by Jerzy Pilch
“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. Y
ou 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.
