The Mighty Angel

by Jerzy Pilch

  Dr. Swobodziczka steadfastly trod the sinusoidal path of intoxication that led into infinity. Often he was more or less deeply under the influence for twenty-four hours a day. He imbibed gallon upon gallon of distilled alcohol; he was a connoisseur of the local moonshine, which was viscid, dark, and flammable as kerosene; he would take bets on whether he could survive the consumption of six bottles of Passover slivovitz in a single evening, and he would win the bet, he would win it with room left over, not merely surviving, but rising from his chair unaided, though with an inordinate stateliness. The black alsatian, drunk on beer, would slink out from under the oak table and sway off behind its master.

  What the doctor’s nights and mornings were like I know only too well—the nightmares were excessive, the voices too loud, the specters too palpable. The undoubtedly ghastly epic must have been impossible to accept, to drink away, or to endure, for in his despair and his helplessness, and seeing that the Homeric narrative of his ordeal showed no signs of coming to an end, Swobodziczka reached for the ultimate means of expression. He reached for morphine, with the aim of easing his pain (for it was certainly not with the aim of intensifying his experiences); he reached for morphine, though he was fully aware that, while after the first injection his sufferings would truly (though only seemingly) disappear, the first injection would after a certain time, a short moment, truth be told immediately, begin to demand a second injection, while after the second dose, or at the latest after the third, there would come nightmares even more excessive than before, there would be even louder voices, and the palpable specters would begin to close in on him in an ever tightening circle. Dr. Swobodziczka knew the simple yet inexorable mechanics of total collapse. He was an excellent physician; he was certain he would get by, and this time he made a bet with himself (on whether he would get by), and that bet he lost.

  In those days my mother was a young pharmacist of the Augsburg Lutheran denomination; she often worked the night shift in Wisła and at the darkest hour, at three or four in the morning, she would be woken by a prolonged ringing of the bell, a desperate knocking and the ritual exclamation:

  “Miss! Miss! I have an acute case requiring immediate intervention! It’s a matter of the utmost urgency!”

  Behind the glass door the thickset figure was swaying to and fro, the dog crouching at his feet. With trembling fingers Dr. Swobodziczka would hand over a prescription bearing a magic spell that would bring relief, or maybe even euphoria: “Morph. Hydr. 002.” His voice would break naturally; he had no need whatsoever to feign convulsive speech.

  “Miss . . . Comrade First Secretary Władysław Gomułka is as we speak present at the Castle; he’s had a sudden attack of the stomach cramps, he’s in great pain, our head of state is in agony, and I’ve been summoned . . . You understand, Miss, it’s a matter of national importance . . .”

  The first time, and maybe even the third time this happened (“Miss, Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz is present at the Castle as we speak, and he’s had a sudden attack of the stomach cramps . . .”), there was a modicum of plausibility in this spectacular pretext. President Mościcki’s prewar castle really did serve as a country residence for dignitaries of the highest level; many a time at dusk we would see a cavalcade of Volgas and Chaykas moving slowly down the road toward the Kubalonka Pass, the distant lights playing across the armor-plated bodywork. In the close presence of the leadership (improbable walking parties crossing wooded hillsides in the misty morning—representatives of the central authorities and their companions, setting out to pick mushrooms), in this close presence, then, there was a certain plausibility, and even in the sudden indisposition of the prime minister or first secretary (though according to doctrine they were superhuman, that is to say incorporeal), but when it transpired before long that according to Swobodziczka, Gomułka and Cyrankiewicz (the doctor rarely stooped to lower ranks) must constantly have been staying at the Castle and, in addition, must have suffered incessant stomach cramps by turns, before long, right away even, everything became clear. Though with the passage of time Swobodziczka himself ceased striving for any sort of verisimilitude in his version of events; he automatically repeated his formula about the Castle, the dignitary, and the stomach cramps, handed over the prescription, took the ampoules, sat on a nearby bench in the middle of the town square, opened his bag, took out a needle, stuck it through his trouser leg at the level of his thigh and through his pants administered a dexterous and discreet injection into the muscle. The great Dr. Swobodziczka—Dr. Morphine, Dr. Codeine, Dr. Moonshine, Dr. Nobody.

  To this day the inhabitants of Wisła sing hymns of praise to his medical expertise, to this day one can hear stories of epidemics he held in check, fearful maladies he drove away without a trace, unerring diagnoses he rendered every time. His soul was burning to nothing, his body was weakening, his speech was ever more indistinct, yet his medical abilities remained unaffected. The blaze of his addiction consumed everything within him except his skill. He would have the greatest difficulty putting on his stethoscope, but he would hear with absolute clarity the rat-like squeak of the disease hidden in the labyrinth of the innards; his hands would shake as he wrote the prescription, but he would prescribe exactly what was needed. When he referred someone to the hospital, the hospital was essential; when he recommended antibiotics, the antibiotics worked; when he instructed a person to collect oak bark, boil it, and drink the decoction each day for six months, everyone knew the half-year course of treatment would be effective. He was a genius when it came to the chronology of a sickness. In seven days there’ll be an improvement, in ten days it’ll go away, in two weeks you’ll be on your feet again, he would say, and it would happen as he said: in seven days there would be an improvement, in ten it would go away, in two weeks you’d be on your feet again. When Swobodziczka retired (and his retirement lasted a very short time) and his pre-mortal visit to this world was reduced to daily visits to the Piast hostelry, even there lines would form to his table. He would appear at 7 A.M. sharp in the company of the black alsatian, drink a restorative double, wash it down with sips of beer, pour a goodly measure of the latter into a tin bowl for the dog keeping watch under the table, raise his hand and, with a patrician gesture, would permit the first patient to approach.

  I fell ill with everything. I fell ill constantly. I fell ill inexorably. I fell ill passionately. I adored Dr. Swobodziczka’s visits; I would breathe in the smell of the medications and the alcohol, and revel in the consternation the doctor inevitably generated among the inhabitants of the house. He would shrug his sheepskin coat off his shoulders, light a cigarette in the bedroom after my mother had carefully aired it, put on his stethoscope, and set about examining me. Breathe. Don’t breathe. Breathe deeply. He would inhale clouds of smoke and cough the resonant, grating cough of an inveterate smoker.

  “How do you like that,” he would say, “a cough, another cough.” “But he’s not coughing, doctor,” my mother would interject, white as a sheet and on the verge of seizure. “Not him, me. I have a cough,” Swobodziczka would retort without interrupting his examination. “I have a cough and I’ve no idea what to do about it. It’s not showing any signs of going away.” He would remove the stethoscope with a decisive gesture, go to the table, and take out his prescription pad.

  “As for him, he’ll have a cough in two days. In two days there’ll be a cough. And seven days after that, in other words nine days from today, the cough will be gone. How old is he?” “Nine,” my mother would say, relief clearly audible in her voice. The doctor peered at me. “Nine years old, nine years old. It’s high time to be looking around and thinking about an occupation. Tell me, Jerzy, which do you prefer, Catholic girls or Lutheran girls?” “Catholic girls,” I said without hesitation, finally given wings by an authorized opportunity to talk about women. “Catholic girls, especially Urszula and Aldona.” “You’re absolutely right,” Dr. Swobodziczka responded with utter seriousness, and a moment later added a further mysterious sentence, in
which what appeared to be the critical phrase—“ecumenical desires”—I not only did not understand but barely even heard, since my mother pounced like a mountain lion toward the table, concealing me behind her body and drowning out the doctor’s words in a hysterically cordial invitation to pass into the kitchen, from where, by the by, a while later there came the mythical clink of glasses being taken from the dresser.

  I am quite certain Dr. Swobodziczka would never have confirmed the suspicion that he himself was shortening his own life and that that was the reason he held suicides in such abhorrence and contempt. He would never have uttered a single word, nor made a single gesture, to let it be known that in their desperation he could see his own reflection, crooked but true in its essence. He claimed to object to the fact that our committers of self-destruction would always go off into the woods and vanish without a trace, having found a convenient beech bough in the depths of the mixed forest, whereas they ought to bear in mind the subsequent difficulties facing the living, and, in order to facilitate all the necessary postmortem procedures, hang themselves at the edge of the wood.

  Take young Oyermah, for example. No one could have imagined it would happen that way. My father and I had been there only a week before—a light and spacious farmhouse on a hilltop, outbuildings with freshly plastered walls, a chicken farm, and various other manifestations of affluence. The fortunate and wealthy Oyermahs had been among the first in these parts to own a television, and that was why we were there: they were showing the Górnik Zabrze-Tottenham Hotspur game (4-2 to Górnik). We sat on a plush sofa and drank tea; Oyermah senior was playing the piano upstairs, while Oyermah junior watched the game with us; his wife, lovely as an angel, strolled through the series of rooms in a heavy brocade dress; their torpid child was playing quietly on a carpet that had the emerald-green tint of the Orinoco; hens were clucking in the yard; at one point Górnik even led 4-0. After the game we walked home in the gathering dark. Seven days later life was over in the blink of an eye. Seven days later young Oyermah went mad; he killed his wife and child and went deep into the woods on Jarzębata Mountain, and there he hanged himself in an inaccessible place.

  Dr. Swobodziczka spat curses, muttered oaths, wiped the sweat from his brow, and threatened never to go to another suicide. When you thought about it, it was a little strange—he had no patience for suicides, but in the end he would always respond to every summons, appearing promptly even in the middle of the night. (His rapidity was undoubtedly aided by insomnia: the habit, as Simon Pure Goodness would have said, leads inexorably to insomnia, then insomnia reinforces the habit.) It can also be surmised that the doctor was particularly fond, for example, of winter trips to the most distant valleys; after all, a sleigh ride through the snow and frost could hardly take place without a little something of a stronger nature—how else could the rescue party keep from freezing to death?

  He walked and rode everywhere. He attended to every last wretch, but he didn’t want anything to do with young Oyermah or with any other desperate individuals hanging from trees. At such times he cursed and blasphemed. I believe, I want to believe, that aside from his fear there was in this a special sort of preventive measure—he cursed those who had already done it so that those who found a similar intention gathering in their wounded hearts should know that, if they went ahead, they would expose themselves to invective and scorn, and to the fearful condemnation of Dr. Swobodziczka.

  I know that he was reluctant to go out to such cases because he was afraid. He was afraid of the breathtaking, mesmerizing temptation of a mound of earth. His soul was in ashes, but the spark of consciousness burned on; he knew that any way he turned he could head off into the depths of the forests on Czantoria Mountain, on Stożek, on Barania, and on Jarzębata. He could clearly see the paths that first led uphill, then on the other side ran downward. His black alsatian, mad with despair, is padding back and forth, till in the end it finds the path that leads unerringly to the Piast hostelry; it slinks under the table, laps warm beer from a tin bowl, and waits in vain for the arrival of its master, lord, and savior, amen.

  Chapter 19

  The Daughters of the Queen

  AFTER THE NEWSPAPERS I would tidy the books. In the course of my diligent and ecstatic reading of newspapers I occasionally felt pangs of intellectual conscience at wasting my time on superficial things, and filling my brain with newspaper pulp. At such moments, between sips I would reach for classics of every hue; for instance, I would open Gottfried Wilhelm Liebnitz’s A Philosopher’s Creed to a random page and read drunkenly, and I would have the drunken impression that I understood it all. I would drunkenly read Moby-Dick or The Magic Mountain and my intoxicated enthusiasm, like my intoxicated illumination, was deep and boundless. I would read Babel or Mickiewicz and in my drunkenness would hear every phrase so perfectly that I was all set to write, in my drunkenness, sequels to the short stories, and to compose additional stanzas of the epic poems.

  The classics, as usual, would be right at the bottom of the wreckage. I would pick up the Summa Theologica, Resurrection, and an anthology of English and American poetry from where they lay on the floor; I would pick them up, straighten the covers, and even iron any creased pages; I would pick them up, dust them off, smooth them down and replace them on the shelf. After I had removed the newspapers and tidied the books I would continue to clean up, emptying the ashtrays, washing the dishes, changing my bed, then stooping over the bathtub and washing my clothes as fiercely as if I were trying to punish myself for the lack of an automatic washing machine, as if with the quality of my hand-washing I were striving to surpass the automatic washing machine, as if I were striving to prove once again the eternal truth that a human being is better than the very best washing machine, not only the automatic kind, but even the latest generation of computerized washing machines, that humans are in general better than the best computer possible. True, computers are capable of surpassing humans in many domains. For example—as I read in between my erstwhile losses of consciousness—for example at some point a computer beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess, and humankind, or at least a significant portion of humankind, was thereby plunged into pessimism; the computer’s victory at chess was supposedly a harbinger of further victories by machines, successive inexorable and ever more all-encompassing and humiliating defeats of humankind in the battle with machines, and it may be that that is indeed the case, it may be that in numerous disciplines computers will bring numerous grandmasters to their knees, but in my humble drunkard’s opinion, until they invent the computer that can drink more than a person, humankind has no need to feel that its essence is under threat. By all means—I, the master, I, the grandmaster take up the gauntlet! By all means, I the master, I the grandmaster accept the challenge! Show me the ingeniously constructed machine, show me a computer of unheard-of intelligence—let it be of infinite capacity, let its halogen lights shine with the power of a thousand suns, let it be as vast as a pre-war apartment building, let it be programmed for fathomless quantities of drinking, let it be resistant to addiction, let it possess a perpetual tolerance for moonshine, let it have special subsystems allowing it to control the situation in its entirety, let it have a brain as mighty as an open-hearth furnace, and let it have the choice of liquor. And place between us a crate of the liquor it chooses, and let the starter give the signal, and right away you will see the triumph of the human race and of humanism. How long will it drink shoulder to shoulder with me: a month, two months, half a year? Sooner or later, at the next pale dawn, sooner or later, after yet another redemptive hair of the dog, before the liquor has dispersed through my bones, before I’ve had time to rise, warm up, regain my color and express my first inspired thought, it will falter, fail, lose consciousness, and puke up its entire hard drive.

  Then I would go onto the balcony and hang out all the clothes that had been washed more thoroughly than in an automatic washing machine, and I would hang them out equally thoroughly, because the more thoroughly laund
ry is hung out, the less work it is later to iron it. After hanging out the laundry I would vacuum the carpets, change the lace curtains, polish the floors, take out the trash, throw out the bottles, meticulously recheck every corner to make sure no eloquent traces of my humiliations remained, but no, order reigned everywhere. I would air all the rooms thoroughly, light a candle, light an incense stick, light a cigarette, sit in the armchair, feel the sweet firmness of my tired muscles, bask in the accomplished deed, pour myself a goodly measure of vodka—I deserved it, after my hard work I had the right to a little holiday—I would pour the vodka and drink thirstily, and lose consciousness, and regain consciousness on the alco ward. I would be standing by the sink listening to Don Juan the Rib tell stories about women.

  Don Juan the Rib, in civilian life a hairdresser, and, additionally, a musician, loved to demonstrate how to use scissors in a professional fashion. He did indeed snip away with extraordinary dexterity; at first glance we couldn’t tell what was magic about his art, and it was only after a period of intense observation, and impatient hints from the man himself, that the unpracticed eye spotted it: the divine fingers of the master set in motion only one of the scissor blades, while the other remained still. Even Dr. Granada was unable to reproduce this trick, and Don Juan the Rib, filled with pride, would not reveal the secret.

  Never without his scissors, which were tucked discreetly into the pocket of his pajamas (the pajama top extravagantly unbuttoned, with a neck-scarf tied fancifully round his neck), he was forever prowling the ward and offering his hairdressing services to all the female patients and all the nurses. The nurses refused—Nurse Viola in particular refused most sternly—but the Queen of Kent and Fanny Kapelmeister frequently paraded about with elegantly trimmed locks. Don Juan the Rib’s professional abilities were truly deserving of respect; even the Queen of Kent’s four daughters, who visited her every day, expressed their genuine admiration for their mother’s new hairstyle.