The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [50]
By then, Bala had become entranced by French postmodernists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. He was particularly interested in Derrida’s notion that not only is language too unstable to pinpoint any absolute truth; human identity itself is the malleable product of language. Bala wrote a thesis about Richard Rorty, the American philosopher, who famously declared, “The guise of convincing your peers is the very face of truth itself.”
Bala interpreted these thinkers idiosyncratically, pulling threads here and there, and often twisting and turning and distorting them, until he had braided them into his own radical philosophy. To amuse himself, he began constructing myths about himself—an adventure in Paris, a romance with a schoolmate—and tried to convince friends that they were true. “He would tell these tall stories about himself,” Rasinski says. “If he told one person, and that person then told someone else, who told someone else, it became true. It existed in the language.” Rasinski adds, “Krystian even had a term for it. He called it ‘mytho-creativity.’” Before long, friends had trouble distinguishing his real character from the one he had invented. In an e-mail to a friend, Bala said, “If I ever write an autobiography, it will be full of myths!”
Bala cast himself as an enfant terrible who sought out what Foucault had called a “limit-experience”: he wanted to push the boundaries of language and human existence, to break free of what he deemed to be the hypocritical and oppressive “truths” of Western society, including taboos on sex and drugs. Foucault himself was drawn to homosexual sadomasochism. Bala devoured the works of Georges Bataille, who vowed to “brutally oppose all systems” and who once contemplated carrying out human sacrifices; and William Burroughs, who swore to use language to “rub out the word” and the Marquis de Sade, who demanded, “O man! Is it for you to say what is good or what is evil?” Bala boasted about his drunken visits to brothels and his submission to temptations of the flesh. He told friends that he hated “conventions” and was “capable of anything,” and he insisted, “I will not live long but I will live furiously!”
Some people found such proclamations juvenile, even ridiculous; others were mesmerized by them. “There were legends that no woman could resist him,” one friend recalled. Those closest to him regarded his tales simply as playful confabulations. Sierocka, his former professor, says that Bala, in reality, was always “kind, energetic, hardworking, and principled.” His friend Rasinski says, “Krystian liked the idea of being this Nietzschean superman, but anyone who knew him well realized that, as with his language games, he was just playing around.”
In 1995, Bala, belying his libertine posture, married his high-school sweetheart, Stanislawa—or Stasia, as he called her. Stasia, who had dropped out of high school and worked as a secretary, showed little interest in language or philosophy. Bala’s mother opposed the marriage, believing Stasia was ill-suited for her son. “I thought he should at least wait until he had finished his studies,” she says. But Bala insisted that he wanted to take care of Stasia, who had always loved him, and in 1997 their son Kacper was born. That year, Bala graduated from the university with the highest possible marks, and enrolled in its Ph.D. program in philosophy. Although he received a full academic scholarship, he struggled to support his family, and soon left school to open his cleaning business. In the documentary on Poland’s new generation of businessmen, Bala says, “Reality came and kicked me