“Have you any idea how much it cost to develop that tab?” he asked. “No, you don’t, and you’d never be able to guess. It’s not meant to be a hangover tablet. It’s a cognitive enhancer; it’s meant for fighter pilots, battlefield troops, astronauts. The hangover thing’s a side-effect, that’s all.”
“I think your employers need some tips on marketing,” I told him.
He shrugged. Then he leaned forward slightly and said, “Have you ever wondered where creativity comes from?”
I was looking at my watch again. “Sorry?”
He sat back. “Am I going to have to come over to that side of the table and shake you by the ears, Jarek?”
I put on an attentive expression.
Marcin started to say something, thought again, started to say something else, closed his mouth. Then he said. “You remember Mirosław Sierpiński?”
“Mirek? Sure.” Mirek Sierpiński had been in the same year as me at school. “Hey, did you hear he’s up for a Pulitzer Prize?”
Marcin rubbed his eyes. “He won the Pulitzer Prize, Jarek. Last year. Don’t you read the papers?”
“Last year was really busy for us,” I said.
“Admit it. You didn’t even know he’d gone to New York until you heard he’d been nominated for the Pulitzer.” He shook his head. “I despair of you, Jarek. I know where every one of my classmates is right now, and what they’re doing. I have done ever since I left school. How many of yours have you seen in the past fifteen years?”
I put my hands up in surrender. “Point taken. Okay.”
He shook his head again. “Mirek’s dad was a fitter at the shipyard. His mum cleans offices. Both of them barely finished school; I don’t think either of them ever wrote anything more complicated than a shopping list.”
“Mirek’s dad wasn’t stupid,” I told him. “Big union man, very smart. I went to his funeral,” I added, to make a point. “Lots of old Solidarity guys were there.”
Marcin was nodding. “Fine, fine. He was well-respected. But not a literary giant, I think we can agree.”
It was impossible to argue with that. “Okay,” I said.
“And nobody else in the family ever showed the slightest inclination to write, or paint, or play the piano.”
“How do you know?”
“Because this is what I’ve been doing, Jarek,” he said in an exasperated voice. “I’ve been researching the nature of creativity — and if you’ve just opened your mouth to tell me you thought I was working on a hangover cure, I swear to God I’ll come round there and put my fist down your throat.”
I closed my mouth.
Marcin put a hand to his forehead and muttered, “Jesus Maria.” He took a breath. “Okay. So we have Mirek’s family, who are not creative at all. And we have Mirek, who is being talked about, quite seriously, as a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. How does that happen?”
I shrugged.
“And then there’s Kasia Gadomska and Andrzej Chlebowski, what does their daughter call herself?”
“Tutu,” I said.
“Tutu,” he repeated sourly. “Whose only talent seems to be attending parties and getting falling-over drunk.”
“There was the chat-show,” I said.
“Tutu Talks, yes. Possibly the worst chat-show ever seen on European television — and there’s an awful lot of competition. How can it happen that two people with no apparent creative talent at all can produce a son who writes novels of exquisite beauty, while two of the greatest actors this country has ever seen — from families with an acting tradition that goes back generations — have a daughter with no artistic talent at all?”
I shrugged. “Beats me.”
He said, “It’s genetic,” and all of a sudden, without any warning at all, a veil fell upon the world. Marcin must have seen it in my face, because he sighed and said, “What?”
I looked at my watch. “I’m supposed to have another half an hour,” I told him in a pathetic little voice.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “It’s neurochemistry, Jarek. It isn’t rocket science, okay?”
I looked round the restaurant. Everything was dull. Sight, sound, taste, smell, touch. Everything. Like listening to a concert while wearing earplugs. I sighed.
Marcin got up and tossed his napkin on the table. “Fine,” he said. “We’re not hungry,” he told the waiter, who was approaching with our starters, and he headed for the exit.
“Something came up,” I said to the waiter. I dropped some euros on the table and followed Marcin up the stairs.
Outside, everything was disappointing. Ordinary. I caught up with Marcin at the Cathedral and said, “Genetics.”
He shook his head irritably. “It doesn’t matter, Jarek. You’re not interested, and you seem to be immune anyway. So no big thing, yes? Forget it.”
“The hangover pill.”
“It’s not —”
“A hangover pill, I know, I know. But you know when you give it to rats?”
He sighed. “Yes?”
“How do you know it’s working?”
Marcin thought about it for a while. “The rats smile.” He looked up at the great brick edifice of the Cathedral. “Have you ever seen a rat smile?”
“Not so far as I’m aware, no.”
He grinned, and there was something otherworldly about that grin. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “The most beautiful thing you ever saw.”
I moped around the flat for the rest of the weekend, watched television, sat on the balcony and looked at the boats in the harbour and the tourists on the other side heading for the Old Town. Everything was dull, flat, uninspired. Uninspiring. Marcin phoned a couple of times to ask how I was feeling, and by Sunday night I was able to report that I had a banging headache and a sore throat.
“If your fucking pill has given me the flu, I’ll kill you,” I told him.
“Hm,” he said. “It’s probably nothing. Take some paracetamol and drink plenty of fluids.” And he hung up.
Monday morning I felt vaguely achy and feverish, but we were in the middle of a big commission for an American bank so I went to the office and sat feeling miserable.
Tuesday was more of the same, with added shivering and a blocked nose. I tried to call Marcin at the hotel where he’d been staying on his visit, but they said he’d checked out.
I barely made it in to the office on Wednesday. I had a Skype conference with a man in Chicago and a man in New Jersey and when it was over I had no idea what we had been talking about. I was sweating and my eyes felt as though they’d been lightly sandpapered. Tomek, one of the partners, helped me home in the afternoon, told me he really enjoyed working with me but no way was he going to get me undressed and help me into bed, and left me on the sofa.
And then the rest of the week just… went away.
It was the following Tuesday before I felt well enough to go back to work, but I still didn’t feel up to doing much apart from contemplating firing Tomek for his failure to come to his boss’s aid in his hour of need. Nobody else seemed to be in the mood for work, either. Tomek and his wife Hania were sitting at one of our big draughting tables, sketching. Agnieszka was doing some embroidery. All the momentum had gone out of the office.
At one point, Agnieszka brought me a coffee and then held up the piece of cloth she’d been working on. I looked at it. Then I looked at her.
“What?” I said.
“What do you think of it?” she asked.
It was an embroidered image of some species of rustic scene. Not very well embroidered. “Very nice,” I told her. I raised my voice. “Everybody?”