and a toothless mouth peeked out from under the blanket. “All right, how much is a hundred and thirteen thousand two hundred and five times twenty-eight thousand six hundred and thirty?”
This was an act of kindness: now the crouched figure murmured in a different tone, fervently, almost prayerfully. A moment later he jabbered, “…illion… forty-one million… ifty-nine thousand… dred and fifty.”
Stefan did not have to check. He knew that the man could multiply and divide six-digit numbers in seconds. When he first arrived at the asylum, Stefan had asked the patient how he did it. The reply was an irate mutter. Once, tempted by Stefan’s offer of a piece of chocolate, the idiot promised to tell his secret. Stammering and drooling on the chocolate, he said, “I’ve got… drawers in my head. Click, click. Thousands here, millions here, click click. Snap. And there it is.”
“There what is?” asked Stefan, disappointed.
Now the mathematician lowered the blanket, and his face beamed. He was big. “Pump me up!” he lisped.
That meant that he wanted to be given two large numbers.
“Well…” Stefan scrupulously counted out the thousands and told him to multiply. The idiot drooled, whispered, hiccuped, and gave the answer. Stefan stood at the foot of the bed, thinking.
The idiot was silent for a moment, then pleaded again, “Pump me up!”
Stefan recited another pair of numbers. Was this what the idiot mathematician needed to be reassured of his own worth? There were times when Stefan felt a sudden fear, as if he should fall to his knees and beg everyone to forgive him for being so normal, for sometimes feeling self-satisfied, for forgetting about them.
He had nowhere to go. In the end he went to see Sekulowski.
The poet was shaving. Noticing a volume of Bernanos on the table, Stefan started to say something about Christian ethics, but Sekulowski did not give him a chance. Standing at the mirror, his face lathered, he shook the shaving brush several times, sending suds flying across the room.
“Doctor, it makes no sense. The church, that old terrorist organization, has been acquiring souls for two thousand years now, and what has come of it? Salvation for some, symptoms for others.”
Sekulowski was more interested in the problem of genius. Stefan supposed that he thought of it “from the inside,” regarding himself as a genius.
“Well, then take van Gogh or Pascal. It’s an old story. On the other hand, you garbagemen of the soul know nothing about us.”
(Aha! thought Stefan.)
“I remember, from the days of my apprenticeship, a few interesting, pure forms nourished by various literary circles. There was this young writer. Things came easy to him. He had his picture in the papers, interviews, translations, reprints. I was green with envy. I could savor hatred the way the Buddha savored nothingness. Once we ran into each other when both of us were drunk. All his inhibitions were gone. He broke down crying, told me that he envied me my elitism and my high standards. That I had been so protective of what I wrote. That my solitude was so productive and proud. The next day we weren’t talking to each other anymore. Soon after, he published an essay on my poems: ‘An Abortion Signifying Nothing.’ A masterpiece of applied sadism. If you want to listen, please come into the bathroom because I’m going to take a shower.”
Lately Sekulowski had been admitting Stefan to his evening ablutions, perhaps as a new way of humiliating him.
He climbed naked into the shower and went on talking. “When I started, I had doubts when my friends praised me. When they didn’t, I thought: Aha! And when they started giving out advice—that I was in a rut, a blind alley, that I was burning myself out—then I knew I was on the right track.”
He ran a washcloth over his hairy backside.
“There were a couple of old men back then. The first was supposed to be an epic poet—he had never published a single epic, but that was his reputation. They believed in him, but I didn’t. He collected mottoes like butterflies. Said he needed them for his ‘life’s work.’ He had been writing this life’s work since his youth, constantly correcting it and comparing it to Flaubert’s manuscripts. Forever making changes and never getting it right. He would put down three words a week. When he died, somebody lent me his manuscript for a couple of days. Well, not to put too fine a point on it: fluff. Nothing that would last, no effort, no desire. Never trust blowhards—you have to have talent. Don’t tell me about Flaubert’s endlessly worked-over manuscripts, because I’ve seen Wilde’s work. That’s right, Oscar. Did you know that he wrote
He stuck his head under the shower and blew his nose thunderously.
“The other one was famous
“And could you?”
Sekulowski scratched his soapy back luxuriantly.
“Almost always. Every so often, when the waves receded, I’d read what I’d written—with some admiration. It’s mostly a question of style. The difference in generations comes down to this: once they used to write, ‘the dawn smelled of roses.’ Then a new wave comes, and for a while they write, ‘the morning smelled of piss.’ But the device is the same. That’s not reform. That’s not innovation.”
He barked like a seal under the hot stream of water.
“All writing has to have a skeleton, like a woman, but not one you can feel. Also like a woman. Wait a second—I just remembered a great story. Yesterday, Doctor Rygier lent me a couple of old literary journals. What a riot! That pack of critics uttering each word convinced that history was speaking through their mouths, when at best it was yesterday’s vodka. Ouch!” His hair had gotten tangled.
He rubbed his belly and went on, “I have a particularly painful memory from that period, on which fate has poured balm. I’ll leave names out of it. May he rest peacefully in his grave, upon which I relieve myself,” Sekulowski said with a vulgar laugh that may have had something to do with his own nakedness.
He rinsed himself off, reached for his bathrobe, and said calmly, “I pretended to be the most impudent man alive, but actually it was only uncertainty. That’s when you pick an ideology like choosing a tie off the rack— whichever seems most colorful and expensive. I was the most defenseless nobody, and above us all, like the brightest of stars, shined a certain critic of the older generation. He wrote like Hafiz praising the locomotive. He was the nineteenth century incarnate. He couldn’t breathe in our atmosphere, he could see no one of greatness. He had not yet noticed us, the young. Individually, we didn’t matter; if there were ten of us, he’d say good morning. He was a curious type, doctor, a born writer. He had talent, an apt metaphor for every occasion, and humor—and he was completely merciless. For one good metaphor, he was willing to annihilate a book and its author. And did he do it honestly? Don’t be naive.” Sekulowski combed his wet hair with great attention. “Today I’m absolutely sure that he believed in nothing. Why should he? He was like a beautiful watch missing one tiny screw, a writer with no counterweight. He wasn’t foolish enough to become the Polish Conrad, but there was no remedy for that.”
He put on his shirt.
“At the time, I had lost God. I don’t mean I stopped believing—I lost Him the way some men lose women, for no reason and with no hope of recovery. I suffered, because I needed an oracle. Well, it wouldn’t have taken much for that critic to finish me off. But he did believe in one thing. Himself. He oozed that belief the way some women ooze sex. Besides which, he was so famous that he was always right. He read a couple of poems that I sent him, and passed judgment. We were about as much alike as the sun and a shovel”—he laughed, knotting his tie—“and I was a dirty shovel. He talked in terms of first causes, fumbled around, and finally explained to me why my poems were worthless. He hesitated for a while, but in the end he let me go on writing. He let me, do you understand?” Sekulowski made an ugly face. “Well, it’s an old story. But when I think that today his name is meaningless to the young, I’m delighted. It’s revenge and I didn’t even have to lift a finger. It was prepared by life itself. It ripened slowly like a fruit—I know of nothing sweeter,” said the poet with great satisfaction, tying the silver belt of his
