... masz przeżywać życie, a nie je opisywać.

His record was a natural foundation for all sorts of jokes at Athena, since so many of the inmates were serving life sentences, or even 2 or 3 life sentences either superimposed or laid end to end. They knew that the richest man in the world was also Japanese and that, about a century before the college and the prison were founded across the lake from each other, a woman in Russia was giving birth to the last of her 69 children. The Russian woman who had more babies than anyone gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, 7 sets of triplets, and 4 sets of quadruplets. They all survived, which is more than you can say for the Donner Party. Hiroshi Matsumoto was the only member of the prison staff with a college education. He did not socialize with the others, and he took his off-duty meals alone and hiked alone and fished alone and sailed alone. Neither did he avail himself of the Japanese clubs in Rochester and Buffalo, or of the lavish rest-and-recuperation facilities maintained in Manhattan by the Japanese Army of Occupation in Business Suits. He had made so much money for his corporation in Louisville and then Athena, and was so brilliant in his understanding of American business psychology, that I am sure he could have asked for and gotten an executive job in the home office. He may have known more about American black people than anybody else in Japan, thanks to Athena, and more and more of the businesses his corporation was buying here were dependent on black labor or at least the goodwill of black neighborhoods. Again thanks to Athena, he probably knew more than any other Japanese about the largest industry by far in this country, which was the procurement and distribution of chemicals that, when introduced into the bloodstream in one way or another, gave anybody who could afford them undeserved feelings of purpose and accomplishment. Only 1 of these chemicals was legal, of course, and was the basis of the fortune of the family that gave Tarkington its band uniforms, and the water tower atop Musket Mountain, and an endowed chair in Business Law, and I don’t know what all else. That mind-bender was alcohol. In the 8 years we lived next door to him in the ghost town down by the lake, he never once indicated that he longed to be back in his homeland. The closest he came to doing that was when he told me 1 night that the ruins of the locks at the head of the lake, with huge timbers and boulders tumbled this way and that, might have been the creation of a great Japanese gardener. In the Japanese Army of Occupation he was a high-ranking officer, the civilian peer of a Brigadier, maybe, or even a Major General. But he reminded me of several old Master Sergeants I had known in Vietnam. They would say worse things about the Army and the war and the Vietnamese than anybody. But I would go away for a couple of years, and then come back, and they were all still there, crabbing away. They wouldn’t leave until the Vietnamese either killed them or kicked them out of there. How they hated home. They were more afraid of home than of the enemy. Hiroshi Matsumoto called this valley a “hellhole” and the “anus of the Universe.” But he didn’t leave it until he was kicked out of here. I wonder if the Mohiga Valley hadn’t become the only home he ever knew after the bombing of Hiroshima. He lives in retirement now in his reconstructed native city, having lost both feet to frostbite after the prison break. Is it possible that he is thinking now what I have thought so often: “What is this place and who are these people, and what am I doing here?” The last time I saw him was on the night of the prison break. We had been awakened by the racket of the Jamaicans’ assault on the prison. We both came running out onto the street in front of our houses barefoot and in our nightclothes, although the temperature must have been minus 10 degrees centigrade. The name of our main street in the ghost town was Clinton Street, the name of the main street in Scipio. Can you imagine that: two communities so close geographically, and yet in olden times so separate socially and economically that, with all the street names they might have chosen, they both named their main street Clinton Street? The Warden tried to reach the prison on a cordless telephone. He got no answer. His 3 house servants were looking out at us from upstairs windows. They were convicts over 70 years old, serving life sentences without hope of parole, long forgotten by the outside world, and coked to the gills on Thorazine. My mother-in-law came out on our porch. She called to me, “Tell him about the fish I caught! Tell him about that fish I caught!” The Warden said to me that a boiler up at the prison must have blown, or maybe the crematorium. It sounded to me like military weaponry, whose voices he had never heard. He hadn’t even heard the atomic bomb go off. He had only felt the hot whoosh after- ward. And then all the lights on our side of the lake went off. And then we heard the strains of “The Star-Span- gled Banner” floating down from the blacked-out penitentiary. There was no way that the Warden and I, even with massive doses of LSD, could have imagined what was going on up there. We were faulted afterward for not having alerted Scipio