I felt suddenly tired. I felt that writing alcos’ confessions, assignments, and emotional journals exhausted me in general, while in particular I felt that writing the counterfeit journal of the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World was beyond my strength. For some time I had suspected, and at this moment I became certain, that the unending labor of reproducing the crude style of the alcos was having an impact on my own exquisite turn of phrase. Further hours of struggle over the composition of further syntactically challenged simple sentences would be harmful to my work, and in addition, as I already said, I no longer had the heart for it. True, I could have raised the price of my writing services, but then the alcos, who were poor as church mice as it was, would be completely wiped out, and when all was said and done the payment they offered in the form of five-zloty coins, or cigarettes, or other sorts of fees, was my only source of income. I chose a more honorable way out: I decided to write freely, I decided not to put a stranglehold on my own song and not to hold back with my own personal éclat; at the very end, though, I planned to edit the text by filtering out its stylistic elegance and erudite references in such a way as to make it look like a genuine alco manuscript scribbled laboriously by a trembling hand.
“By profession I am a truck driver. The last few years I worked for a company that delivers fruit to countries east of us. The work was dangerous but paid well. You also had to do a lot of drinking in all kinds of places. A truck carrying fruit can’t wait for too long. A truck carrying fruit can’t just stand for a week either when it’s being loaded up, or on the way, or at the border. To move things along, to get things going, to allow my truck with its fruit to be on its way, I’d have to buy vodka for the loaders, the warehouse men, the policemen, and the customs officials. I drank with the Poles, and I drank with the Russkies. My boss — the head of shipping for the company that delivers fruit to countries east of us — would reimburse me for the money I had to spend on vodka so as to clear my way. He was a good man, though he didn’t drink at all. So I feel all the worse about what I did. And what I did was, the last time I came back from Russia I was completely drunk. Actually, that in itself was nothing special, things like that had happened to me before. But this time, when I came back from Russia in a state of intoxication, I had a yen (right away! right away!) to have a chat with my boss, I had a yen to clear my head a little in the aura of amiable sobriety that surrounded the man, and I knocked on the door of the head of shipping, and I went in, and sat down, and began a conversation that I don’t remember. My boss saw the condition I was in and gave me coffee. I downed the coffee in one go and suddenly felt sick. An important fact was that outside there was a severe frost, while in my boss’s office it was very hot; the change of temperature must have had a debilitating effect on me. My boss spoke to me in an amiable manner, yet I, ignoring the likelihood that my behavior would be construed as impolite, rose from my seat because I thought I would make it. Unfortunately I did not make it. As I stood up I felt myself gripped by a fearful inner spasm, and a frothy stream of puke issued forth from me, and I threw up all over a map of the Polish-Russian border that was lying on my boss’s desk. My boss watched in dismay as brown trickles of my puke traversed the River Bug, speeding like long-haul trucks over the border crossings at Brześć and Medyka and Terespol, sneaking like masterful smugglers across the unpatrolled sectors of the frontier, engulfing the watchtowers and the contrabandists’ hideaways, streaming into the outskirts of Sokółka, flooding the market square in Bobrowniki, and flowing through Siemiatycze.
“And the organic smell of my puke filled the office, and my body, choked by the puke, the stench, and the shame, fell at my boss’s feet.
“Why did this occur? Why did it happen to me, of all people? What explains the fact that I was trying to show my boss how very much I appreciated his goodwill, yet I ended up showing him the shameful contents of my bowels? More generally, the problem is as follows: how can the depths of the drunken soul be reconciled with the shallows of the drunken body? How can these things be explained and how can they be squared? How can the loftiest flights of the soul ever be equated with a fearful barfing? What black thread can join a fantastical and creative lightness with the next day’s sheets, soaked black with sweat? What is the connection between the boldness and panache of the evening and the fear and trembling of the morning? Am I, in civilian life a simple truck driver for a company delivering fruit to countries east of us, am I, a simple driver, who because of his penchant for military attire is known to his pals as the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, am I not by any chance posing trivial questions that can be answered by any doctor, and even by any first-year medical student? I feel embarrassed to give vent so openly to my own pride, yet the answer is: no. I am asking questions of a higher order. I’m writing this novelistic treatise about addiction not to provide answers but to pose questions. And it so far-reachingly happens that I’m writing the last chapters of this treatise on an alco ward. Because my boss, seeing my puke-smothered corpse lying at his feet, immediately brought me here—”
Suddenly (suddenly! suddenly!) I felt the gentle touch of someone’s hand on my shoulder, and I experienced such a ghastly fright that not only did I break off from my writing, I didn’t even put a period at the end of the last sentence. I knew everything was up; I knew that all my counterfeit creative work had come to light. I knew it was the therapist Quasi Moses alias I Alcohol standing behind me with his hand on my shoulder. I knew that he was looking over my shoulder, that for some time now he had been following the course of my pen and had been reading what I was writing. I turned in my chair and saw his broad, congenial countenance, and I did not dare look into his eyes. I quaked like jello; I could feel, I could tangibly feel, all the symptoms of withdrawal coming back to me out of nowhere: anxiety, excessive perspiration, nausea, insomnia, hallucinations. The therapist Quasi Moses alias I Alcohol gazed at me attentively, glanced back at the written page, which I did not even attempt to cover up, then looked at me, and said:
“I can see you’ve quieted yourself; I can see you’re working on yourself and trying to quiet yourself. That’s very good. Quieting yourself, absolute quiet, that’s the basis for everything.”
With a warm yet quiet gesture he patted me on the shoulder and, just as he had come in, he moved soundlessly out of the writing room. Automatically, with the movements of a golem, I stood up, took my cigarettes out of my pocket, left the quiet room, and headed for the other end of the hallway. As I opened the door of the smoking room I caught the last sentences of an age-long debate about the existence and nature of the relationship between physiology and the soul.
Chapter 22. Fuchs the Chestnut Mare
IT’S A FROSTY WINTER before the war. Mid-January 1932 or 1933. In the part of the world where my grandfather, Old Kubica, is right now drinking another glass of Baczewski vodka, the frosts and snows will last a long time yet. Old Kubica’s immense sheepskin coat has slipped from his shoulders; he’s wearing a white shirt with an upright collar, and a black vest. He’s hot, his blood is circulating vigorously in his veins, yet pain is radiating from somewhere. Over his heart or under his lungs is an intramuscular or intercostal gap — a wound that cannot be healed.
At the Blackbird pub darkness prevails: there’s only a faint shaft of light from an oil lamp on the bar, only the red-hot iron door of the tiled stove glowing like the insignia of the god of war, only a distant white brightness gleaming through the window. The proprietor, who is stacking glasses on the shelves of a dresser, glances into a dark corner. Old Kubica is sitting motionless; that is to say, he sits motionless for a quarter of an hour, then after a quarter of an hour a faint movement of the arm can be seen, there is a soft chink of glass, and his head tips back. My grandfather Old Kubica is drinking and he doesn’t know what to do. He’s fighting off thoughts of his debts, his farm, Grandmother Zofia, his children. He doesn’t even think about his favorite chestnut mare, who has the male name of Fuchs. He’s thinking rather that in the early morning he’s going to have to kill the merchant from Ustroń to whom, earlier today, he sold the chestnut mare called Fuchs.