The Mighty Angel

by Jerzy Pilch

  I can hear it as clearly as in a dream: this music contains the power of approaching death and it contains the power to hold back approaching death, the true writerly power to change the course of events. In my hundred-page notebook I want finally to write the hardest thing (a worthy task for my own sense of pride): the story of a man who picks himself up, gathers his strength and, out of the dangerous metaphor of a great war, emerges whole and victorious. I want to make a literature that liberates from weakness and is as strong as Don Juan’s pastorale. I need health and all good wishes, tranquility, a ready pen, and a lightness of heart. Don Juan the Rib is playing as if he were bringing himself back from the dead a few months later; outside the window there are snowy fields and dark Austrian or Russian walls, and the warmth from the furnaces of the steel mill rises all the way to the Star of Bethlehem. We are sitting at the table, we are mixed in with the suicides, and the nurses, merry as angels, are not letting us out of their sight. The hair of our angels tumbles from under their white caps; their gestures have an added fluidity that we know well, and great benevolence shines in their eyes. The dark-complexioned beauties from the suicide ward stand up, and they ask us for a Christmas dance.

  Chapter 17

  Letter from the Alco Ward

  [Beginning of manuscript illegible even for addressee. Paper of poor quality, squared, A4 format. Letter written with fountain pen, handwriting shaky, navy blue ink.]

  . . . FOR A WHOLE five months. When I tell them I’m giving up my ruinous habit for you, they look at me with contempt. When I tell them I’m giving up my ruinous habit for us, they look at me with contempt; at such times I remain silent for a long time, because I know what those she-wolf therapists are after. I’m giving up my habit for myself, I say after pretending to reflect, and it’s just as well they can’t guess what I’m feeling as I see their approving smiles. They don’t know what I’m feeling, though they ought to; after all they’re past masters in the art of naming feelings and they teach us how to do it: how to name our feelings. Alcoholism is supposedly a sickness of the feelings. Alcoholics are unable either to define their feelings or to control them. In this one case it happens to be true about me: I’m unable to name the much-more-than-love that I feel for you. And I’m certain my addiction will drop from me the way the skin drops from the snake. Good Lord, if any of those she-therapists read the last sentence they’d be horrified.

  “Nothing will happen on its own, no one will do it for you. You have to do it yourself.”

  “That’s right, I’ll fight with my own weakness.”

  “Fight? You’ll fight? With who? With a monster that’s stronger than you and is bound to defeat you? You have to submit. Who are you intending to fight? Gołota the heavyweight? Alcohol is like Gołota—when you tangle with it you don’t stand a chance, you have to submit before you even start.”

  These are the kinds of exchanges you hear in this place; exclamations of this sort rise from here and ascend like supplicatory prayers into the cloudy July heavens. The catchphrases and favorite mantras of the she-therapists (alcohol is like Gołota, or alcohol is like Mike Tyson, or alcoholism is as irreversible as an amputated leg, or alcoholism is like democracy), the she-therapists’ favorite mantras, and the absolute, all-encompassing obsession with first-person narration. I, I, I. God forbid you should use an impersonal form. God forbid you should say “a person.” God forbid you should say “the demon.” God forbid the plural.

  •

  “I lost my money. That is, they robbed me,” says Janek, who is astray in life, and who, because of his strong predilection for cleaning, we call ‘The Hero of Socialist Labor.’ “So then things started.”

  “What things started?” ask the she-therapists, white-hot with fury, stressing the generic noun “things.” “Exactly which ‘things’ began?”

  “The drinking started, the drinking began,” says Janek, and they laugh their awful laughs and exclaim:

  “The drinking began! The drinking started! But who was doing the drinking? Was thedrinkingstarted drinking?” (Animal-like guffaws.) “Who was drinking?”

  “I was drinking,” says Janek, red-faced as a child, and to his own undoing he adds: “Yes, you drank, you drank terribly, you were overcome by the demon, for example all the drinking with the neighbor, with the neighbor the drinking went on all the time.”

  The she-therapists finally stop laughing and zealously teach the Hero of Socialist Labor that instead of “you” you have to say “I,” instead of “the demon” you have to say “alcohol,” instead of “the drinking went on” you have to say “I drank,” instead of “all the time” you have to say “every day,” and give the amount, the date, and the place. And to finish off, the she-therapists repeat emphatically once more: “not ‘the drinking started,’ but ‘I drank.’”

  As you can imagine, I polemicize with them heatedly in my mind, though I’m aware that my polemic misses the point, that my assumptions are different—the she-therapists are striving to bring reality to the point of sobriety, whereas I’m striving to bring reality to the point of literature, and at a certain moment our paths inevitably diverge. I’m aware of this, but I still polemicize with them. It’s common knowledge—I proclaim to myself—that impersonal forms are used to refer to specific individuals, and that they refer to them more fully and more impartially than an “I” stripped naked and thus defenseless in speaking about itself. There are writers who write whole books in this fashion, their narratives built entirely of impersonal constructions: journeys were made, things were seen, the time of dying began. And the first person singular? I’ve been immersed in that person and that number up to my neck and up to the crown of my head. I’m mud-spattered from top to toe by the first person singular. The hopes of the she-therapists notwithstanding, it is no guarantee of credibility, truth, or naked sincerity. The first person singular is an element of literary fiction. My Lord, what great fortune that would be, what a fine instinct, to declare the end of literature at this very juncture and to be able to say simply with a clear conscience: I.

  I looked for you my whole life, I walked the length of Jana Pawła, Pańska, Żelazna, Złota, the entire world; but it was you who found me. You wrote a letter, I replied and—though we didn’t notice it at the time—our letters were already throwing themselves into a definitive embrace, our sentences were tangled with each other, our handwritings were locked together, our inks flowed into one another as fluidly as your blood joins with mine. I was looking for a last love before death, and I found a love that gave me life. A love that I have never read about in any poem or any novel. A love that I did not know could exist in this world. I found a love as powerful as Don Juan’s pastorale. Ala-Alberta, you came to me at the moment when I had written life off. That’s right, for at least two years I had not really wanted to go on living; it seemed to me that, roughly speaking at least, I already had what I wanted to have. I had written what I had written, and I knew that to go on writing would mean either a more or a less intense repetition of experiences already had. A person writes a book and he thinks that when the book goes out among people it will change the world—and that, I assure you, is a very great delusion. Yet to write without the faith that writing will change the world—such a thing is impossible.

  I had been with beautiful women, I’d drunk an ocean of Żołądkowa Gorzka, I’d labored hard and I’d wallowed in idleness, I’d listened to music (music is what I miss the most in here), I’d read the classics, I’d been to soccer games, I’d prayed in my Lutheran church; and it seemed to me that I knew as much about the things of this world as it was meant for me to know. It seemed to me that I was filled, yet I was empty, I was as sounding brass. (As the Scripture says: though I give up drinking, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.) Kill myself? Yes indeed, I thought about suicide (every normal person thinks about suicide at least once in their life, as Camus I think said—that was a reading from the times when you were not yet in the world), but I
thought about it in the same unreal terms that I thought about permanently giving up Żołądkowa Gorzka. How often did I devote my thoughts to the idea of giving up Żołądkowa Gorzka? And what came of it? Nothing. I thought about stopping drinking Żołądkowa Gorzka and, calmly or stormily (usually stormily), I went on drinking that product, which is rather inferior in quality but goes smoothly down the throat. I thought about killing myself, but calmly or stormily (usually stormily) I went on living. The hope of a quick death, a real death, was provided by my habit. As one of the wise she-therapists here says (for there are wise she-therapists and foolish she-therapists, just like the biblical wise virgins and foolish virgins—in my next letter I’ll recount the parable of the wise she-therapists and the foolish she-therapists), so then, the wise she-therapist Kasia says that an alcoholic will escape into death more readily than he will admit his powerlessness with regard to booze. A real man can die from vodka but is afraid to become a fool, as the late Mr. Trąba used to say. And I acquiesced to this, I prepared myself for an escape into death. I may not have been able to define it as exactly as Simon Pure Goodness, who, before he escaped from here, knew and did not conceal the fact that after escaping from the ward he intended, as it were, to escape definitively, in a week, or a month, or at the most three years. I myself did not know the date; I was preparing myself in the dark. But when I read your letter, when I heard your voice, when I saw you for the first time, I understood that the black cord closing ever tighter around my neck would inevitably snap. I understood that the black twine would unravel long before my heart was torn to shreds. I understood that I had been waiting for you my whole life. (Of that time, I had to wait for at least twenty years till you grew up.) But you came. You’re here. (That’s right. She’s here.)

  The first time I saw you, you weren’t wearing the yellow dress with the spaghetti straps. You were wearing a black blouse and gray pants. You were sitting at a table and staring impatiently through the window of the hotel café. I was a whole eight minutes late. I embraced you as fluidly as if I’d been embracing only you my whole life.

  “Do we know each other that well?” you asked. “Better,” I replied, and as long as I live I’ll be proud of that answer. Of course your name was not Ala-Alberta. Your name is what I always wanted it to be; your arms are the arms I’d always wanted to be yours; you have green eyes, so green; and you have hands specially created for me by God. You are beautiful and wise.

  As for me—I’m happy. Of course, I can’t mention the fact that I’m happy to anyone here, I can’t divulge my feelings of happiness even to my therapist (as you correctly guess, it’s Kasia), I can’t even write my feeling of happiness down in my emotional journal. A happy alco immediately raises the worst suspicions; a happy alco bodes terribly ill.

  What bodes well is an alco in the doldrums, an alco in depression, an alco in despair. Alcoholism may be the only illness in which the patient being in a dreadful state gives hope. A true full-blooded alco has to hunger constantly for booze, he has to feel the constant pressure of longing for a bottle of Żołądkowa Gorzka, to be down in the dumps, to be in hell.

  I miss music here. The summer is overcast, but there are sunny days, and at such times I wander with an odd fascination among the dormitories of the insane, which are set amongst untended gardens. At times, singing can be heard from behind the barred windows. Around noon the gardens fill with a crowd of schizophrenics and suicides, and the toneless melody of their jabbering rises to the sky. Yesterday, I passed a suicide on the main avenue; he was carrying a huge portable radio on his shoulder and pressing it convulsively to his ear. From several yards away I could make out a low hypnotic voice singing a recent hit about a silk scarf. It made me think of Don Juan the Rib, my favorite figure and a person close to my heart, and once again I felt the looming shadow of the black cord; Lord, let me be with her as long as possible.

  We were sitting in the hotel café; you were drinking green tea, I was drinking one of the last beers of my life (of my life—not before I die). We were sitting and gazing at one another, and those first gazes, that intense staring at each other, so entered our bloodstream that afterwards it was always like that. Our heads always turned toward one another on their pillows; we gaped at each other endlessly. And it’s going on still, even from here I can still see you. My head is turned towards you and I know that you can see me too, that right now you’re also looking in my direction, you’re giving me strength. You’re giving me a strength that I can’t show here either, by the way. My strength remains my secret. One of the she-therapists’ favorite mantras is: you contain as much sickness as you contain secrets. That is—you have to admit—a terrible, terrible thing to say. According to the view that prevails here, an alco can stay alive only on condition that he allows himself to be disemboweled; more, that he disembowels himself, in accordance with professional instructions. Guts, entrails, problems, fears, bad thoughts and weak hopes, nightmares, colorless innards—everything comes out into the open. Your God is in the open, your sex life is in the open, your puke is in the open. (That’s right, the subject of one of the key confessions is: “The Story of my First Drunken Vomiting.” As you can imagine, it was not without enjoyment and not without satisfaction that I spent numerous pages recounting my first technicolor yawn: I described with relish how I hurled pepper-flavored pieprzówka in the Gierek era, ration-card vodka in the first Solidarity period, and home-brewed moonshine during martial law; I described in detail how under Jaruzelski my head drooped over the toilet bowl. Unfortunately, toward the end of the essay a certain thematic and also aesthetic monotony crept in, since during both the Wałęsa presidency and the Kwaśniewski presidency I barfed nothing but Żołądkowa Gorzka. C’est la vie.)

  I hope I’m not irritating you with my immoderation (including the stylistic kind). I’m writing a little as if I were writing from Siberia or from the Lubyanka, yet you’re only two hundred miles away. Today we spoke on the phone, and in a few days you’ll come visit me and we’ll go for a walk by the Utrata River. In a few weeks we’ll be together forever.

  When I say that I’m abandoning my habit for you, I’m telling the truth. Because I don’t exist without you, I don’t exist without us. My “I” is no longer singular. I cease to be when you’re not there; every separation is unbearable. (Do you remember how we both cried at Centralny Station? How you ran alongside the train?) You can’t be more than a hundred inches from me; beyond that it’s all the same whether you’re a mile or two hundred miles away. (Two hundred miles from my arms.) Beyond that, there’s always a gulf, and everything that’s in between is really . . .

  [End of manuscript legible only for addressee.]

  Chapter 18

  Dr. Swobodziczka

  I’M LYING IN MY parents’ bed, which is as vast as an ocean liner. I’m delirious, though I don’t know what it means to be delirious. I can smell alcohol, though I don’t know it’s the smell of alcohol; Dr. Swobodziczka is leaning over me. Rectified spirit has taken on the form of a luminous aura that shines through all the chakras of his body. Terrifying is Dr. Swobodziczka, terrifying as a shaman from an adventure story. He passes through the center of town like the angel of destruction, clutching his physician’s case; he wades through three-feet-high snowdrifts as if he were the mythical man of snow, swaying from side to side like the Flying Dutchman. He drinks fearfully and insanely. Suicides do not have an easy life with him.

  A year, or even a month, ago I would still have written that Dr. Swobodziczka drank like the Consul, in the very recent past I would have drawn such a comparison; but now, now that I have a clear awareness of the end of literature, now for the sake of the truth I retract that flashy juxtaposition. Next to Dr. Swobodziczka the Consul is an artificial literary character (which is hardly surprising, since the former was a man of flesh and blood, while the latter is only a quasi-being); as for the degree of proclivity toward alcohol, the Consul is to Swobodziczka as a grammar school boy tipsy from a single glass of wine is to t
he Consul. The Doctor drank and ergo was killing himself indefatigably and methodically, and this may well have been why he had a hatred and a scorn for suicides. His “self-annihilation,” as the Russians call it, was diligent, systematic, and measured, while the suicides killed themselves suddenly, messily, any old how, in contravention of all poetics. It was true: in Dr. Swobodziczka’s times the suicides of Wisła did not have an easy life. Horrendous curses were heaped upon their asphyxiated heads. The doctor conducted brutal autopsies, pouring insults on their bodies as they grew cold; he passed his finger along the blue mark on young Oyermah’s neck and said:

  “You’re lucky, you’re lucky you’re not alive, boy, because if you were, I’d kill you.”

  The black alsatian sat by the head of the corpse, sweeping the dirty February snow as it wagged its tail; beads of frothy beer dripped from its mouth.