I fell ill with everything. I fell ill constantly. I fell ill inexorably. I fell ill passionately. I adored Dr. Swobodziczka’s visits; I would breathe in the smell of the medications and the alcohol, and revel in the consternation the doctor inevitably generated among the inhabitants of the house. He would shrug his sheepskin coat off his shoulders, light a cigarette in the bedroom after my mother had carefully aired it, put on his stethoscope, and set about examining me. Breathe. Don’t breathe. Breathe deeply. He would inhale clouds of smoke and cough the resonant, grating cough of an inveterate smoker.
“How do you like that,” he would say, “a cough, another cough.” “But he’s not coughing, doctor,” my mother would interject, white as a sheet and on the verge of seizure. “Not him, me. I have a cough,” Swobodziczka would retort without interrupting his examination. “I have a cough and I’ve no idea what to do about it. It’s not showing any signs of going away.” He would remove the stethoscope with a decisive gesture, go to the table, and take out his prescription pad.
“As for him, he’ll have a cough in two days. In two days there’ll be a cough. And seven days after that, in other words nine days from today, the cough will be gone. How old is he?” “Nine,” my mother would say, relief clearly audible in her voice. The doctor peered at me. “Nine years old, nine years old. It’s high time to be looking around and thinking about an occupation. Tell me, Jerzy, which do you prefer, Catholic girls or Lutheran girls?” “Catholic girls,” I said without hesitation, finally given wings by an authorized opportunity to talk about women. “Catholic girls, especially Urszula and Aldona.” “You’re absolutely right,” Dr. Swobodziczka responded with utter seriousness, and a moment later added a further mysterious sentence, in which what appeared to be the critical phrase—“ecumenical desires”—I not only did not understand but barely even heard, since my mother pounced like a mountain lion toward the table, concealing me behind her body and drowning out the doctor’s words in a hysterically cordial invitation to pass into the kitchen, from where, by the by, a while later there came the mythical clink of glasses being taken from the dresser.
I am quite certain Dr. Swobodziczka would never have confirmed the suspicion that he himself was shortening his own life and that that was the reason he held suicides in such abhorrence and contempt. He would never have uttered a single word, nor made a single gesture, to let it be known that in their desperation he could see his own reflection, crooked but true in its essence. He claimed to object to the fact that our committers of self-destruction would always go off into the woods and vanish without a trace, having found a convenient beech bough in the depths of the mixed forest, whereas they ought to bear in mind the subsequent difficulties facing the living, and, in order to facilitate all the necessary postmortem procedures, hang themselves at the edge of the wood.
Take young Oyermah, for example. No one could have imagined it would happen that way. My father and I had been there only a week before — a light and spacious farmhouse on a hilltop, outbuildings with freshly plastered walls, a chicken farm, and various other manifestations of affluence. The fortunate and wealthy Oyermahs had been among the first in these parts to own a television, and that was why we were there: they were showing the Górnik Zabrze-Tottenham Hotspur game (4–2 to Górnik). We sat on a plush sofa and drank tea; Oyermah senior was playing the piano upstairs, while Oyermah junior watched the game with us; his wife, lovely as an angel, strolled through the series of rooms in a heavy brocade dress; their torpid child was playing quietly on a carpet that had the emerald-green tint of the Orinoco; hens were clucking in the yard; at one point Górnik even led 4–0. After the game we walked home in the gathering dark. Seven days later life was over in the blink of an eye. Seven days later young Oyermah went mad; he killed his wife and child and went deep into the woods on Jarzębata Mountain, and there he hanged himself in an inaccessible place.
Dr. Swobodziczka spat curses, muttered oaths, wiped the sweat from his brow, and threatened never to go to another suicide. When you thought about it, it was a little strange — he had no patience for suicides, but in the end he would always respond to every summons, appearing promptly even in the middle of the night. (His rapidity was undoubtedly aided by insomnia: the habit, as Simon Pure Goodness would have said, leads inexorably to insomnia, then insomnia reinforces the habit.) It can also be surmised that the doctor was particularly fond, for example, of winter trips to the most distant valleys; after all, a sleigh ride through the snow and frost could hardly take place without a little something of a stronger nature — how else could the rescue party keep from freezing to death?
He walked and rode everywhere. He attended to every last wretch, but he didn’t want anything to do with young Oyermah or with any other desperate individuals hanging from trees. At such times he cursed and blasphemed. I believe, I want to believe, that aside from his fear there was in this a special sort of preventive measure — he cursed those who had already done it so that those who found a similar intention gathering in their wounded hearts should know that, if they went ahead, they would expose themselves to invective and scorn, and to the fearful condemnation of Dr. Swobodziczka.
I know that he was reluctant to go out to such cases because he was afraid. He was afraid of the breathtaking, mesmerizing temptation of a mound of earth. His soul was in ashes, but the spark of consciousness burned on; he knew that any way he turned he could head off into the depths of the forests on Czantoria Mountain, on Stożek, on Barania, and on Jarzębata. He could clearly see the paths that first led uphill, then on the other side ran downward. His black alsatian, mad with despair, is padding back and forth, till in the end it finds the path that leads unerringly to the Piast hostelry; it slinks under the table, laps warm beer from a tin bowl, and waits in vain for the arrival of its master, lord, and savior, amen.
Chapter 19. The Daughters of the Queen
AFTER THE NEWSPAPERS I would tidy the books. In the course of my diligent and ecstatic reading of newspapers I occasionally felt pangs of intellectual conscience at wasting my time on superficial things, and filling my brain with newspaper pulp. At such moments, between sips I would reach for classics of every hue; for instance, I would open Gottfried Wilhelm Liebnitz’s A Philosopher’s Creed to a random page and read drunkenly, and I would have the drunken impression that I understood it all. I would drunkenly read Moby-Dick or The Magic Mountain and my intoxicated enthusiasm, like my intoxicated illumination, was deep and boundless. I would read Babel or Mickiewicz and in my drunkenness would hear every phrase so perfectly that I was all set to write, in my drunkenness, sequels to the short stories, and to compose additional stanzas of the epic poems.
The classics, as usual, would be right at the bottom of the wreckage. I would pick up the Summa Theologica, Resurrection, and an anthology of English and American poetry from where they lay on the floor; I would pick them up, straighten the covers, and even iron any creased pages; I would pick them up, dust them off, smooth them down and replace them on the shelf. After I had removed the newspapers and tidied the books I would continue to clean up, emptying the ashtrays, washing the dishes, changing my bed, then stooping over the bathtub and washing my clothes as fiercely as if I were trying to punish myself for the lack of an automatic washing machine, as if with the quality of my hand-washing I were striving to surpass the automatic washing machine, as if I were striving to prove once again the eternal truth that a human being is better than the very best washing machine, not only the automatic kind, but even the latest generation of computerized washing machines, that humans are in general better than the best computer possible. True, computers are capable of surpassing humans in many domains. For example — as I read in between my erstwhile losses of consciousness — for example at some point a computer beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess, and humankind, or at least a significant portion of humankind, was thereby plunged into pessimism; the computer’s victory at chess was supposedly a harbinger of further victories by machines, successive inexorable and ever more all-encompassing and humiliating defeats of humankind in the battle with machines, and it may be that that is indeed the case, it may be that in numerous disciplines computers will bring numerous grandmasters to their knees, but in my humble drunkard’s opinion, until they invent the computer that can drink more than a person, humankind has no need to feel that its essence is under threat. By all means — I, the master, I, the grandmaster take up the gauntlet! By all means, I the master, I the grandmaster accept the challenge! Show me the ingeniously constructed machine, show me a computer of unheard-of intelligence — let it be of infinite capacity, let its halogen lights shine with the power of a thousand suns, let it be as vast as a pre-war apartment building, let it be programmed for fathomless quantities of drinking, let it be resistant to addiction, let it possess a perpetual tolerance for moonshine, let it have special subsystems allowing it to control the situation in its entirety, let it have a brain as mighty as an open-hearth furnace, and let it have the choice of liquor. And place between us a crate of the liquor it chooses, and let the starter give the signal, and right away you will see the triumph of the human race and of humanism. How long will it drink shoulder to shoulder with me: a month, two months, half a year? Sooner or later, at the next pale dawn, sooner or later, after yet another redemptive hair of the dog, before the liquor has dispersed through my bones, before I’ve had time to rise, warm up, regain my color and express my first inspired thought, it will falter, fail, lose consciousness, and puke up its entire hard drive.