Chapter 17. Letter from the Alco Ward
[Beginning of manuscript illegible even for addressee. Paper of poor quality, squared, A4 format. Letter written with fountain pen, handwriting shaky, navy blue ink.]
. . FOR A WHOLE five months. When I tell them I’m giving up my ruinous habit for you, they look at me with contempt. When I tell them I’m giving up my ruinous habit for us, they look at me with contempt; at such times I remain silent for a long time, because I know what those she-wolf therapists are after. I’m giving up my habit for myself, I say after pretending to reflect, and it’s just as well they can’t guess what I’m feeling as I see their approving smiles. They don’t know what I’m feeling, though they ought to; after all they’re past masters in the art of naming feelings and they teach us how to do it: how to name our feelings. Alcoholism is supposedly a sickness of the feelings. Alcoholics are unable either to define their feelings or to control them. In this one case it happens to be true about me: I’m unable to name the much-more-than-love that I feel for you. And I’m certain my addiction will drop from me the way the skin drops from the snake. Good Lord, if any of those she-therapists read the last sentence they’d be horrified.
“Nothing will happen on its own, no one will do it for you. You have to do it yourself.”
“That’s right, I’ll fight with my own weakness.”
“Fight? You’ll fight? With who? With a monster that’s stronger than you and is bound to defeat you? You have to submit. Who are you intending to fight? Gołota the heavyweight? Alcohol is like Gołota — when you tangle with it you don’t stand a chance, you have to submit before you even start.”
These are the kinds of exchanges you hear in this place; exclamations of this sort rise from here and ascend like supplicatory prayers into the cloudy July heavens. The catchphrases and favorite mantras of the she-therapists (alcohol is like Gołota, or alcohol is like Mike Tyson, or alcoholism is as irreversible as an amputated leg, or alcoholism is like democracy), the she-therapists’ favorite mantras, and the absolute, all-encompassing obsession with first-person narration. I, I, I. God forbid you should use an impersonal form. God forbid you should say “a person.” God forbid you should say “the demon.” God forbid the plural.
•
“I lost my money. That is, they robbed me,” says Janek, who is astray in life, and who, because of his strong predilection for cleaning, we call ‘The Hero of Socialist Labor.’ “So then things started.”
“What things started?” ask the she-therapists, white-hot with fury, stressing the generic noun “things.” “Exactly which ‘things’ began?”
“The drinking started, the drinking began,” says Janek, and they laugh their awful laughs and exclaim:
“The drinking began! The drinking started! But who was doing the drinking? Was thedrinkingstarted drinking?” (Animal-like guffaws.) “Who was drinking?”
“I was drinking,” says Janek, red-faced as a child, and to his own undoing he adds: “Yes, you drank, you drank terribly, you were overcome by the demon, for example all the drinking with the neighbor, with the neighbor the drinking went on all the time.”
The she-therapists finally stop laughing and zealously teach the Hero of Socialist Labor that instead of “you” you have to say “I,” instead of “the demon” you have to say “alcohol,” instead of “the drinking went on” you have to say “I drank,” instead of “all the time” you have to say “every day,” and give the amount, the date, and the place. And to finish off, the she-therapists repeat emphatically once more: “not ‘the drinking started,’ but ‘I drank.’”
As you can imagine, I polemicize with them heatedly in my mind, though I’m aware that my polemic misses the point, that my assumptions are different — the she-therapists are striving to bring reality to the point of sobriety, whereas I’m striving to bring reality to the point of literature, and at a certain moment our paths inevitably diverge. I’m aware of this, but I still polemicize with them. It’s common knowledge — I proclaim to myself — that impersonal forms are used to refer to specific individuals, and that they refer to them more fully and more impartially than an “I” stripped naked and thus defenseless in speaking about itself. There are writers who write whole books in this fashion, their narratives built entirely of impersonal constructions: journeys were made, things were seen, the time of dying began. And the first person singular? I’ve been immersed in that person and that number up to my neck and up to the crown of my head. I’m mud-spattered from top to toe by the first person singular. The hopes of the she-therapists notwithstanding, it is no guarantee of credibility, truth, or naked sincerity. The first person singular is an element of literary fiction. My Lord, what great fortune that would be, what a fine instinct, to declare the end of literature at this very juncture and to be able to say simply with a clear conscience: I.
I looked for you my whole life, I walked the length of Jana Pawła, Pańska, Żelazna, Złota, the entire world; but it was you who found me. You wrote a letter, I replied and — though we didn’t notice it at the time — our letters were already throwing themselves into a definitive embrace, our sentences were tangled with each other, our handwritings were locked together, our inks flowed into one another as fluidly as your blood joins with mine. I was looking for a last love before death, and I found a love that gave me life. A love that I have never read about in any poem or any novel. A love that I did not know could exist in this world. I found a love as powerful as Don Juan’s pastorale. Ala-Alberta, you came to me at the moment when I had written life off. That’s right, for at least two years I had not really wanted to go on living; it seemed to me that, roughly speaking at least, I already had what I wanted to have. I had written what I had written, and I knew that to go on writing would mean either a more or a less intense repetition of experiences already had. A person writes a book and he thinks that when the book goes out among people it will change the world — and that, I assure you, is a very great delusion. Yet to write without the faith that writing will change the world — such a thing is impossible.
I had been with beautiful women, I’d drunk an ocean of Żołądkowa Gorzka, I’d labored hard and I’d wallowed in idleness, I’d listened to music (music is what I miss the most in here), I’d read the classics, I’d been to soccer games, I’d prayed in my Lutheran church; and it seemed to me that I knew as much about the things of this world as it was meant for me to know. It seemed to me that I was filled, yet I was empty, I was as sounding brass. (As the Scripture says: though I give up drinking, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.) Kill myself? Yes indeed, I thought about suicide (every normal person thinks about suicide at least once in their life, as Camus I think said — that was a reading from the times when you were not yet in the world), but I thought about it in the same unreal terms that I thought about permanently giving up Żołądkowa Gorzka. How often did I devote my thoughts to the idea of giving up Żołądkowa Gorzka? And what came of it? Nothing. I thought about stopping drinking Żołądkowa Gorzka and, calmly or stormily (usually stormily), I went on drinking that product, which is rather inferior in quality but goes smoothly down the throat. I thought about killing myself, but calmly or stormily (usually stormily) I went on living. The hope of a quick death, a real death, was provided by my habit. As one of the wise she-therapists here says (for there are wise she-therapists and foolish she-therapists, just like the biblical wise virgins and foolish virgins — in my next letter I’ll recount the parable of the wise she-therapists and the foolish she-therapists), so then, the wise she-therapist Kasia says that an alcoholic will escape into death more readily than he will admit his powerlessness with regard to booze. A real man can die from vodka but is afraid to become a fool, as the late Mr. Trąba used to say. And I acquiesced to this, I prepared myself for an escape into death. I may not have been able to define it as exactly as Simon Pure Goodness, who, before he escaped from here, knew and did not conceal the fact that after escaping from the ward he intended, as it were, to escape definitively, in a week, or a month, or at the most three years. I myself did not know the date; I was preparing myself in the dark. But when I read your letter, when I heard your voice, when I saw you for the first time, I understood that the black cord closing ever tighter around my neck would inevitably snap. I understood that the black twine would unravel long before my heart was torn to shreds. I understood that I had been waiting for you my whole life. (Of that time, I had to wait for at least twenty years till you grew up.) But you came. You’re here. (That’s right. She’s here.)