your hand for ten years or more. How on earth can that be?” he said with considered sternness. “How can that be?” he repeated, this time directing the question to himself, and quickly answering it himself: “My question would seem purely rhetorical in nature. You’ve not had a shot glass in your hand for ten years or more because for ten years or more you’ve been swilling vodka exclusively from tumblers or straight from the bottle. The technique of drinking, as Christopher Columbus the Explorer would say, has grown utterly sloppy. Come to your senses, my friend, use a shot glass and listen to the poems. Be well.”

Both gangsters saluted me mockingly and moved toward the door of the apartment, and a moment later the door of the apartment closed behind them.

•

I looked at Alberta. She smiled gently and took the first step in my direction.

“I saw you at the ATM,” I said in a feeble voice. “I stared at you and I was certain you were the last love of my life.”

“At the ATM?” Alberta raised her eyebrows most fetchingly. “That’s entirely possible, I often use ATMs. When was it?”

“I don’t know how many days ago — maybe forty, maybe a hundred and forty, maybe just a few. In any case it was an uncommon July afternoon.”

Alberta came up to me and leaned over me, and I caught sight of the outline of the most beautiful breasts — I was just about to think, the most beautiful breasts in the Warsaw Pact, but the world had changed and I was now looking at the most beautiful breasts in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the most beautiful breasts in the European Union, or rather the most beautiful breasts in the candidate countries in line for membership of the European Union. Alberta leaned over me, placed her hand on my forehead and said, almost in a whisper:

“You can’t possibly have been gone for so long. It’s winter now. Snow is falling, there’s a frost. Christmas is around the corner.”

Chapter 12. All the Washing Machines in the World

THE ETERNALLY POSTPONED notion of repairing my old washing machine or buying a new one eventually perished of its own accord, to a large extent independently of my foibles. In my life I’ve drunk away a vast amount of money, I’ve spent a fortune on vodka, but the reprehensible moment of drinking away a sum set aside for the repair of my washing machine has never occurred. I make this confession not with pride in my heart but with a sense of abasement. For the fact that I never drank away a sum of money set aside for the repair of my washing machine arises from the fact that I never set aside any sum of money for the repair of my washing machine in the first place. Before I ever managed to set aside a particular sum for the repair of the washing machine, I drank it away along with all the other sums of money not yet set aside for any special purpose. I drank away the money before I’d had time to set it aside for something else; therefore I can say, seemingly contradicting myself (yet only seemingly, for in the former case there was only a small quantifier, while in this case there is a large one), I can say then that in fact I did drink away the money for the repair of the washing machine. I drank away the money for a whole series of repairs, I drank away the money for all possible repairs. What am I saying, repairs? I drank away the money for an entire new washing machine, I drank away a whole series of new washing machines, I drank away a thousand new washing machines, I drank away a million new automatic washing machines, I drank away a billion state-of-the-art washing machines. I drank away all the washing machines in the world.

What kind of soul does a man have when he knows he has drunk away all the washing machines in the world? My answer is this: He has a winged soul, and his mind spins like the rotating drum in the final stages of the spin cycle. When you sense upon your heart the burden of a thousand drunk-away washing machines, it is unbearable. But when you lift your tormented gaze and see flocks of white-winged washing machines soaring across the watery heavens like squadrons of papal helicopters, you understand that you have been given more than others. You have been given an uncommon gift, and if you manage to survive, if you do not perish beforehand, you can begin a voyage in search of all the lost washing machines, and even — yes indeed — in search of all lost objects in general.

The gates of worldliness may open wide before you, yet if they do you must pay special attention, you must concentrate hard, because the gates of worldliness may open for good. They will not slam shut behind you, but if you are weak, if your step is unsteady and if sleep is upon you, you will be neither willing nor able to return. Often, after the hundredth drunk-away washing machine, or in the case of frailer individuals even the tenth, one loses for good one’s interest and pleasure in worldly matters. And things of the mind that have been completely freed from the bonds of worldliness are nothing but pure graphomania. Drinking away all the washing machines in the world leads inexorably to a complete neglect of worldliness; in writing, a complete neglect of worldliness leads to graphomania, and so anyone who writes and drinks is in a tough situation. I drank and I did not neglect writing, and now, with a drunkard’s tear in my eye, I am writing about a washing machine that has been neglected through drink. Oh, if I had found within myself not so much a curiosity about the worldly fault in its workings, but if I had simply found a free moment, a moment of free will, then naturally I would have had the appropriate person repair the washing machine. But I found within myself neither the one thing nor the other. Neither our, nor daily, nor bread, nor amen. My first wife eventually got used to the permanently unrepaired washing machine and stopped nagging me, and she left me without nagging. My second wife left before she had gotten used to it and before she started to nag.

Chapter 13. Passages

They drank on Thursday too. And how! And now he was shouting day and night, and he had gone hoarse; now he was dying.

— Yuri Tynyanov

After first fortifying myself amply, very amply, I started to assemble all my belongings on the roof of the shack, where I could reach them: first my briefcase, then one bottle after another: a Saxon rye, then four unopened Black Forest slivovitzes and one opened one, all carefully placed in a row at the edge of the roof.

— Hans Fallada

The man is killing time — there’s nothing else.

No help now from the fifth of Bourbon

chucked helter-skelter into the river.

— Robert Lowell

“Brandy?” Danny cried. “Thou hast brandy? Perhaps it is for some sick old mother,” he said naïvely. “Perhaps thou keepest it for Our Lord Jesus when He comes again. Who am I, thy friend, to judge the destination of this brandy?”

— John Steinbeck

Do you know, do you know, my good sir, that I even drank away her stockings?

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

Do I not have feelings? Of course I do. The more I drink, the more I feel. That’s exactly why I drink — in drink I’m seeking compassion and sympathy. I’m not looking for joy, only for pain. . I drink because I want to suffer more intensely!

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

God neither wants nor does not want the sins that actually happen; He merely permits them.

— Gottfried Wilhem Leibnitz

And that was how I spent the whole night, drinking and vomiting in turn.

— Hans Fallada

He enters the church; his lips move in something resembling a prayer. Inside it’s cool; on the walls are pictures of the stations of the cross. No one seems to be looking. He especially likes to drink in churches.

— Malcolm Lowry

But there were also topers who, sensing an excess of drink within themselves, and unwilling to give up when the merriment continued after dinner, would go behind the house, deliberately make themselves vomit, then return to the company and start drinking all over again.

— Jędrzej Kitowicz

Don’t you find it a little tiresome living with a drunk? You haven’t seen the worst yet. I knock everything over. I puke the whole time. It’s a miracle I’ve felt so good these last few days. You’re like an antidote that’s mixed with the alcohol to maintain my equilibrium; but it won’t last forever.

— John O’Brien

And He will pass sentence on everyone justly, and He will forgive the good and the evil, the arrogant and the humble. . And when He is done with everyone, then He will say unto us too: “You too come hither,” he will say. “Come, all you thoroughly drunk ones! Come, you weak, weak ones! Come, you disgraced ones!” And we will all come without shame and stand before Him. And He will say: “You are swine! In the image and likeness of beasts! But come to me, you too!”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

Only a second-rate mind is unable to choose between literature and a true night of the soul.

— E. M. Cioran

Yet I cannot comprehend how someone was able to extend the pleasure of drinking beyond his thirst, and create in his imagination as it were an artificial and unnatural appetite.

— Michel de Montaigne

Lord, grant all us drunkards such a gentle and beautiful death.

— Joseph Roth

“I think I feel like a drink.”

“Almost everyone feels like a drink, it’s just they don’t know it.”

— Charles Bukowski

I was terrified and drank more than ever. I was attempting my first novel. I drank a pint of whiskey and two six packs of beer each night while writing. I smoked cheap cigars and typed and drank and listened to classical music on the radio until dawn. I set a goal of ten pages a night but I never knew until the next day how many pages I had written. I’d get up in the morning, vomit, then walk to the front room and look on the couch to see how many pages there were. I always exceeded my ten.

— Charles Bukowski

And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write. .

— Revelation

This shaking keeps me steady.

— Theodore Roethke

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud. .

— Revelation

Hard drink is the gateway to all immorality:

To quarrels and insults, to stealing, vulgarity,

And other things too; for the drunken man’s sin

Is the devil within.

— Song Against Drunkenness

(from Heczka’s hymnal, no. 443)

Why don’t you sing us that little drunken aria?

— (from Samuel B. Linde’s dictionary)

As a biologist, as a social thinker concerned with power and world projects, the molding of a universal order, as a furnisher of interpretation and opinion to the educated masses — as all of these he appeared to need a great amount of copulation.

— Saul Bellow

Vodka’s a strange thing. It’s a fiendishly sharp drink, a mysterious concoction of herbs, which has some peculiar relation to the stars.

— Herman Broch

We walked side by side down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and in front of the window of the anti-alcohol league, which as usual contained a display of desiccated brains, I said:

“At this point, of course, it’s best to cross to the other side.”

— Philippe Soupault

A real man is one who desires repetition.

— Søren Kierkegaard

At sixteen, while still at school, I began to visit more regularly than before a pleasantly informal bawdy house; after sampling all seven girls, I concentrated my attention on roly-poly Polymnia, with whom I used to drink lots of foamy beer at a wet table in an orchard — I simply adore orchards.

— Vladimir Nabokov

My soul is among lions. .

— Psalm 57

Vats of porter wonderful. Rats get in too. Drink themselves bloated as big as a collie floating. Dead drunk on the porter. Drink till they puke again like christians.

— James Joyce

While I was in the helicopter whopping over Manhattan, viewing New York as if I were passing in a glass-bottomed boat over a tropical reef, Humboldt was probably groping among his bottles for a drop of juice to mix with his morning gin.

— Saul Bellow

Life is possible only as a result of discontinuities.

— E. M. Cioran

My Lord, I loved strawberry jam

And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body.

Also well-chilled vodka.

— Czesław Miłosz

If it weren’t for the thought of suicide, I’d have killed myself long ago.

— E. M. Cioran

They that sit in the gate speak against me; and I was the song of the drunkards.

— Psalm 69

Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known.

— Psalm 77

And now help me decide: what should I drink?

— Venedikt Erofeev

Chapter 14. The Poems of Alberta

LOVELY, LOVELY AS a dream were the poems of Alberta. Light, or perhaps shadow, a ray of light, or the shadow of a child, a mysterious and unclear little soul moved through those poems from line to line. It abided in the old homestead, and in a husky soprano it sang a song for all the objects and furnishings that had ever belonged there. Alberta recited a poem about a tin kettle on the stove top that had once been used to boil water; she recited a poem about the water of yesteryear, about the stove top itself, about the candle on the Christmas table; she recited a beautiful love poem about the woolen cap of a boy who passed beneath her window every day on his way to school.

How long it lasted I couldn’t say; how long Alberta’s recitation went on I couldn’t really say; it was shorter rather than longer and I’m pretty sure that during this time I did not lapse into a shorter or longer admiration-filled nap. In any case she recited her poems standing in the center of the room as if in the center of a stage, and everything suggested then and suggests now that it ought to have been ridiculous, whereas in fact it was not only not ridiculous, it made the experience even more affecting. I listened to the poems of Alberta as she stood there on the linoleum like a statue, and I felt I was reclining on a cloud.

Afterwards she sat on the edge of the cloud, which had now gone back to being the alluring edge of the mattress, and she placed her warm hand on my icy-cold hand, and she asked me the question I had heard a thousand times before, she asked me the question I have been asked by thousands, millions of people, she asked me the question I’ve been asked by Europeans, Asians, Americans, Africans, Australians, and possibly even Eskimos, she asked me the question that at this point only the Lord God may never have asked me.

“Why do you drink?” asked Alberta.

“Alberta,” I replied, choking up, “if I’d met you twenty years ago I wouldn’t drink at all.”

“First of all, twenty years ago I was four years old and if you’d actually met me then, then you’d really have knocked it back, you’d have knocked it back two times or a hundred times more,” she responded. “But call me Ala, I prefer it. Why do you drink?” she repeated.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I don’t know, or rather, I know a thousand answers. None of them is entirely true and each of them contains a grain of truth. But nor can it be said that together they comprise some single whole great truth. I drink because I drink. I drink because I like to. I drink because I’m afraid. I drink because I’m genetically predisposed to. All my progenitors drank. My great-grandparents and grandparents drank, my father drank and my mother drank. I have no sisters or brothers, but I’m certain that if I did, all my sisters would drink and all my brothers would drink too. I drink because I have a weak character. I drink because there’s something wrong with my head. I drink because I’m too quiet and I’m trying to be more lively. I drink because I’m the nervous type and I’m trying to calm my nerves. I drink because I’m sad and I’m trying to raise my spirits. I drink when I’m happily in love. I drink because I’m searching for love in vain. I drink because I’m too normal and I need a little craziness. I drink when I’m in pain and I need to ease the pain. I drink out of longing for someone. I drink from an excess of fulfillment when I’m with someone. I drink when I listen to Mozart and when I read Leibnitz. I drink out of sensual pleasure and I drink out of sexual hunger. I drink when I finish my first glass and I drink when I finish my last glass; at such times I drink all the more, because I’ve never yet drunk my last glass.”

“Listen,” said Ala-Alberta with visible impatience, “are there any moments at all when you don’t drink?”

“I guess I don’t drink when I’m so terribly drunk that I don’t have the strength to drink, though truth be told, I always find the strength to continue drinking; or I don’t drink when I’m having a terrible drunken dream, though who knows, maybe at those times I drink too. I guess I drink both asleep and awake.”

“Maybe you should just get treatment. I mean, the doctors could help you, they’d help you to find the answer. Maybe you should go see someone who knows more about these things.”

“I do see doctors. Dr. Granada is like a father to me. Eighteen times I’ve been on the alco ward and listened to the reasons why my brothers in addiction drank. They all drank for the same reasons, though sometimes for different ones too. They drank because their father was too hard on them, and they drank because their mother was too soft on them. They drank because everyone around them was drinking. They drank because they came from families of drunkards, and they drank because they came from families whose lips had not touched a drop in generations. They drank because Poland was under the Muscovite yoke, and they drank out of euphoria when it was liberated. They drank because a Polish man became Pope, and they drank because a Polish man won the Nobel Prize, and they drank because a Polish woman won the Nobel Prize. They drank the health of the interned, and with their drinking they honored the memory of the murdered. They drank when they were alone and they drank whenever anyone appeared next to them. They drank when the Polish team won, and they drank when the Polish team lost. And Dr. Granada would listen to all these answers with superhuman patience, shake his head, and say what I said at the beginning: ‘You drink because you drink.’”

“Snap out of it, wake up.” Maybe Alberta was speaking in a general sense, or maybe in a specific sense, or maybe, in the course of the long sleep I had been immersed in for years, I had additionally dozed off. Alberta was shaking my arm gently: “Wake up.”

“Why should I wake up when in the waking world things are even worse? The waking world is one immense reason to drink.”

“If you drink when you’re asleep and also when you’re awake, then actually you’ve no idea what the waking world is like.”

“Look, if I’d been sober back on that July afternoon I never would have spotted you by the ATM, I never would have thought that you are wise and beautiful, it never would have occurred to me that you’re the greatest love of my life, I never would have run after you, I never would have experienced such ecstasy. .”

I was unable to go on, because I was filled with emotion. Seeing that my eyes were glazing over and I was about to break down in tears, Alberta poured a dose that in her view was the right amount, and in mine was insufficient. But I didn’t insist on being topped up, the missing amount being in any case minimal, because I could see she was doing it out of the goodness of her heart, and out of obedience to the gangsters who had brought her here, but also because she wanted to keep on talking with me.

“Fine,” she said, “you experienced a fiery ecstasy, in connection with me furthermore, which is always agreeable for a woman. But tell me, how did it end? Tell me, if you remember that is.”

“It ended on the alco ward,” I said after a moment of inevitable silence.

“Exactly. In my view fiery ecstasies that end on the alco ward aren’t worth very much. Truth be told, they’re not worth shit. You have to get out of it.”

“The thing is, Ala, do you know what the alcos talk about the whole time on the alco ward? Do you know the principal subject of their most serious conversations?”

“You said yourself a moment ago that they’re constantly talking about drinking and their reasons for drinking.”

“That too, of course, they speak constantly about how they drank and why they drank; but their first topic of conversation is getting out. They deliver lengthy treatises on the art of getting out. They’re constantly going on about getting out. They’re constantly asking: When will we get out of here? I wonder when they’ll let us out? I wonder when a person will get out? In a month, or maybe two? Maybe tomorrow? Tomorrow no, because tomorrow is Sunday, and on Sunday there are no discharges. But Monday for sure. On Monday for sure we’ll get out.”

Alberta looked at me with the kind of tenderness with which a woman looks at a man who is by nature more foolish than she is.

“I’m not talking about getting out of the hospital, I’m talking about getting out of the addiction.”

“Let me tell you, Ala: only the naïve think that there are different kinds of getting out. The wise and the experienced know: every kind of getting out is the same.”

“Wise and experienced drunkards, maybe.”

“I’m tempted to reply that there are no wiser or more experienced people than wise and experienced drunkards, but that would be a typical drunken aphorism, and of late I’ve been avoiding drunken aphorisms. You get out of the hospital, in other words you get out of your illness, and re-enter the world, which itself is one big illness. Do you see?”

The room was slowly growing darker; evening was evidently coming, though it may equally have been morning that was slowly coming, it may have been entirely dark for a long time, and it may just have seemed to me that it was only now getting darker. I had no idea what time of day it was, and I was embarrassed to ask. I remembered a story the Hero of Socialist Labor told about losing track of time, one of a hundred thousand drunken parables about losing track of time.

The Hero of Socialist Labor started work at the Sendzimir (formerly Lenin) Steel Mill at six in the morning. The incident he was recounting, that is to say, his great drinking bout, took place in the winter, when, as is common knowledge, at six in the morning and six in the evening it is equally dark. The Hero of Socialist Labor woke up in the dark; it was half past five. With all the usual drunken melodrama he realized he would barely make it to work. Fortunately he still had something left in the bottle; he knocked back a restorative hair of the dog, and on the way to the bus stop he went in to the store and drank a beer as well. He was a little surprised at the store being open at such an early hour, since it usually opened at seven, but there it was, open before six. . Then at the bus stop something was wrong too, the people waiting were not the usual ones, and on top of that they were too numerous and animated for an early winter’s morning. . A terrible suspicion finally formed in the Hero of Socialist Labor’s heart, but he was embarrassed to ask anyone; he began to search the crowd for a fellow tribesperson, which, incidentally, did not take long. In the appropriate place, right on the curb, there was a person swaying on his feet in the appropriate manner. His swaying was extremely appropriate, it was in fact slight and barely perceptible; this person, though he was swaying on his feet, was also sure to know what time of day it was. The Hero of Socialist Labor went up to him and asked:

“Excuse me, it’s coming up for six, but is that six in the morning or six in the evening?”

“Six noon,” replied the other man, and it’s for the beauty of that reply I tell the story, not for the time mix-up, which is obvious from the beginning.

In any case, the room was dark and it was probably evening after all. Alberta stood up, turned on the desk lamp, and came back to me.

“I don’t think that’s particularly hard to understand either.” At this point I had no idea what Alberta was saying, I had completely forgotten what we’d been speaking about a moment before. In the light of the lamp her yellow dress and her arms seemed to have taken on a moonlit glow.

“I don’t think that’s particularly hard to understand either,” she repeated, as if knowing that I needed a repetition. “Those people, your dire comrades in arms, shouldn’t talk about getting out, they shouldn’t look forward so desperately to getting out. They should sit there or lie there patiently and stay put till they’re cured.”

“Ala,” I replied, the way Dr. Granada would have said it, “Ala, you have the mind of a child. It’s true they shouldn’t be talking about getting out, because they shouldn’t ever get out. I don’t mean the alco ward should be some kind of life sentence, though it’s also true that life in general is a life sentence. I simply mean that for alcos the alco ward is the right place. Let me tell you in confidence, Ala: I’ve often felt I could live there forever. My comrades in arms are constantly telling war stories, there’s always talk of greater or lesser but always interesting adventures, the meals are regular and reasonably nutritious, the lack of radio, television, and games encourages juvenile but inspirational stratagems, the dominant mood there is a stifling melancholy, reflection decidedly prevails over any kind of activity — in a word, it’s an ideal atmosphere for an intellectual. .”

“Dear, dear Lord, how awfully ill you are. You’re saying unbelievable things. Are you in some kind of permanent delirium or something? Did you really — when you saw me that time at the ATM, if you actually saw me there, and if it really was me — did you actually run after me, or did you just think you did?”

“What about now,” I asked; my voice was once again quavering and unsure, as if the fortifying Becherovka was not yet running through my veins—“are you here now? Are you sitting next to me?”

“Yes, now I’m here, I’m sitting here and talking to you.”

“I love you, Ala,” I said, “I love you like I’ve never loved anyone else before.”

“You know what, sweetheart?” Ala chucked me under the chin and may even have stroked my cheek under its covering of drunken stubble. “You know what, my sweetest one, I know you’re deliriously drunk, I know you’re seeing things, I know that your head is all messed up, but setting all that aside, out of pure curiosity let me ask: how many women have you already said that to? How many times, you bastard, have you repeated your famous: ‘I love you more than life itself’?”

“I’ve only ever said it to you, that is, I’ve only said it to you in such a true and such an intense way. I may happen to have uttered similar or even identical phrases before, but that was just cynical rhetoric. I feigned love, like any male who’s hungry for copulation.”

“And they believed you? Did any one of them actually believe you? Who were these women? What kind of gullible idiots were they? Was every girl you met a pervert turned on by the smell of badly digested Żołądkowa Gorzka, or what?”

“Do you want to know the truth?”

“Yes, I do.”

“All right, but you should be aware that if I tell you the truth you may be put off me. . You may even be physically repulsed by me,” I added playfully.

“I have the feeling that so far I’m not especially enthralled by your quaking person. Of course, I liked the fact that you seemed enchanted by my poems, but even that may just have been drunken euphoria.”

“Let me ask you again: do you want to know the truth?”

“Yes, I do.”

“The truth?”

“Not only have I never met such an inveterate drunkard as you, I’ve also never met such a tiresome one.”

“Then listen, Ala-Alberta, to my shamefully true confession: my women ran individual drying-out facilities just for me. I treated my women like the managers of my own personal detox units. As a drunkard, I had a private network of drying-out facilities that were run by my successive or concurrent girlfriends. Whenever I needed to I’d call up and go there, and if I was in no state to do so alone, they’d come for me and take my corpse back to their place, and minister to it solicitously.

“The Seductive Movie Star ran a private drying-out facility for me, the Uruguayan Center Forward always had a fancy convalescent home for my exclusive use, and Joanna Scourge of the Asylum kept a similar institution for me, and Barb the Broker waited for me with a permanently available bed, and vitamins, and juice, and even an IV drip, and the Utterly Irresponsible Minx was also the director of my personal, extremely respectable detoxification center; I list only the most important names, for there was also a considerable number of short-lived temporary helpers.

“I also had she-angels who would fly down to me, or rather to my by now absolutely immovable cadaver, and would transform the room in which we presently find ourselves into an intensive care unit. It goes without saying that these unfortunate women possessed differing kinds of resources, from the sophisticated equipment, up-to-date medications, and practically unlimited financial reserves available to Barb the Broker, to the complete disorganization and lack of qualifications that marked Joanna Catastrophe, whom I have not yet mentioned in this regard.”

“You know what,” said Alberta, interrupting me just in time, “I’m wondering what is more terrible: the fact that you’re incapable of living normally, or the fact that you’re incapable of talking normally. I mean, your tongue is swollen from the booze and your throat is sore. You’re talking in this stilted way. Where did all those names come from? Talk normally, start to live normally why don’t you.”

“Where and when and by whom was it said”—a venomous note appeared in my voice and intensified—“where and when and by whom was it said, where and when and by whom was it written that I’m supposed to lead a normal life?”

“What sort of life are you supposed to lead? An abnormal one? An exceptional one? A brilliant one? A sick one?”

“Ala, I’m supposed to lead an exceptionally unhappy life.”

“Get a grip on yourself and start to live in moderation but happily.”

“In moderation but happily? That in itself is a contradiction in terms.”

“It’s not a contradiction in terms. When you understand that you’ll stop drinking.”

“Alberta-Ala, Alberta Lulaj, author of captivating poems, at first I thought you were the greatest love of my life, all the greater and more tragic because you disappeared for good round the corner of Jana Pawła and Pańska; then I thought you were a member of a band of mysterious gangsters, then, that you were an unworldly apparition; then during our conversation I thought you were the person closest to me in the whole world; but now I see you’re just the most ordinary inquisitive she-therapist, yes, you’re a she-wolf therapist, a chick therapist. .”

She looked at me a while in profound sorrow and said:

“I refuse to let you help in any way to get my poems published. I’ll manage on my own. I have an absolute inner certainty that I’ll manage on my own. And you, you poor wretch, all you need to do is have another drink.”

And Alberta poured me a full glass, and I knocked it back instantly in a single draft, because by now I was able to drink in single drafts again. I needed it. I was so infinitely empty and hollow that only infinite nothingness was capable of filling me up.

Chapter 15. Pale Blue Weasels

AFTER I HAD FILLED the bath with hot water, after I had put in the laundry and added an over-generous quantity of Omo-Color washing powder I would tidy up the newspapers. They would be lying around all over the place and the disorder they created, though superficial, was visually devastating. When in the course of a drinking bout I set off early in the morning for a new bottle, or two or three new bottles, or for a dozen new cans of beer, on the way I would always buy a considerable number of newspapers. When I was drunk or hung over, especially when the hangover had been mitigated by the first early morning shot, I bought considerably more newspapers than ordinarily. (Actually, I ought to say: than extraordinarily, since ordinarily I was extraordinarily drunk, while I was sober extraordinarily rarely — once again the seductive beast of drunken rhetoric raises its head. Drinking is ghastly; writing about drinking is ghastly; drinking, writing, and battling with the beast of drunken rhetoric is ghastly, ghastly, ghastly.) I would buy every newspaper that appeared on a given day, I would buy tabloids filled with sordid special offers, I would buy weeklies, illustrated magazines, women’s journals (especially those devoted to fashion, makeup, and pressing questions of skin care), I would buy monthlies and literary quarterlies, and even certain specialist publications. Depending on my mood I would select a periodical devoted to hunting, or medicine, or astronomy. Then for several hours, till I completely lost consciousness, I would lie on the couch and peruse the press. Those were unforgettable moments of homeostasis between one loss of consciousness and the next. My mind was clear, my thinking quick, and I read everything from cover to cover. I read domestic and international wire reports, I read introductory articles and political commentaries. I studied financial tables indicating that Poland was the economic tiger of Eastern Europe, I examined sports tables indicating that Poland could defeat any opponent, I immersed myself in religious sections indicating that Poland could bring redemption for everyone. With helpless obstinacy I gazed at photographs of beautiful high school girls whose phenomenally slender arms stirred in me an obscure sense of unease, and in order to quell that unease at least a little I would drink a little, I would take one small sip.

Now. . Now — meaning when? After drinking the first half-liter that steadies a person, or after drinking the second half-liter that gives him wings? Now? After a feigned sobering-up? Now after getting out? after going in? after going down? Now — after three weeks, or maybe six, after forty or maybe one hundred and forty days.

Now, after returning from the alco ward, I would not remember a single one of the articles I read during the moments of homeostasis (between one loss of consciousness and the next); only occasionally would some vivid magazine cover, some photograph of a captivating anorexic in a denim dress seem vaguely familiar, as if I had seen it in a dream, or in a previous life.

Piles of faded newspapers would be lying everywhere, covered with a gritty dust. I would tidy them methodically, carefully forming bundles of the appropriate size, which I then took out to the trash chute. I might have said that I was removing the traces of my drunken excesses, that I was simply cleaning up my apartment, that I was getting rid of anything that recalled my drunken abasement, that I was wiping everything I could from my already sufficiently unreadable memory. I might have said this, but it would not have been the truth; in the language of drunkards even the simplest expression, for example “cleaning up the apartment,” can prove to be bombastic and duplicitous rhetoric. I was cleaning up the apartment, but I was not certain of what I was doing, I was not certain of where I was, I did not know what had happened to my home, if in fact it was my home.

After six weeks I would leave the alco ward, I would take a cab, I would enter and leave the pub called “The Mighty Angel,” I would enter and leave the store, take the elevator, open the door, and for the longest time I would stand dumbstruck on the threshold. Who had been here during my absence? Who on earth had been staying in the place while the owner was away? Who had been twisting and turning in fearful agonies in my bedding? Who had sweated urine-colored perspiration? Who had left a filthy bed sheet behind? Who had been reading The Magic Mountain and gotten to page 27, since it was lying open at that page on the floor? What speckled rats, what pale blue weasels must have made their nest here? Who had been reading newspapers? Who had been smoking cigarettes and leaving piles of butts all over? Who had slept in the armchair? Who had thrown towels on the bathroom floor? Who had left a tiger-striped headband in the hallway? What individuals, what ghosts had been at large? That’s right, rats and weasels must have made their nests here, and during their nocturnal tangles and hunting trips they must have upset everything and scattered it all from one corner to the other.

And where did the stifling atmosphere of debauchery come from, and the body lotion, and the lone hair on the pillow, and all the objects that had been moved from place to place by a woman’s hand? Often, as I lay in my damp bedding, I had had the impression that shades were moving around the empty rooms. Shades of skinny high school girls and shades of my ex-wives were leaning over me, seduced teenagers were opening the windows, novice nuns were making a hearty soup in the kitchen, sisters of mercy were holding up my forehead and uttering gentle words of succor as I engaged in the pious labor of puking my guts out. Women photographers, beautiful as a dream, were taking my picture, ambitious women reporters conducted in-depth interviews with me, and it was among them that I’d find my last love before death. I would stretch out my hands and encounter darkness. Someone was walking around the room, someone was lying in my bed and howling, howling in a lifeless voice.

I pressed the bottle to not-my mouth; at first the vodka wouldn’t flow, then it flowed, it flowed in a burning, sulfurous stream through parched lips and down the throat. It whirled in its fieriness, it murmured like a creek suddenly swelling after midsummer rains. The clear surface of the liquid was like a scalpel; it flowed through the innards and cut them open, and the stream of molten lava crossed a dead land, searching for a secret place, searching for the bay of tranquility.

•

Somewhere in my innards, between diaphragm, heart, and lungs, between the respiratory system and the circulatory system, between the lungs and the spinal column, there was a negative chakra, an anatomical hole, an inter-muscular or perhaps intercostal cavity shaped like a spindle and half a liter in capacity. I was like one of those heavy old Kalwaria wardrobes with a secret compartment; I would take the key, which was as silver as the screw top of a bottle, open the dark little door inside myself, and beneath my wooden heart I would place a half liter of Żołądkowa Gorzka. My heart would begin to pump blood and my lungs would fill with oxygen; daybreak would come, the dense fog would lift from the bay of tranquility, I would be light as a cloud and happy as a cured man, I would take one more well-calculated sip, rest my head on the pillow, and allow my gaze to stray idly across the ceiling. And my gaze would pass through the ceiling, and it would pass through all the ceilings above my ceiling, and through the roof of the building, and it would pass through the dark sky over Kraków or Warsaw, and it would traverse the stratum of low clouds and the stratum of high clouds, and it would pass through the light blue sky and the dark blue sky, and it would reach the black regions, and, in a firmament as black as Smirnoff Black or as Johnny Walker Black Label, I would see the constellations. Once again I would see the comet over Czantoria Mountain and once again I would see the constellation of the Mighty Angel.

Heavenly father of mine and drunken father of mine, and drunken father of my drunken father, and all my drunken forefathers, and all my drunken ancestors, and also all those unrelated fatalists who have seen and who know where the constellation of the Mighty Angel is located, all of you who were born and who died in its blue-and-gold glow — accept my greeting.

You would be standing by me, barely able to keep on your feet, yet, true to your pedagogical and parental mission, you’d be standing by me. There was Grandma Maria, the owner of the slaughterhouse; there was Granddad Jerzy, the postmaster; and there was Granddad Kubica, a big farm-owner; and my father, an ever-so-young soldier in the Wehrmacht; and my mother, a pharmacology student; and there was Doctor Swobodziczka. You were all standing by me and with trembling hands and shaking fingers you would point out the constellations and the stars: the North Star, the Plow and the Great Bear, and Berenice’s Hair, and Andromeda, and the Pleiades, and the trail of the Milky Way. The river roared, the trees soughed, the mountains stood as they have always stood, unmoved by your words or your breath, and over everything, the length and breadth of it all, was the constellation of the Mighty Angel. In the darkness I could clearly see all the stars that comprised it: Seven stars made up its swaying body, three its raised head, four its tipped-back hat; five bright stars showed its raised arm, nine indicated its wings, and ten stars, fiery as orange-flavored vodka, formed the bottle pressed to its thirsty lips, which were marked by a single dark, dark star. Beneath its feet were the Centaur, the Water Snake, and the Scales; at its right hand were the Lion, the Herdsman, and the Virgin; at its left was the Lyre; and above it was darkness.

Chapter 16. Pastorale

WE WERE SITTING at the table with the suicides, and the nurses weren’t letting us out of their sight. Simon Pure Goodness was recounting for the hundredth time his fever of the previous year, during which a sleigh had been ridden through the air by the Angel Gabriel, or possibly by God himself. The paper tablecloths rustled as if starched, the candles shone, the suicides were beautiful and lost in thought, but they had come to the Christmas Eve dinner empty-handed, my Lord, and we didn’t forget that. We were sitting at the table: me, Don Juan the Rib, Fanny Kapelmeister, the Queen of Kent, Simon Pure Goodness, Christopher Columbus the Explorer, and the other less determinate characters, which is to say the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, the scornful Sugar King, the venerable Hero of Socialist Labor, and the suicides. The nurses weren’t letting us out of their sight, and since all of them had already wetted their Christmas whistle they kept a close watch, staring at us with the well-known intensity of the drunkard.

Long ago, in Old Poland, before the Berlin Wall came down, when there was no segregation into alcos, schizophrenics, and suicides — many years ago, when I was rising from the dead here for the first or third time — what a to-do there would be when one of the suicides would go missing, when one of them would get lost in the labyrinth of hallways, which were built all the way back in the time of Tsar Nicholas or the Emperor Franz Joseph! The male and female nurses, the doctors, the orderlies, the auxiliaries, the ambulance drivers — they all went looking for him — even the kitchen staff would climb the wooden ladder into the attic! Everyone knew he was most likely up there, hanging from a rafter, or bleeding to death in the small room behind the laundry, having slit his wrists with a piece of glass. But that never happened. The missing suicide was quickly found; he was usually standing motionless by the last window at the end of the hallway, gazing through the untouched, half-transparent pane at a snow-covered field, at the brick walls of the Austrian or Russian barracks, at the dense smoke rising from the burning pajamas of the insane or from the furnaces of the Lenin Steel Mill. From that time on I had a soft spot for suicides; I liked them for the gravity with which they stared at the grass, a fragment of wall, a dark cloud.

They came to the Christmas Eve dinner with empty hands, in pajamas and dressing gowns; every second one of them had bandaged wrists. The nurses from the suicide ward who brought them here were beautiful, dark-complexioned, and tense as devils. They evidently believed it was easier to watch over a fragment of wall or grass or sky as it vanished from the mind, without moving from where one is — which, let it be said openly, is a classic delusion of the young.

They came with empty hands, but we were ready with hospitality. The little tables in the rec room had been arranged into one single long table; if their laminated tops hadn’t been as hard as granite they would have sagged under the weight of the food. First of all there was barszcz with potatoes, then breaded cod, then Chinese instant soups of various kinds, different sorts of cheese, six different kinds at the very least, pickled cucumbers, any amount of pretzel sticks, potato chips, four cans of sardines, two jars of rollmops, oranges, tangerines, apples, bread rolls, yeast buns, and a box of candies — whatever anyone happened to have, whatever anyone had been given, whatever could be bought at the little store on the first floor. Dr. Granada had already shared the traditional Christmas wafer with us earlier in the afternoon; he had wished each of us good health and all the best, then he’d thrown his everlasting sheepskin round his shoulders, climbed into his Ford Sierra, and set off for some part of the world that was uncertain, quite unnecessary and, from our point of view, in all probability non-existent. Good health and best wishes, we repeated now with childlike seriousness; the suicides weren’t even able to say good health and best wishes, but merely returned the softest of handshakes, while the barely perceptible shadow of a smile passed over their romantic countenances. We ate in silence; the meal took its course without elaborate orations and without animated conversation. Only the Sugar King, who was wearing a garish emerald-green track suit, retained his usual pathetic nonchalance; he was crumbling his third packet of Chinese soup into his bowl and dissolving the dry powder, with a kind of villainous dexterity, in boiling water from a kettle as huge as a nightstand.

“Soup is the most important thing,” the Sugar King was saying, “soup is the foundation. Well-prepared soup is an absolutely crucial matter. The soup makes the home, you might say. In my home, I’m telling you, in my home there were four different kinds of soup for Christmas Eve dinner. That’s right,” he would repeat exultingly, “four different kinds: clear barszcz, barszcz with dumplings, mushroom soup, and żurek. And of course, on top of that there was carp, pike in jelly, bigos, kutia . .”

Our heads and our entire selves drooped lower and lower; the Queen of Kent’s gray hair was touching the paper tablecloth, Christopher Columbus the Explorer took out his French translation of the New Testament and began thumbing through it, two more nurses left and two more returned from the nurses’ station. Those ever more angelic angels of ours kept going there and coming back the whole time, as if overcome by a mysterious urge to constantly be stretching their legs. Only the suicides remained impassive, sitting up straight like an Olympic team composing themselves before the game.

“Talk about dull,” groaned the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World.

The delivery of inappropriate monologues was, as it happened, the speciality of the Sugar King, in civilian life a wealthy entrepreneur; in every situation he managed to say something improper. More: Unaware of his own desperation, he would plow ahead and develop dangerous theses, and when he finally checked himself, realizing the extent of the faux pas he had committed, the worst would come: that burly sixty-year-old in the emerald-green track suit would burst into terrible tears of embarrassment, and often it was the longest time before he could be consoled. Now the tears came quickly. The inappropriate monologue had not even managed to attain the full extent of its inappropriateness when the emerald-clad shoulders began to quake. The Sugar King gave a cough and snorted like a wild boar; someone from a different world might have thought he was choking, but no, this was one of his tragic spasms, and the first teardrops fell into his third bowl of Chinese soup.

“Talk about dull,” repeated the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World; the mocking distaste in his voice contained a curious note of admiration.

“That’s not dull.” The Hero of Socialist Labor was the first to bring hurried consolation and to offer, with a greater or lesser level of superficiality, his approval of the Sugar King’s problematic speech. “That’s not dull, it’s simply concrete knowledge. Knowledge and experience. Take me, for instance”—the Hero of Socialist Labor performed a skillful imitation of vitality and of bliss flooding his entire being—“take me, for instance, whenever I would start drinking, first I’d make myself a big pot of soup, best of all cabbage soup. .”

“You’re lying, you’re lying for the other fellow’s sake.” This time, in the voice of the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World there could be heard a lazy yet unshakeable demur. “You’re a good person yourself and that’s why you’re lying, but you’re lying in a general sense. Either a person starts drinking or they make soup. Either-Or, as a certain philosopher used to say.”

“Was I intending to drink or was I not?” As frequently happens to good-natured people, the Hero of Socialist Labor was gripped by sudden rage. “Was the need for drink rising within me relentlessly, or was it not? Before that need rose to the point of irresistibility, did I made soup, or did I not? It may be that that was not always the case, but it was the case sufficiently often for me to know what a consolation it is to have a mouthful of cabbage soup, even cold. After all, hunger doesn’t come often and it doesn’t last long; many times a person doesn’t even know he’s hungry, he doesn’t know for instance that he wakes in the night, gets up, goes to the kitchen, opens the refrigerator, sometimes a person doesn’t even know that he takes out the pot, there’s lots of things a person doesn’t know, but the refreshing mouthful of ice-cold broth going down his throat can always be felt. And later too”—the Hero of Socialist Labor’s good humor had returned with neurotic rapidity—“and later too, when he’s recovering, the soup is indispensable also. Take me, for instance, when I’m recovering, my favorite part is replenishing my mineral salts. And what’s the best thing for replenishing mineral salts?”

The sound of music was heard. Don Juan the Rib had taken out his mouth organ and was playing the music from the Christmas carol Tiny Infant Jesus. The Hero of Socialist Labor continued speaking for a good time longer, in an ever quieter voice, accompanying the carol; he sang the praises of broths rich in mineral salts, the plaintive melody and the matter-of-fact parlando creating an extraordinary duet. If I had made the scene up I’d know how to describe it, but I was there, I saw it, I heard it, and thus I’m powerless. The simple music drifted across the rec room, past the nurses’ station and through all the rooms of the alco ward; snippets of lines passed through our sieve-like heads, Don Juan the Rib (in civilian life a hairdresser, and additionally a musician, as he used to say about himself) played one carol after another, and we with our ravaged brains were unable to sing, we couldn’t recall a single verse, not even the first one, tiny infant Jesus. “God is born, the powers quail,” played Don Juan the Rib, “the fire is stilled, the light must fail,” not another word. It may have been during this carol, or perhaps during “Wise men of this world and kings, whither do you hasten,” or perhaps during “On Christmas day is sweet elation Felt through all of God’s creation,” that Simon Pure Goodness began for the hundredth time to tell the story of his Christmas delirium of the previous year. That is just how it was, I’m not relying on my sieve-like memory, but on the hundred-page lined notebook in which the following day, Christmas Day (horrified by my own condition, horrified by the fact that I didn’t remember the best-known carols, not a single word), I began to write everything, literally everything, down on paper. I wrote the whole of Simon’s Christmas story; admittedly I didn’t write down exactly which carol was playing when he began to tell it (when it comes down to it that is of little significance; and I didn’t write it down because the next day I didn’t remember), but I did write down the way the men overlapped one another, as if in a child’s counting-out rhyme — before the first had finished talking the second began to play, and before the second had finished playing, the third started to tell his story.

•

On the evening of Christmas Eve the preceding year Simon Pure Goodness had awakened from an unexpectedly deep sleep. For years he had not slept deeply; the dream of a deep sleep is the greatest dream of every drunkard. “What I personally think,” said Simon, ruffling his straight blond hair and gazing at us with those permanently surprised vitreous blue eyes of his, “what I personally think is that delirium can be explained by sleeplessness, that it’s a function of sleeplessness. Because I mean, many a person’ll get royally sozzled, many a person will get sozzled like each of us in our prime, or even worse, and what happens? Nothing. He sleeps. He sleeps the sleep of a righteous drunkard, he sleeps twelve hours, twenty-four hours, he sleeps a whole day or two whole days. Three days and three nights he sleeps like a dead man, and in his sleep he burns up all his drunken badness. Whereas here you have a person without sleep, a sleepless person, he’s gotten sozzled as the Devil intended, and he doesn’t sleep at all or, what’s even worse, he wakes up after two or three hours of unprincipled sleep, paradoxical sleep, sleep that’s unconscious even though it’s shallow. You wake after two or three hours and you’re neither sober nor drunk, you can’t stand but you can’t lie down either, your trembling hand won’t reach for a nineteenth-century novel so you can calm yourself with a little harmonious reading, you’re not capable of reading, the light dazzles you and you’re afraid of the darkness, there is nothing, nothing all around you, it’s as if you were inside a spinning shell of nothingness, there’s no succor from anywhere, no salvation, nothing but your hand crawling like an ignoble reptile, like an iniquitous snake, in search of the bottle that’s placed oh so providently at your bedside, and you raise the bottle, and you drink with despair in your heart, because you know that only bad things will come to you. And you drink there in the nothingness, in the darkness, in solitude, you drink for a phony and transient sense of relief, because amid all these worst things, it seems to you that the least worst of all is another hour of unprincipled sleep.”

When Simon, then, woke from his unexpectedly deep sleep, he was amazed at what had happened, at how such a deep and such a calm sleep had been possible at such a time, when he was in such a condition? He rose, crossed to the window, and opened the window; it was a frosty Christmas night, with dawn not far away. The sky was composed of a billion evenly arranged bottles; a billion streams of clear Scandinavian vodka were pouring from a billion opened and at the same time forever full bottles, and a half-inch layer of alcohol covered everything: the moon, the stars, the snow; the universe smelled of clear Scandinavian vodka. The bottles clinked faintly; then there was a sleigh flying through the air like an airplane, and sitting in the sleigh, in a gold track suit, was God.

“Why am I unhappy?” asked Simon.

“That’s how things worked out,” replied God, “that’s how the accounts worked out. If you didn’t drink you’d be happy, but you wouldn’t understand much.”

“I don’t want to understand. I want my hands to stop shaking and my heart to stop palpitating.”

“Properly speaking it’s too late”—God tipped his gold baseball cap back on his head—“but if you wanted to, if you wanted to, then you could. The question of free will”—God gave a cough—“the question of free will has been analyzed from every angle to the point that my exegetes know me better than I know myself, though there’s nothing wrong with that, exegetes are supposed to know everything. I know everything, though I don’t know everything; for example I don’t know everything about my own subconscious, which is unmistakable proof that I have one. Does God have a subconscious? He does. He does, because he hasn’t the faintest idea about it; if he did, it wouldn’t be a subconscious. .” God broke off and grew visibly dispirited; his thoughts must have been exceedingly bitter. “At every step, at every step there are these exhausting paradoxes. . Yet things are simple, even the question of free will is simple.” God looked at Simon. “You don’t have to study it, there’s no need to read about it. Although”—God paused a moment—“although you might read Augustine one day when you’re a little less hung over than usual. . Really it’s too late, but if you wanted to then you could. The effort required is considerably less than you think; the thing is, you have to truly make that small effort and see it through to the end. When the urge takes you and you say to yourself, I need a drink, think to yourself that you don’t need it, tell yourself you don’t need it, and do this: don’t force yourself to drink. Because the fact that you ‘need a drink’ means that you drink out of need; avoid that need, force yourself to not-need. Don’t drink the next day. Just don’t drink the next day. Don’t drink the next day, either in the morning, or in the afternoon, or in the evening. You don’t need to. Don’t drink the next day and that’s all it takes. Catch you later”—God clicked his tongue and the sleigh moved slowly off—“catch you later. We, by the grace of ourselves, are off to other hotspots around the globe.”

This time Simon Pure Goodness (in civilian life a law student) told about an encounter with God, but in earlier variants of his story, the flying sleigh contained either the Angel Gabriel, or Santa Claus, or one of the wise men of this world and kings hastening to Bethlehem by this atypical means of transportation. Simon was not sure; it was only a year later, when he would go mad, when he would decide he was the incarnation of John the Baptist, don shabby small-town garb, and walk across Poland in the heat and rain and wind, announcing the Second Coming and the destruction, it would only be a year later that he would acquire absolute certainty that the sleigh contained the angel, the same Angel Gabriel who said to Zacharias: Your son shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost.

The heavenly visitor was disappearing in the icy distance, while through Simon there passed a gentle torrent of benevolent movement, a kindly stream of mild clouds. He could clearly sense within himself a great commotion, and for the first time it occurred to him that that which was inside him was holy. Even if I’m only hearing the murmur of my own blood, that too means I am chosen. But it was not the murmur of his blood, nor disagreeable swings in blood pressure; this was not a stiffening of the innards that heralded a collapse, nor an asthmatic attack, nor a fever, nor the shivers. The Divine Mill was slowly starting to turn in Simon’s heart, while he comprehended fully that labors now awaited him, that he would have to serve the heavenly windmills and angelic millstones that had appeared in the depths of his soul.

We were sitting at the table: myself, Don Juan the Rib, Fanny Kapelmeister, the Queen of Kent, Simon Pure Goodness, Columbus the Explorer, and the other less determinate characters. Don Juan the Rib, in civilian life a hairdresser, and, additionally, a musician, would die a few months later; I would attend his funeral. Simon Pure Goodness would go mad; the Queen of Kent’s ashen hair would in a short while turn completely to ash; Columbus the Explorer, in civilian life a professor of social sciences, would attempt to return to his former life, which no longer existed, in the hope that he might succeed.

That’s right: civilian life, in civilian life, I keep desperately repeating this military phraseology. Our lives before the habit were civilian lives; in those lives we had undevastated homes, our mothers were alive, our wives and fiancées and children were by our side. We ate lunches and dinners and breakfasts. In those lives we could distinguish different dishes, different times of year, and different times of day. We fell asleep in the evening, woke in the morning, and pottered about in our workshops that were as yet undestroyed by fire. The comprehensible and impassive city stood there in its pigeon-gray cloud, the smell of coffee and exhaust fumes filled the streets, a young woman in a yellow dress was pausing in front of a window display, even if we only thought so; we existed. We read newspapers, browsed in bookstores, listened to music; we enjoyed ice cream with chocolate syrup, and watched soccer, and rode streetcars. But all that had passed, it had vanished; for many years now a great war had been going on, we were soldiers of a defeated and besieged self-styled army, against the dictates of common sense we refused to surrender, for many years now we had had nowhere to retreat to and no word came from our homes, while the dark ring of diabolic forces was inexorably closing in. We fell asleep with our forehead resting against the nearest earthworks; we were woken by the cannonade of our heart, we had been wearing the same uniform for who knew how long, we ate whatever we could find, it was only by some miracle that our canteens were always full, and an ever more primitive rotgut sustained our ever shorter lives. Don Juan the Rib started playing his mouth organ again; this time he played the melody of an uncommon, long-forgotten carol. I had heard it before — someone close to me used to sing that melody and play along on the piano. Perhaps my grandfather, Old Kubica, sang it as he walked across the square? Perhaps you are humming it as you lay an empty plate on the white tablecloth? Perhaps the almost completely black cat on the windowsill is listening to that carol in an unoccupied home?

I can hear it as clearly as in a dream: this music contains the power of approaching death and it contains the power to hold back approaching death, the true writerly power to change the course of events. In my hundred-page notebook I want finally to write the hardest thing (a worthy task for my own sense of pride): the story of a man who picks himself up, gathers his strength and, out of the dangerous metaphor of a great war, emerges whole and victorious. I want to make a literature that liberates from weakness and is as strong as Don Juan’s pastorale. I need health and all good wishes, tranquility, a ready pen, and a lightness of heart. Don Juan the Rib is playing as if he were bringing himself back from the dead a few months later; outside the window there are snowy fields and dark Austrian or Russian walls, and the warmth from the furnaces of the steel mill rises all the way to the Star of Bethlehem. We are sitting at the table, we are mixed in with the suicides, and the nurses, merry as angels, are not letting us out of their sight. The hair of our angels tumbles from under their white caps; their gestures have an added fluidity that we know well, and great benevolence shines in their eyes. The dark-complexioned beauties from the suicide ward stand up, and they ask us for a Christmas dance.

Chapter 17. Letter from the Alco Ward

[Beginning of manuscript illegible even for addressee. Paper of poor quality, squared, A4 format. Letter written with fountain pen, handwriting shaky, navy blue ink.]

. . FOR A WHOLE five months. When I tell them I’m giving up my ruinous habit for you, they look at me with contempt. When I tell them I’m giving up my ruinous habit for us, they look at me with contempt; at such times I remain silent for a long time, because I know what those she-wolf therapists are after. I’m giving up my habit for myself, I say after pretending to reflect, and it’s just as well they can’t guess what I’m feeling as I see their approving smiles. They don’t know what I’m feeling, though they ought to; after all they’re past masters in the art of naming feelings and they teach us how to do it: how to name our feelings. Alcoholism is supposedly a sickness of the feelings. Alcoholics are unable either to define their feelings or to control them. In this one case it happens to be true about me: I’m unable to name the much-more-than-love that I feel for you. And I’m certain my addiction will drop from me the way the skin drops from the snake. Good Lord, if any of those she-therapists read the last sentence they’d be horrified.

“Nothing will happen on its own, no one will do it for you. You have to do it yourself.”

“That’s right, I’ll fight with my own weakness.”

“Fight? You’ll fight? With who? With a monster that’s stronger than you and is bound to defeat you? You have to submit. Who are you intending to fight? Gołota the heavyweight? Alcohol is like Gołota — when you tangle with it you don’t stand a chance, you have to submit before you even start.”

These are the kinds of exchanges you hear in this place; exclamations of this sort rise from here and ascend like supplicatory prayers into the cloudy July heavens. The catchphrases and favorite mantras of the she-therapists (alcohol is like Gołota, or alcohol is like Mike Tyson, or alcoholism is as irreversible as an amputated leg, or alcoholism is like democracy), the she-therapists’ favorite mantras, and the absolute, all-encompassing obsession with first-person narration. I, I, I. God forbid you should use an impersonal form. God forbid you should say “a person.” God forbid you should say “the demon.” God forbid the plural.

•

“I lost my money. That is, they robbed me,” says Janek, who is astray in life, and who, because of his strong predilection for cleaning, we call ‘The Hero of Socialist Labor.’ “So then things started.”

“What things started?” ask the she-therapists, white-hot with fury, stressing the generic noun “things.” “Exactly which ‘things’ began?”

“The drinking started, the drinking began,” says Janek, and they laugh their awful laughs and exclaim:

“The drinking began! The drinking started! But who was doing the drinking? Was thedrinkingstarted drinking?” (Animal-like guffaws.) “Who was drinking?”

“I was drinking,” says Janek, red-faced as a child, and to his own undoing he adds: “Yes, you drank, you drank terribly, you were overcome by the demon, for example all the drinking with the neighbor, with the neighbor the drinking went on all the time.”

The she-therapists finally stop laughing and zealously teach the Hero of Socialist Labor that instead of “you” you have to say “I,” instead of “the demon” you have to say “alcohol,” instead of “the drinking went on” you have to say “I drank,” instead of “all the time” you have to say “every day,” and give the amount, the date, and the place. And to finish off, the she-therapists repeat emphatically once more: “not ‘the drinking started,’ but ‘I drank.’”

As you can imagine, I polemicize with them heatedly in my mind, though I’m aware that my polemic misses the point, that my assumptions are different — the she-therapists are striving to bring reality to the point of sobriety, whereas I’m striving to bring reality to the point of literature, and at a certain moment our paths inevitably diverge. I’m aware of this, but I still polemicize with them. It’s common knowledge — I proclaim to myself — that impersonal forms are used to refer to specific individuals, and that they refer to them more fully and more impartially than an “I” stripped naked and thus defenseless in speaking about itself. There are writers who write whole books in this fashion, their narratives built entirely of impersonal constructions: journeys were made, things were seen, the time of dying began. And the first person singular? I’ve been immersed in that person and that number up to my neck and up to the crown of my head. I’m mud-spattered from top to toe by the first person singular. The hopes of the she-therapists notwithstanding, it is no guarantee of credibility, truth, or naked sincerity. The first person singular is an element of literary fiction. My Lord, what great fortune that would be, what a fine instinct, to declare the end of literature at this very juncture and to be able to say simply with a clear conscience: I.

I looked for you my whole life, I walked the length of Jana Pawła, Pańska, Żelazna, Złota, the entire world; but it was you who found me. You wrote a letter, I replied and — though we didn’t notice it at the time — our letters were already throwing themselves into a definitive embrace, our sentences were tangled with each other, our handwritings were locked together, our inks flowed into one another as fluidly as your blood joins with mine. I was looking for a last love before death, and I found a love that gave me life. A love that I have never read about in any poem or any novel. A love that I did not know could exist in this world. I found a love as powerful as Don Juan’s pastorale. Ala-Alberta, you came to me at the moment when I had written life off. That’s right, for at least two years I had not really wanted to go on living; it seemed to me that, roughly speaking at least, I already had what I wanted to have. I had written what I had written, and I knew that to go on writing would mean either a more or a less intense repetition of experiences already had. A person writes a book and he thinks that when the book goes out among people it will change the world — and that, I assure you, is a very great delusion. Yet to write without the faith that writing will change the world — such a thing is impossible.

I had been with beautiful women, I’d drunk an ocean of Żołądkowa Gorzka, I’d labored hard and I’d wallowed in idleness, I’d listened to music (music is what I miss the most in here), I’d read the classics, I’d been to soccer games, I’d prayed in my Lutheran church; and it seemed to me that I knew as much about the things of this world as it was meant for me to know. It seemed to me that I was filled, yet I was empty, I was as sounding brass. (As the Scripture says: though I give up drinking, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.) Kill myself? Yes indeed, I thought about suicide (every normal person thinks about suicide at least once in their life, as Camus I think said — that was a reading from the times when you were not yet in the world), but I thought about it in the same unreal terms that I thought about permanently giving up Żołądkowa Gorzka. How often did I devote my thoughts to the idea of giving up Żołądkowa Gorzka? And what came of it? Nothing. I thought about stopping drinking Żołądkowa Gorzka and, calmly or stormily (usually stormily), I went on drinking that product, which is rather inferior in quality but goes smoothly down the throat. I thought about killing myself, but calmly or stormily (usually stormily) I went on living. The hope of a quick death, a real death, was provided by my habit. As one of the wise she-therapists here says (for there are wise she-therapists and foolish she-therapists, just like the biblical wise virgins and foolish virgins — in my next letter I’ll recount the parable of the wise she-therapists and the foolish she-therapists), so then, the wise she-therapist Kasia says that an alcoholic will escape into death more readily than he will admit his powerlessness with regard to booze. A real man can die from vodka but is afraid to become a fool, as the late Mr. Trąba used to say. And I acquiesced to this, I prepared myself for an escape into death. I may not have been able to define it as exactly as Simon Pure Goodness, who, before he escaped from here, knew and did not conceal the fact that after escaping from the ward he intended, as it were, to escape definitively, in a week, or a month, or at the most three years. I myself did not know the date; I was preparing myself in the dark. But when I read your letter, when I heard your voice, when I saw you for the first time, I understood that the black cord closing ever tighter around my neck would inevitably snap. I understood that the black twine would unravel long before my heart was torn to shreds. I understood that I had been waiting for you my whole life. (Of that time, I had to wait for at least twenty years till you grew up.) But you came. You’re here. (That’s right. She’s here.)

The first time I saw you, you weren’t wearing the yellow dress with the spaghetti straps. You were wearing a black blouse and gray pants. You were sitting at a table and staring impatiently through the window of the hotel café. I was a whole eight minutes late. I embraced you as fluidly as if I’d been embracing only you my whole life.

“Do we know each other that well?” you asked. “Better,” I replied, and as long as I live I’ll be proud of that answer. Of course your name was not Ala-Alberta. Your name is what I always wanted it to be; your arms are the arms I’d always wanted to be yours; you have green eyes, so green; and you have hands specially created for me by God. You are beautiful and wise.

As for me — I’m happy. Of course, I can’t mention the fact that I’m happy to anyone here, I can’t divulge my feelings of happiness even to my therapist (as you correctly guess, it’s Kasia), I can’t even write my feeling of happiness down in my emotional journal. A happy alco immediately raises the worst suspicions; a happy alco bodes terribly ill.

What bodes well is an alco in the doldrums, an alco in depression, an alco in despair. Alcoholism may be the only illness in which the patient being in a dreadful state gives hope. A true full-blooded alco has to hunger constantly for booze, he has to feel the constant pressure of longing for a bottle of Żołądkowa Gorzka, to be down in the dumps, to be in hell.

I miss music here. The summer is overcast, but there are sunny days, and at such times I wander with an odd fascination among the dormitories of the insane, which are set amongst untended gardens. At times, singing can be heard from behind the barred windows. Around noon the gardens fill with a crowd of schizophrenics and suicides, and the toneless melody of their jabbering rises to the sky. Yesterday, I passed a suicide on the main avenue; he was carrying a huge portable radio on his shoulder and pressing it convulsively to his ear. From several yards away I could make out a low hypnotic voice singing a recent hit about a silk scarf. It made me think of Don Juan the Rib, my favorite figure and a person close to my heart, and once again I felt the looming shadow of the black cord; Lord, let me be with her as long as possible.

We were sitting in the hotel café; you were drinking green tea, I was drinking one of the last beers of my life (of my life — not before I die). We were sitting and gazing at one another, and those first gazes, that intense staring at each other, so entered our bloodstream that afterwards it was always like that. Our heads always turned toward one another on their pillows; we gaped at each other endlessly. And it’s going on still, even from here I can still see you. My head is turned towards you and I know that you can see me too, that right now you’re also looking in my direction, you’re giving me strength. You’re giving me a strength that I can’t show here either, by the way. My strength remains my secret. One of the she-therapists’ favorite mantras is: you contain as much sickness as you contain secrets. That is — you have to admit — a terrible, terrible thing to say. According to the view that prevails here, an alco can stay alive only on condition that he allows himself to be disemboweled; more, that he disembowels himself, in accordance with professional instructions. Guts, entrails, problems, fears, bad thoughts and weak hopes, nightmares, colorless innards — everything comes out into the open. Your God is in the open, your sex life is in the open, your puke is in the open. (That’s right, the subject of one of the key confessions is: “The Story of my First Drunken Vomiting.” As you can imagine, it was not without enjoyment and not without satisfaction that I spent numerous pages recounting my first technicolor yawn: I described with relish how I hurled pepper-flavored pieprzówka in the Gierek era, ration-card vodka in the first Solidarity period, and home-brewed moonshine during martial law; I described in detail how under Jaruzelski my head drooped over the toilet bowl. Unfortunately, toward the end of the essay a certain thematic and also aesthetic monotony crept in, since during both the Wałęsa presidency and the Kwaśniewski presidency I barfed nothing but Żołądkowa Gorzka. C’est la vie.)

I hope I’m not irritating you with my immoderation (including the stylistic kind). I’m writing a little as if I were writing from Siberia or from the Lubyanka, yet you’re only two hundred miles away. Today we spoke on the phone, and in a few days you’ll come visit me and we’ll go for a walk by the Utrata River. In a few weeks we’ll be together forever.

When I say that I’m abandoning my habit for you, I’m telling the truth. Because I don’t exist without you, I don’t exist without us. My “I” is no longer singular. I cease to be when you’re not there; every separation is unbearable. (Do you remember how we both cried at Centralny Station? How you ran alongside the train?) You can’t be more than a hundred inches from me; beyond that it’s all the same whether you’re a mile or two hundred miles away. (Two hundred miles from my arms.) Beyond that, there’s always a gulf, and everything that’s in between is really. .

[End of manuscript legible only for addressee.]

Chapter 18. Dr. Swobodziczka

I’M LYING IN MY parents’ bed, which is as vast as an ocean liner. I’m delirious, though I don’t know what it means to be delirious. I can smell alcohol, though I don’t know it’s the smell of alcohol; Dr. Swobodziczka is leaning over me. Rectified spirit has taken on the form of a luminous aura that shines through all the chakras of his body. Terrifying is Dr. Swobodziczka, terrifying as a shaman from an adventure story. He passes through the center of town like the angel of destruction, clutching his physician’s case; he wades through three-feet-high snowdrifts as if he were the mythical man of snow, swaying from side to side like the Flying Dutchman. He drinks fearfully and insanely. Suicides do not have an easy life with him.

A year, or even a month, ago I would still have written that Dr. Swobodziczka drank like the Consul, in the very recent past I would have drawn such a comparison; but now, now that I have a clear awareness of the end of literature, now for the sake of the truth I retract that flashy juxtaposition. Next to Dr. Swobodziczka the Consul is an artificial literary character (which is hardly surprising, since the former was a man of flesh and blood, while the latter is only a quasi-being); as for the degree of proclivity toward alcohol, the Consul is to Swobodziczka as a grammar school boy tipsy from a single glass of wine is to the Consul. The Doctor drank and ergo was killing himself indefatigably and methodically, and this may well have been why he had a hatred and a scorn for suicides. His “self-annihilation,” as the Russians call it, was diligent, systematic, and measured, while the suicides killed themselves suddenly, messily, any old how, in contravention of all poetics. It was true: in Dr. Swobodziczka’s times the suicides of Wisła did not have an easy life. Horrendous curses were heaped upon their asphyxiated heads. The doctor conducted brutal autopsies, pouring insults on their bodies as they grew cold; he passed his finger along the blue mark on young Oyermah’s neck and said:

“You’re lucky, you’re lucky you’re not alive, boy, because if you were, I’d kill you.”

The black alsatian sat by the head of the corpse, sweeping the dirty February snow as it wagged its tail; beads of frothy beer dripped from its mouth.

Dr. Swobodziczka steadfastly trod the sinusoidal path of intoxication that led into infinity. Often he was more or less deeply under the influence for twenty-four hours a day. He imbibed gallon upon gallon of distilled alcohol; he was a connoisseur of the local moonshine, which was viscid, dark, and flammable as kerosene; he would take bets on whether he could survive the consumption of six bottles of Passover slivovitz in a single evening, and he would win the bet, he would win it with room left over, not merely surviving, but rising from his chair unaided, though with an inordinate stateliness. The black alsatian, drunk on beer, would slink out from under the oak table and sway off behind its master.

What the doctor’s nights and mornings were like I know only too well — the nightmares were excessive, the voices too loud, the specters too palpable. The undoubtedly ghastly epic must have been impossible to accept, to drink away, or to endure, for in his despair and his helplessness, and seeing that the Homeric narrative of his ordeal showed no signs of coming to an end, Swobodziczka reached for the ultimate means of expression. He reached for morphine, with the aim of easing his pain (for it was certainly not with the aim of intensifying his experiences); he reached for morphine, though he was fully aware that, while after the first injection his sufferings would truly (though only seemingly) disappear, the first injection would after a certain time, a short moment, truth be told immediately, begin to demand a second injection, while after the second dose, or at the latest after the third, there would come nightmares even more excessive than before, there would be even louder voices, and the palpable specters would begin to close in on him in an ever tightening circle. Dr. Swobodziczka knew the simple yet inexorable mechanics of total collapse. He was an excellent physician; he was certain he would get by, and this time he made a bet with himself (on whether he would get by), and that bet he lost.

In those days my mother was a young pharmacist of the Augsburg Lutheran denomination; she often worked the night shift in Wisła and at the darkest hour, at three or four in the morning, she would be woken by a prolonged ringing of the bell, a desperate knocking and the ritual exclamation:

“Miss! Miss! I have an acute case requiring immediate intervention! It’s a matter of the utmost urgency!”

Behind the glass door the thickset figure was swaying to and fro, the dog crouching at his feet. With trembling fingers Dr. Swobodziczka would hand over a prescription bearing a magic spell that would bring relief, or maybe even euphoria: “Morph. Hydr. 002.” His voice would break naturally; he had no need whatsoever to feign convulsive speech.

“Miss. . Comrade First Secretary Władysław Gomułka is as we speak present at the Castle; he’s had a sudden attack of the stomach cramps, he’s in great pain, our head of state is in agony, and I’ve been summoned. . You understand, Miss, it’s a matter of national importance. .”

The first time, and maybe even the third time this happened (“Miss, Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz is present at the Castle as we speak, and he’s had a sudden attack of the stomach cramps. .”), there was a modicum of plausibility in this spectacular pretext. President Mościcki’s prewar castle really did serve as a country residence for dignitaries of the highest level; many a time at dusk we would see a cavalcade of Volgas and Chaykas moving slowly down the road toward the Kubalonka Pass, the distant lights playing across the armor-plated bodywork. In the close presence of the leadership (improbable walking parties crossing wooded hillsides in the misty morning — representatives of the central authorities and their companions, setting out to pick mushrooms), in this close presence, then, there was a certain plausibility, and even in the sudden indisposition of the prime minister or first secretary (though according to doctrine they were superhuman, that is to say incorporeal), but when it transpired before long that according to Swobodziczka, Gomułka and Cyrankiewicz (the doctor rarely stooped to lower ranks) must constantly have been staying at the Castle and, in addition, must have suffered incessant stomach cramps by turns, before long, right away even, everything became clear. Though with the passage of time Swobodziczka himself ceased striving for any sort of verisimilitude in his version of events; he automatically repeated his formula about the Castle, the dignitary, and the stomach cramps, handed over the prescription, took the ampoules, sat on a nearby bench in the middle of the town square, opened his bag, took out a needle, stuck it through his trouser leg at the level of his thigh and through his pants administered a dexterous and discreet injection into the muscle. The great Dr. Swobodziczka — Dr. Morphine, Dr. Codeine, Dr. Moonshine, Dr. Nobody.

To this day the inhabitants of Wisła sing hymns of praise to his medical expertise, to this day one can hear stories of epidemics he held in check, fearful maladies he drove away without a trace, unerring diagnoses he rendered every time. His soul was burning to nothing, his body was weakening, his speech was ever more indistinct, yet his medical abilities remained unaffected. The blaze of his addiction consumed everything within him except his skill. He would have the greatest difficulty putting on his stethoscope, but he would hear with absolute clarity the rat-like squeak of the disease hidden in the labyrinth of the innards; his hands would shake as he wrote the prescription, but he would prescribe exactly what was needed. When he referred someone to the hospital, the hospital was essential; when he recommended antibiotics, the antibiotics worked; when he instructed a person to collect oak bark, boil it, and drink the decoction each day for six months, everyone knew the half-year course of treatment would be effective. He was a genius when it came to the chronology of a sickness. In seven days there’ll be an improvement, in ten days it’ll go away, in two weeks you’ll be on your feet again, he would say, and it would happen as he said: in seven days there would be an improvement, in ten it would go away, in two weeks you’d be on your feet again. When Swobodziczka retired (and his retirement lasted a very short time) and his pre-mortal visit to this world was reduced to daily visits to the Piast hostelry, even there lines would form to his table. He would appear at 7 A.M. sharp in the company of the black alsatian, drink a restorative double, wash it down with sips of beer, pour a goodly measure of the latter into a tin bowl for the dog keeping watch under the table, raise his hand and, with a patrician gesture, would permit the first patient to approach.

I fell ill with everything. I fell ill constantly. I fell ill inexorably. I fell ill passionately. I adored Dr. Swobodziczka’s visits; I would breathe in the smell of the medications and the alcohol, and revel in the consternation the doctor inevitably generated among the inhabitants of the house. He would shrug his sheepskin coat off his shoulders, light a cigarette in the bedroom after my mother had carefully aired it, put on his stethoscope, and set about examining me. Breathe. Don’t breathe. Breathe deeply. He would inhale clouds of smoke and cough the resonant, grating cough of an inveterate smoker.

“How do you like that,” he would say, “a cough, another cough.” “But he’s not coughing, doctor,” my mother would interject, white as a sheet and on the verge of seizure. “Not him, me. I have a cough,” Swobodziczka would retort without interrupting his examination. “I have a cough and I’ve no idea what to do about it. It’s not showing any signs of going away.” He would remove the stethoscope with a decisive gesture, go to the table, and take out his prescription pad.

“As for him, he’ll have a cough in two days. In two days there’ll be a cough. And seven days after that, in other words nine days from today, the cough will be gone. How old is he?” “Nine,” my mother would say, relief clearly audible in her voice. The doctor peered at me. “Nine years old, nine years old. It’s high time to be looking around and thinking about an occupation. Tell me, Jerzy, which do you prefer, Catholic girls or Lutheran girls?” “Catholic girls,” I said without hesitation, finally given wings by an authorized opportunity to talk about women. “Catholic girls, especially Urszula and Aldona.” “You’re absolutely right,” Dr. Swobodziczka responded with utter seriousness, and a moment later added a further mysterious sentence, in which what appeared to be the critical phrase—“ecumenical desires”—I not only did not understand but barely even heard, since my mother pounced like a mountain lion toward the table, concealing me behind her body and drowning out the doctor’s words in a hysterically cordial invitation to pass into the kitchen, from where, by the by, a while later there came the mythical clink of glasses being taken from the dresser.

I am quite certain Dr. Swobodziczka would never have confirmed the suspicion that he himself was shortening his own life and that that was the reason he held suicides in such abhorrence and contempt. He would never have uttered a single word, nor made a single gesture, to let it be known that in their desperation he could see his own reflection, crooked but true in its essence. He claimed to object to the fact that our committers of self-destruction would always go off into the woods and vanish without a trace, having found a convenient beech bough in the depths of the mixed forest, whereas they ought to bear in mind the subsequent difficulties facing the living, and, in order to facilitate all the necessary postmortem procedures, hang themselves at the edge of the wood.

Take young Oyermah, for example. No one could have imagined it would happen that way. My father and I had been there only a week before — a light and spacious farmhouse on a hilltop, outbuildings with freshly plastered walls, a chicken farm, and various other manifestations of affluence. The fortunate and wealthy Oyermahs had been among the first in these parts to own a television, and that was why we were there: they were showing the Górnik Zabrze-Tottenham Hotspur game (4–2 to Górnik). We sat on a plush sofa and drank tea; Oyermah senior was playing the piano upstairs, while Oyermah junior watched the game with us; his wife, lovely as an angel, strolled through the series of rooms in a heavy brocade dress; their torpid child was playing quietly on a carpet that had the emerald-green tint of the Orinoco; hens were clucking in the yard; at one point Górnik even led 4–0. After the game we walked home in the gathering dark. Seven days later life was over in the blink of an eye. Seven days later young Oyermah went mad; he killed his wife and child and went deep into the woods on Jarzębata Mountain, and there he hanged himself in an inaccessible place.

Dr. Swobodziczka spat curses, muttered oaths, wiped the sweat from his brow, and threatened never to go to another suicide. When you thought about it, it was a little strange — he had no patience for suicides, but in the end he would always respond to every summons, appearing promptly even in the middle of the night. (His rapidity was undoubtedly aided by insomnia: the habit, as Simon Pure Goodness would have said, leads inexorably to insomnia, then insomnia reinforces the habit.) It can also be surmised that the doctor was particularly fond, for example, of winter trips to the most distant valleys; after all, a sleigh ride through the snow and frost could hardly take place without a little something of a stronger nature — how else could the rescue party keep from freezing to death?

He walked and rode everywhere. He attended to every last wretch, but he didn’t want anything to do with young Oyermah or with any other desperate individuals hanging from trees. At such times he cursed and blasphemed. I believe, I want to believe, that aside from his fear there was in this a special sort of preventive measure — he cursed those who had already done it so that those who found a similar intention gathering in their wounded hearts should know that, if they went ahead, they would expose themselves to invective and scorn, and to the fearful condemnation of Dr. Swobodziczka.

I know that he was reluctant to go out to such cases because he was afraid. He was afraid of the breathtaking, mesmerizing temptation of a mound of earth. His soul was in ashes, but the spark of consciousness burned on; he knew that any way he turned he could head off into the depths of the forests on Czantoria Mountain, on Stożek, on Barania, and on Jarzębata. He could clearly see the paths that first led uphill, then on the other side ran downward. His black alsatian, mad with despair, is padding back and forth, till in the end it finds the path that leads unerringly to the Piast hostelry; it slinks under the table, laps warm beer from a tin bowl, and waits in vain for the arrival of its master, lord, and savior, amen.

Chapter 19. The Daughters of the Queen

AFTER THE NEWSPAPERS I would tidy the books. In the course of my diligent and ecstatic reading of newspapers I occasionally felt pangs of intellectual conscience at wasting my time on superficial things, and filling my brain with newspaper pulp. At such moments, between sips I would reach for classics of every hue; for instance, I would open Gottfried Wilhelm Liebnitz’s A Philosopher’s Creed to a random page and read drunkenly, and I would have the drunken impression that I understood it all. I would drunkenly read Moby-Dick or The Magic Mountain and my intoxicated enthusiasm, like my intoxicated illumination, was deep and boundless. I would read Babel or Mickiewicz and in my drunkenness would hear every phrase so perfectly that I was all set to write, in my drunkenness, sequels to the short stories, and to compose additional stanzas of the epic poems.

The classics, as usual, would be right at the bottom of the wreckage. I would pick up the Summa Theologica, Resurrection, and an anthology of English and American poetry from where they lay on the floor; I would pick them up, straighten the covers, and even iron any creased pages; I would pick them up, dust them off, smooth them down and replace them on the shelf. After I had removed the newspapers and tidied the books I would continue to clean up, emptying the ashtrays, washing the dishes, changing my bed, then stooping over the bathtub and washing my clothes as fiercely as if I were trying to punish myself for the lack of an automatic washing machine, as if with the quality of my hand-washing I were striving to surpass the automatic washing machine, as if I were striving to prove once again the eternal truth that a human being is better than the very best washing machine, not only the automatic kind, but even the latest generation of computerized washing machines, that humans are in general better than the best computer possible. True, computers are capable of surpassing humans in many domains. For example — as I read in between my erstwhile losses of consciousness — for example at some point a computer beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess, and humankind, or at least a significant portion of humankind, was thereby plunged into pessimism; the computer’s victory at chess was supposedly a harbinger of further victories by machines, successive inexorable and ever more all-encompassing and humiliating defeats of humankind in the battle with machines, and it may be that that is indeed the case, it may be that in numerous disciplines computers will bring numerous grandmasters to their knees, but in my humble drunkard’s opinion, until they invent the computer that can drink more than a person, humankind has no need to feel that its essence is under threat. By all means — I, the master, I, the grandmaster take up the gauntlet! By all means, I the master, I the grandmaster accept the challenge! Show me the ingeniously constructed machine, show me a computer of unheard-of intelligence — let it be of infinite capacity, let its halogen lights shine with the power of a thousand suns, let it be as vast as a pre-war apartment building, let it be programmed for fathomless quantities of drinking, let it be resistant to addiction, let it possess a perpetual tolerance for moonshine, let it have special subsystems allowing it to control the situation in its entirety, let it have a brain as mighty as an open-hearth furnace, and let it have the choice of liquor. And place between us a crate of the liquor it chooses, and let the starter give the signal, and right away you will see the triumph of the human race and of humanism. How long will it drink shoulder to shoulder with me: a month, two months, half a year? Sooner or later, at the next pale dawn, sooner or later, after yet another redemptive hair of the dog, before the liquor has dispersed through my bones, before I’ve had time to rise, warm up, regain my color and express my first inspired thought, it will falter, fail, lose consciousness, and puke up its entire hard drive.

Then I would go onto the balcony and hang out all the clothes that had been washed more thoroughly than in an automatic washing machine, and I would hang them out equally thoroughly, because the more thoroughly laundry is hung out, the less work it is later to iron it. After hanging out the laundry I would vacuum the carpets, change the lace curtains, polish the floors, take out the trash, throw out the bottles, meticulously recheck every corner to make sure no eloquent traces of my humiliations remained, but no, order reigned everywhere. I would air all the rooms thoroughly, light a candle, light an incense stick, light a cigarette, sit in the armchair, feel the sweet firmness of my tired muscles, bask in the accomplished deed, pour myself a goodly measure of vodka — I deserved it, after my hard work I had the right to a little holiday — I would pour the vodka and drink thirstily, and lose consciousness, and regain consciousness on the alco ward. I would be standing by the sink listening to Don Juan the Rib tell stories about women.

Don Juan the Rib, in civilian life a hairdresser, and, additionally, a musician, loved to demonstrate how to use scissors in a professional fashion. He did indeed snip away with extraordinary dexterity; at first glance we couldn’t tell what was magic about his art, and it was only after a period of intense observation, and impatient hints from the man himself, that the unpracticed eye spotted it: the divine fingers of the master set in motion only one of the scissor blades, while the other remained still. Even Dr. Granada was unable to reproduce this trick, and Don Juan the Rib, filled with pride, would not reveal the secret.

Never without his scissors, which were tucked discreetly into the pocket of his pajamas (the pajama top extravagantly unbuttoned, with a neck-scarf tied fancifully round his neck), he was forever prowling the ward and offering his hairdressing services to all the female patients and all the nurses. The nurses refused — Nurse Viola in particular refused most sternly — but the Queen of Kent and Fanny Kapelmeister frequently paraded about with elegantly trimmed locks. Don Juan the Rib’s professional abilities were truly deserving of respect; even the Queen of Kent’s four daughters, who visited her every day, expressed their genuine admiration for their mother’s new hairstyle.

All four of the Queen of Kent’s daughters were genuine princesses. They were beautiful young women, 24, 25, 27, and 30 years old respectively, smartly dressed, fragrant with the respective narcotic scents of Dune, Poème, Organza, and Dolce Vita; all four drove to the hospital in their own cars, a Ford Mondeo, a Renault Laguna, a Volkswagen Golf, and a Nissan Almera respectively, and all four always had their hair gorgeously done by expert stylists from Jean-Louis David salons. Don Juan the Rib swooned at the very sight of these four lovelies. While I can say with a reasonably clear conscience that I was in thrall to women, Don Juan the Rib was in utter, slavish, cocaine-and-morphine thrall to women. At the sight of anything whatsoever that was loosely associated with femininity he would perk up and at the same time swoon; any female voice at all, even if it was the rasping, aggressive baritone of Mrs. Poniatowska the nurse’s aide, would tear him from his bed — he would jump to his feet, nervously straighten his neck-scarf, splash himself with copious amounts of cologne, and dash off toward the siren song that was calling him.

Yet the four beauties who came to see their mother day after day also intimidated him. While he knew every woman who had ever set foot in the alco ward, and had struck up an unembarrassed familiarity with all the wives, daughters, and girlfriends who visited us, and while he hit on the nurses relentlessly (though without success), with the four princesses he would merely sneak looks in their direction, edging past them, greeting them awkwardly and not even attempting to engage them in conversation. Evidently, not one of his famous come-on lines, as majestic as they were viscous (“I swear to God I’ve never seen a woman with such pedigree fetlocks,” he would say for example to a speechless Mrs. Poniatowska, who incidentally wore ankle-high orthopedic shoes) — not one of his legendary flirtatious advances, then, could evidently pass his lips in this case, and he would merely give an awkward and lopsided smile, creep warily down the hallway, enter the ward and hurry back out, lie on his bed then immediately jump back up. He was in the grip of contradictory desires. On the one hand, with all his heart and all his unbridled lust he wanted the four incarnations of female perfection to stay as long as possible, wishing for the visit to last and last with all his soul; on the other hand, he wanted with all his soul for the visit to end immediately. For invariably, the moment all the visitors had left, and especially after the departure of the four princesses, Don Juan, glowing from the beauty he had enjoyed from afar, in high spirits and filled with vigor, Don Juan then would ply the Queen Mother with questions. Through the mother he sought to draw closer to the daughters; he would ask in detail about their lives, their childhood pastimes, their favorite games and dolls, what they were like growing up, what they were like at school; he asked about their husbands (all four were married), whether these husbands were wealthy and dependable, and whether none of them happened to be overly fond of a tipple; he asked if her daughters were happy, where they lived, why they had the names they had and not some other names (they were Katarzyna, Magdalena, Ewelina, and Anna respectively), and whether he might call the “young ladies” on the appropriate day to wish them a happy name-day, and how the good mother of “such a charming foursome” might advise him to proceed should he make the call and hear, not the bewitching voice of the lady of the hour, but an unfriendly masculine baritone.

“If that happens you should hang up without saying a word,” the Queen of Kent would always answer in her hollow voice, and that would be all she said.

Because the Queen of Kent, the Queen Mother, was a walking handful of ash. When it came down to it, nothing concrete could be said even about her appearance; she may once have been just as beautiful as her daughters, but now her face, her eyes, hair, arms, hands, and legs, all had turned to ash. The traces of her former beauty had been buried under ash, her fiery gaze had been extinguished, her skin was gray, and she had lost all feeling.

The Queen of Kent (in civilian life a qualified pharmacist) was a person of unimaginable shyness. She was unimaginably shy as an infant, she was unimaginably shy in elementary school and high school, and she was unimaginably shy at college. Her father, an authoritarian pharmacist inclined to tyranny, who was first the owner of a private pharmacy and then the manager of a state-owned one, aggravated his daughter’s shyness with his pharmaceutical authoritarianism. Whether that shyness had other causes I do not know and never will. My subject is the method for overcoming that shyness with which both the Queen of Kent and I were familiar — which is to say, mint-flavored liqueur.

The Queen of Kent’s future husband was a fellow student of pharmacology; he fell in love with her alluring restraint at first sight, or maybe third. She avoided him, refused to take his phone calls, and in his presence she was as silent as if she were under a magic spell. Yet despite all this he was entrapped beyond reach in the net of her stolen glances, in the aura of her virginal scent, in the storm of her dark hair.

After graduating she worked in her father’s pharmacy; her enamored former classmate moved heaven and earth to be close to her. Her father (the Old King of Kent) sensed what was up and sent the young man packing. The latter, moreover, had the worst luck, appearing in the pharmacy at least six times in a row at the very moment when its former proprietor was suffering agonies of frustration at the fact that he was no longer the proprietor of his own property. It was only at the seventh attempt that he happened upon a moment when the old chemist had succumbed uncritically to the illusion that everything was as it used to be, and he looked favorably upon the world, and favorably upon the ill-starred suitor.

“The two of you can do whatever you like,” he said, and immersed himself once again in his delusions of privatization.

The old man did not regret his decision. His future son-in-law proved to be a capable pharmacist, and the mint liqueur that he made with surgical spirit, according to an old recipe, was a real treat. When the Queen of Kent drank a glass on her name-day (the first glass of alcohol she had ever consumed in her life), the stifling mesh of shyness was removed, and her eternal fear of nothing in particular vanished.

•

He proposed; she drank a glass of mint liqueur and said yes. They made love for the first time on the small pharmacy sofa during the night shift; she had drunk a glass of liqueur before. After, it was also always before: after, whenever they made love she would drink a glass of liqueur before. A year later she would also drink a glass of liqueur when they did not make love; two years later she would drink a glass of liqueur on any occasion, and three years later she was drinking liqueur in every free moment. After four years he stopped making the liqueur according to the old recipe. This made little difference to her; for some time now she had preferred straight spirit.

They had gotten married two years earlier (during the phase in which she drank liqueur on any occasion). As she went on drinking surgical spirit she gave birth to four daughters; he still loved her. He was tender and solicitous; he did better and better, importing hard-to-get foreign medications. When his father-in-law died he took over as manager of the pharmacy, and after the fall of communism he became its owner. He looked after his daughters and when they grew up he provided them with handsome dowries; besides which, all four married very well.

The Queen of Kent drank pure spirit; one day her shyness returned. Yet this was no longer the former frail mesh of bashfulness but rusty iron bars. In the early morning she would look in the mirror, but she was so far away she could not even see herself; she could not make out the storm of dark hair that had turned to ash.

“If that happens you should hang up without saying a word,” she would answer, brushing off Don Juan the Rib’s insistent questions. The latter would hang his head, go back to his room, lie on his bed, and play wistful melodies on his mouth organ.

Chapter 20. The Funeral of Don Juan

THE CEMETERY WHERE we buried Don Juan the Rib was picturesquely located on a hilltop, with a picturesque view of valleys and mixed woods; the whole of the Beskid Mountains could be seen. The funeral party stood for a long time around the open grave singing and playing various instruments.

Don Juan the Rib — hairdresser and additionally musician, as he was wont to introduce himself — came from a most musical family. All his brothers, sisters, male cousins and female cousins, and all his close and distant relatives were exceptionally musical, all had virtually perfect pitch and lovely singing voices, and could probably have played any instrument in the world. Some of them had taken their art to lofty levels; for instance, a female singer who was immensely popular that season was a distant cousin of Don Juan’s. She was known for her stylized Balkan Gypsy ballads, which she sang in a fine low voice, and for her risqué outfits and captivating beauty. She appeared at the funeral too, somewhat late, and even significantly so. We had already picked up the spades and were all set to shovel soil onto the casket, that smelled of denatured spirits, when a colorful procession appeared round a bend in the gravel path down below. It was led by the female singer who was immensely popular that season; she was wearing an extraordinarily low-cut black dress and was followed by four instrumentalists clad in peacock colors — a guitarist, a saxophonist, a trumpeter, and a drummer. The extraordinarily low-cut dress did not scandalize anyone; on the contrary, it was a mark of the high regard in which she evidently held her distant fallen kinsman. We all knew the dress. It was one of the most risqué of her outfits; the singer who was immensely popular that season wore it at her most important concerts, at festivals, on the television, and at the most prestigious indoor and outdoor venues in Poland and around Europe. She stopped by the open grave, leaned over, and crossed herself; almost immediately, without even tuning their instruments, her musicians began to play her great hit song, that everyone knew, about the silken scarf.

Starting from the second verse, all of Don Juan’s exceptionally musical relatives began to sing along; those who had instruments accompanied the musicians, and the great song of the silken scarf, of inconceivable sorrow, of love, despair, and the end of all things, drifted from the cemetery hill and was heard in the other world, in paradise, where the soul of Don Juan the Rib was already in angelic rapture among the tastefully half-dressed souls of approachable women.

I know what it was like when Don Juan was dying, though I was not there; I know the source of his pain. The people who broke down his door and found his body reported a certain strange detail. Namely, they reported that the apartment was in a state of disarray typical for the apartment of a drunkard, though in this case it was not excessive; yet one element in this disarray caught their eye. It was a pile of footwear that reached almost up to the ceiling. One entire corner of the room was filled with a mountain of slippers, sneakers, flip-flops, mules, leather and canvas shoes, sandals, overshoes, boots, snow-boots, and even clogs from the quondam heights of fashion.

Only a very naïve person, some unthinking teetotaler for example, could imagine that this was just another symptom of drunken disorder, that in his vodka-induced delirium Don Juan the Rib had simply been in the habit of removing his footwear and flinging it willy-nilly into the corner; after all, drunkards who remove their footwear methodically are in the minority, while the majority of drunkards remove their footwear in a haphazard manner. That is true, but first, Don Juan belonged precisely to the minority of drunkards who remove their footwear methodically, and second, he was someone who in general avoided disorder; after all, he was a hairdresser and a musician, and both an artful hairdo and a musical harmony represent the antithesis of all disorder.

•

Don Juan the Rib, for instance, unlike most drunkards did not remove objects from his home, but, on the contrary, he accumulated objects there. He neither sold nor threw out old furniture; Stalinist-era suits still hung in his closet, many of the kitchen utensils in his kitchen had been inherited from his ancestors and came from the beginning of the century, and the wedding ring from his only marriage still lay at the bottom of a drawer, though Don Juan was not quite as certain which drawer it was as he had been ten years ago.

That’s right — it was not only in recent times that Don Juan the Rib had drunk denatured spirit, yet he did so not out of ruination but because he enjoyed it. (As it happens, he prepared his denatured beverage according to his own special recipe, about which I will say more in a moment.) Don Juan the Rib, then, was a man who had fallen in a particular way; he was a paradoxical alcoholic, for what kind of alcoholic, other than a paradoxical one, would have so many pairs of shoes in his closet that, simply by throwing them, he could eventually cover up the terrible thing, the thing that was in the corner of the room.

I know only too well that the mysterious pyramid of shoes was not a sign of disorder. Its purpose was to drive away, or at the very least conceal, the thing that stank of shit; it was a sign of fear and trembling, it was the relic of a final struggle, a battlefield over which a crematorial pall still hung. I know, because I once heard you weeping, Don Juan, and I hear you still, and I see your eyes, which are like two craters of terror sunk into your skull. When at a certain moment you woke up, you did not yet believe, and you reached for the bottle at your bedside, and you drank what was left, and fell into the last drunken sleep of your life.

It’s true, in between his final stays on the alco ward Don Juan exclusively drank denatured spirit, but it was denatured spirit prepared in a precise and masterful way. This was no vulgar dilution in tap water, this was no technologically horrific neutralization of the episcopal purple with the aid of Ace brand bleach, nor the addition of three containers of mint essence so as to lend the concoction a passing resemblance to mint-flavored vodka.

Don Juan the Rib began by making ersatz coffee. He used a large amount of coffee and brewed it for a long time; at the end, so as to give it the thickness of tar, an ebony hue, and the strength of a steam locomotive, he would add a single spoonful of honeydew honey, four spoonfuls of instant coffee, and two sachets of vanilla sugar. This mocha he mixed with the denatured spirit, in other words he poured a bottle of denatured spirit into the pan containing the ersatz coffee, which, already enriched by the extra ingredients listed above, had to be chilled to freezing point. (To the trivial question of why the coffee had to be chilled to freezing point, I will not respond.) Using a wooden ladle, he would stir the cocktail for such a long time that he would enter a sort of stirring trance, and he began to think he would never stop stirring. When Don Juan the Rib realized he might never stop stirring the denatured spirit, he would break off his stirring, remove the wooden ladle from the pan, touch it with his tongue and taste the ever more arid taste. Then he would place a colander, from which the enamel had almost completely worn off, over the pan, and he would line the inside of the colander with sterile gauze. The season of citrus fruit was beginning. Don Juan would take two handsome lemons, chosen with great care at the market, and with a precision that was quite natural in a hairdresser and musician, yet at the same time quite surprising in a drunkard with trembling hands, he would slice the lemons in two. This operation brought him satisfaction, and for a long while (though not to the point of entering a trance) he would stare at the four identical lemon halves. Then he would squeeze the juice out of each half in turn, with extreme thoroughness, over the gauze-lined colander. He would press out the gauze ever so gently and then toss it away casually — for the time of extreme thoroughness, in fact the time of any thoroughness whatsoever, was over. Even so, Don Juan the Rib faced one more round of stirring (the last, thank goodness), and he faced the job, demanding the utmost attention, of transferring the nearly ready beverage (with the aid of a funnel from which the enamel had almost completely worn off) into an old Johnny Walker bottle that Don Juan the Rib kept for sentimental reasons. (It reminded him of a certain high school senior who had debuted in his arms.)

And still he faced a wait. A dramatic wait, as the drink, with its outstanding and incomparable taste, was placed in the refrigerator till it became as dark and profound as an ocean overgrown with mouldering vegetation.

And it was the final sip of this very beverage that Don Juan had just taken when at a certain moment he came to and still did not believe that he was seeing what he was seeing, or smelling what he was smelling. He fell asleep for a moment, and when he woke up again the thing in the corner was even more distinct, it was so distinct Don Juan thought that he could see cankerous innards pulsating beneath a skin covered in pig-like stubble. And there was a stench, an unbearable stench. But when Don Juan the Rib finally understood that what he was seeing (he clearly saw a beckoning claw-shaped finger) was not a hallucination, he showed courage and decided to defend himself. Since he knew for sure the bottle was empty, he decided to fling his keepsake at the diabolical creature lurking in the corner. Yet when his hand began (with a cautious, lizard-like motion) to grope about on the floor, instead of his memento it encountered a house slipper, and Don Juan the Rib flung first one house slipper, then the second, at the diabolical creature. And it was then that fear and trembling made his hair stand on end. It was then that he was overcome by a true fury, because after he threw the second slipper at the diabolical creature he began to feel like a soldier who has run out of ammunition, and he was horrified that he had no more slippers to throw, because he had deluded himself into thinking that the first two slippers had had some impact, that it was only with slippers he could overcome the evil, that slippers alone were the only effective projectiles, that the diabolical creature would only succumb to an artillery barrage of footwear. With a superhuman effort he crawled from the bed and reached the closet, which was filled with various sorts of footwear, and he began convulsively flinging slippers at the diabolical creature, and when the slippers ran out he threw sandals, and when the sandals ran out he threw mules, and after that he resorted to any kind of shoes that were in the closet, and there was an extraordinary number of these shoes, so many that in the end they brought about victory for Don Juan, though it was quite literally a last-minute victory. At the last minute the last shoe covered up the last fragment of pulsating skin covered with pig-like stubble. Don Juan the Rib felt a slight relief, and his quaking heart may even have known a brief moment of calm; he was panting terribly and his awful physical exhaustion may at least for a moment have made him forget about his fear. He closed the door to the room in which the evil was breathing its last beneath a pyramid of shoes; either it was no more, or at least it was entirely hidden. He went into the kitchen, lit a cigarette, and looked around. Everything was where it belonged, nothing was moving, nothing was crawling, nothing was making a scraping noise. The refrigerator, the dresser, the dishwasher, and the gas stove were all where they had stood for centuries. On the dresser, just as in the days under the Muscovite yoke, there stood a small black-and-white Yunost television. Don Juan the Rib raised his hand and turned it on; a moment later the screen lit up like a mercury mine, and the voice of the singer who was immensely popular that season was heard. Amid flashes of mercurial lightning, on the unseen stage she was singing a song about a silken scarf. A terrible sadness transfixed Don Juan’s heart.

He still could have saved himself, he still could have gone to the all-night store, he still could have called one of his current women, he still could have summoned an ambulance; but he must no longer have wanted to. He turned off the television and sat in the kitchen, smoking. I know that he was afraid, and I know that he was in pain. Maybe he searched his medicine cabinet for diazepam or aspirin? It was bare; there was nothing but an empty packet of Rutinacea tablets and two Vitamin C capsules, insufficient medication for the purposes of a resurrection. He drank cold tap water, that much is certain; he turned the faucet on, drank greedily, and wiped his mouth. Maybe he felt hungry? But in the refrigerator there were only three bone-dry chicken stock cubes and a single (though almost untouched) jar of strawberry jam. Maybe he suddenly believed? Yes, he believed that if he drank a mug of nutritious bouillon and replenished his reserves of mineral salts, he would feel better. Yes, he believed that gradually, spoonful by spoonful, he would eat the jar of strawberry jam, and the sugar and glucose and vitamins would bring back his strength. And he put out his cigarette and set about preparing his last supper, and the people who broke down the door found him like that: lying on the floor, his mouth stopped up with a white-and-strawberry seal.

Chapter 21. Thursday July 6, 2000

THE SUGAR KING — in civilian life a wealthy businessman — had announced to the alcos gathered in the smoking room that in the emotional journal he kept he had included the emotion of relief he had experienced at passing a stool. This confession caused great consternation among the female alcos in particular. Male snickers of recognition mingled with female murmurs of indignation.

“We’re supposed to keep a journal of our emotions, and you can’t argue with that,” the Sugar King said in self-defense. “In our journals we’re supposed to be completely honest, and you can’t argue with that. We do it so as to relearn how to name our emotions, something we are no longer able to do as a result of our abuse of intoxicating liquor, and we do it so as to learn how to have control over our emotions, an ability we’ve also lost, and that too is perfectly—”

“But describing the state of your soul after passing a stool seems to me inappropriate,” Fanny Kapelmeister, in civilian life a history teacher, interrupted him without conviction.

“Fanny, you should be made to start your therapy again from the beginning”—the Sugar King’s voice was filled with mockery and venom—“since you’re incapable of distinguishing the spiritual sphere from the emotional sphere. And all this after Dr. Granada, and Nurse Viola, and the therapist Moses alias I Alcohol, along with all his she-therapists, have repeated to you time and again that these are two different spheres. I’m afraid I’m going to have to present your case at the evening meeting.”

“All right”—Fanny raised her head, and by this single gesture she was transformed from the wasted fifty-year-old dwarf she resembled, into the tall and imperious thirty-year-old brunette she actually was—“all right, but start by saying, start by announcing at the evening meeting that today, Thursday, July 6, in the year of our Lord two thousand, you took a crap and it made you feel better.”

“I don’t need to say it, because I wrote it down,” replied the Sugar King, and he added a powerful comment that put me painfully in mind of the next world: “When something is written down it doesn’t need to be talked about. At the meeting there’s something else I’m going to bring up,” he added ominously.

But in the evening, when we all gathered in the cafeteria, as we did every day to take account of our lives, the Sugar King did not take the floor, and did not say a word; neither on that day, nor any other, were we able to resolve the question of whether the state of one’s soul after passing a stool was or was not worthy of being recorded in one’s emotional journal. The one debate to occur that evening was a debate over the telephone (if such a feeble exchange of opinions can even be called a debate). Fanny Kapelmeister, who was unusually animated that day — perhaps she was consumed by a terrible thirst for vodka, perhaps she was trying to avoid an embarrassing discussion on the matter alluded to above, perhaps she was afraid of the Sugar King, or perhaps she had been upset by some inadvisable contact with the outside world — in any case Fanny Kapelmeister, who was unusually animated that day, put up her hand.

“I came to understand,” she said, “after a time I came to understand why we can’t watch television, listen to the radio, play dominoes or other games, this I came to understand after a time. But why the telephone is switched off after 9 P.M. I cannot understand.”

“The telephone is switched off after 9 P.M. for the good of the patients.” Sister Viola responded to Fanny Kapelmeister’s unintentionally teacher-like tone with the deliberately intensified tone of a ward sister. “At that time some of the patients want to be asleep, and others want to use the quiet to work and write—”

“How can you talk about quiet”—Fanny Kapelmeister had undergone yet another transformation, this time metamorphosing from patient to tsarina, from supplicant to she-eagle—“how can you talk about quiet and about sleeping, when at 10 P.M. they start cleaning the hallway, with all the accompanying clatter, and then at 10:30 we all have to go to the nurses’ station with our personal mouthpieces to take a breathalyzer test. How can you talk about quiet—”

Fanny Kapelmeister suddenly fell silent and stiffened; for a moment it looked like a classic early sign of an epileptic fit, but no, Fanny Kapelmeister had fallen silent in astonishment because she had suddenly grasped the absolute essence of her fate. What does a person feel when, every evening, they stand in line with several dozen other people — personal mouthpiece in hand — in order to take a breathalyzer test? What does that person feel? That person feels nothing in particular, especially if they’ve not drunk anything beforehand, that person feels nothing in particular, unless they did have something to drink — then they feel afraid. Fine, but what does a person feel when they suddenly become aware that they stand in line every evening with several dozen alcos so as to walk up and blow into a breathalyzer? Well then, such a person — like Fanny Kapelmeister — may succumb to astonishment; they may turn into a pillar of salt. Fanny’s skull was filled with a crowd of alcos. They stood obediently one behind the other and blew into the breathalyzer with such force that they seemed to drive every thought from her head. Fanny spoke no more and slowly sat down, though that sitting down was more an involuntary slide into her chair than actually sitting down. Simultaneously, like the other half of a set of scales, as Fanny descended the therapist Quasi Moses alias I Alcohol rose at the other end of the table.

Fanny Kapelmeister seemed to fall silent a second time, and this time she turned to stone. She may have wanted to add something; she may have wanted to say how important even a minute-long phone conversation can be for an alco; she may have wanted to refer to the relevant clause in the patient’s bill of rights; she may have wished to remind everyone of something that could have been the punch-line of this chapter: namely, that the sole telephone accessible to the alcos on this ward only took tokens, which had been unavailable for years, in consequence of which hardly anyone ever actually used it; she may have had other arguments, but probably not, and, in fact, most certainly not. There was nothing in her head except the crowd of alcos waiting in line for the breathalyzer.

Fanny could clearly see her own specter standing in this line, and it occurred to her that perhaps a person whose evening ritual involves blowing into a breathalyzer should indeed have no other right than the right to blow into a breathalyzer every evening. In the meantime, the therapist Quasi Moses alias I Alcohol was already on his feet and said very quietly:

“According to the regulations the telephone ought to be available to all you alcoholics between the hours of 7 A.M. and 9 P.M. That is how it has been and that is how it will be, or maybe not, because I can see we need to think about removing the telephone from the ward entirely. This is not a question”—he gave a slight bow in Sister Viola’s direction—“this is not a question of quiet in what I might call its audible or inaudible aspect. You are all supposed to quiet down inwardly, you’re supposed to compose yourselves. You’re supposed to calm your frayed nerves — not so as to go to sleep, but so as to lead a tranquil life in the future. And anything that comes from the outside world, even a telephone call, can upset you. Telephone calls, especially telephone calls I would say, can upset a person; I personally know how upsetting some telephone calls can be. So then, as I said: from 7 A.M. to 9 P.M. After that there is curfew, the telephone’s switched off, and you all work on yourselves, on quieting yourselves. You quiet yourselves indefinitely with the goal of quieting yourselves absolutely. That’s right, quiet yourselves, quiet yourselves, because if you do not, I, alcohol”—the therapist Quasi Moses alias I Alcohol continued to speak very quietly, but he spread his arms wide to give himself a dragon-like appearance—“if you do not quiet yourselves, I, alcohol, will destroy you.”

•

Quieting ourselves was the goal of our lives; it was our prayer and our God (or alternatively, in the local lingo: our higher power, however we chose to understand that). Quieting ourselves was our Promised Land, toward which we were guided by our she-therapists, under the leadership of the therapist Moses alias I Alcohol. Dr. Granada engaged us in philosophical debates about life and death. Nurse Viola and the other nurses did what nurses do: they administered drips, gave injections, and distributed vitamins and sedatives and mineral complexes for our thoroughly depleted bodies; whereas the therapists guided us toward the Promised Land of quiet. All the therapists had themselves long ago become exceptionally quiet; they were professionally quiet, they were virtuosos of quietness. They could tell at a single glance the extent of our quietness, so as to determine, to an inch, the distance that still separated us from the Promised Land of absolute quiet. The therapist Quasi Moses alias I Alcohol (the first part of his name came from his role as a leader, not from his faith) was perceptive to a god-like degree. The therapist Quasi Moses alias I Alcohol had undoubtedly met with the God of quiet on the mountaintop, and the Almighty had imparted to him all there is to know on the subject of quieting oneself. The therapist Quasi Moses alias I Alcohol looked at a person who had not sufficiently quieted himself and said to the insufficiently quieted person: “Quiet yourself!” And the person immediately quieted himself.

I remember as if it were yesterday the precise day of my face-to-face meeting with the therapist Moses alias I Alcohol. It was on Thursday, July 6, 2000 precisely. I remember precisely that it was on that very day I had written the first paragraphs in the emotional journal of the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, in civilian life a long-haul truck driver who transported fruit to countries east of us. The Most Wanted Terrorist in the World had given me an exceedingly cursory account of his life story; he had spoken disjointedly and it was impossible to follow. Dictation, even subconscious dictation, was in this case out of the question, as was the notion that he himself should write anything. I hesitated to take on the task of writing for him in the fullest sense, both mechanically and mentally; I was reluctant to assume the character of the narrator — a long-haul truck driver transporting fruit to countries east of us. I hesitated, but the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World offered me a small bottle of Polo Sport cologne, and I could not resist the temptation. All colognes and deodorants were strictly forbidden on the alco ward, but I was obsessed during this particular stay of mine by the idea that my whole body, and my whole expensive track suit, were permeated with the odor of madmen’s pajamas.

All around the alco ward were the brick-built residences of the insane, set amid untended, overgrown gardens. At the height of noon these gardens would fill with noisy throngs of schizophrenics and suicides clad in striped pajamas; dense yellowish-gray clouds of odor from the blue-and-white pajamas and the farinaceous bodies they contained drifted over the gardens; I was unable to rid myself of the notion that one of these clouds had encircled me and soaked into me.

I accepted the small bottle of Polo Sport cologne from the shaking hands of the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World; I promised myself I would use it discreetly, in any case in such a way as to evade the matchless sense of smell of Nurse Viola, who from a distance of several dozen yards (and, I repeat, by smell alone) was capable of determining what kind of alcohol, consumable or non-consumable, a person had had (internal or external) contact with. I accepted the small bottle, hiding it in a hiding place the whereabouts of which I will not reveal, and in return I undertook to keep a journal of someone else’s emotions.

On July 6th, at four-thirty in the morning, I sat down at the table in the writing room, and in the upper left-hand corner of a blank sheet of A4 paper I wrote the date: 7/6/2000.

“I’ve come to the end of the first week of my stay. It’s half past five in the morning. It’s raining. In half an hour the wake-up bell will ring. I’m sitting in the quiet room and writing my emotional journal. At the moment in my heart I’m feeling despair. What is the state of soul of a person who wakes up at the beginning of July on an alco ward, knowing he has to spend the whole summer here? The rain outside the window depresses me and at the same time it’s a relief. It depresses me because if it keeps raining till Sunday, then on Sunday when my girlfriend comes to visit I won’t know where to go with her. The rain is a relief because if the weather were hot I’d regret even more the vacation I already paid for but wasted because of my drinking rampage. I’d always be imagining my girlfriend and me lying on the beach, and my despair would be even greater.

“Yesterday at the evening community meeting we said goodbye to the people who were leaving. I was jealous and I wanted to be one of them. Homeless Czesław, who was supposed to give the last farewell speech, read a poem he had written instead of giving a speech. When he finished, Nurse Viola told him he would have to repeat the whole cure from the beginning. It’s just as well I don’t know how to write poetry.”

I felt suddenly tired. I felt that writing alcos’ confessions, assignments, and emotional journals exhausted me in general, while in particular I felt that writing the counterfeit journal of the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World was beyond my strength. For some time I had suspected, and at this moment I became certain, that the unending labor of reproducing the crude style of the alcos was having an impact on my own exquisite turn of phrase. Further hours of struggle over the composition of further syntactically challenged simple sentences would be harmful to my work, and in addition, as I already said, I no longer had the heart for it. True, I could have raised the price of my writing services, but then the alcos, who were poor as church mice as it was, would be completely wiped out, and when all was said and done the payment they offered in the form of five-zloty coins, or cigarettes, or other sorts of fees, was my only source of income. I chose a more honorable way out: I decided to write freely, I decided not to put a stranglehold on my own song and not to hold back with my own personal éclat; at the very end, though, I planned to edit the text by filtering out its stylistic elegance and erudite references in such a way as to make it look like a genuine alco manuscript scribbled laboriously by a trembling hand.

“By profession I am a truck driver. The last few years I worked for a company that delivers fruit to countries east of us. The work was dangerous but paid well. You also had to do a lot of drinking in all kinds of places. A truck carrying fruit can’t wait for too long. A truck carrying fruit can’t just stand for a week either when it’s being loaded up, or on the way, or at the border. To move things along, to get things going, to allow my truck with its fruit to be on its way, I’d have to buy vodka for the loaders, the warehouse men, the policemen, and the customs officials. I drank with the Poles, and I drank with the Russkies. My boss — the head of shipping for the company that delivers fruit to countries east of us — would reimburse me for the money I had to spend on vodka so as to clear my way. He was a good man, though he didn’t drink at all. So I feel all the worse about what I did. And what I did was, the last time I came back from Russia I was completely drunk. Actually, that in itself was nothing special, things like that had happened to me before. But this time, when I came back from Russia in a state of intoxication, I had a yen (right away! right away!) to have a chat with my boss, I had a yen to clear my head a little in the aura of amiable sobriety that surrounded the man, and I knocked on the door of the head of shipping, and I went in, and sat down, and began a conversation that I don’t remember. My boss saw the condition I was in and gave me coffee. I downed the coffee in one go and suddenly felt sick. An important fact was that outside there was a severe frost, while in my boss’s office it was very hot; the change of temperature must have had a debilitating effect on me. My boss spoke to me in an amiable manner, yet I, ignoring the likelihood that my behavior would be construed as impolite, rose from my seat because I thought I would make it. Unfortunately I did not make it. As I stood up I felt myself gripped by a fearful inner spasm, and a frothy stream of puke issued forth from me, and I threw up all over a map of the Polish-Russian border that was lying on my boss’s desk. My boss watched in dismay as brown trickles of my puke traversed the River Bug, speeding like long-haul trucks over the border crossings at Brześć and Medyka and Terespol, sneaking like masterful smugglers across the unpatrolled sectors of the frontier, engulfing the watchtowers and the contrabandists’ hideaways, streaming into the outskirts of Sokółka, flooding the market square in Bobrowniki, and flowing through Siemiatycze.

“And the organic smell of my puke filled the office, and my body, choked by the puke, the stench, and the shame, fell at my boss’s feet.

“Why did this occur? Why did it happen to me, of all people? What explains the fact that I was trying to show my boss how very much I appreciated his goodwill, yet I ended up showing him the shameful contents of my bowels? More generally, the problem is as follows: how can the depths of the drunken soul be reconciled with the shallows of the drunken body? How can these things be explained and how can they be squared? How can the loftiest flights of the soul ever be equated with a fearful barfing? What black thread can join a fantastical and creative lightness with the next day’s sheets, soaked black with sweat? What is the connection between the boldness and panache of the evening and the fear and trembling of the morning? Am I, in civilian life a simple truck driver for a company delivering fruit to countries east of us, am I, a simple driver, who because of his penchant for military attire is known to his pals as the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, am I not by any chance posing trivial questions that can be answered by any doctor, and even by any first-year medical student? I feel embarrassed to give vent so openly to my own pride, yet the answer is: no. I am asking questions of a higher order. I’m writing this novelistic treatise about addiction not to provide answers but to pose questions. And it so far-reachingly happens that I’m writing the last chapters of this treatise on an alco ward. Because my boss, seeing my puke-smothered corpse lying at his feet, immediately brought me here—”

Suddenly (suddenly! suddenly!) I felt the gentle touch of someone’s hand on my shoulder, and I experienced such a ghastly fright that not only did I break off from my writing, I didn’t even put a period at the end of the last sentence. I knew everything was up; I knew that all my counterfeit creative work had come to light. I knew it was the therapist Quasi Moses alias I Alcohol standing behind me with his hand on my shoulder. I knew that he was looking over my shoulder, that for some time now he had been following the course of my pen and had been reading what I was writing. I turned in my chair and saw his broad, congenial countenance, and I did not dare look into his eyes. I quaked like jello; I could feel, I could tangibly feel, all the symptoms of withdrawal coming back to me out of nowhere: anxiety, excessive perspiration, nausea, insomnia, hallucinations. The therapist Quasi Moses alias I Alcohol gazed at me attentively, glanced back at the written page, which I did not even attempt to cover up, then looked at me, and said:

“I can see you’ve quieted yourself; I can see you’re working on yourself and trying to quiet yourself. That’s very good. Quieting yourself, absolute quiet, that’s the basis for everything.”

With a warm yet quiet gesture he patted me on the shoulder and, just as he had come in, he moved soundlessly out of the writing room. Automatically, with the movements of a golem, I stood up, took my cigarettes out of my pocket, left the quiet room, and headed for the other end of the hallway. As I opened the door of the smoking room I caught the last sentences of an age-long debate about the existence and nature of the relationship between physiology and the soul.

Chapter 22. Fuchs the Chestnut Mare

IT’S A FROSTY WINTER before the war. Mid-January 1932 or 1933. In the part of the world where my grandfather, Old Kubica, is right now drinking another glass of Baczewski vodka, the frosts and snows will last a long time yet. Old Kubica’s immense sheepskin coat has slipped from his shoulders; he’s wearing a white shirt with an upright collar, and a black vest. He’s hot, his blood is circulating vigorously in his veins, yet pain is radiating from somewhere. Over his heart or under his lungs is an intramuscular or intercostal gap — a wound that cannot be healed.

At the Blackbird pub darkness prevails: there’s only a faint shaft of light from an oil lamp on the bar, only the red-hot iron door of the tiled stove glowing like the insignia of the god of war, only a distant white brightness gleaming through the window. The proprietor, who is stacking glasses on the shelves of a dresser, glances into a dark corner. Old Kubica is sitting motionless; that is to say, he sits motionless for a quarter of an hour, then after a quarter of an hour a faint movement of the arm can be seen, there is a soft chink of glass, and his head tips back. My grandfather Old Kubica is drinking and he doesn’t know what to do. He’s fighting off thoughts of his debts, his farm, Grandmother Zofia, his children. He doesn’t even think about his favorite chestnut mare, who has the male name of Fuchs. He’s thinking rather that in the early morning he’s going to have to kill the merchant from Ustroń to whom, earlier today, he sold the chestnut mare called Fuchs.

“I tell you, Mr. Kubica, it’s the most beautiful horse I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s the most beautiful horse in the world,” the merchant has been repeating to him for more than six months. “Mr. Kubica, Marshal Piłsudski’s chestnut mare can’t hold a candle to your chestnut mare. Name your price; for what I pay you, you’ll be able to build a new house.”

Old Kubica would smile, stroke the horse’s mane, and listen to it stamping its feet, snorting, neighing; his head was raised like an orchestral conductor listening to perfectly played music, like a drunkard drinking his glass of delight.

Early this morning his hands had been trembling and his heart pounding irregularly, while his brow was bathed in sweat, and insistent thoughts roared in his head: everything is lost, everything is gone, all is wasted. The bailiff will come, and he’ll have to take his woman and his child and move out.

In the room where he slept it was perhaps thirty, perhaps twenty-five degrees fahrenheit. He was standing at the window; waves of heat and cold struck him in turn. He rested his forehead on the frost-covered pane, gazing at the empty yard in front of the house, gazing at the path that my ten-year-old father had diligently swept clean of snow, down which the merchant was approaching.

“He must have gotten up early,” Old Kubica whispered to himself, and for a moment he thought about how people who get up early, wash in ice-cold water, eat scrambled eggs and bacon, drink hot coffee, then hitch their horses to a sleigh, cover themselves in blankets, and ride in absolute silence and whiteness the whole six miles from Ustroń to Wisła — that such people must be happy, that they must not feel pain. Maybe he himself should hitch up and head out for nowhere in particular? My proud grandfather grimaced in disgust and was annoyed at himself for entertaining such women’s notions. “Head out for nowhere in particular? Where on earth would I go?” He gave a sour smile. “Except to the pub.”

“Right,” he murmured, “the furthest I’d get would be the pub in Ustroń.”

The merchant was standing in the doorway, his hands spread in a half-hearted gesture, a smile of collusion on his face.

“Mr. Kubica. .”

“All right,” grandfather interrupted him. “What you said, and another twenty zloties.”

The other man immediately reached for his wallet.

“And one more thing.” The merchant’s smooth hand paused amid the folds of his warm jacket. “The money today, the horse tomorrow. Come back tomorrow at the same time.”

The merchant was about to say something, but the expression on my grandfather’s face must have been such that he said nothing. He dug around much less briskly in his pockets, and eventually pulled out a wad of banknotes.

“I’ll bring the extra twenty tomorrow,” he said in a voice so wan it seemed the longed-for transaction that was finally taking place had suddenly ceased to interest him. “I trust you, Mr. Kubica — everyone hereabouts knows you to be a man of his word.”

“Till tomorrow then,” said Kubica, and, paying no more attention to the merchant, he left the house first.

Out in front he stooped down, took a handful of snow, and wiped his face. The merchant saw him standing motionless in the middle of the yard; he saw his snow-covered eyebrows and forehead. He didn’t go up to him, and even strayed a little from the cleared path. Once he was sure the other man was at a safe remove he said:

“Goodbye, see you tomorrow.”

Old Kubica saw nothing and heard nothing. He did not hear the bells of the merchant’s sleigh fading into the distance, and he did not see the children on their way to school. Smoke rose from the chimneys of the houses, the sound of wood being chopped came from somewhere far off, and in the forest on Ochodzita Mountain someone was calling: “Come on, come on.” An almost completely black cat was cautiously crossing the yard at a diagonal.

“Something has to be done, but what?” grandfather was saying to himself. “Something has to be done. .”

He gazed about distractedly, though not so distractedly as to look at the gate leading to the stable. At the far end of the farmyard he saw a fir tree leaning against the wall; just two weeks earlier it had been decorated with apples and candies. Christmas had come and gone, though it would have been better if it hadn’t come at all.

He had been in no state to say prayers, or to sing carols. At the Christmas Eve supper hardly anyone had spoken; the children were tearful. His heart had been like a stone exploding in the fire. Grandma Zofia served undercooked cabbage. The white-enameled serving dish of barely warm food tipped the scales toward the evil spirits; one of them entered into him. He leaned across the table, took the ill-fated vessel in his hands, and hurled it against the opposite wall, on which there hung a likeness of Martin Luther after the portrait by Cranach; the candle on the table went out, and the portrait of our reformer fell to the ground. Everyone ran away — my father always told stories about running away from Old Kubica — everyone hurried, they fled down the hallway and across the unlit yard, put the ladder against the trapdoor to the loft in the barn, and agilely climbed up one after another, like a well-trained fire brigade. Old Kubica was knocking over chairs, knocking over the table, knocking over the dresser. He took his shotgun down from the wall and summoned my ten-year-old father. They crossed the farmyard together; grandfather had the gun slung over his shoulder and a bottle in his hand, and he was singing carols:

God grant a merry eve and night.God grant a merry eve and night.First to the farmer on his farm.First to the farmer on his farm.Then to the farmer’s wife so fine.Then to the farmer’s wife so fine.And to his farmhands, good men all.And to his farmhands, good men all.

He drank from the bottle, and his splendid voice carried across the valleys. My father tried to sing too, but he was seized by a fear stronger than the twenty-below frost — the shadow of that fear would remain with him forever. At that time, on Christmas Eve in the winter of 1932 or 1933, my nine- or ten-year-old father was afraid that an angel hurrying to Bethlehem would pop out from behind one of the buildings. He was afraid that somewhere very close there was an angel who had gone astray or had decided to take a brief rest on its flight. On the night of Christmas Eve the sky was crisscrossed with angels flying in swooping arcs like swallows; on this night angels stopped in fields and flew over roofs, and a person could sometimes hear the sound of their wings and their choral singing. My father was afraid because he was convinced that Old Kubica would shoot at the angel. They’d come round the corner of the house; a white-winged creature would be standing before them under a snow-covered apple tree, and without hesitation my grandfather would take the gun from his shoulder and fire almost without taking aim, and he would hit the angel. And on its wing there would appear a single drop of blood, and that single drop would have such power that if it fell to the ground, everything would catch fire and everything would burn. Everything would catch fire, even the snow. But they made it all the way across the yard and through the orchard behind the house, and nothing happened; the fear slowly dissipated, Old Kubica’s movements became ever more sluggish. He had stopped singing and had stopped looking for the one responsible for the evil, who needed to be killed. He went back to his freezing room, stood the bottle on the floor by the iron bed, and fell asleep.

“Something needs to be done, but what?” thinks my grandfather; he gazes at the Christmas tree leaning against the wall, and he remembers the promissory note he signed right after the holiday, and he remembers the moment of hesitation before he appended his signature. Him! Him, who never hesitated, who never had doubts — he had not only had a moment of doubt before appending his desperate signature, but furthermore he had not stopped, had not drawn any inferences from his doubts. It was nothing but the devil addling his brain; nothing but the Lord God punishing him for flinging a dish of lukewarm cabbage against the wall instead of sitting quietly and praying at Christmas Eve supper. The whole farm for a single dish of cabbage, and a cold one into the bargain? What sort of accounting is that, Lord? he had asked without conviction, and the Lord with all the conviction in the world answered nothing, and in his soul Old Kubica had accepted the divine reckoning; the dish of cold cabbage was evidently the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back of his irascibility.

He goes into the woodshed and with both hands seizes the axe that next morning he may use to kill the merchant from Ustroń. How exactly he’ll kill him he doesn’t yet know, but he knows he’ll kill him. Details have never interested him and at the present moment they interest him even less. He doesn’t think about whether he’ll use a shotgun or an axe or a hammer; he’ll use whatever is at hand, because he always uses whatever is at hand, and if there isn’t anything at hand, he’ll do it with his bare hands. What will he do with the body of the murdered merchant? How will he do it? He won’t do anything. He’ll leave the stiff where it is and go to the pub. He’ll sit at the pub like he does every morning, except on this particular day he’ll wait there till the police come for him. When they come, he’ll go with them. Old Kubica grips the axe in his hands, and at the thought that around noon tomorrow the police will take him away, he finally feels a sense of relief.

“Yes, the police,” he whispers to himself, and unaware he is paraphrasing an as yet unknown poem, adds: “the police is always some kind of solution.”

My grandfather now hacks the branches off the fir, already knowing what he’s going to do that morning. He finds a piece of glass, some sandpaper, and a small handsaw. He’s going to carve objects out of the fir wood. Above all, he’ll make at least four rogulas. The fir is beautifully branched, like a star, and the rogulas, which resemble miniature ski poles, and which Grandma Zofia will use to stir food in the blue enameled pots, will be perfect. For an hour, or perhaps two, grandfather works with pleasure; he handles the resinous wood, the smell of the fir calms his jangling nerves, and his hands are steady. He gently removes the bark from a fir branch and, at first discordantly, like an orchestra tuning up, then more and more harmoniously, like musicians playing an overture for a grand ball, he begins to sing. After two weeks of silence my grandfather begins to sing again, and now it’s as if he were adding his voice to our choir, the choir of the alcoholics.

•

In the hallways of the ward all the voices and all the melodies of the world join together, and sometimes in the plaintive polyphony I can distinctly hear the highland tune that Old Kubica sang decades ago in the snow-covered yard. The melody is the same but the words are different; he’s bent over the slippery barkless trunk of the fir tree and, inspired it would seem, sings whatever comes into his head:

You’re not here, you’re not here, you’ll always be gone.On the lake, on the lake, there swims a white swan.

Is my grandfather singing a song for the death of the merchant from Ustroń, who he is going to kill the next morning? Or for the departure of Fuchs the chestnut mare? Or for his own departure in the company of the police? Is he singing about me? Is he singing about you? You’re not here, you’re not here, you’ll always be gone. No, you’re here. I am here. I’m here because I do not choose death. Old Kubica, given a choice between the lack of a bottle at his bedside or death, would have chosen death. I choose life, and Old Kubica drinks to my health in the heavenly pub, where an angel tops up his glass. Grandfather, I say to him, drunken father of my drunken father, grandfather, I was in the same snow-covered yard; a bottle stood at my bedside, the same black perspiration poured from me, my heart quaked and my hands shook. But I choose life. At my side there is a love that is as strong as your singing; it brings me salvation. Our addiction, which killed you, drops from me as the skin of the snake drops from the snake; I am victorious, and I’m sharing my victory with you. I’m writing about you and I’m writing about myself not only to show that true alcoholic prose does not end in death; it ends in life, and who knows how life will end.

After an hour, or perhaps two, of work Old Kubica suddenly jumps up. Maybe he’s decided to do immediately what he was going to do the next day; maybe he’ll hitch the horses to the sleigh and gallop off amid billowing snows to Ustroń, the axe at his feet. But no, Old Kubica jumps up because what always happens to us is happening to him: the time comes when a person has to have a drink. And my grandfather, already possessed of the knowledge and certainty that he would soon be having a drink, and mightily relieved by this fact, throws his immense sheepskin coat round his shoulders and goes to the pub. He sits in the furthest corner and orders Baczewski, the most expensive vodka. He pays for successive bottles, but to all those who during the day, and also now after dark, want to come and sit with him, he says:

“Don’t sit with me today. Sit somewhere else.”

Today the only person who can put his glass next to Old Kubica’s glass is Dr. Swobodziczka. The doctor comes into the pub in the late evening; he’s on his way back from visiting someone whose aches he has eased (early tomorrow the pain will pass, in three days the temperature will be gone, in four days you’ll start to feel weak, in five days I’ll come again), he’s on his way back from visiting someone whose pre-mortal or perhaps life-giving sufferings he has eased. First he shakes Old Kubica’s hand without a word, then he sits down and gazes at him intently.

“You’ve lost everything,” he says, half stating, half asking.

Old Kubica says nothing.

“Property’s just something to be bought. In a year you’ll get it all back, in two years you’ll have even more.”

Old Kubica says nothing; he picks up the bottle with a smooth motion, but the doctor places his hand over his own glass.

“It occurred to me not to drink,” he says in a tone that is striving not to be apologetic.

Grandfather turns to him with great difficulty, his face altered, his features drained of expression.

“How long for?” he asks in a voice not his own. “How long for? A month? Till Easter? A year?”

“It occurred to me not to drink at all,” the doctor now says with relief; the guilty note is gone from his voice. “I woke up this morning and decided not to drink, but I didn’t have anyone to tell, because no one would believe me anyway. Since, as you know full well, Paweł, one drunkard can only be fully understood by another drunkard, I tried to tell my fellows in addiction, but they were all already drunk. So I came to the conclusion that a drunkard who’s decided to say goodbye to booze can only be understood by another drunkard who’s also decided to say goodbye to booze. Unfortunately, all day long I’ve not been able to find anyone like that in our neck of the woods. I see that I’ve come to you too late as well, Paweł.” The doctor slightly raised the hand that was covering the empty glass. “And it’s a great, great pity. I’m convinced it’s a fine idea — the only way. After that a third drunkard would be found who also wanted to say goodbye to booze, then a fourth, a fifth, a hundredth, a ten thousandth. There’d be a whole army of drunkards supporting each other in not drinking. If you’d not had a drink today, Paweł, we’d go down in history as the founders of a worldwide movement. I really feel sorry. .”

“Sorry for what?” asks Grandfather Kubica, still in a voice that isn’t his own. Not everything the doctor has said has gotten through to him, and what has gotten through is utterly staggering.

“Sorry for Poland,” says the doctor bitterly. “Sorry most of all for Poland. Poland could have been the first, but this way America’s going to get there before us yet again.”

“America,” grandfather repeats mechanically, and he thinks of America, from where he returned ten years ago, and he thinks of green-eyed Jennifer, the pastor’s daughter, with whom he twice went for a walk. They strolled down a path between two endless fields of corn; on the horizon was the Mississippi River, vast as an ocean. My grandfather didn’t understand what the green-eyed daughter of the pastor was saying to him, but he longed for her to confide in him about her intense emotions, to try and persuade him to stay for good, to tell him about the log cabin they would share, from the windows of which they would be able to see the great flowing Mississippi.

“I feel sorry for Poland,” repeated the doctor. “Sorry for life, sorry for us.”

“Either way, here or there, in Poland or in America, either way we’re going to die,” says my grandfather, and he sees the doctor’s hand not only capitulate and cease guarding the empty glass, but even, in an eloquent gesture, push it toward the almost full bottle of Baczewski.

And grandfather fills the doctor’s glass, and both of them drink, and both of them say:

“Good health, good health!”

The scale tips again, this time not in the direction of evil spirits: this time the scale tips in the direction of hell. The last glassful fills the measure and exceeds the measure. Old Kubica feels the vodka bursting his skull open.

“America, America,” he sputters; flecks of foam appear in the corners of his mouth. Yet he stands up with unexpected ease and walks toward the exit with an even tread. He forgets his sheepskin coat, which is draped over a chair like a shepherd’s hut that has been demolished by a gale. My grandfather walks through the snow towards home in his black vest and his white shirt with the upright collar. The frost fills the measure and the frost exceeds the measure, and Old Kubica starts to shout, he starts to howl; terrible, terrible is his howling, he howls the way I howled when the mafiosi appeared in my apartment along with the dark-complexioned poetess Alberta Lulaj.

•

When was this? It was never. Literature doesn’t exist, because that past does not exist and those stories do not exist. There’s only the present — a late evening in January 1932 or 1933. My grandfather reels and howls like an animal being killed. They hear his howling from a long way off. They run down the hallway and across the unlit yard, place the ladder against the trapdoor to the loft, and agilely climb up, one after another, like a well-drilled fire brigade. When Old Kubica lurches into the yard, not even their breathing can be heard; he himself falls silent and starts to come to his senses. He’s standing in the same place he stood in the morning; he’s standing in the same place, even though it’s impossible to stand in the same place twice. Old Kubica must be reading what I’m writing, because he says, as if he were repeating after me:

“It’s impossible to rub your face in the same snow twice. It’s impossible, but maybe, goddammit, it is possible!”

He stands in the same place, and sets off down the same swept path toward the woodshed, and with the same movement he takes hold of the ax. The wooden door of the stable opens and closes, and now there is a terrifying silence. A minute, two, three, five minutes of terrifying silence and then, maybe close by or maybe far away, there comes a single dull thud, perhaps a horse’s hoof striking the ground, perhaps a pine tree splitting open on the distant slope of Ochodzita Mountain. More silence, several more seconds of silence, then immediately there comes a diabolic percussion and the stable door opens, a drum-roll sounds, someone tries to play an out-of-tune violin, someone hammers iron on iron, there is mad laughter and howling, and a cry from my grandfather, Old Kubica. He’s standing in the door of the stable; his white shirt and black vest are covered in blood. In one hand he grasps a torch; the other, raised to his shoulder, is holding up the severed head of Fuchs the chestnut mare. And he sets off walking; his pace quickens, he’s walking ever faster, he runs, he stumbles as he is running, and traces of blood and fire mark his faltering steps. Then all that can be seen is the flickering light of the torch climbing ever higher up the steep hillside. The wood must be burned, and the snow must be burned, and the world must be burned. And a moment later a fire, a great fire is upon the snow-covered mountains, it’s as if a single drop of blood has fallen from an angel’s wing. You’re not here, you’re not here, you’ll always be gone. On the lake, on the lake, there swims a white swan.

Chapter 23. Intense Emotions by the Utrata River

SHIVERS ZIGZAG THROUGH our bodies. We’re sitting on a stone bench by the Utrata River. I say: The Mill on the Utrata; you say: The Mill on the Lutynia. The pair of us are lifted straight from a pastoral eclogue. It’s muggy; every hour there are violent downpours. We stand up and enter ever deeper into the dark woods. You visit on Sundays. Around eleven I wait by the hospital gates; you step out of the local train and run down the platform. (She’s here.) A sandy path between the dormitories of the insane leads down to the Utrata. I place thick layers of the week’s Gazeta Wyborczas on the bench; we have our whole life before us, a whole seven hours, and a whole life can’t be spent on bare stone.

The last addiction from my previous sojourn on this earth is that I buy Gazeta Wyborcza every day, at the kiosk outside the ward, and read it, or rather leaf through it impatiently. What’s going on in the outside world? Nothing is going on. People are dying.

The dead are strolling through the untended gardens. Their tongue is inhuman and their movements too; only their white-and-blue hospital pajamas give them a semblance of personhood. We walk along the fence; from the other side one of the dead approaches, jerkily proffers his hand through the iron railings, and exclaims in English:

“How do you do?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” I respond automatically.

His face suddenly lights up; the cadaverous expression of a man who has died from excessive pain gives way to the animated, intelligent physiognomy of an emeritus professor of physics or genetics.

“Tell me, please,” says the resurrected one in a clear and bright voice, “What’s been happening in Poland? What’s been happening in the world? What’s the latest news?”

“Nothing in particular,” I reply, embarrassed, as is natural in my position. “I don’t know much, just what’s in the papers.” I show him my pile of Gazeta Wyborczas. “What’s the latest news? I’ve no idea what you’re interested in. . France won the European Championship, a big passenger plane crashed, Wałęsa doesn’t stand a chance in the elections. .”

“How do you do!!” cries the other man in an inhuman voice; his face turns gray and once again becomes a death-mask conveying fearful suffering. He shakes my hand vigorously; then you and I quicken our pace, and behind me I can still hear the clear and bright voice:

“Tell me, please, what’s been happening in Poland? What’s been happening in the world?”

We’re alone, completely alone, and so it can be said: this is the summer of life, this is the only season in which the most secret intentions are carried out. We enter deep into the dark woods; schizophrenics and suicides pass us by, the path comes to an end, the sky darkens, we’re walking up to our waists in wet undergrowth, we embrace like no one on earth ever embraced before. Lord, I’m learning freedom at her side; my heart is learning to beat, I breathe, I exist, because she exists. What kind of problem is a jacket tossed down in the wet grass? What kind of problem are damp wrinkled pants? What kind of problem is it to walk barefoot, and to step barefoot onto a local train? Come on, come on, now let’s go on like this. A raindrop and the shadow of a leaf falls on your skin. I’ve stopped being afraid. Someone inside me has stopped being afraid. He’s not afraid. He’s not afraid that here, where we embrace madly, an unpredictable lunatic will suddenly appear, or that we’ll be tracked down by a posse of she-therapists. I’m not afraid of the coming week because I know that in a week’s time I’ll see her running down the platform; I’m not afraid of the coming life because I know she’ll be there till the end of that life. I’m not afraid of the nightmare in which my grandfather Kubica is running — a severed horse’s head on his shoulder, his clothing covered in blood, a burning torch in his hand — with the intention of setting the frozen woods on Ochodzita Mountain alight. I can still hear the tongues of flame, but I no longer feel fear. Someone inside me is not afraid of the greenish oceans of Bison Brand, the brown lakes of Żołądkowa Gorzka, nor of the transparent rivers of pure spirits — he has already reached the shore.

I’m not afraid of unwritten books, I’m not afraid of sitting in the quiet room in the pale dawn of the ward and writing the last sentences of my epic poem in prose which shows irrefutably that the narrator has been saved by love. I didn’t plan such a very happy plot twist.

“I love you, but I didn’t plan to,” you said, and raised your eyes above the Utrata and higher still, above the woods and the trembling air over Okęcie airport.

“So what did you plan?”

“My intention was to check out your unwittingly praised abilities.”

“And after you’d done that?”

“After I’d checked them out I was going to release you.”

“You’re speaking my language.”

“No, you’re speaking my language.”

“In that case who’s speaking now — you or me?”

“Us, we’re speaking. I’d never have thought the plural could be such a turn-on.”

“I never planned this love either; to be honest, I intended. . Oh, it’s all the same what I intended.”

“You’re not just speaking my language, your intentions are the same as mine.”

“Now I have serious intentions; before, though, I was worried, I was afraid.”

“What were you afraid of?”

“I expected, actually I was pretty much certain, that you’d fall in love with me, and that once again I’d be facing the arduous and disagreeable ritual of getting rid of someone.”

“I was the one who was certain you’d fall in love, and that I’d have the ritual problems once again.”

“I warned you. Watch out, I said in our very first conversation; watch out, this is too much for you. I took you for an impetuous young lady.”

“And I took you for an irresponsible womanizer. To be frank, I took you for nothing but a heartless bastard. And there was a brief moment, but a moment nevertheless, when out of a sense of female solidarity I may even have wanted to punish you. In any case, I had nothing against the idea of you suffering, though I knew you wouldn’t suffer long, I was sure you’d only suffer for a short time and that you’d quickly find consolation in someone else’s arms. But you’ll never be in anyone else’s arms again. If you do that, it’ll be the end of both of us.”

“I’ll never be unfaithful to you. I’ll never deceive you. Before, I would have said that from my point of view those are utterly suicidal statements, a year ago I would have said so; but I’ve forgotten that tongue. I’ve lost my tongue, or perhaps I’ve freed myself from the bonds of that tongue. Or perhaps my tongue has descended from the heights of bombast.”

•

A mere month ago I planned to describe in this chapter my own personal network of private drying-out facilities, which were run by my successive or simultaneous girlfriends. I even thought up grandiose names for them: Barb the Broker, Joanna Scourge of the Asylum, the Seductive Movie Star, the Uruguayan Center Forward, Joanna Catastrophe — I wrote these names on index cards, but recently, early one morning (leaden clouds over the alco ward) I saw a great conflagration of all my index cards, and all my files and notes and names were burned. The original models for the characters turned to ash, nothing was left of them, for either there was nothing there to begin with, or they were too flammable, which amounts to the same thing. All my elegant notebooks, with lines and no margins, were burned; the fire consumed the archive of ideas I had in my head, and literature came to an end. I had finished writing my treatise on addiction, or rather I’d lost my enthusiasm for writing about addiction, I could think only of you. My head and my heart were filled with an intense emotion that I did not know was possible. If love is everything that exists, what name can be given to our super-existence?

Just a few days ago I was going to write a farewell speech to be delivered before I left the alco ward: Dear fellow alcos! Respected Dr. Granada! Viola, nurse above nurses! Venerable therapist of the double name! And you, quieted and alluring she-therapists! Tomorrow I shall quit these walls, that were once erected by Russian or Austrian builders; I leave with a light heart. I speak of the Russian or Austrian walls because my liberated brain is filled with something of a tangle. I get Kraków mixed up with Warsaw, the Kobierzyn asylum with the Tworki asylum; I confuse the Vistula with the Utrata, Iwaszkiewicz with Gombrowicz, and the oceanic billows of smoke issuing from the furnaces of the Sendizimir (formerly Lenin) steel mill are associated with the clouds of odor rising from the pajamas of the insane. Aside from one thing, of which I will not speak, at present there are no certain things in my mind; yet I would like to tell you about one thing, not the thing of which I will not speak, but a quite different thing. So then: regardless of whatever faces I make, regardless of my mocking laughter, regardless of the phrases I recorded in my notes, which were consumed by a conflagration of the heart, and regardless of all my poses, know this: I adore you all, my venerable prototypes, I adore you with my most sincere adoration. You exist already, but in the fervid sincerity of my narration you exist even more. Be well, you shades of my characters, always and everywhere I will tell enthralling tales about you. .

Just yesterday I was going to write my farewell speech, but early this morning I lost the ability to compose artful orations. I lost that ability and with a profound sense of relief I thought to myself that now I would describe how I placed old Gazeta Wyborczas on a stone bench overlooking the Utrata; the gardens, deserted at dawn, that in a couple of hours would be filled with the deceased; your black blouse in the tall wet grass.

On Sunday, around eleven in the morning, I stand by the hospital gates. Rolled up safe in the voluminous pockets of my expensive track suit is another chapter; I’m sort of able to write here, and sort of not.

“How does your writing about drinking affect your drinking,” Kasia the she-therapist asked during one of my first sessions.

“It doesn’t affect it at all, because when I drink I don’t write, and when I write I don’t drink. They’re two separate things.”

“No, they’re not two separate things. Don’t pretend you don’t understand the question.”

“I understand the question and I’m answering it. The author isn’t the narrator and the narrator isn’t the author. They teach you this at the highest levels of initiation into the study of literature, and they’re right. If I construct a character, even if the character is based on me, even if he drinks like me, and even if his name is Jerzy, the character still isn’t me, for goodness sake!”

“I disagree. The narrator is always you; he arises from your thoughts and comes into being in your mind.”

I wanted to say that not everything that comes into being in my mind is associated with me; I wanted to quote once again (I must have quoted it a thousand times) the line from Kafka: “I have nothing in common with myself.” I wanted quite simply to fend off the prohibition on personal creativity that was forming in the head of that charming she-therapist in glasses; but I decided not to. As everyone knows, prohibitions breed resistance, and resistance can often be highly creative.

“Apparently you’re writing a book about drinking while you’re here,” said Kasia, unnecessarily delaying her arrival at the inevitable conclusion.

“For some time now I’ve been writing about love.”

“In any case, don’t write about drinking for the moment. Leave that for later. Because you know, Jerzy, later you won’t feel like writing about it. Later, who knows, you may not feel like writing at all. I mean, in life you can’t just be a writer; you also have to be a friend, acquaintance, worker, father, lover, vacationer, goodness knows what else.”

“Goodness knows,” I said and fell silent again, and remained silent, because what was I supposed to say? Was I supposed to answer like a true graphomaniac that if I won’t feel like writing, I won’t feel like living? So I was silent for a good while; eventually, though, I forced myself to break the silence and say:

“When I write I don’t drink, and if I wrote every day, then every day I wouldn’t drink. That’s all it’s about, that’s the purpose of this therapy; as the Sugar King would say, you can’t argue with that.”

“Listen, Jerzy, you belong to the category of difficult patients. Difficult patients are patients who possess exceptional ability in some domain, and when they find themselves in here, not only are they incapable of relinquishing their ability, they actually make use of it to defend their alcoholism. I once had an alco who was a lawyer in civilian life, and in defense of his alcoholism he presented such well-constructed, convincing, beautiful arguments that he almost convinced me. I wept in admiration at the case he made, and it was extremely hard for me to repeat to myself over and again that this person met all the conditions to the letter, that I shouldn’t be misled by his protestations of innocence, because he was displaying as plain as day the six core symptoms of alcoholism. Another alco who passed through here a few years ago, in civilian life a urologist, instead of concentrating on treating himself for his alcoholism and leaving it at that, busied himself with the other alcos and treated them for urological problems, or at the very least offered urological advice.”

I was sorely tempted to say in a superior tone of voice, with scant regard for the truth, that urological advice was not the same thing as literature, but I restrained myself. It wasn’t right, either for respectable polemical purposes, or in defense of one’s métier, or even in self-defense, to speak an untruth: urological advice was capable of being great literature.

Besides, in one sense Kasia was right: I no longer wanted to be only a writer, now I wanted to be only with you. But since no one, neither Kasia, nor the therapist Moses alias I Alcohol, nor Dr. Granada, nor the Lord God himself has forced me to choose between you and literature, I’m still writing, though now I do it discreetly. If on the other hand the Lord God had spoken to me through the mouth of Kasia the she-therapist and He had been the one forcing me to choose between alcoholism and literature, between treating alcoholism or writing a book, I would have curled up in humility, but I would have said: “Lord, you’ve chosen too frail a messenger, too frail a messenger to convince such a hardened toper as myself.”

Kasia the she-therapist looked at me searchingly, but I withstood her gaze. As the time passed she relaxed visibly, while I relaxed invisibly (though the reverse ought to have been the case). I raised my head and she lowered her head and said in an extremely quieted voice:

“In any case, neither I nor anyone else is going to check your manuscripts.”

About that I had no worries. When the posse of she-therapists conducted a spot check of some alco’s bedside table it was exclusively in search of spirit in a toothpaste tube, Żołądkowa Gorzka in a shampoo bottle, valium hidden in a shoe. Anti-alcoholism books and brochures, questionnaires, written assignments, confessions and emotional journals flew through the air; the alcoholics’ tattered notebooks, which contained not a single drop of alcohol, were of no interest to anyone. But of course the very fact that anyone at all should presume to speak of checking or not checking my papers aroused my utmost disgust, and I decided to pursue my writing with discretion.

Then, when in the course of a group session on the topic “How I have explained and justified my drinking,” when in the course of this session one of the she-therapists (never mind her name) snatched my notebook from me and started peering at what I had written, I decided — just in case — to go completely underground. I intensified my time-consuming discretion to the point where it took on a conspiratorial quality.

I get up at four in the morning. Mist is rising from the gardens of the insane; I slip surreptitiously into the quiet room and surreptitiously begin to write. On Sunday, the completed manuscript under my arm, I wait by the hospital gates. Around eleven o’clock you run down the platform; we walk along our path and sit on the stone bench by the Utrata River. In the late afternoon you smuggle my latest chapter safely past the guards minding the gates. You get into a local WKD train and ride to Centralny Station; there you transfer to an InterCity express, there you are safe already. (Years ago, or maybe only a few months ago, I almost sensed it: you were two hundred miles from here.) Now it’s evening; darkness enfolds the alco wing. I sit on my bed in the five-person room and read your letters. You sit in your compartment, and were it not for the fact that you’re very close, I would say sentimentally: you’re further and further away. But no: she’s there. She’s sitting by the window, watching the distant flat plain passing by; on her lap (her green summer slacks are almost completely dry now) she smoothes out the poor-quality squared notepaper and reads with ease the shaky handwriting: “Shivers zigzag through our bodies. We’re sitting on a stone bench by the Utrata River. I say: The Mill on the Utrata; you say: The Mill on the Lutynia. .”

Chapter 24. Simon’s Undescribed Escape

NIGHT HAS FALLEN over the alco ward. The routed army lies side by side, the hallway lit by a single bulb; they are sleeping. (One of them, however, is not sleeping; he sees freedom beyond the mist.) Simon Pure Goodness wakes from a shallow, vigilant doze, gets up, takes a canvas bag from under his bed and soundlessly, so as not to rouse his sleeping roommate, starts to pack. Simon Pure Goodness does not like his sleeping roommate. He struggles with this feeling, constantly repeating “love thine enemy” to himself, constantly reminding himself of the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous; but hostility is in his heart. His sleeping roommate snores, and Simon cannot sleep at nights. Simon’s sleeping roommate borrowed ten zloties from him, and Simon knows he will never see the money again, though now especially, when he has decided to escape, every penny would be worth its weight in gold. Simon’s sleeping roommate uses Simon’s cigarette lighter and pen without asking, and Simon lacks the inner strength to bring this up with him. The other man, however, has no qualms about reminding Simon to close his cabinet and to sweep the room properly when it’s his turn. At such moments Simon not only has hostility in his heart, he becomes the very embodiment of hostility.

“What is hostility?” asked the therapist Moses alias I Alcohol in one of his talks. “What is hostility?” he repeated, and when the silence in the lecture theater became unbearable he presented, and subsequently dictated, the definition of hostility to the forlorn alcos. “Hostility,” wrote the half-dead army in sluggish unison, “hostility is rage,” wrote Simon along with all the others, “hostility is rage directed against someone or something.” Simon read the definition he’d written down in a cheap sixty-page notebook; his mind cleared, and he suddenly felt uneasy. In Simon’s opinion, if he had been able to express his opinion, an excessive clarity of mind leads to nervous disorders. To know something fully means not to have any reserves of knowledge on a given subject, and when a person has no reserves they feel foolish; at such times a person feels as if they were about to run out of cigarettes. Not “a person” but I Simon, not “they” but I Jerzy. And not “feels,” but “drinks. .”

•

Could the cute young she-therapist Kasia have been right? Was it actually possible I no longer felt like writing about drinking? Or maybe I no longer felt like writing because I no longer felt like drinking? As I wrote I was trying to keep up with my writing about drinking and with my giving up drinking, and I lost the chase, or maybe I won the chase? Or maybe the same thing happened to me that happened to Marcel Proust? Pourquoi pas? Warum nicht? Pochemu nyet? In Proust — an interpretation I remember from Professor Błoński’s lectures twenty-eight years ago — in Proust then, the lost time of the hero is the recovered time of the narrator. With me it’s almost the same: I, Jerzy the narrator, am not only recovering the lost time of the Drunkard protagonist, I’ve also found the thing he has been looking for in vain from the very first sentence. On the way I’m recovering the wasted, drunk-away time of the other characters. Between myself and my characters there are at times very few differences. (There’s no contradiction here with what is said elsewhere in this epic poem.) Between myself and myself there are also only a few subtle distinctions; because of this it may even be the case that the Drunkard is the narrator, while Jerzy is searching in vain for a last love before death, and when it comes down to it they are interchangeable.

In other words not Don Juan the Rib but I Don Juan the Rib. Not Dr. Granada but I Dr. Granada. Not Nurse Viola but I Nurse Viola. Und so weiter.

I don’t speak any foreign languages, but the she-therapists exert such a profound influence on me that I sometimes have the feeling that any minute now I’m going to start speaking foreign languages. My German, sent to sleep in my childhood, will awaken; my schoolboy Russian will grow khorosho in both spoken and written form; my never properly learned English will become proper. Speaking in tongues would not be the strangest thing to happen on the alco ward.

Simon Pure Goodness looks around at the countenances of his comrades in arms gathered in the lecture theater and he sees how after a week, or three weeks, or a month, those countenances have become less puffy and more refined, while noses lose their redness and eyes acquire a twinkle. The Hero of Socialist Labor has changed beyond recognition. Just recently his head was still as tumid as a neon light, his tufts of gray hair in disorder, his clothing awry, his hands atremble. And now how does he look? A slim, tan masculine face, a mane of hair, a smart red-and-black checked flannel shirt, hands firmly and precisely gripping a cup of ersatz coffee. The Hero of Socialist Labor now looks like Clint Eastwood’s older brother.

The alcos recover their sight, their hearing, and their speech. The Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, par exemple. I don’t know if I mentioned this, but an additional obstacle in writing down the Terrorist’s chaotic stories was the fact that he spoke in a hoarse inaudible whisper. It was the famous voice of the actor Jan Himilsbach at the point where it had almost completely disappeared, the vocal chords reduced to ashes. And now? A few weeks later? Now the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World not only speaks in such a way that he can be understood, now the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World speaks in such a way that immortalizing his speech is a task of the first importance. He stops me in the hallway and whispers confidentially in my ear:

“Don’t worry, Jerzy, don’t worry, they’ll find a medicine to cure our illness. I mean, they found something for Johnson’s.”

“If the graduates of this academy can go from apathetic muteness to the lucid production of such memorable turns of phrase in the space of a few short weeks,” whispers Christopher Columbus the Explorer to himself in rapturous admiration, “if that’s the case, then from now on, in the box marked Education on forms, I’m going to write that I have two degrees: one in philosophy and one in alcohology.”

Or the Sugar King. I’ve not written much about him because I don’t much like him. But he too has one affecting characteristic: he’s sensitive to the beauty of nature and the fate of stray animals. The entire army of alcos is almost without exception sensitive to the beauty of nature and the fate of stray animals. At dusk, wandering shades can be seen in the fields — the alcos are picking wild flowers. Legs afflicted with polyneuropathy carry them across the steaming meadows between the dormitories of the insane. The luxuriant bouquets decorate nightstands; the scent of cornflowers, camomile, and mimosa fills the ward like tear gas. They sleep, stifled by the smell and by their own weeping. In the dormitories of the insane, orange lights burn all night long; caterwauling can be heard at the foot of the walls. The innumerable cats have it good at this infirmary for paranoids. It’s impossible to look out of a barred or unbarred window and not see a band of felines crossing from one wing to another or moving from the forensic building to the neurology ward. There are more cats here than alcos, schizos, and suicides put together. And in the depths of the Sugar King’s unfeeling soul there is a great love of cats. Every evening the Sugar King wraps the paltry remains of his hospital dinner in a torn-out page from Gazeta Wyborcza and sneaks off to the day ward. From the opposite direction, from behind the brick wall, he’s met by an almost completely black cat by the name of Sky Pilot — he’s almost completely black, but round his neck he has a white mark that really does look like a dog collar. As to whether Sky Pilot and the Sugar King are dear friends, the answer is unclear. It’s unclear because for the sake of the Sugar King it does not wish to be in the negative.

Sky Pilot eats the leftover cold frankfurters or plain sausage; he sniffs unenthusiastically at an undercooked piece of chicken and for a moment, as if out of distraction, he lets the Sugar King pick him up. From behind the dingy windows of the neurology ward the patients, motionless as cadavers, watch a thickset man in an emerald-green track suit stroking and cuddling a cat; he presses his face to the dark fur and cries, tears running down the animal’s pitch-black coat. The Sugar King has been reminded of sorry things — a life wasted, parties long over, women lost. When did the Sugar King last pick up a cat? During the occupation? Under Stalinism? Not any later than that, for sure.

The ritual scene of feeding and weeping repeats every evening. But for a few days now it has not repeated. Sky Pilot has disappeared; he failed to come out from behind the brick wall at the established time. The Sugar King has walked the entire area, round all the wings; he even went through the dark woods down to the Utrata. Sky Pilot is nowhere to be found.

We’re not brave enough to openly poke fun at the Sugar King’s childlike despair; we merely cast hypocritically commiserative glances in his direction, while he glares at us through eyes that are as dead as pebbles in the Utrata and shouts:

“What do you expect of a cat? Why would a cat look at a person when it’s got cat-whores on every side? Cats aren’t able to jerk off, and you can’t argue with that!”

I’m not fond of the Sugar King, but I admit the difference between him and me is not so great. The difference between me and Simon Pure Goodness, on the other hand, is fundamental. Simon is escaping.

From the point of view of the further drinking of Żołądkowa Gorzka you can’t argue with it. If Simon had graduated in alcohology, if he’d diligently attended the lectures and the seminars, if he’d conscientiously kept his emotional journal and written all his confessions and assignments, if he had persevered — then it would have been much harder for him to drink than it will be after he escapes. After an escape from the Department of Alcohology it’s not only easier to drink, after an escape drinking is a higher imperative — and after all, why does one escape? Because of a higher imperative.

To graduate in alcohology and then keep on drinking is something of a faux pas. What will people say? They’ll say so-and-so, he studied alcohology and then when he graduated he kept on drinking, he’s a corpse now. Though people are one thing, people often saw me as a stinking corpse and I the corpse remained alive, and the people remained alive too. People are one thing, but what would the specters say, the ones I’ve been summoning for years through the drinking of successive bottles of Żołądkowa Gorzka? What would they say as they crowd around me? What would the green-winged angel with the build of a wrestler say? What would my grandfather Old Kubica say? What would my alleged Sunday School pal say, the one who smelled of cheap cologne?

I felt waves of hot and cold washing over me; I rested my forehead against the frost-covered window pane and saw cankerous innards pulsating beneath skin that was covered with piglike stubble.

“Get your things together and run away, run away as fast as you can.” His voice was remarkably similar to that of the alleged Józef Cieślar — the same good-natured tone of a G.P. on a house visit, a slightly different, shriller coloration, but good-natured nevertheless. I listened to him and did not feel the cold.

“Get your things together, run away; at any moment you can go wherever the mood takes you.”

“I’m staying here. Simon Pure Goodness is running away.”

“Fine, just fine”—I believe he gave a convulsive giggle—“I’m staying, he’s leaving. You’re talking like a member of the Politburo, that’s the first comparison that comes to mind. ‘Comrade, our cause is lost. You have to leave; I’m staying.’”

“Not a word about the former regime. The former regime makes me want to puke, and so do comments about the former regime.”

“Not a word about the former regime. . Fine, that’s actually even better. Not a word about the former regime, because you’re quite incapable of saying anything sensible about the former regime. All you can do is make pathetic jokes about how Solidarity supposedly robbed you of a hot babe in a yellow dress or something.”

“It’s true, Solidarity robbed me of a certain, as you put it, hot babe in a yellow dress, for which, by the way, at the present moment I’m eternally grateful to said labor union.”

“We know all about that. The yellow dress has been replaced by a black blouse, so to speak. . Am I right?”

“The hell you care.”

“You’re right, I really could care less about yellow dresses, or any other slutty item of clothing. But I care about the black blouse, I care about the black blouse almost as much as you care about the Solidarity labor union. I’m grateful to it.”

“You? Grateful to it? You’re grateful to it? For what, if I might ask?”

“For the fact that you got sober. After all, you got sober for it. . And if not for it, it still played a leading role in your getting sober. You got sober splendidly, definitively, and in style. You got sober the way Luis Figo dribbles a soccer ball. You’re completely sober and finally, finally you can be negotiated with.”

“Negotiated with about what?”

“What do you mean, what? Continuing to drink. You continuing to drink — right now that game is worth the black candle.”

“I’m afraid it would be a waste of effort for me. I realize that directing your attention to my comrades in arms is, if not inappropriate, then actually criminal, but right here you’ll have no problem finding a good few eagles, as Dr. Granada calls them, ready and waiting for their next phantom flights.”

“Who is it you’re recommending to me? These wretches, whose last ounce of reason has been eaten away by firewater? Surely you can see that all of your comrades in arms, as you so grandiloquently call them, have damaged brains? You don’t see that? And anyway, how come you’re so understanding all of a sudden, you who were once the embodiment of malice, my friend? I know — you decided to accept a lesson in humility and so you’re humble, except that you don’t even believe in that humility of yours. You’re prostituting yourself out of humility, and that’s the worst kind of prostitution.”

“My mind is damaged too.”

“Your mind isn’t damaged, with you it’s quite the opposite. Even here, in this intellectually lean environment, even here the she-therapist princesses sing anthems of praise to your mental proficiency. By the by, I’d like to talk about that some time.”

“About what? The therapists or my mind?”

“Both. As far as the princesses are concerned, take your pick. In this respect at least I understand your humility and your toleration. You’re attracted to them, and so you tolerate the nonsense they talk: flush the toilet, brush your teeth, and wash your socks, because the ward is our little home and we’re a little family. . Fine, that’s actually even better. . Sixty half-cut yahoos are a “little family” according to a sleeping princess of a she-therapist. You must really want them to put up with it all. . So take your pick. . It’ll be like before — not one of them will say no to you. Remember how great it was? And as for your mind, don’t you worry, it’s in good shape, your noggin survived too, you lucky drunk, you’ve got everything a Polish writer needs to get down to work.”

“If my mind wasn’t damaged I wouldn’t be able to hear you or see you.”

“As it is you can barely hear me or see me. Have a drink, you’ll hear me and see me better.”

“I won’t do that. You know I won’t. You know it, and that’s why you’re here.”

“True, I’m a little concerned, but let’s not exaggerate. You won’t do it now, today. . But after a while. . in a year. . in two. . you’ll reach for the bottle.”

“No I won’t. I tell you in truth, Satan, I won’t reach for the bottle.”

“I’m not Satan, I’m your green-winged angel in the gold baseball cap. Though the question of my identity is of little importance. . And what if something happens? You won’t reach for the bottle even if something happens?”

“No visible events ever had any influence on me. I drank because I drank. I never drank because something happened. At most my drinking was accompanied by certain events. For example I drank when the Berlin Wall was coming down, but I didn’t drink because the Berlin Wall was coming down.”

“And what if something special happened?”

“Like what for example?”

“Let’s say. . Let’s say the black blouse disappears from your life.”

“There is no human or inhuman force that could separate us. That you know too, and you’re flailing about in a truly pathetic manner.”

“You won’t reach for the bottle?”

“You’re the measure of my true decline. Your home isn’t in the underworld, you live in the back room of the liquor store. My eternally hung-over angel, my Satan crawling like an amber worm from a bottle of Żołądkowa Gorzka.”

“Don’t demean yourself, Jerzy. A devil from a bottle is better than no devil at all. My own lot pains me too; I’d rather have been Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s devil or Thomas Mann’s, but it fell to me to be Jerzy’s. It pains me, but I also accept it; each of us evidently gets the author he deserves.”

“Each of us gets the demon he deserves.”

“I’m telling you — better a devil from a bottle of Żołądkowa Gorzka than none at all. Besides, Żołądkowa Gorzka wasn’t that bad; sometimes it was delicious. For instance in the winter, at four in the morning, remember how divinely it traveled down the throat straight from the bottle? Remember the overwhelming sense of bliss that came to you at the door of the all-night store?”

“I feel like barfing.”

“Less of the puke if you please. Communism is stamped with puke, analyses and condemnations of communism are stamped with puke, your drunken licentious past is also marked permanently with puke. Permanently — or maybe not so permanently? We could eliminate certain things.”

“What sorts of things could you eliminate, my sulfurous gentleman?”

“The puking for example. We could get rid of the puking. Also the insomnia, the oceans of sweat, the quaking, the fear, and the hallucinations.”

“Meaning what?” I pursued with a stubbornness worthy of a better cause — but in my stubbornness there was cunning.

“Meaning that it would be like twenty years ago. In the evening you’d knock it back like a wild animal, in the evening you’d experience great relief, because the constant experiencing of relief became the foundation of your life, till late in the night you’d wallow in a stream of pure relief; then a deep sleep and in the morning, nothing. In the morning there’s a heathy appetite, bacon and eggs, a hot and cold shower, a walk, no sign of any indisposition; in the afternoon some reading. . Do you remember? Do you remember?”

“I remember very well. I remember everything from back then, from before, and I especially remember everything from afterwards. That I’ll never forget, and that’s exactly why. .”

“That’s why you won’t reach for the bottle, even if you were free of the burden of puking, like in the old days?”

“I won’t.”

“You yourself don’t even believe in your Lutheran resistance. Since you know you won’t reach for the bottle, why are you sitting here? Get your things together and run away. Just think, in a few hours you could be anywhere you want, in Sopot, in Wisła, in Jarocin. .”

“I’m staying here. Simon Pure Goodness is running away.”

“Give me a goddam break with that loser! That escape of his is pure kitsch, it’s lousy writing! Why escape in the night when he could just as easily do it in the daytime? Why through the window when the door and the gates are open the whole time? And why through the window of the smoking room in particular, when there are other rooms without bars on the windows? I mean, there’s no need to escape from here at all, you can just walk out of the place. At any time of the day or night you can sling your kit on your back, say bye-bye at the nurses’ station, and it really is bye-bye. No one will even ask where you’re going or why. And if someone really is weak in spirit, and passing publicly through the open doors of the alco ward is beyond them, they can just go into town, walk into the first bar they find, knock back a beer and one or two doubles, come back, and blow boldly into the breathalyzer. There you are — you’re at 1.5, you have fifteen minutes to pack your things. Bye-bye. Why creep out in the night when no one’s guarding you to begin with? Why wrap yourself in the garb of a great fugitive, when no one is giving chase? And why’s he running away anyway? What’s his motivation? Because his sleeping roommate snores? Because the fugitive has an overpowering thirst for booze? Because he’s fleeing in panic back to his former incarnation? Because all of the above? He’s running away, and he’s going to do what? Take a cab to “The Mighty Angel”? To the all-night store? Brace himself with a couple of doubles, take the elevator to the twelfth floor, open the door and wonder who’s been staying in his place while the owner was away? Who was here while I was gone? And, as he drinks, he’ll clear up the mess? He’ll put his keys, his books, his records, his pencils, his photographs, and his drinking glasses where they belong? He’ll vacuum the floor, change the bed, take down the lace curtains and gather the laundry? He’ll pour an over-generous quantity of Omo-Color washing powder into the bathtub? He’ll wash his filthy clothing and carefully hang it out to dry on the balcony, ever so carefully, because the more care you put into hanging out the washing, the less work it is to iron it later? And when his labors are done he’ll pour himself a goodly shot of Żołądkowa Gorzka, and drink it, and fall asleep, and wake up on the alco ward? I, your green-winged angel, cannot keep up with such an intense tempo, and I tell you — this is not good. Simon’s escape is highly artificial and irritating. If you have even a little bit of an instinct, stay away from such artificiality and don’t describe it. Listen to me finally; I’m not tempting you now, I’m giving you a friendly piece of advice: don’t describe Simon’s escape. Don’t do it. And don’t go overboard either with that childlike faith in recovered time; lost time, and especially lost money, can never be recovered, especially by means of literature. You yourself calculated that in the course of the last twenty years you’d drunk two thousand three hundred and eighty bottles of vodka, two thousand two hundred and twenty bottles of wine, and two thousand two hundred and fifty bottles of beer, when the latter two are converted to vodka (the ratio being: half a liter of vodka equals two bottles of wine, equals ten beers), and so, counting in vodka, in the course of the last twenty years you’d drunk three thousand six hundred bottles of vodka, and converting to today’s prices you figured out that you’d drunk a good deal more than seventy thousand zloties. And on top of that you have to add the cab rides, the tips, the snacks, and the lost wallets, bags, scarves, jackets, gloves, documents, the fees for home treatments and stays in drying-out facilities, the monstrous bills for drunken phone conversations, the interest, the fines, the penalties, and the paid women. And you need to add at least two more years of drinking, because you, Jerzy, didn’t start drinking in the Year of our Lord 1980, when Solidarity was founded, you, Jerzy, began drinking in earnest in the Year of our Lord 1978, when a Pole ascended to the Throne of St. Peter, which, incidentally, even taking into consideration your Protestantism, is nothing but a superficial coincidence. So that at a conservative estimate alone, Jerzy, you drank away a billion old zloties, a hundred thousand new ones, a sum of money that a chump like yourself, filled with hypocritical humility, is unlikely ever to get back. To get it back, the epic poem whose parts I’m dictating to you right now would have to earn you that billion old zloties. Though if you really listened to me, if you wrote everything down faithfully, that seemingly unattainable amount would not have to be imaginary. If you put your mind to it, you could earn it, you could sell our co-authored work at a good price, you could make a packet and — think about it — you could carry on drinking. But don’t write on your own. Don’t write on your own, Jerzy. I’m begging you: don’t write. Leave Simon’s artificial escape undescribed.”

•

Simon Pure Goodness walks down the hallway that is lit by a single bulb. He opens the door to the smoking room, goes up to the unbarred window, and tosses his duffle bag out onto the grass at the foot of the wall, then he climbs onto the window ledge and jumps down lightly. It’s a warm August night; a plane is coming in to land at Okęcie, and there’s a smell of cornflowers, camomile, and mimosa. Simon Pure Goodness passes between the brick-built dormitories. He sees an orange glow and hears the rumble of the local train. An almost completely black cat runs across the grass. Behind Simon, a green-winged angel treads at a slow pace; behind the angel come the shades of the dead in blue and white pajamas. They follow behind him; there are more and more of them. Tempt me not, Satan.

Chapter 25. The Eternal Awakening

AND MY ADDICTION was dropping from me the way the snake’s skin drops from the snake; the last shadows of tangible specters fell across the wall. She was with me, holding my hand, and I felt within myself a spring-like renewal of strength. Only six months before I’d been preparing for a different ending; in the quiet of my heart I was certain that I would finish writing the somber chronicle of my addiction, I’d inscribe the last period on the damp paper, and with the aid of a few modest, truly modest doses of Żołądkowa Gorzka I’d dispatch myself to the next world. I had calculated that to reach the finishing line I needed at the very most five bottles, two and a half liters to my last breath; of this I was absolutely certain. Aside from anything else, aside from this not approximate but precise calculation, there was an additional possibility and hope: it was not out of the question, it was entirely conceivable, that I would give up the ghost after only three bottles. (In such an eventuality I would bequeath the remaining two bottles to the mourners attending my wake.)

But now (now, meaning when? now! now, when you’re running toward me in your black blouse and green slacks), now there was no quiet in my heart; now my heart was churning like the greatest waterfall in the world.

I’ve so often wanted to write the story of someone bringing themselves back from ruin, so often, such an untold number of times, that when finally, by an incomprehensible coincidence I myself was bringing myself back from ruin, when I myself was being brought back from ruin, when someone’s visible or invisible hand was lifting me out of that cavernous pit, I could not keep pace with my own recovery. I’m not capable of describing my own liberation as a series of plausible events; I lack the ability to convey the evolutionary history of my own resurrection — I present only these epiphanic stanzas, though my resurrection too was like an epiphany, like a haiku; it was like a single line of poetry, unerring as lightning.

For decades I boozed like an unclean beast; for decades I was drunk as an unclean beast, and in the course of a few hours, to no one’s credit, I got sober. To no one’s credit? No, I utterly reject any kind of coyness. To my credit was my despair; to my credit were my prayers, and to my credit is my love.

Just six months ago, or maybe only a week ago, I was swimming deep below the ice in a frozen pond; the water was dense with thorns of frost and the serried floes drifted above my frigid head. There was not a scrap of light. I was a skeleton chilled to the bone, and I was disillusioned by the stereotypical story-line of my own death throes; everything was proceeding just as I had read about it a thousand times: I closed my freezing eyelids and began to remember my entire wasted life. By a stroke of good fortune, however, the first thing I remembered was soccer, and I remembered all the goals I’d scored in my childhood, and I saw the yellow Hungarian soccer ball flying into the goalmouth from my kick at the Start stadium in Wisła, and between all the makeshift goalposts set up on the Błonie in Kraków; and I remembered the header I scored on the meadow in front of the hostel in Markowe Szczawiny; and I remembered the goals I’d scored in the gym in Powązki. I remembered all my soccer dreams and nightmares, all my hallucinations, and even in my last dream before death I instinctively drew back my right foot, as if for one last time I wished to send a spectral ball into a spectral goalmouth, and my heel touched the frozen sideline of the last circle, and I rebounded, that’s right, whatever it sounds like, and it doesn’t sound good: I rebounded. Yet I repeat: I was disillusioned with the story-line of dying, and the story-line of salvation was not turning out any better; it too was as unsophisticated as a novel for cooks.

My foot touched the sideline; I rebounded and at first slowly, then faster and faster I rose upwards, and after a short while I knew. I knew that I would break through the darkest layers, that without any help I would make it through the frozen floes. And I broke through them, I made it through, and here I am. Here I am amid vast August fields, and you are with me.

In the late afternoon we will drink tea on a porch with a sweeping view. Our souls will never leave here and will never fall asleep.

Author Bio

JERZY PILCH is one of Poland’s most important contemporary writers and journalists. In addition to his long-running satirical newspaper column, Pilch has published several novels, and has been nominated for Poland’s prestigious NIKE Literary Award four times; he finally won the Award in 2001 for The Mighty Angel. His novels have been translated into many languages, and in 2002, Northwestern University Press published His Current Woman, Pilch’s only other book in English translation.

Translator Bio

BILL JOHNSTON is Director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University. In addition to Jerzy Pilch, he has translated the work of Witold Gombrowicz, Magdalena Tulli, and Stefan Zeromski, among others. In 1999 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship for Translation. In 2005 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and in 2008 he won the inaugural Found in Translation Award — presented annually to the translator of the finest Polish-English literary translation of the year — for Tadeusz Różewicz’s New Poems.

Content

Jerzy Pilch
The Mighty Angel

Chapter 1. The Yellow Dress

Chapter 2. The Dark-Skinned Wrestler

Chapter 3. Dr. Granada

Chapter 4. The Fifty-Zloty Bill

Chapter 5. Prolegomena to Ideal Order

Chapter 6. Joanna Catastrophe

Chapter 7. The Very Beginning

Chapter 8. Christopher Columbus the Explorer

Chapter 9. The Principles of Elusiveness

Chapter 10. The River of Tranquility

Chapter 11. Alberta Lulaj

Chapter 12. All the Washing Machines in the World

Chapter 13. Passages

Chapter 14. The Poems of Alberta

Chapter 15. Pale Blue Weasels

Chapter 16. Pastorale

Chapter 17. Letter from the Alco Ward

Chapter 18. Dr. Swobodziczka

Chapter 19. The Daughters of the Queen

Chapter 20. The Funeral of Don Juan

Chapter 21. Thursday July 6, 2000

Chapter 22. Fuchs the Chestnut Mare

Chapter 23. Intense Emotions by the Utrata River

Chapter 24. Simon’s Undescribed Escape

Chapter 25. The Eternal Awakening

Author Bio

Translator Bio