The Mighty Angel

by Jerzy Pilch

  “Don’t sit with me today. Sit somewhere else.”

  Today the only person who can put his glass next to Old Kubica’s glass is Dr. Swobodziczka. The doctor comes into the pub in the late evening; he’s on his way back from visiting someone whose aches he has eased (early tomorrow the pain will pass, in three days the temperature will be gone, in four days you’ll start to feel weak, in five days I’ll come again), he’s on his way back from visiting someone whose pre-mortal or perhaps life-giving sufferings he has eased. First he shakes Old Kubica’s hand without a word, then he sits down and gazes at him intently.

  “You’ve lost everything,” he says, half stating, half asking.

  Old Kubica says nothing.

  “Property’s just something to be bought. In a year you’ll get it all back, in two years you’ll have even more.”

  Old Kubica says nothing; he picks up the bottle with a smooth motion, but the doctor places his hand over his own glass.

  “It occurred to me not to drink,” he says in a tone that is striving not to be apologetic.

  Grandfather turns to him with great difficulty, his face altered, his features drained of expression.

  “How long for?” he asks in a voice not his own. “How long for? A month? Till Easter? A year?”

  “It occurred to me not to drink at all,” the doctor now says with relief; the guilty note is gone from his voice. “I woke up this morning and decided not to drink, but I didn’t have anyone to tell, because no one would believe me anyway. Since, as you know full well, Paweł, one drunkard can only be fully understood by another drunkard, I tried to tell my fellows in addiction, but they were all already drunk. So I came to the conclusion that a drunkard who’s decided to say goodbye to booze can only be understood by another drunkard who’s also decided to say goodbye to booze. Unfortunately, all day long I’ve not been able to find anyone like that in our neck of the woods. I see that I’ve come to you too late as well, Paweł.” The doctor slightly raised the hand that was covering the empty glass. “And it’s a great, great pity. I’m convinced it’s a fine idea—the only way. After that a third drunkard would be found who also wanted to say goodbye to booze, then a fourth, a fifth, a hundredth, a ten thousandth. There’d be a whole army of drunkards supporting each other in not drinking. If you’d not had a drink today, Paweł, we’d go down in history as the founders of a worldwide movement. I really feel sorry . . .”

  “Sorry for what?” asks Grandfather Kubica, still in a voice that isn’t his own. Not everything the doctor has said has gotten through to him, and what has gotten through is utterly staggering.

  “Sorry for Poland,” says the doctor bitterly. “Sorry most of all for Poland. Poland could have been the first, but this way America’s going to get there before us yet again.”

  “America,” grandfather repeats mechanically, and he thinks of America, from where he returned ten years ago, and he thinks of green-eyed Jennifer, the pastor’s daughter, with whom he twice went for a walk. They strolled down a path between two endless fields of corn; on the horizon was the Mississippi River, vast as an ocean. My grandfather didn’t understand what the green-eyed daughter of the pastor was saying to him, but he longed for her to confide in him about her intense emotions, to try and persuade him to stay for good, to tell him about the log cabin they would share, from the windows of which they would be able to see the great flowing Mississippi.

  “I feel sorry for Poland,” repeated the doctor. “Sorry for life, sorry for us.”

  “Either way, here or there, in Poland or in America, either way we’re going to die,” says my grandfather, and he sees the doctor’s hand not only capitulate and cease guarding the empty glass, but even, in an eloquent gesture, push it toward the almost full bottle of Baczewski.

  And grandfather fills the doctor’s glass, and both of them drink, and both of them say:

  “Good health, good health!”

  The scale tips again, this time not in the direction of evil spirits: this time the scale tips in the direction of hell. The last glassful fills the measure and exceeds the measure. Old Kubica feels the vodka bursting his skull open.

  “America, America,” he sputters; flecks of foam appear in the corners of his mouth. Yet he stands up with unexpected ease and walks toward the exit with an even tread. He forgets his sheepskin coat, which is draped over a chair like a shepherd’s hut that has been demolished by a gale. My grandfather walks through the snow towards home in his black vest and his white shirt with the upright collar. The frost fills the measure and the frost exceeds the measure, and Old Kubica starts to shout, he starts to howl; terrible, terrible is his howling, he howls the way I howled when the mafiosi appeared in my apartment along with the dark-complexioned poetess Alberta Lulaj.

  •

  When was this? It was never. Literature doesn’t exist, because that past does not exist and those stories do not exist. There’s only the present—a late evening in January 1932 or 1933. My grandfather reels and howls like an animal being killed. They hear his howling from a long way off. They run down the hallway and across the unlit yard, place the ladder against the trapdoor to the loft, and agilely climb up, one after another, like a well-drilled fire brigade. When Old Kubica lurches into the yard, not even their breathing can be heard; he himself falls silent and starts to come to his senses. He’s standing in the same place he stood in the morning; he’s standing in the same place, even though it’s impossible to stand in the same place twice. Old Kubica must be reading what I’m writing, because he says, as if he were repeating after me:

  “It’s impossible to rub your face in the same snow twice. It’s impossible, but maybe, goddammit, it is possible!”

  He stands in the same place, and sets off down the same swept path toward the woodshed, and with the same movement he takes hold of the ax. The wooden door of the stable opens and closes, and now there is a terrifying silence. A minute, two, three, five minutes of terrifying silence and then, maybe close by or maybe far away, there comes a single dull thud, perhaps a horse’s hoof striking the ground, perhaps a pine tree splitting open on the distant slope of Ochodzita Mountain. More silence, several more seconds of silence, then immediately there comes a diabolic percussion and the stable door opens, a drum-roll sounds, someone tries to play an out-of-tune violin, someone hammers iron on iron, there is mad laughter and howling, and a cry from my grandfather, Old Kubica. He’s standing in the door of the stable; his white shirt and black vest are covered in blood. In one hand he grasps a torch; the other, raised to his shoulder, is holding up the severed head of Fuchs the chestnut mare. And he sets off walking; his pace quickens, he’s walking ever faster, he runs, he stumbles as he is running, and traces of blood and fire mark his faltering steps. Then all that can be seen is the flickering light of the torch climbing ever higher up the steep hillside. The wood must be burned, and the snow must be burned, and the world must be burned. And a moment later a fire, a great fire is upon the snow-covered mountains, it’s as if a single drop of blood has fallen from an angel’s wing. You’re not here, you’re not here, you’ll always be gone. On the lake, on the lake, there swims a white swan.

  Chapter 23

  Intense Emotions by the Utrata River

  SHIVERS ZIGZAG THROUGH our bodies. We’re sitting on a stone bench by the Utrata River. I say: The Mill on the Utrata; you say: The Mill on the Lutynia. The pair of us are lifted straight from a pastoral eclogue. It’s muggy; every hour there are violent downpours. We stand up and enter ever deeper into the dark woods. You visit on Sundays. Around eleven I wait by the hospital gates; you step out of the local train and run down the platform. (She’s here.) A sandy path between the dormitories of the insane leads down to the Utrata. I place thick layers of the week’s Gazeta Wyborczas on the bench; we have our whole life before us, a whole seven hours, and a whole life can’t be spent on bare stone.

  The last addiction from my previous sojourn on this earth is that I buy Gazeta Wyborcza every day, at the kiosk ou
tside the ward, and read it, or rather leaf through it impatiently. What’s going on in the outside world? Nothing is going on. People are dying.

  The dead are strolling through the untended gardens. Their tongue is inhuman and their movements too; only their white-and-blue hospital pajamas give them a semblance of personhood. We walk along the fence; from the other side one of the dead approaches, jerkily proffers his hand through the iron railings, and exclaims in English:

  “How do you do?”

  “I’m fine, thank you,” I respond automatically.

  His face suddenly lights up; the cadaverous expression of a man who has died from excessive pain gives way to the animated, intelligent physiognomy of an emeritus professor of physics or genetics.

  “Tell me, please,” says the resurrected one in a clear and bright voice, “What’s been happening in Poland? What’s been happening in the world? What’s the latest news?”

  “Nothing in particular,” I reply, embarrassed, as is natural in my position. “I don’t know much, just what’s in the papers.” I show him my pile of Gazeta Wyborczas. “What’s the latest news? I’ve no idea what you’re interested in . . . France won the European Championship, a big passenger plane crashed, Wałęsa doesn’t stand a chance in the elections . . .”

  “How do you do!!” cries the other man in an inhuman voice; his face turns gray and once again becomes a death-mask conveying fearful suffering. He shakes my hand vigorously; then you and I quicken our pace, and behind me I can still hear the clear and bright voice:

  “Tell me, please, what’s been happening in Poland? What’s been happening in the world?”

  We’re alone, completely alone, and so it can be said: this is the summer of life, this is the only season in which the most secret intentions are carried out. We enter deep into the dark woods; schizophrenics and suicides pass us by, the path comes to an end, the sky darkens, we’re walking up to our waists in wet undergrowth, we embrace like no one on earth ever embraced before. Lord, I’m learning freedom at her side; my heart is learning to beat, I breathe, I exist, because she exists. What kind of problem is a jacket tossed down in the wet grass? What kind of problem are damp wrinkled pants? What kind of problem is it to walk barefoot, and to step barefoot onto a local train? Come on, come on, now let’s go on like this. A raindrop and the shadow of a leaf falls on your skin. I’ve stopped being afraid. Someone inside me has stopped being afraid. He’s not afraid. He’s not afraid that here, where we embrace madly, an unpredictable lunatic will suddenly appear, or that we’ll be tracked down by a posse of she-therapists. I’m not afraid of the coming week because I know that in a week’s time I’ll see her running down the platform; I’m not afraid of the coming life because I know she’ll be there till the end of that life. I’m not afraid of the nightmare in which my grandfather Kubica is running—a severed horse’s head on his shoulder, his clothing covered in blood, a burning torch in his hand—with the intention of setting the frozen woods on Ochodzita Mountain alight. I can still hear the tongues of flame, but I no longer feel fear. Someone inside me is not afraid of the greenish oceans of Bison Brand, the brown lakes of Żołądkowa Gorzka, nor of the transparent rivers of pure spirits—he has already reached the shore.

  I’m not afraid of unwritten books, I’m not afraid of sitting in the quiet room in the pale dawn of the ward and writing the last sentences of my epic poem in prose which shows irrefutably that the narrator has been saved by love. I didn’t plan such a very happy plot twist.

  “I love you, but I didn’t plan to,” you said, and raised your eyes above the Utrata and higher still, above the woods and the trembling air over Okęcie airport.

  “So what did you plan?”

  “My intention was to check out your unwittingly praised abilities.”

  “And after you’d done that?”

  “After I’d checked them out I was going to release you.”

  “You’re speaking my language.”

  “No, you’re speaking my language.”

  “In that case who’s speaking now—you or me?”

  “Us, we’re speaking. I’d never have thought the plural could be such a turn-on.”

  “I never planned this love either; to be honest, I intended . . . Oh, it’s all the same what I intended.”

  “You’re not just speaking my language, your intentions are the same as mine.”

  “Now I have serious intentions; before, though, I was worried, I was afraid.”

  “What were you afraid of?”

  “I expected, actually I was pretty much certain, that you’d fall in love with me, and that once again I’d be facing the arduous and disagreeable ritual of getting rid of someone.”

  “I was the one who was certain you’d fall in love, and that I’d have the ritual problems once again.”

  “I warned you. Watch out, I said in our very first conversation; watch out, this is too much for you. I took you for an impetuous young lady.”

  “And I took you for an irresponsible womanizer. To be frank, I took you for nothing but a heartless bastard. And there was a brief moment, but a moment nevertheless, when out of a sense of female solidarity I may even have wanted to punish you. In any case, I had nothing against the idea of you suffering, though I knew you wouldn’t suffer long, I was sure you’d only suffer for a short time and that you’d quickly find consolation in someone else’s arms. But you’ll never be in anyone else’s arms again. If you do that, it’ll be the end of both of us.”

  “I’ll never be unfaithful to you. I’ll never deceive you. Before, I would have said that from my point of view those are utterly suicidal statements, a year ago I would have said so; but I’ve forgotten that tongue. I’ve lost my tongue, or perhaps I’ve freed myself from the bonds of that tongue. Or perhaps my tongue has descended from the heights of bombast.”

  •

  A mere month ago I planned to describe in this chapter my own personal network of private drying-out facilities, which were run by my successive or simultaneous girlfriends. I even thought up grandiose names for them: Barb the Broker, Joanna Scourge of the Asylum, the Seductive Movie Star, the Uruguayan Center Forward, Joanna Catastrophe—I wrote these names on index cards, but recently, early one morning (leaden clouds over the alco ward) I saw a great conflagration of all my index cards, and all my files and notes and names were burned. The original models for the characters turned to ash, nothing was left of them, for either there was nothing there to begin with, or they were too flammable, which amounts to the same thing. All my elegant notebooks, with lines and no margins, were burned; the fire consumed the archive of ideas I had in my head, and literature came to an end. I had finished writing my treatise on addiction, or rather I’d lost my enthusiasm for writing about addiction, I could think only of you. My head and my heart were filled with an intense emotion that I did not know was possible. If love is everything that exists, what name can be given to our super-existence?

  Just a few days ago I was going to write a farewell speech to be delivered before I left the alco ward: Dear fellow alcos! Respected Dr. Granada! Viola, nurse above nurses! Venerable therapist of the double name! And you, quieted and alluring she-therapists! Tomorrow I shall quit these walls, that were once erected by Russian or Austrian builders; I leave with a light heart. I speak of the Russian or Austrian walls because my liberated brain is filled with something of a tangle. I get Kraków mixed up with Warsaw, the Kobierzyn asylum with the Tworki asylum; I confuse the Vistula with the Utrata, Iwaszkiewicz with Gombrowicz, and the oceanic billows of smoke issuing from the furnaces of the Sendizimir (formerly Lenin) steel mill are associated with the clouds of odor rising from the pajamas of the insane. Aside from one thing, of which I will not speak, at present there are no certain things in my mind; yet I would like to tell you about one thing, not the thing of which I will not speak, but a quite different thing. So then: regardless of whatever faces I make, regardless of my mocking laughter, regardless of the phrases I recorded in my notes, which w
ere consumed by a conflagration of the heart, and regardless of all my poses, know this: I adore you all, my venerable prototypes, I adore you with my most sincere adoration. You exist already, but in the fervid sincerity of my narration you exist even more. Be well, you shades of my characters, always and everywhere I will tell enthralling tales about you . . .

  Just yesterday I was going to write my farewell speech, but early this morning I lost the ability to compose artful orations. I lost that ability and with a profound sense of relief I thought to myself that now I would describe how I placed old Gazeta Wyborczas on a stone bench overlooking the Utrata; the gardens, deserted at dawn, that in a couple of hours would be filled with the deceased; your black blouse in the tall wet grass.

  On Sunday, around eleven in the morning, I stand by the hospital gates. Rolled up safe in the voluminous pockets of my expensive track suit is another chapter; I’m sort of able to write here, and sort of not.

  “How does your writing about drinking affect your drinking,” Kasia the she-therapist asked during one of my first sessions.

  “It doesn’t affect it at all, because when I drink I don’t write, and when I write I don’t drink. They’re two separate things.”