Cancer Ward), all four remote controls (TV, radio, DVD, Canal+), both cell phones, and the receiver from the home phone. On the whole, I don’t eat, drink, smoke, write, talk on the phone, watch television, or even read in bed (once I begin to read, I fall asleep immediately) — but I like to have everything within reach. I checked the cell phone to see whether there were any messages — and sure enough: at dawn two strophes of love and longing had flowed onto the mysterious machinery. The first was from The Greatest Love of My Life; the second, from an unknown author. The number of idealists — who do not consider it fitting to sign their missives, since they are absolutely convinced that not only do I have their numbers registered in my phone, but also etched on my heart — is significant. God be with you. Every morning when I find the received messages, it seems to me that I slept like a log. An absurd illusion (at night I put it on “silent”), but irresistible. SMSes, silent like moths, deepen the nocturnal peace, such that — recalling the times when we used to write poetry — I express the matter in the form of a poetic aphorism. Long ago, I noticed that the first messages arrive around five in the morning. Completely as if the most virulent letter senders had, at that hour, their preliminary versions ready. After intoxicating and prolonged excesses with the organist’s daughter — deliberately not leading to fulfillment and thereby always a bit destructive — I slept, perhaps not like a log (I got up once to go to the can), but quite well. I didn’t have any nightmares, no deranged telephone call ripped me from my sleep (I don’t unplug the home phone at night), no betrayed husband called to make threats, not a one of my abandoned girlfriends woke me up in a fit of hysteria. Nor were there any silent or ecstatic calls from old drinking buddies, no madman or murdered passerby howled on the street under my windows. The night hadn’t been bad; so, too, the awakening. The sheets smelled of the sprinter’s sweat of the organist’s daughter. I didn’t enter her name in the register. There wasn’t any reason. For the moment there isn’t any reason. She didn’t do anything to make me angry. She didn’t smoke in bed. She didn’t jabber on the phone for hours on end. She didn’t puff like a steam engine, she didn’t bare her saliva covered teeth, and she didn’t make any silly faces during orgasm. After which, she didn’t cuddle spasmodically and devotedly. She quickly went to the bathroom and didn’t sit there long. She didn’t speak up very often. When she picked up the Bible, she didn’t wink at me in a sign of Lutheran brotherhood. She glanced at Cancer Ward, but in her glance there wasn’t any of the usual cognitive obtuseness indicating that this was the first time in her life she had seen that medical textbook. On the contrary — she knew what the book was. She stood for a long time facing the wall with the bookshelves — a risky venture in itself — but it didn’t end in any whimpering. High marks! Whenever I hear whimpering — can I borrow this or that for a few days — I don’t know myself what infuriates me more: the whimpering, the borrowing, or the assumption that our intoxicating acquaintance might last that long. Woman! After all, in a few more days you might — as far as I’m concerned — no longer be living. On the spot, now, immediately, I feel like killing you, and on the spot, now, immediately, I will frivolously enter your name in the register! In a few days! She would give it back in a few days! Or maybe in a week? Or in two weeks? Who will give it back? You? More likely your two-week old corpse with a rusty spoke still not removed from your aorta. We can’t stand lending anything. Lending is the worst. When you are from the tribe of nut jobs who always have all their pairs of shoes polished, and all their pencils always sharpened — well, it’s clear. All objects impeccable and in their place. A loaned object = a lost object. The principle that you don’t lend objects of personal use arose, I think, in a kolkhoz. All objects are of personal use. Everybody touches objects in his own way, and in his own way prostitutes and thwarts them by his touch. People don’t notice and don’t discern that the neighbor who returns a borrowed umbrella returns an umbrella that is deformed and defiled. There are objects that are more and less prone to deformation and defilement. Books are unusually susceptible to such massacres. Just being picked up, just being read by someone else, defiles them, and then they also open them up, fold them back, make notes in the margin, flip the pages, close them, glance through them, check, look for the page, bring them closer to the eyes, shove them under somebody’s nose, set them aside, etc. The manner of touching a book as an object contains an entire arsenal of gropings, defilements, and sullyings. Reading a borrowed book is like taking a paid woman. Except that taking a paid woman is better, to the extent that it is quick. Quick reading makes practically no sense. That is why I never have any borrowed books. Paid women — certainly. Because I treat literature with deadly seriousness, I go to the brothel, not to the library. Of the two evils, I would prefer to give someone a book than to lend it. My library isn’t large, slightly more than one thousand five hundred titles. Predominately history, classics, dictionaries and encyclopedias, a lot of poetry. None of our holy books. No old hymnals or prewar Protestant almanacs. Luther’s Postil, Kubala, Sr.’s How to Protect Against the Deviltry of Daily Life, as well as the Illustrated History of the Protestant Church in Granatowe Góry—they’re on the bookshelf of specters. And way back, at that. I don’t need to add that everything, especially the specters, are arranged in orderly fashion, according to size. The organist’s daughter stood for a long time near that harmony, but she didn’t disturb it. She didn’t even take a volume off the shelf. She settled for communing with the spines. This is a commendable form of communing with a library — to tell the truth, for outsiders, even for young Lutheran girls, the only acceptable form. In a word, the organist’s daughter didn’t betray her spiritual poverty in this, or that, or any other manner. Which doesn’t mean that I had come upon some sort of ideal. Not at all! She has a huge, cardinal defect, except that for now that defect looks like a virtue. For now. For now I don’t feel like killing her. In what does that defect, which looks like a virtue, consist? Let’s not pretend we don’t know! Let’s not make up stories! What’s this all about? Haven’t we had any Protestant girls? Haven’t we cast a greedy eye on virginal confirmation class girls? Haven’t we tried to put one over on charming pastors’ wives? Haven’t we analyzed the cut of Lutheran thongs? Hasty female parishioners haven’t bickered with you sweetly that they won’t kneel, because that’s Catholic? So what defect, which looks like a virtue, did the organist’s daughter have? Why, she had this defect, which looks like a virtue: that, in giving herself to a Lutheran from our parts, she did this with peculiar delight, because she felt that she was doing what was pleasing to Lord Jesus. And also to the Apostle Paul, all four evangelists, and — of course — our Reformer, Dr. Martin Luther. As likewise to the organist, the organist’s wife, the bishop, and all our pastors, and all our brethren. All of them surrounded our sack, and gave their blessing, and encouraged us to