He wrote this novel for several years. Whenever he quit smoking

Maciej Piotr Prus is a writer, journalist and cultural animator. In the 1980s, he worked as an editor of the uncensored periodical “Bez Dekret” and the Parisian monthly “Kontakt”, then in the editorial offices of “Playboy” and “Max”, and also as the editor-in-chief of “Przekrój”. He has published, among others, the novels “Confessions of the Owner of the Piękny Pies Club” (2009), “Przyducha” (2017) and “Island and Other People” (2020). In 2020, he received the Krakow UNESCO City of Literature Award. We are publishing a fragment of his novel “Cigarettes”.

Read an excerpt from the book:

I wouldn’t be here if my father hadn’t taken a drag on a cigarette at a student dance and decided to approach my mother. Tobacco gave him strength, and then I was born.

I have had cigarettes for as long as I can remember. My world did not exist without cigarettes. Apart from them, there were also rooks, trampled paths in the meadow, a large walnut tree outside the window, the setting sun and burdock leaves. But it remained distant, mysterious, alien and a little scary. Cigarettes were close, warm and safe, the smell of home.

The 1960s. The father smokes and plays by making smoke rings. Cigarettes have no filter, I don’t know what their name is, I can’t read yet. It could be Giewonts in a soft package with a snowflake drawing. There may also be Wawel castles with a reproduction of an engraving under the lid of a cardboard box (the engraving shows the castle hill). But definitely not the Belvedere Palace. My father rarely smoked Belvederes. They were expensive, and he was a young master engineer who didn’t earn much. The Belvedere Palace was drawn on the box. But, were the mouthpieces gold? I won’t let my head be cut off. I remember the white mouthpieces of the equally expensive Carmens better. If the Belvederes took you back in time to Sanation Poland, the Carmens were like a taste of the Western world. Carmens cost twelve zlotys. It wasn’t little – a loaf of bread cost three fifty. “Produced with a blend of the best American tobaccos” – that’s what the inscription on the side of the package said. These Carmens smelled beautiful – when my father lit one, the aroma spread even in the stairwell. And all the neighbors knew that my father smoked Carmen.

Over the years, the Carmens stopped smelling, and then the inscription about American tobacco disappeared from the package. In the 1980s, their filters were falling apart and the woody tobacco did not want to burn.

For now, however, we are in the 1960s. My father is smoking and I am trying to put my finger in the middle of the smoke ring. I sit on his lap and feel safe. Outside the window, in the distance, power plant chimneys and aluminum smelters. There are meadows just behind the block, they just dug a big hole for another building. It will rain and enough water will collect in it that you will be able to bathe. The banks will be clay and slippery, the water will be cloudy and brown. A young jackdaw that has not yet learned to fly will drown in it.

I remember the smell of cigarettes from my childhood better than the taste of a cigarette smoked half an hour ago. I also remember the prices from the 1970s better than those from last summer. I could describe all the brands from that time. I remember Mermaids from the 1960s – the package had a graphic with a mermaid with a round, smiling face, the cigarettes had a gold filter. Ducats had no filter; they were packed in flat cardboard boxes with the image of a gold ducat. Strong – the packaging showed a drawing of a blooming tobacco bush, Flat – sold in cardboard boxes with graphics imitating the sky and water. While Płaskie could be bought everywhere, Seagulls and Captains were sold only in northern Poland, mainly by the sea. The seagulls had an image of a flying bird, and the Captains had a soft package with a sailing ship and flags, including the flag of France. Very strong Górnik cigarettes appeared in Silesia, with a drawing of a miner holding a pickaxe against the background of mine shafts. Blue Caros were all over Poland, they had a thick, unclosed white circle in their logo – the letter C. Where the circle ended, there was the inscription Caro in calligraphy. And on the Piast pack there was a crown – specifically cut, spare and ceremonial, as if taken from a fairy tale. For me, all these packages were like travel cards or covers of books I would like to read.

*

I still have four cigarettes in the pack, it’s almost midnight. I decide that I won’t smoke from tomorrow, and I light one. The three that are left may pose too much of a threat in the morning, as I know what it’s like when I finish breakfast and make a second cup of coffee. Then I become as weak as a young plant and light up, lying to myself that it’s just to finish the pack and then I’ll be free. However, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, because you can’t quit smoking in the middle of the day. You just can’t! You have to start not smoking in the morning. So I can’t let these three cigarettes stay in the pack. I brew some tea and smoke another one. There are two left. I don’t feel like it, but I have to overcome it so that when I wake up everything is clear – the sun and my mind. So that demons cannot tempt you with the smell of tobacco. I can’t bring myself to throw the cigarettes into the trash and bury them in the peels, so I smoke another one. There’s one more left. I tell myself: “This is the last cigarette in your life – the closing of years of struggles, defeats and dilemmas. Celebrate it, smoke it carefully.” And I smoke. I go to bed and despite brushing my teeth a moment ago, I still feel bitterness in my mouth. I wake up in the morning with a headache, but I’m happy. Today is the first day of freedom. I eat breakfast, abandon my half-drunk coffee and go to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes.

*

Even if the plane flight lasts six hours, I don’t feel like smoking. As if smoking was mainly in the head. All you need to do is move something there and suddenly the need disappears. It’s worse when there is a transfer or the flight is delayed and I have to camp out at the airport, where there is usually no place for smokers. Some – like teenagers at school – do it in the toilet. Some airports have stinking, airless glass crematoriums; I go there and I’m on display like an animal in a zoo, like a freak of nature in a medieval market. And the crowds pouring through the airport have to watch me as part of anti-smoking education. Everyone should see my fall, because smoking cigarettes is a fall – this is the assumption of the architecture of European and American airports. I discovered the nicest airport smoking room in Cambodia. In Phnom Penh, people smoke in a well-air-conditioned, fragrant room, probably the most elegant room in the entire building. There are steel ashtrays, leather armchairs and sofas, all sponsored by a large tobacco company. And that’s what I like. Although not all of the East is so friendly to smokers. In the state of Kerala, India, you are not allowed to smoke on the street and you may be reported to the police for doing so. In my case, it ended with a nice chat – at the police station, but over a cup of chai. When I left there, I gave the policemen a pack of Marlboros, which they accepted with a smile.

While traveling, offering a cigarette to me often opened doors and allowed me to find lost paths. My observations show that in Asia everyone will happily accept a cigarette. If he doesn’t smoke, he’ll put it in his shirt pocket to sell or give as a gift. The cheapest cigarettes in India are called bidi. A mixture of tobaccos is wrapped in the leaf of the persimmon tree that produces kaki fruit, and the whole thing is strengthened by a braid of colorful thread. These cigarettes are handmade, do not undergo any chemical processing, and are dried in charcoal ovens. It sounds beautiful, but I don’t like this invention. Smoking bidi is more like the ritual smoking of herbs than cigarettes.

Cheap exotic cigarettes are rarely suitable for smoking, but often come in pretty packaging with pictures of elephants or jewels. For a long time I brought them to a poet friend of mine – in Cambodia or Nepal I always looked for the cheapest ones for him. A true poet should burn such things, only then he feels the pain of existence. It looks like I may have contributed to at least a few good poems.

*

My great-grandfather wound clocks. At 6 p.m. he would enter the Habsburg palace in Żywiec, take a bunch of clock keys off the hook and wind them up one by one. He did this every day for forty-something years. When he couldn’t wind anymore, he died. For me, the ritual of smoking a morning cigarette is perhaps as important as winding clocks was for my great-grandfather. Rituals organize life, give it meaning, and create the illusion of continuity. There are so few things that are permanent and dependent on me.

The number of cigarettes I smoke speeds up or slows down my clock. When I smoke twenty or even more a day, everything blurs and disappears. Time is shrinking and the world is shrinking, an hour is like a blink and there is much less in it. But when I smoke no more than eight cigarettes a day, time stretches. Now, for example, I limit myself, smoke less, and celebrate. Breakfast – and then a cigarette. The hours between breakfast and noon coffee (when I light the next one) last unimaginably long. By lunchtime, after which I smoke two more, time slows down even more. Then each minute swells again, becomes intense, until finally, when I light up after dinner, time begins to run again with the precision of a clock.

*

I have the impression that things are getting worse in the world. Yesterday, after I heard that all episodes of the fairy tale about the wolf and the hare were removed from the schedule, I put the TV in the trash. Because why do I need him? There won’t be a fairy tale from my childhood, because the wolf walks around there with a cigarette and chases that hare, and the children like him anyway. There will be no wolf, and there will be no Rumcajs: after all, he showed the children that every time he takes a puff from his pipe and blows out a cloud of smoke, he comes up with a great idea. And there will be no Popey, because although he sells spinach to children, he does so with a cigarette in his mouth. These and other bedtime shows will never be shown again, there will only be Polish cabarets, so why do I need a TV.

I wonder if they will soon forbid flaunting my addiction, and if I walk down the street and smoke, I will be stopped by a patrol. Now there are also municipal waste bins with a place to put out a cigarette. So I put out the cigarette in it and throw it away, but I feel that the whole world is looking at this practice with suspicion and wagging its finger threateningly.

Cigarettes – cover Promotional materials I published