Our heads and our entire selves drooped lower and lower; the Queen of Kent’s gray hair was touching the paper tablecloth, Christopher Columbus the Explorer took out his French translation of the New Testament and began thumbing through it, two more nurses left and two more returned from the nurses’ station. Those ever more angelic angels of ours kept going there and coming back the whole time, as if overcome by a mysterious urge to constantly be stretching their legs. Only the suicides remained impassive, sitting up straight like an Olympic team composing themselves before the game.
“Talk about dull,” groaned the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World.
The delivery of inappropriate monologues was, as it happened, the speciality of the Sugar King, in civilian life a wealthy entrepreneur; in every situation he managed to say something improper. More: Unaware of his own desperation, he would plow ahead and develop dangerous theses, and when he finally checked himself, realizing the extent of the faux pas he had committed, the worst would come: that burly sixty-year-old in the emerald-green track suit would burst into terrible tears of embarrassment, and often it was the longest time before he could be consoled. Now the tears came quickly. The inappropriate monologue had not even managed to attain the full extent of its inappropriateness when the emerald-clad shoulders began to quake. The Sugar King gave a cough and snorted like a wild boar; someone from a different world might have thought he was choking, but no, this was one of his tragic spasms, and the first teardrops fell into his third bowl of Chinese soup.
“Talk about dull,” repeated the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World; the mocking distaste in his voice contained a curious note of admiration.
“That’s not dull.” The Hero of Socialist Labor was the first to bring hurried consolation and to offer, with a greater or lesser level of superficiality, his approval of the Sugar King’s problematic speech. “That’s not dull, it’s simply concrete knowledge. Knowledge and experience. Take me, for instance”—the Hero of Socialist Labor performed a skillful imitation of vitality and of bliss flooding his entire being—“take me, for instance, whenever I would start drinking, first I’d make myself a big pot of soup, best of all cabbage soup. .”
“You’re lying, you’re lying for the other fellow’s sake.” This time, in the voice of the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World there could be heard a lazy yet unshakeable demur. “You’re a good person yourself and that’s why you’re lying, but you’re lying in a general sense. Either a person starts drinking or they make soup. Either-Or, as a certain philosopher used to say.”
“Was I intending to drink or was I not?” As frequently happens to good-natured people, the Hero of Socialist Labor was gripped by sudden rage. “Was the need for drink rising within me relentlessly, or was it not? Before that need rose to the point of irresistibility, did I made soup, or did I not? It may be that that was not always the case, but it was the case sufficiently often for me to know what a consolation it is to have a mouthful of cabbage soup, even cold. After all, hunger doesn’t come often and it doesn’t last long; many times a person doesn’t even know he’s hungry, he doesn’t know for instance that he wakes in the night, gets up, goes to the kitchen, opens the refrigerator, sometimes a person doesn’t even know that he takes out the pot, there’s lots of things a person doesn’t know, but the refreshing mouthful of ice-cold broth going down his throat can always be felt. And later too”—the Hero of Socialist Labor’s good humor had returned with neurotic rapidity—“and later too, when he’s recovering, the soup is indispensable also. Take me, for instance, when I’m recovering, my favorite part is replenishing my mineral salts. And what’s the best thing for replenishing mineral salts?”
The sound of music was heard. Don Juan the Rib had taken out his mouth organ and was playing the music from the Christmas carol Tiny Infant Jesus. The Hero of Socialist Labor continued speaking for a good time longer, in an ever quieter voice, accompanying the carol; he sang the praises of broths rich in mineral salts, the plaintive melody and the matter-of-fact parlando creating an extraordinary duet. If I had made the scene up I’d know how to describe it, but I was there, I saw it, I heard it, and thus I’m powerless. The simple music drifted across the rec room, past the nurses’ station and through all the rooms of the alco ward; snippets of lines passed through our sieve-like heads, Don Juan the Rib (in civilian life a hairdresser, and additionally a musician, as he used to say about himself) played one carol after another, and we with our ravaged brains were unable to sing, we couldn’t recall a single verse, not even the first one, tiny infant Jesus. “God is born, the powers quail,” played Don Juan the Rib, “the fire is stilled, the light must fail,” not another word. It may have been during this carol, or perhaps during “Wise men of this world and kings, whither do you hasten,” or perhaps during “On Christmas day is sweet elation Felt through all of God’s creation,” that Simon Pure Goodness began for the hundredth time to tell the story of his Christmas delirium of the previous year. That is just how it was, I’m not relying on my sieve-like memory, but on the hundred-page lined notebook in which the following day, Christmas Day (horrified by my own condition, horrified by the fact that I didn’t remember the best-known carols, not a single word), I began to write everything, literally everything, down on paper. I wrote the whole of Simon’s Christmas story; admittedly I didn’t write down exactly which carol was playing when he began to tell it (when it comes down to it that is of little significance; and I didn’t write it down because the next day I didn’t remember), but I did write down the way the men overlapped one another, as if in a child’s counting-out rhyme — before the first had finished talking the second began to play, and before the second had finished playing, the third started to tell his story.
•
On the evening of Christmas Eve the preceding year Simon Pure Goodness had awakened from an unexpectedly deep sleep. For years he had not slept deeply; the dream of a deep sleep is the greatest dream of every drunkard. “What I personally think,” said Simon, ruffling his straight blond hair and gazing at us with those permanently surprised vitreous blue eyes of his, “what I personally think is that delirium can be explained by sleeplessness, that it’s a function of sleeplessness. Because I mean, many a person’ll get royally sozzled, many a person will get sozzled like each of us in our prime, or even worse, and what happens? Nothing. He sleeps. He sleeps the sleep of a righteous drunkard, he sleeps twelve hours, twenty-four hours, he sleeps a whole day or two whole days. Three days and three nights he sleeps like a dead man, and in his sleep he burns up all his drunken badness. Whereas here you have a person without sleep, a sleepless person, he’s gotten sozzled as the Devil intended, and he doesn’t sleep at all or, what’s even worse, he wakes up after two or three hours of unprincipled sleep, paradoxical sleep, sleep that’s unconscious even though it’s shallow. You wake after two or three hours and you’re neither sober nor drunk, you can’t stand but you can’t lie down either, your trembling hand won’t reach for a nineteenth-century novel so you can calm yourself with a little harmonious reading, you’re not capable of reading, the light dazzles you and you’re afraid of the darkness, there is nothing, nothing all around you, it’s as if you were inside a spinning shell of nothingness, there’s no succor from anywhere, no salvation, nothing but your hand crawling like an ignoble reptile, like an iniquitous snake, in search of the bottle that’s placed oh so providently at your bedside, and you raise the bottle, and you drink with despair in your heart, because you know that only bad things will come to you. And you drink there in the nothingness, in the darkness, in solitude, you drink for a phony and transient sense of relief, because amid all these worst things, it seems to you that the least worst of all is another hour of unprincipled sleep.”