have no need to, or that you do not drink because you don’t like the taste of vodka, or, God forfend, you answer that you do not drink because you have no need of artificial stimulants, or you say something equally foolish, for example you say that you do not drink because you manage perfectly well without alcohol, if you, you sinner, in your naïvety, yet also in your insolence, should say something like that, then know: a harsh punishment awaits you. As the Scriptures say: the wages of sin is death.
•
Eighteen times I was on the alco ward; faint scars of subcutaneous esperals adorn my body, the way needles adorn a conifer, and my liver possesses the unique smell of a combination of perfume, eau de cologne, and surgical spirit. Yet in my life there was once an unimaginable time when I too would say: I don’t drink, when my liver did not smell of perfume and when my skin was smooth. “Why on earth don’t you drink?” my brothers sitting at the bar would ask, and they were angry, and the ghost of Venedikt Erofeev hovered over their heads, and their volitionless tongues spoke with his tongue, and I wrote down a few lines under his influence and, having paid homage, I released myself from his influence. For between even the cleverest literature and the vehement simplicity of one’s own terror there is no choice. “Why do you not drink, my brother?” those sitting at the bar would ask. “I don’t drink,” I would reply, “because I don’t feel like it, because I don’t like the taste, I don’t need artificial stimulants, I manage perfectly well without alcohol.” That’s how I would answer, and it was true, but only for a time. Until the time when the hour of the fatal glassful began to strike. Until the time when I looked into the maw of the foundational bottle. In due course I will tell you the tale of the fatal glassful, the foundational bottle, and the still undrunk glass of liquor, heavy as a coffin lid. On the motionless surface there spins a little black umbrella stuck in a slice of lemon.
Chapter 3
Dr. Granada
“You know, Mr. J., I’m a hundred percent certain that not one of the several dozen eagles presently on my ward, nor any one of the handful of she-eagles, will ever rise into the air again. None of you will recover, none of you will stop drinking. Not your roommate Christopher Columbus the Explorer, not Simon Pure Goodness, nor Don Juan the Rib, nor the Sugar King, nor the Hero of Socialist Labor, whose living corpse returned to our establishment as recently as yesterday, nor the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, nor the Queen of Kent, nor Fanny Kapelmeister, nor Joanna, nor Marianna; it’s quite certain that none of you will stop drinking. Although it’s hardly necessary to speak of the venerable hall of fame whose names I just listed. Debutants have no chance here either, though even those who come to me for the first time are no longer debutants, they’re mostly seasoned artists; the real debutants, who right now are cracking open their first bottle on the little square outside their apartment building, never even imagine that one day they’ll become acknowledged masters.”
Dr. Granada gazed at the world through one eye; his second eye (or maybe his first? Which eye is first, and which second? Behold a classic example of a drunken concern; its every aspect can be explored with exceeding nicety as one drinks), his second, or perhaps his first eye, was covered with a leukoma, a problem that was rather superficial and could easily have been removed by some surgical colleague of his. Yet the Doctor rightly chose not only not to eradicate his one-eyedness, but, on the contrary, to cultivate it. It made him a charismatic leader: memories of childhood books about pirates stirred in our addled minds, while the nurses reacted to their director’s cyclopism swooningly—I have long observed that a distinct asymmetry in the male physique enhances the languishing receptivity of women. The mystery of this aberration cannot be unlocked, however, without drunken hypotheses, and for the moment I set it aside.
Dr. Granada reminded me of Dr. Swobodziczka of the town of Wisła: the same scent of archaic eau de cologne, a similarity in physical appearance, the palpable analogy of memorable last names, a similarly supercilious attitude to the world (“I speak to you from on high”), a similar, perhaps even identical, resonant, stentorian voice, a shared fondness for florid yet, at the same time, pointed paradoxes, an identical one-eyedness. The left eye of one was covered with a white film, while the other had a glass prosthesis in his right socket. I’m delirious, though I don’t know what it means to be delirious. I have a terrible fever. I’m lying in my parents’ bed, which is as vast as a transatlantic liner; the bedside lamp goes on and off, and the one-eyed doctor is leaning over me.
•
“But there is within them a sort of delusion; some of them, at any rate, surrender with all their might to the power of their own hallucinations.” The blue in Dr. Granada’s one eye intensified, like frozen Absolut. “Even now they believe they won’t drink any more; they are profoundly convinced they’ll never drink another glass in their lives. They promise themselves this in all honesty. Naturally they’re incapable of it; sooner or later the talons of the addiction tighten around their thirsty throats. Now, after their treatment, they’re total abstainers, or at least let’s say quasi-abstainers; they’re fully aware that it is good not to drink, and if they don’t die the first time they go on a bender again, for a time at least they’ll remember how they were sober in the hospital and for a short while after they got out. They’ll struggle, they’ll struggle in vain between drinking and not drinking, but at least that futile battle will be the sign of a fight, even when it ends in defeat; it’ll indicate some kind of movement. They’ll be whipped, but they’ll go out onto the playing field. While you, Mr. J., will no longer go out onto the playing field. You’re immobile; you’ve come to a stop in the bottle like a fly in amber. You’re all burned out inside. You’re filled with cinders, and they are cold cinders. The fire has been thoroughly extinguished by torrential rains. It would seem that you’re sitting here in my office, that you’re saying something; one might even at moments have the erroneous impression that you’re saying something sensible. You’re still wearing hospital pajamas, but in reality you’re no longer here: you’re already elegantly dressed in your street clothes, sitting on a high stool—you’re already drinking, Mr. J. Toward the end of the week you’ll walk out of here in fine shape, pumped full of vitamins and with your magnesium deficiency more or less replenished, fortified with fortifying substances and tranquilized with tranquilizing medicines, you’ll walk out of here on your own two feet, because we have put you for the umpteenth time back on your feet, and where will you, unerringly, direct your steps? Do I need to ask? Do I have to bother with an interrogative intonation? You will head with all speed for the nearest pub or the nearest liquor store.”
Dr. Granada was absolutely correct. Always, after I left the alco ward I would direct my steps to the nearest pub or the nearest liquor store. To be exact, I would first head for the pub; in the interests of further exactitude I must state that it was not the nearest pub, or rather, it was the pub nearest my apartment, which my wives had abandoned, on the ONZ Circle. That’s right, I would leave the alco ward, head for the nearest cab stand, and take a cab to the immediate vicinity of my apartment building. I probably felt safer in my own neighborhood; anywhere is good, but there’s no place like home. And I would enter the pub called “The Mighty Angel” and with the goal of putting my experiences in order I would drink four double shots. Then, in the nearby store I would buy a bottle of vodka and go and face up to the hurly-burly of physical objects. For in a state of sobriety I was incapable of dealing with the disarray that constantly accumulated in the apartment my wives had abandoned, though I did so tenaciously—I have an exceedingly pedantic nature.
Chapter 4
The Fifty-Zloty Bill
In the alco ward a dispute had broken out over plagiarism. Incidentally, when I arrived there for the first time I did not have the slightest notion that I was crossing the threshold of a creative writing program, that I was entering a community of people of the pen, of writers who were incessantly creating their alcoholic autobiographies, recording their innermost feelings in cheap sixty-page notebooks that were called emotional journals, laboriously assembling
