“I, too, am happy to see you alive,” she said with a light touch, but that lightness immediately weighed like lead upon my brain.
It’s impossible — I feverishly began to mull over the facts — it’s impossible for her to know that, two weeks ago, I was at death’s door, in the strict sense of the phrase. How could she have known? I had locked myself up at home, I had pulled the Venetian blinds, I had turned off the telephones, I talked with no one, I didn’t go out anywhere, except to the twenty-four-hour delicatessen William… Someone must have noticed me when I was crawling to the store, and the news had immediately made its way around town. It was possible. I tried my hardest, but in the end you always had to go out to the store… Yes, someone saw me as I was crawling to the twenty-four-hour delicatessen William. There was no other possible explanation.
Except, it was also possible that she had answered without any ulterior motive; that she had answered mechanically; that, for the sake of reinforcing the joke, she had repeated my clumsy opening as an echo. Such a possibility existed, and it was even highly probable, but, in order to accept it with equanimity, I would have to have been cured of my complex. And I had a gigantic complex about this. Every time someone asked me in completely neutral tones: “How are you doing? How’ve you been feeling? How’s life? Everything OK?”; every time I received similar SMSes; every time I heard such questions posed on the phone, or face-to-face — each time I was unable to answer normally and make light of it. Instead, I always shrank with fear, and I always groaned before I answered under the weight of the one-ton question: How does he know? How does that louse know that I am hitting the bottle again? And this time it was the same, or even worse, since, after all, in the assertion “I’m happy to see you alive” lurks not speculation about, but the certainty of my downfall. Nothing to be done about it, I thought. On the whole, it’s even better that she knows about my afflictions. At least then it won’t be an unpleasant surprise if I go on a bender right after the wedding.
“It’s true. I’m barely alive,” I said carefully. “To tell the truth, I’m completely exhausted.”
“That’s not good,” she replied with an inordinately subtle motherly tone. “Not good at all. Even bad. Very bad.”
“I had a Russian teacher who spoke the same way. Exactly the same.”
“I beg your pardon?” Not that she immediately stiffened, but she was unquestionably startled, and she was well on the way to absolute stiffening. Besides, there’s nothing strange about it. There hadn’t been any teachers of Russian in Polish schools for more than ten years now, and yet the summoning of even the specter of a teacher of the Russian language continued to give rise to problematic associations. Evidently The Most Beautiful Woman in the World was, like many Poles, painfully sensitive when it came to Moscow. No doubt she had this from her parents.
“I once had a Russian teacher”—hoping to soothe her trauma, I began to tell her the story, feverishly and in haste—“he was a fantastic guy, we liked him a lot. Also because he was not only intelligent, but also understanding. He didn’t go overboard in the enforcement of knowledge. Not that he allowed us to walk all over him, but, all the same, he allowed us quite a lot. Nonetheless, every now and then, more or less once every two months, a frenzy of inordinate severity would seize him. He would enter the room with a boundlessly severe facial expression, summon us to the blackboard with boundless severity, and, inordinately severely, in absolute silence, listen to our answers. He wouldn’t interrupt, he wouldn’t correct, he wouldn’t speak up. Without a word, he would listen to the delinquent as he writhed like an eel, and when he had finally finished, he would say: ‘Very bad.’”
She laughed, she laughed the entire time I was telling my story, she laughed, and that was good, but also a bit irritating, since when the punch line came she went on laughing in just the same fashion, and, strictly speaking, it wasn’t clear whether she had noticed and appreciated the end of the story at all. But I didn’t delve deeper into this. Distant, still golden and leisurely threads of lightning intersected the dark horizon. Three, maybe four storms were approaching the city.
“Very good,” she said (she had noticed and appreciated after all!). “Very good. You get high marks from me for that answer. But it is very bad that you are barely alive, and that must change.”
“What must change?”
“Life. Life must change.”
“You know, it is difficult to change life. Life isn’t likely to change. Unless it’s for the worse. And from a certain point on, it is exclusively for the worse.”
For a moment I considered whether to intensify the pessimistic tone, and even whether to push the pedal of pessimism to the floor, but I eased off. Pessimism and bitterness were means of arousing comforting reflexes in women, which are as certain as they are standard; her all-embracing beauty, however, cautioned against playing this one from memory.
“If you go on to tell me that you don’t have anyone for whom to change your life for the better, and if you gaze meaningfully into my eyes as you say this, the situation will admittedly be clear, but also quite finished.”
She had passed me a difficult, a very difficult ball — one that would be downright impossible for a rookie to handle — but as bad as I am, out of boredom, at handling weak balls, difficult balls lend me wings, and I climb the heights.
“Of course I don’t have anyone for whom to change my life. It’s just that I couldn’t care less about that. God forbid I should change my life, or anything in my life for anyone. I am too accustomed to myself and to my own solitude, and I value it too much to change it. If you tell me that, when true love appears in my life, I will certainly and enthusiastically change my life for the better; if you tell me this, and if you gaze knowingly into my eyes as you say this, then the situation will also be clear, but also quite finished.”
I knew that she wouldn’t be able to field a riposte let loose with that sort of spin, but I also didn’t foresee that she would go for a feint.
“The situation is clear,” she said with irritating infallibility. “The situation is clear. You’ve got no idea about life. You don’t know what life is.”
“So what is it?” I feigned irritation, and even fury, in my voice. There was no retreat. The game was heating up. If she should conclude that I was a madman — game over. If, in an access of vanity, she should be filled with pride, thinking that she had destroyed my equilibrium, I will have won. “So, I humbly beg your pardon, what is life? Please be so kind as to enlighten me, because I truly don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t know. He pretends to be a connoisseur of souls, a man of letters, a theoretician of everything — and he hasn’t a clue.”
I had succumbed, at that moment I had succumbed definitively and — I would say — far-reachingly. I had succumbed, because I had thought, with a rookie’s haughtiness, that I had the victory in my pocket. When a woman proceeds to a seemingly sharp, but in fact tender, attack, the victory is usually in your pocket.
“But of course I haven’t a clue about anything. And when it comes to life, not the least, not even a hint. Just what is life? I don’t know. I say this in dead earnest: I don’t know.”
“Oh God, man, don’t go to pieces on me. Don’t you see that I am full of nothing but good intentions, even eagerness? Don’t you see that either, you dope? What year were you born?”
“Fifty-three,” I responded mechanically, and not without distaste; after all, the date of my birth usually stood plain as day on the covers of my books, and she has to ask? Hasn’t she ever picked one up, or what? For a moment I even considered taking offense and giving up, but after brief consideration I came to the conclusion that the operation would succeed, that I would punish her for ignorance of my work with attacks of eccentric brutality in bed.