by Jerzy Pilch
“If you permit, another round for courage? To your health. To the health of the ladies. That’s just it. It’s easier after a drink. After a drink, it is a lot easier. After a drink, it is much easier to think about women. Much, much easier. The fact of the matter is, I don’t think about women at all when I am sober. But once I have had a drink, I begin to think about them intensely, I begin to think about them fluently, and I begin to think about them copiously. Such is my—you must admit—rather boorish syndrome. After a drink, I get a hankering for the erotic. Not in any practical sense. After a drink, I get a hankering for sex—but in the intellectual sense. After a drink, I can compose romantic aphorisms; after a drink, I can think about the erotic in orderly fashion; after a drink (but a big one!), I am even able to sketch a bedroom scene. But only orally. Not in writing. If I knew how to write after a drink, I would be—if you please—Stefan Żeromski, in the strict sense; I would be Żeromski through and through; I would be more than Żeromski. You will forgive me, but if I knew how to write after a drink, I would be Żeromski to a significantly greater degree than you are Zweig when sober. Granted, better a sober Zweig than a drunk Żeromski, but the tragedy of Polish literature depends—among other things—on the fact that Żeromski didn’t drink, and that Zweig wasn’t present at all. Yes, sir. After a drink, I’d write totally unprecedented histories of sin, but after a drink I am unable to write a single letter. I can only narrate orally. Only oral transmission comes into play. The song of the Wajdelota. Then, I can tell a story. Yes, sir! That’s when I can tell a story.
“When I found out that you were coming to K., I decided to have a drink with you and tell you the story that torments me. I decided that I would tell you a story that I am able to tell, but which I am unable to write down. It’s a love story. It’s easy to guess that I felt the lack of a sensual aspect in my works especially acutely when an emotional plot turn occurred in my own life.
“I fell in love. I fell in love with a student. I fell in love with a woman more than forty years my junior. With a woman, not a child. With a woman, not a girl. Anyway, her womanliness manifested itself rather occasionally and rather sporadically. The charm of changeability. Thanks to this charm, gray mice sometimes win the competition with out-and-out beauties. The out-and-out beauty is once-and-for-all and unchangeably out-and-out beautiful, and that’s that. Zero changeability and zero surprises. But the gray mouse, for whom you wouldn’t give five cents, all of a sudden—it sometimes happens—somehow magically rearranges her hair; the blouse on her flat chest opens mysteriously, although deceptively; her eye sparkles; a ray of light falls on her asymmetrical face—and there you see it: the mouse is transformed into the Miss! The potato-eater into the angel! Grayness becomes light!
“The virtues of my angel were basically exhausted with this sort of sporadic charm. To be perfectly clear: I sing the song of a very unremarkable person. This, in fact, was to be my doom. When an unremarkable person comes to be considered remarkable, it usually ends badly. Precisely this course of events occurred. First, she was a normal woman of unremarkable looks and average intelligence, but then—God knows who. Most certainly a fallen woman with a bird’s brain and the looks of a whore. And even that isn’t certain. In other words, it is even worse, because wandering about the cracks of existence is worse than whorishness. She’s gone. It was the art of today, miserable and devoid of values, that destroyed her. It was aspiring to superiority, the appearance of which is given by the cultivation of art, that depraved her and cast her out of life. And it was the devil himself, who—having taken on the form of a film star who was known as a ladies man and had come to our parts—pushed her to this. He spent a night here. In the hotel At the Sign of the Falcon. I don’t know whether it was precisely this room. Probably not. He didn’t commit suicide. But he didn’t live all that long afterward. No, I didn’t kill him. I wished him nothing but the worst—death, too—but I didn’t kill him. He died in an accident. You can’t even speculate that I caused the accident through my obsessive thoughts. My thoughts were highly intense in their obsessiveness, but they didn’t have any force, because they were mainly drunk. What are you doing?—I think.—He destroyed her life. He plunged her into the abyss of superiority. He seduced her with the mirages of alleged triumphs. He made her giddy, without even seducing her. Which is basically all the worse.
“Let’s say her name was Wiktoria. It is only for the sake of appearances that I change her name, since the story is, to this day, discussed over and over and from every angle in K., and tomorrow morning, as soon as you exit the hotel, the first chance passerby will tell you who she was. Actually, you don’t even have to go out. Emil will also be happy to reveal to you who the prototype for Wiktoria is. She was the daughter of the curator of the Lutheran church. Our parts—as you well know—abound in daughters of curators, daughters of pastors, daughters of presbyters, or daughters of organists. In spite of the indisputable sexiness of such descriptions, none of them ever came into question for me. Nor did Wiktoria—until a certain balmy September day—come into question. Never did any of my female students come into question. Absolutely not! Not even the hint of a thought. For an old teacher, who never thinks about women, thinking about female students as women was beyond all categories and didn’t come into question a thousand times over. The dark side of the moon. The light of a star that would arrive on Earth in a million light years. Above all, my female students had no bodies. They were composed of navy blue skirts, white blouses, and sailor collars. Their heads contained, at best, superficial summaries of readings, badly memorized verses, and paltry essays. At best, because, on the whole, they didn’t contain anything. And after the holidays, their skulls, light as dandelion fluff, had been absolutely swept clean of any sort of material. You could recognize this by their suntans and bovine bliss. On their faces, my dear sir, an even Balkan suntan, in their eyes, bovine bliss, and in their heads, a complete void. I know that I express myself like an old and grumpy pedant. Unfortunately, the continuation of this story will require much worse expressions. I will tell the beginning of the story in high pedant style. And the crux of the beginning, to which I am now passing, occurred right after the holidays.
“One fine September day, I called upon her to answer. O doom! O fate! O bloodied arrowhead! Yes, sir! One fine September day, a student, a third-year lyceum student, composed of a dark skirt, white blouse, and sailor collar, with the first name, let’s say, Wiktoria, and the surname, let’s say, Złotnica, stood at the blackboard and—not a peep. I ask about the greats—nothing. I ask about Mickiewicz—nothing. I ask about Gombrowicz—nothing. I ask about Sienkiewicz—nothing. I ask about whatever—nothing. What did you read during your vaction? Nothing. Where were you during the vacation? In the mountains. What mountains? In our mountains. In Wisła. And you didn’t read anything in that Wisła? Nothing during the entire vacation? Nothing. Well, yes—I say with the studied venom that my students, especially the boys, adore—you, Złotnica, ought not go to the mountains, but rather to the sea. That’s what I’d advise you to do. At the seaside, at least there is iodine. In the mountains, even in our mountains, and maybe especially in our mountains, there is no iodine. And the lack of iodine, plus Lutheranism, produces—as it turns out—pitiful intellectual results. At least in your case—I enunciate clearly and slowly—at least in your case, Złotnica.
“The class, of course, howls with laughter. I cast my victorious glance over the laughing faces, I turn my face toward her in order to wrap up and conclude the matter with a final grimace full of pity, and suddenly I see a miracle taking place before my very eyes. Suddenly I am witness to a most genuine, biblical miracle. Suddenly I see how the word—forget the word!—suddenly I see how the lack of the word—for, after all, she wasn’t able to stammer out a single word—and so, suddenly I see how the lack of the word becomes flesh! Suddenly I see how ignorance becomes flesh! First—from her head, through the collar, blouse, skirt, down to her very feet—there runs a most distinct sh
iver. It is as if a delicate lightning bolt had pierced her, and immediately thereafter the void was filled. Suddenly I see how a delicate neck, the most delicate in the world, just now created, emerges from a sailor collar. Suddenly there appears from under the sailor collar the outline of collarbones just a moment before shaped from clay. And the thin shoulders begin to support the white blouse, and the frail outline of a bust takes form before my eyes, and the daringly projected construction of hips becomes noticeable under the dark skirt, and even the shoes with flat heels are suddenly filled with feet, and all of this takes place quite literally before my very eyes.
“‘Professor,’ says the body created only the moment before, and shivers, as if it had experienced the cold of the earth’s atmosphere for the first time, ‘Professor, I did, indeed, read a few books, but none of these books was a book by Stefan Żeromski, so, in the professor’s opinion, it is as if I didn’t read a single book.’
“For the first time in my life, I look her right in the eyes, and so, it seems to me that her eyes, too, had only now been called into existence. For the first time in my life, I look a female student in the eyes, and, for the first time in my life, I see gray lightning bolts. In the classroom, it is as quiet as the grave. The quiet before the storm. But no one knows that it will be a storm full of gray lightning bolts, and that it will be a storm raging in my heart.
“‘In other words, when I say that I didn’t read a single book, from the professor’s point of view I am telling the truth. But my admission is none of the professor’s business, nor where I go for the holidays. I am a Lutheran, and I am certainly a better Lutheran than your Żeromski, who converted to Lutheranism only in order to get a divorce. But he is buried in the Protestant cemetery, and, if only for that reason, you ought to have respect for us, and not ridicule us for lacking iodine—in other words, for having a screw loose.’”
My collocutor, or rather, my narrator, interrupted his story; he poured some more into the glasses, and he drank it off, without raising a toast or even checking to see whether I would join him; and he poured again, and he drank again; he made a motion as if he wished to take off his jacket, but then shrugged it off, lit a cigarette, inhaled two times or so, and looked me in the eye.
“Yes sir!” Gray. She had eyes like mine, like my father’s, like my brother’s, and, funny thing, like those of my departed wife. Very funny, but also slightly terrifying. One of a thousand very funny, but also slightly terrifying, details. If I knew how to capture all of them, I could write a shocking love story. The very first scene, the very beginning of emotion—seemingly nothing: the boorish professor and the desperate snot-nosed kid, but what an avalanche, what a cataclysm, what an earthquake. In my absolute confusion, I was certain that she, in a sudden illumination, knows everything, that she saw my sudden infatuation as clearly as can be, and she came out with—God help us—the story of Żeromski’s Lutheranism, which was, in fact, lined with a romantic plot turn, in order to finish me off with an ostentatious allusion.
“As a non-believer, I’m not crazy about either Catholics or Lutherans, and I’m especially not crazy about Lutherans. Why? Because I know you. I know you better than the Catholics. As the author of The Natural History of the Cieszyn Land, I have come to know, inside and out, all—as you would put it—the Lutheran phantoms. Lutherans are more convenient for caricature and derision. To make fun of Catholics in Poland is a shallow art. Lutheranism, through its exoticism, lends to an anecdote an additional—I would say—aesthetic force. Besides, in my agnostic opinion, in matters of faith and God, Lutherans are more right than Catholics. And whoever is more right is more comical. It’s an old truth. The most ludicrous are those who are right a hundred percent of the time. May the Lord God defend us from those who own one-hundred-percent infallibility. My truth is as old as the world: there is no God. We are mayflies who have learned how to build Gothic churches, fly into the cosmos, and compose symphonies. We are mayflies who have written the Bible, painted The Final Judgment, and made films with Greta Garbo. We are mayflies who elect the pope, and we are mayflies who sometimes withdraw our allegiance from the pope. We are mayflies who turn to dust after death, and we are mayflies who are capable of composing a sentence about that turning to dust. And please do not protest and assert that mayflies who have constructed violins and are capable of composing string quartets are not mayflies. All the more are they mayflies. All the more tragically—mayflies. Sometimes, when great misfortune incapacitates us, it seems to us that there exists something more; it seems to us that we see or hear signs: a light over a house, a knocking at the window, the cry of a child in the garden… Perhaps you know that, in a certain piece of biblical apocrypha, one of Job’s clones utters the sentence: ‘Suffering incapacitates me like a crying child?’ We are all clones of Job. Our appearance has been altered in the hands of the demon of fate. We are all mayflies. We are mayflies, who suffer from a lack of iodine.
“No. I never asked her to forgive me. Broad anti-Lutheran jokes were, in my classes, a daily affair. My joke about the connection between iodine and Lutheranism was nothing exceptional. The exception was the fact that she talked back. And of course it was exceptional, and even very exceptional, that—when she mouthed off—I fell in love with her. As far as that joke is concerned, to this day I believe that I am right. To this day, I believe that Lutheranism plus the lack of iodine is an intellectual tragedy. You can prove this, if only through negation. For you can turn the matter around and say legitimately that Lutheranism plus iodine is an intellectual, and not only intellectual, fulfillment. Just why is it that Protestantism enjoys all sorts of triumphs, for example, in Scandinavia? Well, it is precisely because those are maritime countries and full of iodine. Scandinavian Protestantism, my dear sir, is the height of democratic freedom, economic efficiency, and intellectual power. Unfortunately, you can’t say the same about Beskid Mountain Protestantism.
“I interrupted the lesson and left the classroom. I told the head of school that I wasn’t feeling well, and that wasn’t a lie in the least. I didn’t feel well. Not at all well. I shut myself up at home, having covered the windows tightly, and put on a CD with the sonatas of Franz Schubert, and I drank, in the course of the afternoon and night, three bottles of vodka, pure vodka, if you please. It went down like water. The best proof is this: in the morning, as if nothing had happened, I was off to school. Not that I was happy as a lark and in a perfect mood. Not at all! Ill treated, dejected, with a pierced heart, but still as if nothing had happened. Each subsequent day, it was as if nothing had happened. Life went on as if nothing had happened. I conducted my lessons and performed all my obligations according to routine. I limited the number of anti-Lutheran jokes during my lessons, but I didn’t give them up entirely. I never returned to the aforementioned incident. I took great care not to betray my emotions, in other words not to be especially severe with her. It is well known that showing affection is most generally, and most ineptly, masked with brutality. I tried not to make that mistake, and I think I was successful. For a time, of course. In the evenings, I would get drunk, and then I would allow myself embarrassing scenes. I imagined that we were doing together all those things that make for a great love: we go to the movies, we eat suppers, we play chess, we watch detective programs on television. I staged in my mind our shocking conversations about what we needed to buy for the house, when we would finally decide to remodel the bathroom, and where we would go for vacation. With complete detachment from this world, I began to believe that we would be accepted, that our neighbors, and, in general, all the inhabitants of K., would respect the uniqueness and beauty of our story. Sometimes a drunken blubbering accompanied my amorous cantos, but everything was done behind closed doors, in isolation, as a conspiracy of one. And she? Nothing. To be honest, it isn’t worth talking about her. If it weren’t for the fact that I had fallen in love with her, there wouldn’t be anything to talk about at all. You couldn’t even say that my love had lent her a glow, or something like tha
t. Rather, on the contrary. What hadn’t been extinguished up to then, now went out. The eyes went out. I avoided the gray fire. I was to see how they burn only one more time. Only once. Altogether, two times. For a shocking love, this is not, you must admit, an excessively overwhelming result.
