Such philosophising didn’t prevent any of them from living their own lives completely incorrectly. Sulisław turned out to be the irrationally jealous kind, and he only ever recognised one true love in his entire life. He’d stumbled onto a girl who was externally gentle but internally extremely ambitious, so that they clashed so intensely over their points of view that after a long, complicated, mentally suffocating love affair, they had to split up all the same, and against Sulisław’s wishes. It came out that although young Zawisza was radical, open-minded, and magnanimous on paper, in his core, he was identical to or even crazier than the men found in thousands of romance novels. It was bad enough that his sweetheart was an immense talent and devilishly hard-working, and though she might throw hard drinking and heavy smoking into the mix, she’d still achieved more than Sulisław ever had—either at any time or throughout his entire life. This schoolgirl was constantly winning all kinds of international competitions, and she performed on stages around the world, because music doesn’t respect international borders, and one’s knack for it is relatively easily globalised. By contrast, only a handful of Polish youths had ever read any of Sulisław’s poems. When the house was still in working order, one could hear her lively, high-heeled footsteps clatter before dawn, leading after them the horrible droning of her rolling suitcase as she dashed off again to the airport. Behind them, they left a poor man with wounded pride, in whom bubbled love, shame, and vanity, which is an explosive mixture. To satisfy her moods, Sulisław freely agreed to candlelit dinners and roses and wanted more than anything to prove that he, Sulisław, could achieve what no other man in the world could, if only he were given the time. What’s more, the right woman would simply have believed in him, looked at him with her big eyes and repeated only, “Sulisław, you’re the smartest man in all the land.” Because in fairness, the world is unjust—Poland, to say nothing of the rest of the globe, didn’t care much about Sulisławic young geniuses, because a gift (of whatever kind) must first be packaged into a form comprehensible to the masses and only then broadcast widely, preferably with the help of colourful video clips.
Success usually begins from a happy coincidence, and then one thing simply leads to another: a TV star who’d already made a name for himself ended up with a copy of Sulisław’s poems. This guy had a sharp eye and saw the righteous fury in Sulisław’s work, the kind of freshness no forty-year old can get squeeze of themselves with any formula, and he saw that this was worth owning. Worth swindling out of the hands of those who don’t know what kind of lucre they’ve got, or how to sell it to people, but who gift it, toss it away, scattering their young spirit’s fiery scraps about themselves.
