Oh, Joanna Catastrophe was far from stupid, and she was well aware that freedom was not a matter of leaving one’s best moccasins in the middle of the room. With Joanna one could have long and fascinating conversations about the concept of freedom, and about other concepts too. Joanna was studying economics and fine arts, and she came from a very good home. Her father was the principal of an elite grammar school; he possessed a degree in history and, as it transpired after the fall of communism, a number of apartment buildings and acreages of land. Her mother was a dentist with a long-standing practice in the heart of the old town, a sophisticated, well-groomed lady who was oppressively enticing in her over-ripeness.
I did not have a clean conscience during my one and only Sunday lunch at the suburban residence of the Catastrophe family. What am I saying: it was not that I did not have a clean conscience, it was that I had a thoroughly unclean conscience; I was unclean as a hog, and I was hungry as a wolf. I wolfed down my food and stared wolfishly at my future never-to-be mother-in-law. She was clad in a flowing yellow gown, and yellow gowns always bring me to my knees. I ate meatballs in broth, veal tongue in jelly, veal roast game style, fruit salad, and ice cream; I ate and at the same time restrained the debauched song that was springing up within me. At the time I was in excellent form. I wasn’t drinking at all; I drank nothing but non-carbonated mineral water (under communism there was no non-carbonated mineral water), I didn’t drink so much as a drop of wine over lunch, I didn’t drink so much as a thimbleful of liqueur over dessert, I didn’t even wet my lips on the brandy served with the coffee, and later in the afternoon, it goes without saying, I also did not drink the glass of Jack Daniel’s offered me by the man of the house. I didn’t drink at all and not drinking did not bother me in the slightest. I was on top form; I listened, I spoke, and I held in check the detailed story-line of the pornographic tale that was forming in my head about enjoying both mother and daughter at the same time—I didn’t hold it so firmly in check that it would be completely suppressed, only so it would not dominate and merely smoldered in the background. I took an active part in the conversation and listened with genuine curiosity to the hosts’ divagations on the subject of their literary tastes, which as it happens were rather broad. For Mr. Catastrophe it was German-language literature, with a special interest in Austrian writers of the twentieth century; Mrs. Catastrophe liked Latin American literature, with no particular special interest; with Joanna it was Russian and American literature, with a special interest in Vladimir Nabokov. I listened, I spoke, and on the subject of Nabokov I delivered the daring (given my situation) opinion that he was a writer whose dark, infernal inquisitiveness and precise mastery of icy form predestined him perfectly to write a novel that was a study in addiction. “Alas,” I added with flippant erudition, “the rumors of the author’s profound alcoholism proved untrue.” I listened, I spoke, I confessed my own literary tastes, and then at dusk I found myself in Joanna’s girlhood room.
“Look how nicely I tidied up,” whispered Joanna. “I did it for you, I cleaned it for you.”
Indeed, the room was marked by a disquieting symmetry which was at odds not only with Joanna’s nature but with human nature in general; one could see at first glance that what had been introduced here was a superficial, Potemkinesque monument to perfect order that could come crashing down at any moment.
“Joanna, I love you in chaos, I love you among all your scattered things.”
But Joanna, evidently given wings by the newly discovered art of the harmonious arrangement of objects, paid no attention, perhaps failing to comprehend the poetic depths of my declaration.
“Even my keys,” she whispered with childlike enthusiasm, “now I even put my keys where they’re supposed to be. And this morning, can you imagine, I couldn’t find them, I couldn’t find my keys, because I’d forgotten I put them where they’re supposed to be.”
I could feel my throat stiffening with emotion; I was moved by the sudden certainty that I would spend the rest of my life with Joanna Catastrophe.
“I love you,” I repeated, “I love you regardless of where you put your keys.”
“Come with me,” said Joanna, and she took me by the hand, and led me up the stairs to the upper floor of the residence, and brought me down a long hallway, and at the end of the hallway she opened a door. I beheld an as yet unfurnished room with white walls; it was well lit and cosy. Outside the window was a view that would have been the dream of any scribbler. Down below was the cooling city; over it, masses of hot air were gathering, while the China grass of darkness was taking over the alleyways and the first lights were coming on in the distant windows.
“You’ll have your own armchair here, your bookcases, your books, and your desk, you’ll be able to write here,” said Joanna, while I realized that the great irrevocable change I had waited for for so many years and whose arrival after all those years I had begun to doubt—that this change had finally come after all. I realized that my life would change and improve, and gently, as if I were embracing a soul that was giving me new life, gently I took Joanna in my arms.
•
And then, very late in the evening, when all the grownups were long asleep, and many lights on our part of Earth had already been turned out, I phoned for a cab (under communism it wasn’t possible to phone for a cab). Joanna yawned sweetly as she walked me across the garden; at the gate the promised white Mercedes was already waiting, sleep well, Joanna. The taxi drove through the dark outskirts of the city, empty fields on either side, fragile walls of houses; I was filled with an appreciation of the entire world, and I even liked the fact that the cab that had come for me was a white Mercedes.
I sprawled comfortably on the back seat and looked for lighted windows. I’d always been struck by windows which are lit up late at night—someone was reading the book of their life all night long, someone was dying, someone was coughing so hard they choked, someone was waking with a cry from a nightmare, someone was taking someone else in their arms, someone was taking something to calm their nerves, someone was weeping from longing, someone was going to the bathroom. I looked at my watch; it was 3 a.m., and the constellations overhead moved like shifting sands. We stopped for a moment by an all-night store, and a moment later we were again driving down a deserted parkway. In my dark building no one was up, no one was dying, no one was reading an enthralling book, but these were the last moments in which everybody would be asleep—in a short while a light would come on on the twelfth floor. And a light came on on the twelfth floor, and it stayed on without a break for forty days and nights; for forty days and nights I drank without a break. The light bulb shone above my insensate body; dawns rose and evenings fell, my insensate hand reached for the bottle and poured vodka into my insensate throat, my bedding and my skin acquired a corneous exoskeleton of dried puke, destruction followed destruction across my apartment. Dear Lord, the mess that Joanna Catastrophe created was exemplary order compared with what I left behind me when I writhed about on all fours in search of the bottle that had been hidden away for a rainy day (and had long ago been consumed by my numbed innards, as the rainy day had long since come and gone, and all the days that followed were also rainy, each one rainier than the next), or when, in a viscous glimmer of lucidity, I crawled to the telephone to phone in my ritual shopping order: Two bottles of Premium peach-favored vodka and a liter of Coke, please. I give the address. Under communism there was no shopping by phone.
Chapter 7
The Very Beginning
The beginning, the very beginning, the beginning told in such huge close-up that the image becomes grainy, the beginning of this or, truth be told, any other drinking bout, the beginning, then, of the universal drinking bout, the beginning of the timeless drinking bout, the beginning of the total drinking bout, the beginning of the Book of Genesis of drinking is then as follows: The earth was without form and the spirit moved upon the face of the waters, and I paid the cab driver, and I got out of the cab, and I checked whether my bag was safely on my shoulder