by Jerzy Pilch
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.
