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The Yellow Dress
Before the mafiosi appeared in my apartment in the company of the dark-complexioned poetess Alberta Lulaj, before they wrenched me from my drunken sleep and set about demanding—first with dissembling pleas, then with ruthless threats—that I arrange for Alberta Lulaj’s poetry to be published in the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, before there began the tempestuous events I wish to recount, there was the eve of those events, there was the morning and the evening of the preceding day, and I, from the morning to the evening of the preceding day, had been drinking peach vodka. Yes indeed, I had been drinking peach vodka, brutishly longing for one last love before death, and immersed up to my ears in a life of dissolution.
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“How is it possible to live a long and happy life without drinking?” I uttered this sentence, brimming with barroom grandiloquence; my face assumed a roguish expression, and I immediately felt like spitting on the very core of my soul demoralized by booze. Of course I knew full well that it was possible; it was, yes, it was possible to live a long and happy life without drinking. I personally had known people who lived a long and happy life without drinking. And even if I didn’t know any personally (because, come to think of it, I’d never personally known anyone who was happy, and I wouldn’t even want to know them; whenever I heard people say: he’s a happy guy, that fellow’s doing well, he’s had a successful life, I ran away, I avoided such happy folk like the plague), even if I didn’t know any personally, other people did know some, and even if other people didn’t know any, there still have been happy people. There have been and there still are. I mean, let’s not make too much of a thing about drunkards—drunkards comprise a marginal group, the great majority of humanity doesn’t drink. Though when it comes down to it, it’s not really clear why. When it comes down to it, why does the great majority of humanity not drink? What are the reasons? This is one of the famous foundational questions. Knotty questions. Quaffing hard liquor is such a productive subject that at any moment some foundational question can arise. Wherever you turn your visage, whichever of the paths through the quagmire you should choose, in every place you can encounter an angel with a flaming sword, and the angel will speak unto you (and his voice will be as the voice of many waters), and he will ask: why do you not drink, my brother? And if you, my brother, answer that you do not drink because you 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.
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