by Jerzy Pilch
“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 ho
stility?” 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 seminar
s, 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.’”
