“No visible events ever had any influence on me. I drank because I drank. I never drank because something happened. At most my drinking was accompanied by certain events. For example I drank when the Berlin Wall was coming down, but I didn’t drink because the Berlin Wall was coming down.”
“And what if something special happened?”
“Like what for example?”
“Let’s say. . Let’s say the black blouse disappears from your life.”
“There is no human or inhuman force that could separate us. That you know too, and you’re flailing about in a truly pathetic manner.”
“You won’t reach for the bottle?”
“You’re the measure of my true decline. Your home isn’t in the underworld, you live in the back room of the liquor store. My eternally hung-over angel, my Satan crawling like an amber worm from a bottle of Żołądkowa Gorzka.”
“Don’t demean yourself, Jerzy. A devil from a bottle is better than no devil at all. My own lot pains me too; I’d rather have been Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s devil or Thomas Mann’s, but it fell to me to be Jerzy’s. It pains me, but I also accept it; each of us evidently gets the author he deserves.”
“Each of us gets the demon he deserves.”
“I’m telling you — better a devil from a bottle of Żołądkowa Gorzka than none at all. Besides, Żołądkowa Gorzka wasn’t that bad; sometimes it was delicious. For instance in the winter, at four in the morning, remember how divinely it traveled down the throat straight from the bottle? Remember the overwhelming sense of bliss that came to you at the door of the all-night store?”
“I feel like barfing.”
“Less of the puke if you please. Communism is stamped with puke, analyses and condemnations of communism are stamped with puke, your drunken licentious past is also marked permanently with puke. Permanently — or maybe not so permanently? We could eliminate certain things.”
“What sorts of things could you eliminate, my sulfurous gentleman?”
“The puking for example. We could get rid of the puking. Also the insomnia, the oceans of sweat, the quaking, the fear, and the hallucinations.”
“Meaning what?” I pursued with a stubbornness worthy of a better cause — but in my stubbornness there was cunning.
“Meaning that it would be like twenty years ago. In the evening you’d knock it back like a wild animal, in the evening you’d experience great relief, because the constant experiencing of relief became the foundation of your life, till late in the night you’d wallow in a stream of pure relief; then a deep sleep and in the morning, nothing. In the morning there’s a heathy appetite, bacon and eggs, a hot and cold shower, a walk, no sign of any indisposition; in the afternoon some reading. . Do you remember? Do you remember?”
“I remember very well. I remember everything from back then, from before, and I especially remember everything from afterwards. That I’ll never forget, and that’s exactly why. .”
“That’s why you won’t reach for the bottle, even if you were free of the burden of puking, like in the old days?”
“I won’t.”
“You yourself don’t even believe in your Lutheran resistance. Since you know you won’t reach for the bottle, why are you sitting here? Get your things together and run away. Just think, in a few hours you could be anywhere you want, in Sopot, in Wisła, in Jarocin. .”
“I’m staying here. Simon Pure Goodness is running away.”
“Give me a goddam break with that loser! That escape of his is pure kitsch, it’s lousy writing! Why escape in the night when he could just as easily do it in the daytime? Why through the window when the door and the gates are open the whole time? And why through the window of the smoking room in particular, when there are other rooms without bars on the windows? I mean, there’s no need to escape from here at all, you can just walk out of the place. At any time of the day or night you can sling your kit on your back, say bye-bye at the nurses’ station, and it really is bye-bye. No one will even ask where you’re going or why. And if someone really is weak in spirit, and passing publicly through the open doors of the alco ward is beyond them, they can just go into town, walk into the first bar they find, knock back a beer and one or two doubles, come back, and blow boldly into the breathalyzer. There you are — you’re at 1.5, you have fifteen minutes to pack your things. Bye-bye. Why creep out in the night when no one’s guarding you to begin with? Why wrap yourself in the garb of a great fugitive, when no one is giving chase? And why’s he running away anyway? What’s his motivation? Because his sleeping roommate snores? Because the fugitive has an overpowering thirst for booze? Because he’s fleeing in panic back to his former incarnation? Because all of the above? He’s running away, and he’s going to do what? Take a cab to “The Mighty Angel”? To the all-night store? Brace himself with a couple of doubles, take the elevator to the twelfth floor, open the door and wonder who’s been staying in his place while the owner was away? Who was here while I was gone? And, as he drinks, he’ll clear up the mess? He’ll put his keys, his books, his records, his pencils, his photographs, and his drinking glasses where they belong? He’ll vacuum the floor, change the bed, take down the lace curtains and gather the laundry? He’ll pour an over-generous quantity of Omo-Color washing powder into the bathtub? He’ll wash his filthy clothing and carefully hang it out to dry on the balcony, ever so carefully, because the more care you put into hanging out the washing, the less work it is to iron it later? And when his labors are done he’ll pour himself a goodly shot of Żołądkowa Gorzka, and drink it, and fall asleep, and wake up on the alco ward? I, your green-winged angel, cannot keep up with such an intense tempo, and I tell you — this is not good. Simon’s escape is highly artificial and irritating. If you have even a little bit of an instinct, stay away from such artificiality and don’t describe it. Listen to me finally; I’m not tempting you now, I’m giving you a friendly piece of advice: don’t describe Simon’s escape. Don’t do it. And don’t go overboard either with that childlike faith in recovered time; lost time, and especially lost money, can never be recovered, especially by means of literature. You yourself calculated that in the course of the last twenty years you’d drunk two thousand three hundred and eighty bottles of vodka, two thousand two hundred and twenty bottles of wine, and two thousand two hundred and fifty bottles of beer, when the latter two are converted to vodka (the ratio being: half a liter of vodka equals two bottles of wine, equals ten beers), and so, counting in vodka, in the course of the last twenty years you’d drunk three thousand six hundred bottles of vodka, and converting to today’s prices you figured out that you’d drunk a good deal more than seventy thousand zloties. And on top of that you have to add the cab rides, the tips, the snacks, and the lost wallets, bags, scarves, jackets, gloves, documents, the fees for home treatments and stays in drying-out facilities, the monstrous bills for drunken phone conversations, the interest, the fines, the penalties, and the paid women. And you need to add at least two more years of drinking, because you, Jerzy, didn’t start drinking in the Year of our Lord 1980, when Solidarity was founded, you, Jerzy, began drinking in earnest in the Year of our Lord 1978, when a Pole ascended to the Throne of St. Peter, which, incidentally, even taking into consideration your Protestantism, is nothing but a superficial coincidence. So that at a conservative estimate alone, Jerzy, you drank away a billion old zloties, a hundred thousand new ones, a sum of money that a chump like yourself, filled with hypocritical humility, is unlikely ever to get back. To get it back, the epic poem whose parts I’m dictating to you right now would have to earn you that billion old zloties. Though if you really listened to me, if you wrote everything down faithfully, that seemingly unattainable amount would not have to be imaginary. If you put your mind to it, you could earn it, you could sell our co-authored work at a good price, you could make a packet and — think about it — you could carry on drinking. But don’t write on your own. Don’t write on your own, Jerzy. I’m begging you: don’t write. Leave Simon’s artificial escape undescribed.”