"How am I to know? It's always easier to find death in a big city."
"I'm coming!" cried the director.
"And your wife?"
"It's easier to find a husband in the provinces."
And in that way this good old devil became my friend. I had an inexplicable weakness for him and I liked the lame wise wretch. In fact all my friends grew to like him too for his kindness, his wit and bitter but gentle sense of humour.
A few times he tried to kill himself in "big city style": he would throw himself from the top floor of the tallest building in town but managed only to scare a dog, which ran away bewildered by the view of a man who fell from the sky, then sprang to his feet, cursed, and walked away.
I had my plans, but I was careful, cunning and purposeful. It would be too boring to tell the whole story of how I reached my goal. Suffice it to say that this charming devil, once in Rome, did as the Romans do, and after a year became a playwright. Of course, his talent was diabolical. He wrote an excellent play and then began to write for a living. I cut off his allowance. At this point the story begins to be really interesting: the critics denied he had talent, accused him of being too pretentious, full of cliched wisdom, his ironies too virulent, and they stated he was too slavish a follower of G.B. Shaw. That's what was said about the wise, old devil because he was, the fool, a Pole and wrote in Polish. His novel was sent to the devil, his great poem Inferno condemned as "falsely demonic" rubbish.
This stirred up in him his hellish pride; the devil was suffering. The insults heaped on him were painful and poisonous, he was torn limb from limb and thrown into despair. Quite well fed when with me, now he was losing weight by the day; he turned grey and looked old. Someone wrote about him in a magazine that a man who leaves his wife on the street is scum, not a poet.
The devil who swallowed cyanide like aspirin could not swallow what was written about him. He suffered terrible torment. His noble soul was reduced to spasms of utter desperation. Soon nobody wanted to publish his stupid books. He came to ask me for money. I refused. When I visited him (he lived in an attic despite his fame), he was lying in bed, a broken, tortured man. The triumph of his initial success had been too great for the subsequent disappointment not to be terrible.
One night he sent for me.
I found a skeleton ravaged by hunger and despair surrounded by piles of manuscripts.
He gave me one of his gentle smiles:
"Thank you," he said quietly. "Now I understand how wisely you led me to it. Tonight I will die ... Of hunger ... To think that I, an old devil, haven't thought of it before, that to die all I had to do was to start writing books ... How wise you are, how wise ... I only hope they'll take me back in hell ... for I cannot bear it any longer ..
He took my hand, and died with a wise and kindly smile on his face.
He must have died properly for there was a sudden, strange noise in the air, like the wind howling. It was the devils, his brothers, crying when they saw what had happened to him and what terrible torture he suffered, the devil who wrote books in Poland.
And so they welcomed him back to Hell with great love and compassion.
It's difficult to state with absolute certainty what my intimate acquaintance with Countess Kotlubay was founded upon. Naturally, speaking of intimacy, I have in mind only that fragile mode of closeness possible between a full-blooded and to-the-bone aristocratic member of society, and an individual from a sphere which is respectable and worthy enough, but only middle class. I flatter myself that on a good day I possess in my demeanour a certain loftiness, a deeper gaze and a sense of idealism, which allowed me to win the discriminating sympathy of the countess. For since childhood I have felt a close affinity with Pascal's "thinking reed" and have had an inclination towards the sublime; I often spend long hours contemplating lofty and beautiful ideas.
This selfless inquiry - this nobility of thought, this romantic, aristocratic, idealistic, slightly anachronistic attitude of mind - earned me, as I suspect, access to the countess's petits fours and to her incomparable Friday dinners. For the countess belonged to that rare breed of women - at once evangelic and renaissance - who preside over charity balls and at the same time pay homage to the Muses. Her countless acts of compassion aroused admiration. The fame of her philanthropic "teas" and artistic "five o'clocks" at which she performed like some Medici princess was widely spread while the smaller salon, where the countess used to receive just a handful of truly close and trustworthy guests, was tempting in its exclusivity.
But most famous were the countess's vegetarian dinners. Those dinners gave her, as she used to say, a breathing space in the continuous stream of philanthropy. They were something of a holiday, a new point of departure. "I too want to have something for myself," said the countess with a sad smile inviting me for the first time to one of those dinners two months ago. "Please come on Friday. A little singing and music, a small circle of my closest friends and you. And it's on Friday in order to avoid even a shadow of thought about, well ... meat," she recoiled slightly, "about this eternal meat of yours and this blood ... Too much carnivorousness, too many meaty smells. You see no happiness beyond a bloody beefsteak! You run away from fasts. You would gobble up disgusting scraps of meat all day long without a break! I am throwing down my gauntlet," she added with a subtle wink of her eye, meaningful and symbolic as usual. "I want to convince you that a fast is not a diet, but a feast for the spirit."
What an honour! To be numbered among the ten people, fifteen at most, who obtain access to the meatless dinners of the countess!
The world of high society has always held a magnetic attraction for me, let alone the world of those dinners. It seems that the countess's secret aim was to dig, as it were, new trenches of Holy Alliance' against the barbarity of our days (after all the blood of the Krasinskis ran in her veins),' that she wanted to pay tribute to the deep conviction that blue-blooded aristocracy exists not only to adorn fetes and parties but that also in other, spiritual and artistic areas, it is capable of self-sufficiency by virtue of the superiority of its race; that therefore a truly aspiring salon is an aristocratic salon. It was an archaic, if somewhat unoriginal thought, but at any rate - in its venerable archaism - unbelievably brave and deep, such as could rightly be expected from the descendant of hetmans.3 And indeed, at the table in the historic dining-room, away from corpses and murders, away from the billions of slaughtered cows and oxen, the representatives of the oldest families under the leadership of the countess would resurrect Plato's symposia. It seemed that the spirit of poetry and philosophy rose from among the crystal and flowers and that the charmed words fell spontaneously into rhyme.
There was for instance one prince who at the countess's request took the role of intellectual and philosopher, and he acted it in such a princely manner, delivering such beautiful and noble ideas, that on hearing them Plato himself would have humbly consented to wait upon the prince, napkin in hand. There was a baroness who undertook to enliven the meetings with her singing, and although she had never been taught to sing I doubt whether Ada Sari would have sung so well in such a situation. Something inexpressibly marvellous, wonderfully vegetarian, luxuriously vegetarian, I would say, was contained in the gastronomic frugality of those parties; and seeing those gigantic fortunes modestly bent over small portions of kohlrabi made an unforgettable impression, particularly in view of the horrific carnivorousness of our times. Even our teeth, the teeth of rodents, were losing their Cain-like stigma. As for the cuisine - undoubtedly the countess's cuisine had no equal. The extraordinarily rich juicy taste of her tomatoes stuffed with rice, the firmness and aroma of her omelettes with asparagus were truly divine.
After a few months, on the Friday I'm going to speak about, I was honoured with another invitation, and with understandable nervousness I drove in a modest drozhka under the ancient fronton of the palace located near Warsaw. But instead of the greater number of people I had expected I found only two guests, and even these were not in
the least distinguished: an old toothless marquise who made a virtue of necessity by indulging in vegetables every day of the week, and some baron, namely Baron de Apfelbaum of a somewhat dubious family, who by means of his millions and his mother - nee princess Pstryczynska - had redeemed himself from the number of his ancestors and his otherwise irredeemable nose. From the start I sensed a subtle dissonance, as if something was out of tune. Moreover, the pumpkin soup - specialize de la maison - soup from a pumpkin cooked sweet and tender, which was served as the first course, turned out to be unexpectedly thin, watery and tasteless. However I betrayed not the slightest sign of surprise or disappointment (this kind of behaviour would be acceptable anywhere else but not at Countess Kotlubay's); instead, with my face bright and exalted I managed a compliment:
As I mentioned before, at the countess's Friday dinners poetic verses would form themselves on one's lips as a result of the exceptional harmony and loftiness of these meetings; it would be simply unbecoming not to weave rhymes into stretches of prose. Suddenly - to my horror! - Baron de Apfelbaum, who, as a poet of exceeding refinement and a fastidious gourmand, was an ardent admirer of the hostess's inspired gastronomy, leans towards me and whispers in my ear with ill-concealed distaste and an anger which I never would have suspected of him:
Surprised by this naughty aside I coughed. What did he mean by that? Luckily the baron restrained himself. What on earth had happened since my last visit? The dinner seemed merely to be the phantom of a dinner, the food was mean, the faces were long ... After the soup the second course was served - a platter of thin and peaky carrot in brown flour and butter. I admired the spiritual strength of the countess. Pale, in a black toilette with family diamonds, she consumed the dubious dish with undaunted courage, thus forcing us to follow her, and with her usual skill she led the conversation towards celestial heights. She started off with charm, though not without melancholy, waving her napkin:
I responded immediately, giving myself suitable airs and glittering along with the front of my evening suit:
The countess thanked me with a smile for the immaculate beauty of this thought. The baron, like a thoroughbred seized by the spirit of noble rivalry, drumming his fingers, throwing sparks from the precious stones - and rhymes whose art he alone possessed - took off:
"Beautifully expressed, dear sir," lisped out the toothless marquise ecstatically. "Wonderful! Charity! Saint Francis of Assisi! I too have my poor, little children suffering from the English disease, to whom I have sacrificed my toothless old age. We ought to think constantly about the poor, unhappy ones.
"About prisoners and cripples who can't afford artificial limbs," added the baron.
"About old, skinny, emaciated ex-school mistresses," said the countess compassionately.
"About hairdressers prostrated by swollen veins and starving miners suffering from ischemia," I added, deeply moved.
"Yes," said the countess, as her eyes lit up and she looked into the distance. "Yes, Love, Charity, two flowers - roses de the, tea roses of life ... But one shouldn't forget about one's noble duty to oneself." And having thought a little, she said, paraphrasing the famous dictum of Prince Poniatowski: "God entrusted me with Maria Kotlubay and to Him alone shall I return her!"4
"Bravo! Excellent! What a thought! Deep! wise! proud! God entrusted me with Maria Kotlubay and to Him alone shall I return her!" - cried out everybody, while I, bearing in mind that Prince Josef had been mentioned, allowed myself to strike gently the note of patriotism: "And remember always - Eagle White."5
The servants brought in an enormous cauliflower swimming in fresh butter, glistening with gold, although on the basis of previous experience one could only assume that its colouring was as misleading as a consumptive's flush. That's what the conversation at the countess's was like. It was a feast even in such unfavourable gastronomic circumstances. I flatter myself that my statement that Love was the most beautiful virtue was by no means a shallow one; I'd even say it might be a jewel in the crown of any philosophical poem. And then another of the guests throws in an aphorism that Charity is even more beautiful than Love. Wonderful! And true! For indeed, when one thinks about it deeply Charity spreads its cloak wider and covers more than lofty Love. But that's not the end of it. This wise Amphitryon of ours, anxious that we should not be carried away by Love and Charity, mentions en passant the noble duties one owes to oneself; and then I, subtly taking advantage of the ending on "-ight", added just one thing - "Eagle White". And the form, the manners, the mastery of self-expression, the noble and elegant frugality of the feast, all competing with the content. "Oh no!" I thought delightedly, "someone who has never been to the countess's Friday dinner - he does not, properly speaking, know the aristocracy."
"Excellent cauliflower," all of a sudden muttered the baron, gastronome and poet, and in his voice one could detect pleased surprise.
"Indeed," confirmed the countess looking at the plate with suspicion.
As for myself I noticed nothing extraordinary in the taste of the cauliflower. It seemed to me as pale as the previous dishes.
"Could it be Philip?" asked the countess, her eyes firing sparks.
"We'd better check," said the marquise mistrustfully.
"Call Philip!" ordered the countess.
"There is no reason to hide it from you, my dear fellow," said Baron de Apfelbaum and explained to me in a low voice, with badly concealed irritation, what was the matter. Thus, no more and no less, on the previous Friday the countess had caught the cook seasoning her idea of a vegetarian feast with bouillon. What a rascal! I couldn't believe it. Indeed, only a cook could have done such a thing! What's worse the obstinate cook, as I heard, showed no repentance but had the cheek to contrive in his defence a peculiar argument - that he wanted their lordships to have their cake and eat it. What did he mean by that? (Allegedly, his previous employment was with a bishop.) Only when the countess threatened him with immediate dismissal did he swear to discontinue the practice. "Fool!" the baron summed up his story. "The fool, let himself be caught! And that's why, as you see, most people haven't come, and hm, if it hadn't been for the cauliflower I'm afraid they would be quite right."
"No," said the toothless marquise chewing the vegetable with her gums, "it's not a meaty taste ... Smack, smack ... It's not a meaty taste, rather ... comment dirais-je - exceptionally nourishing; must have masses of vitamins."
"Something pepper-like," remarked the baron, discreetly helping himself to another portion. "Something delicately peppery ... smack, smack ... but meatless," he added hastily. "Clearly vegetarian, peppery-cauliflowery. You can rely on my palate, my dear Countess. In the matter of taste I'm another Pythia." But the countess would not calm down until the cook appeared before her - a long, skinny, ginger-haired character with an oblique look - and swore on the grave of his dead wife that the cauliflower was pure beyond reproach.
"Cooks - they are all like that," I said sympathetically and helped myself too to the dish which was enjoying such popularity (although I still couldn't find in it any outstanding quality). "Oh, yes, one needs to keep an eye on cooks." (I'm not sure whether such remarks were sufficiently tactful but I was overcome by the excitement - light as champagne bubbles.) "Cook - in that funny hat of his and an apron!"
"Philip looks so good-natured," said the countess with a tone of sadness and a mute reproach, as she reached out for the butter-dish.
"Good-natured, good-natured ..." I was insisting on my opinions perhaps too stubbornly. "However, a cook ... a cook - please consider this fact, ladies and gentlemen - is a common fellow, homo viulgaris, whose task it is to prepare elegant, exquisite dishes - there's a dangerous paradox. Churlishness preparing elegance! What's that supposed to mean?"
"Extraordinary aroma," said the countess inhaling the bouquet of the cauliflower with her nostrils wide open (I couldn't smell it), and without putting down the fork which constantly flickered in her hand.
"Extraordinary," repeated the banker, and in order not to spatter
his shirt frills with the butter he tucked the napkin under his collar. "Just a little more, if I may, dear Countess. I'm reviving indeed after that, hm, soup ... Smack, smack ... True, cooks cannot be trusted. I had a cook who cooked Italian macaroni like no one else. I would simply stuff myself! And one day, can you imagine, I come into the kitchen and see in the saucepan my macaroni swarming, literally swarming! And it was earth-worms - smack, smack - earth-worms which the rascal was serving as macaroni. Since then I never - smack, smack - look into saucepans."
"There we are," I said. "Precisely." And I went on saying something about cooks, that they are assassins, small time murderers who don't care what or how as long as there is something to pepper, dress up or prepare. Not entirely proper remarks, and indeed wholly obnoxious, but I got carried away. "You, Dear Countess, who shudder at the idea of touching a cook's head - in soup - you eat his hair!" I could have gone on in that vein even longer, for in no time at all I was overwhelmed by a tide of treacherous eloquence - when suddenly I stopped. No one was listening to me. An extraordinary vista opened before me - that of the countess, an aristocratic patroness and dogaressa, devouring in silence and with such greed that her ears were quivering. It was a sight which both frightened and astonished me. The baron was seconding her bravely, bent over the plate, slurping and smacking with all his heart. The old marquise too was trying to catch up with them, chewing and swallowing enormous chunks, apparently in fear that they would snatch up the best bits from under her nose.
This sudden and incredible picture of gluttony - I can't express it in any other way - such gluttony, in such a house, this dreadful transgression, this crashing discord, so shocked the foundation of my being that, unable to constrain myself, I sneezed. And because I had left my handkerchief in the pocket of my coat I was forced to excuse myself from the guests and leave the table. In the hall, having collapsed on a chair, I tried to calm-my- bewildered senses.
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