“If that happens you should hang up without saying a word,” the Queen of Kent would always answer in her hollow voice, and that would be all she said.
Because the Queen of Kent, the Queen Mother, was a walking handful of ash. When it came down to it, nothing concrete could be said even about her appearance; she may once have been just as beautiful as her daughters, but now her face, her eyes, hair, arms, hands, and legs, all had turned to ash. The traces of her former beauty had been buried under ash, her fiery gaze had been extinguished, her skin was gray, and she had lost all feeling.
The Queen of Kent (in civilian life a qualified pharmacist) was a person of unimaginable shyness. She was unimaginably shy as an infant, she was unimaginably shy in elementary school and high school, and she was unimaginably shy at college. Her father, an authoritarian pharmacist inclined to tyranny, who was first the owner of a private pharmacy and then the manager of a state-owned one, aggravated his daughter’s shyness with his pharmaceutical authoritarianism. Whether that shyness had other causes I do not know and never will. My subject is the method for overcoming that shyness with which both the Queen of Kent and I were familiar — which is to say, mint-flavored liqueur.
The Queen of Kent’s future husband was a fellow student of pharmacology; he fell in love with her alluring restraint at first sight, or maybe third. She avoided him, refused to take his phone calls, and in his presence she was as silent as if she were under a magic spell. Yet despite all this he was entrapped beyond reach in the net of her stolen glances, in the aura of her virginal scent, in the storm of her dark hair.
After graduating she worked in her father’s pharmacy; her enamored former classmate moved heaven and earth to be close to her. Her father (the Old King of Kent) sensed what was up and sent the young man packing. The latter, moreover, had the worst luck, appearing in the pharmacy at least six times in a row at the very moment when its former proprietor was suffering agonies of frustration at the fact that he was no longer the proprietor of his own property. It was only at the seventh attempt that he happened upon a moment when the old chemist had succumbed uncritically to the illusion that everything was as it used to be, and he looked favorably upon the world, and favorably upon the ill-starred suitor.
“The two of you can do whatever you like,” he said, and immersed himself once again in his delusions of privatization.
The old man did not regret his decision. His future son-in-law proved to be a capable pharmacist, and the mint liqueur that he made with surgical spirit, according to an old recipe, was a real treat. When the Queen of Kent drank a glass on her name-day (the first glass of alcohol she had ever consumed in her life), the stifling mesh of shyness was removed, and her eternal fear of nothing in particular vanished.
•
He proposed; she drank a glass of mint liqueur and said yes. They made love for the first time on the small pharmacy sofa during the night shift; she had drunk a glass of liqueur before. After, it was also always before: after, whenever they made love she would drink a glass of liqueur before. A year later she would also drink a glass of liqueur when they did not make love; two years later she would drink a glass of liqueur on any occasion, and three years later she was drinking liqueur in every free moment. After four years he stopped making the liqueur according to the old recipe. This made little difference to her; for some time now she had preferred straight spirit.
They had gotten married two years earlier (during the phase in which she drank liqueur on any occasion). As she went on drinking surgical spirit she gave birth to four daughters; he still loved her. He was tender and solicitous; he did better and better, importing hard-to-get foreign medications. When his father-in-law died he took over as manager of the pharmacy, and after the fall of communism he became its owner. He looked after his daughters and when they grew up he provided them with handsome dowries; besides which, all four married very well.
The Queen of Kent drank pure spirit; one day her shyness returned. Yet this was no longer the former frail mesh of bashfulness but rusty iron bars. In the early morning she would look in the mirror, but she was so far away she could not even see herself; she could not make out the storm of dark hair that had turned to ash.
“If that happens you should hang up without saying a word,” she would answer, brushing off Don Juan the Rib’s insistent questions. The latter would hang his head, go back to his room, lie on his bed, and play wistful melodies on his mouth organ.
Chapter 20. The Funeral of Don Juan
THE CEMETERY WHERE we buried Don Juan the Rib was picturesquely located on a hilltop, with a picturesque view of valleys and mixed woods; the whole of the Beskid Mountains could be seen. The funeral party stood for a long time around the open grave singing and playing various instruments.
Don Juan the Rib — hairdresser and additionally musician, as he was wont to introduce himself — came from a most musical family. All his brothers, sisters, male cousins and female cousins, and all his close and distant relatives were exceptionally musical, all had virtually perfect pitch and lovely singing voices, and could probably have played any instrument in the world. Some of them had taken their art to lofty levels; for instance, a female singer who was immensely popular that season was a distant cousin of Don Juan’s. She was known for her stylized Balkan Gypsy ballads, which she sang in a fine low voice, and for her risqué outfits and captivating beauty. She appeared at the funeral too, somewhat late, and even significantly so. We had already picked up the spades and were all set to shovel soil onto the casket, that smelled of denatured spirits, when a colorful procession appeared round a bend in the gravel path down below. It was led by the female singer who was immensely popular that season; she was wearing an extraordinarily low-cut black dress and was followed by four instrumentalists clad in peacock colors — a guitarist, a saxophonist, a trumpeter, and a drummer. The extraordinarily low-cut dress did not scandalize anyone; on the contrary, it was a mark of the high regard in which she evidently held her distant fallen kinsman. We all knew the dress. It was one of the most risqué of her outfits; the singer who was immensely popular that season wore it at her most important concerts, at festivals, on the television, and at the most prestigious indoor and outdoor venues in Poland and around Europe. She stopped by the open grave, leaned over, and crossed herself; almost immediately, without even tuning their instruments, her musicians began to play her great hit song, that everyone knew, about the silken scarf.
Starting from the second verse, all of Don Juan’s exceptionally musical relatives began to sing along; those who had instruments accompanied the musicians, and the great song of the silken scarf, of inconceivable sorrow, of love, despair, and the end of all things, drifted from the cemetery hill and was heard in the other world, in paradise, where the soul of Don Juan the Rib was already in angelic rapture among the tastefully half-dressed souls of approachable women.
I know what it was like when Don Juan was dying, though I was not there; I know the source of his pain. The people who broke down his door and found his body reported a certain strange detail. Namely, they reported that the apartment was in a state of disarray typical for the apartment of a drunkard, though in this case it was not excessive; yet one element in this disarray caught their eye. It was a pile of footwear that reached almost up to the ceiling. One entire corner of the room was filled with a mountain of slippers, sneakers, flip-flops, mules, leather and canvas shoes, sandals, overshoes, boots, snow-boots, and even clogs from the quondam heights of fashion.