Dmitry Gorchev - "Alcohol"

Dmitry Gorchev is a writer who mostly published in the net. He died recently. I translated this piece called "Alcohol" using Google translator and edited it a bit.

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How wonderful is a drunken man! When he lies with his pants down on the pavement near the entrance to the railway station, any passer by will surely feel a sense of pride. Pride for himself, not for the drunken man, but so what? Who is more free in this world - he who comes home from his hateful work, who with regularity pulls its rigid strap, bears his splintery cross, and pays his exorbitant rent, or the one who, knowing no worries, freely sprawls in a stinking pool?

Suppose that he is despised, dirty, driven away from any employment, lonely and not much to look at. Yet it was he who took Bastille, and the Winter Palace, wrote the opera 'Khovanshchina', the epic 'Moscow to End of the Line', and the poem 'Golden grove had said its piece''. While the teetotalers gave the world Hitler and Chikatillo.

Here's a drunken man wading knee-deep through the see like he was on dry ground; while everybody else has long been drowned, he is on his way somewhere in the underwater City of Kitezh looking for beer.

There he goes on foot to the sky, but he stumbled and fell, straight at the enemy bunker. And the enemy chokes on his own bullets, then twisted out and turned into a policeman. And our hero came to under a shivering lightbulb of the law.

Drunken man is always pursued. Demons with eagles' heads hunt him relentlessly, they lie in wait for him while he, barely dragging his feet, is returning from his nightwatch. They press him to the ground and drag him to their hell. There they torture him till morning to make him reveal a Classified Information, but to this day not one prisoner revealed it, and that is why we are all still alive. Shaking with anger, the demons chase the hero out from Hell, back under the cold and hateful (to them) morning sun. Who among you, the sober ones, ever in your life had seen a sky over a detox center? Not one, because it is not for you that this sky was moved there directly from the lost paradise.

A sober man is a liar and pragmatic. He will sell the Motherland and slaughter a child, if it is profitable for him, and will deftly cover up the traces. A drunk will do the same in a fit of inspiration, quite unselfishly, and when sobered up, will be horrified. When two drunken men are kissing, it does not mean that they are ready to get married - it just means that they genuinely love and respect each other. Can a sober man with all his heart love the first passerby, having known him only half an hour? Never.

But it is in the time of profound hangover that the drunken man becomes completely beautiful.

A superficial hangover brings with it only nausea and headache, which are quite accessible even to those who do not drink at all. But the profound hangover is accompanied by an equally profound comprehension of the fragility of the surrounding world. A hungover man gently puts his foot on the pavement, knowing that beneath its thin layer lies a bottomless pit that leads to nowhere. He heroically focuses his gaze and thus keeps from disintegration and disappearance the city which surrounds him, this city populated by unsuspecting old men, women and children. The leaden sky is pressing down on his shoulders, and under his feet the cracks slither. And alone in all the world he sees and carefully carries all this, taking care to not drop and accidentally break it.

And so: will anybody raise a monument to our quiet hero? Hang on his breast a round medal? Pour him a mug of beer, at least? No one. Bastards.