The Mighty Angel

by Jerzy Pilch

  “Not a word about the former regime. The former regime makes me want to puke, and so do comments about the former regime.”

  “Not a word about the former regime . . . Fine, that’s actually even better. Not a word about the former regime, because you’re quite incapable of saying anything sensible about the former regime. All you can do is make pathetic jokes about how Solidarity supposedly robbed you of a hot babe in a yellow dress or something.”

  “It’s true, Solidarity robbed me of a certain, as you put it, hot babe in a yellow dress, for which, by the way, at the present moment I’m eternally grateful to said labor union.”

  “We know all about that. The yellow dress has been replaced by a black blouse, so to speak . . . Am I right?”

  “The hell you care.”

  “You’re right, I really could care less about yellow dresses, or any other slutty item of clothing. But I care about the black blouse, I care about the black blouse almost as much as you care about the Solidarity labor union. I’m grateful to it.”

  “You? Grateful to it? You’re grateful to it? For what, if I might ask?”

  “For the fact that you got sober. After all, you got sober for it . . . And if not for it, it still played a leading role in your getting sober. You got sober splendidly, definitively, and in style. You got sober the way Luis Figo dribbles a soccer ball. You’re completely sober and finally, finally you can be negotiated with.”

  “Negotiated with about what?”

  “What do you mean, what? Continuing to drink. You continuing to drink—right now that game is worth the black candle.”

  “I’m afraid it would be a waste of effort for me. I realize that directing your attention to my comrades in arms is, if not inappropriate, then actually criminal, but right here you’ll have no problem finding a good few eagles, as Dr. Granada calls them, ready and waiting for their next phantom flights.”

  “Who is it you’re recommending to me? These wretches, whose last ounce of reason has been eaten away by firewater? Surely you can see that all of your comrades in arms, as you so grandiloquently call them, have damaged brains? You don’t see that? And anyway, how come you’re so understanding all of a sudden, you who were once the embodiment of malice, my friend? I know—you decided to accept a lesson in humility and so you’re humble, except that you don’t even believe in that humility of yours. You’re prostituting yourself out of humility, and that’s the worst kind of prostitution.”

  “My mind is damaged too.”

  “Your mind isn’t damaged, with you it’s quite the opposite. Even here, in this intellectually lean environment, even here the she-therapist princesses sing anthems of praise to your mental proficiency. By the by, I’d like to talk about that some time.”

  “About what? The therapists or my mind?”

  “Both. As far as the princesses are concerned, take your pick. In this respect at least I understand your humility and your toleration. You’re attracted to them, and so you tolerate the nonsense they talk: flush the toilet, brush your teeth, and wash your socks, because the ward is our little home and we’re a little family . . . Fine, that’s actually even better . . . Sixty half-cut yahoos are a “little family” according to a sleeping princess of a she-therapist. You must really want them to put up with it all . . . So take your pick . . . It’ll be like before—not one of them will say no to you. Remember how great it was? And as for your mind, don’t you worry, it’s in good shape, your noggin survived too, you lucky drunk, you’ve got everything a Polish writer needs to get down to work.”

  “If my mind wasn’t damaged I wouldn’t be able to hear you or see you.”

  “As it is you can barely hear me or see me. Have a drink, you’ll hear me and see me better.”

  “I won’t do that. You know I won’t. You know it, and that’s why you’re here.”

  “True, I’m a little concerned, but let’s not exaggerate. You won’t do it now, today . . . But after a while . . . in a year . . . in two . . . you’ll reach for the bottle.”

  “No I won’t. I tell you in truth, Satan, I won’t reach for the bottle.”

  “I’m not Satan, I’m your green-winged angel in the gold baseball cap. Though the question of my identity is of little importance . . . And what if something happens? You won’t reach for the bottle even if something happens?”

  “No visible events ever had any influence on me. I drank because I drank. I never drank because something happened. At most my drinking was accompanied by certain events. For example I drank when the Berlin Wall was coming down, but I didn’t drink because the Berlin Wall was coming down.”

  “And what if something special happened?”

  “Like what for example?”

  “Let’s say . . . Let’s say the black blouse disappears from your life.”

  “There is no human or inhuman force that could separate us. That you know too, and you’re flailing about in a truly pathetic manner.”

  “You won’t reach for the bottle?”

  “You’re the measure of my true decline. Your home isn’t in the underworld, you live in the back room of the liquor store. My eternally hung-over angel, my Satan crawling like an amber worm from a bottle of Żołądkowa Gorzka.”

  “Don’t demean yourself, Jerzy. A devil from a bottle is better than no devil at all. My own lot pains me too; I’d rather have been Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s devil or Thomas Mann’s, but it fell to me to be Jerzy’s. It pains me, but I also accept it; each of us evidently gets the author he deserves.”

  “Each of us gets the demon he deserves.”

  “I’m telling you—better a devil from a bottle of Żołądkowa Gorzka than none at all. Besides, Żołądkowa Gorzka wasn’t that bad; sometimes it was delicious. For instance in the winter, at four in the morning, remember how divinely it traveled down the throat straight from the bottle? Remember the overwhelming sense of bliss that came to you at the door of the all-night store?”

  “I feel like barfing.”

  “Less of the puke if you please. Communism is stamped with puke, analyses and condemnations of communism are stamped with puke, your drunken licentious past is also marked permanently with puke. Permanently—or maybe not so permanently? We could eliminate certain things.”

  “What sorts of things could you eliminate, my sulfurous gentleman?”

  “The puking for example. We could get rid of the puking. Also the insomnia, the oceans of sweat, the quaking, the fear, and the hallucinations.”

  “Meaning what?” I pursued with a stubbornness worthy of a better cause—but in my stubbornness there was cunning.

  “Meaning that it would be like twenty years ago. In the evening you’d knock it back like a wild animal, in the evening you’d experience great relief, because the constant experiencing of relief became the foundation of your life, till late in the night you’d wallow in a stream of pure relief; then a deep sleep and in the morning, nothing. In the morning there’s a heathy appetite, bacon and eggs, a hot and cold shower, a walk, no sign of any indisposition; in the afternoon some reading . . . Do you remember? Do you remember?”

  “I remember very well. I remember everything from back then, from before, and I especially remember everything from afterwards. That I’ll never forget, and that’s exactly why . . .”

  “That’s why you won’t reach for the bottle, even if you were free of the burden of puking, like in the old days?”

  “I won’t.”

  “You yourself don’t even believe in your Lutheran resistance. Since you know you won’t reach for the bottle, why are you sitting here? Get your things together and run away. Just think, in a few hours you could be anywhere you want, in Sopot, in Wisła, in Jarocin . . .”

  “I’m staying here. Simon Pure Goodness is running away.”

  “Give me a goddam break with that loser! That escape of his is pure kitsch, it’s lousy writing! Why escape in the night when he could just as easily do it in the daytime? Why through the window when the door a
nd the gates are open the whole time? And why through the window of the smoking room in particular, when there are other rooms without bars on the windows? I mean, there’s no need to escape from here at all, you can just walk out of the place. At any time of the day or night you can sling your kit on your back, say bye-bye at the nurses’ station, and it really is bye-bye. No one will even ask where you’re going or why. And if someone really is weak in spirit, and passing publicly through the open doors of the alco ward is beyond them, they can just go into town, walk into the first bar they find, knock back a beer and one or two doubles, come back, and blow boldly into the breathalyzer. There you are—you’re at 1.5, you have fifteen minutes to pack your things. Bye-bye. Why creep out in the night when no one’s guarding you to begin with? Why wrap yourself in the garb of a great fugitive, when no one is giving chase? And why’s he running away anyway? What’s his motivation? Because his sleeping roommate snores? Because the fugitive has an overpowering thirst for booze? Because he’s fleeing in panic back to his former incarnation? Because all of the above? He’s running away, and he’s going to do what? Take a cab to “The Mighty Angel”? To the all-night store? Brace himself with a couple of doubles, take the elevator to the twelfth floor, open the door and wonder who’s been staying in his place while the owner was away? Who was here while I was gone? And, as he drinks, he’ll clear up the mess? He’ll put his keys, his books, his records, his pencils, his photographs, and his drinking glasses where they belong? He’ll vacuum the floor, change the bed, take down the lace curtains and gather the laundry? He’ll pour an over-generous quantity of Omo-Color washing powder into the bathtub? He’ll wash his filthy clothing and carefully hang it out to dry on the balcony, ever so carefully, because the more care you put into hanging out the washing, the less work it is to iron it later? And when his labors are done he’ll pour himself a goodly shot of Żołądkowa Gorzka, and drink it, and fall asleep, and wake up on the alco ward? I, your green-winged angel, cannot keep up with such an intense tempo, and I tell you—this is not good. Simon’s escape is highly artificial and irritating. If you have even a little bit of an instinct, stay away from such artificiality and don’t describe it. Listen to me finally; I’m not tempting you now, I’m giving you a friendly piece of advice: don’t describe Simon’s escape. Don’t do it. And don’t go overboard either with that childlike faith in recovered time; lost time, and especially lost money, can never be recovered, especially by means of literature. You yourself calculated that in the course of the last twenty years you’d drunk two thousand three hundred and eighty bottles of vodka, two thousand two hundred and twenty bottles of wine, and two thousand two hundred and fifty bottles of beer, when the latter two are converted to vodka (the ratio being: half a liter of vodka equals two bottles of wine, equals ten beers), and so, counting in vodka, in the course of the last twenty years you’d drunk three thousand six hundred bottles of vodka, and converting to today’s prices you figured out that you’d drunk a good deal more than seventy thousand zloties. And on top of that you have to add the cab rides, the tips, the snacks, and the lost wallets, bags, scarves, jackets, gloves, documents, the fees for home treatments and stays in drying-out facilities, the monstrous bills for drunken phone conversations, the interest, the fines, the penalties, and the paid women. And you need to add at least two more years of drinking, because you, Jerzy, didn’t start drinking in the Year of our Lord 1980, when Solidarity was founded, you, Jerzy, began drinking in earnest in the Year of our Lord 1978, when a Pole ascended to the Throne of St. Peter, which, incidentally, even taking into consideration your Protestantism, is nothing but a superficial coincidence. So that at a conservative estimate alone, Jerzy, you drank away a billion old zloties, a hundred thousand new ones, a sum of money that a chump like yourself, filled with hypocritical humility, is unlikely ever to get back. To get it back, the epic poem whose parts I’m dictating to you right now would have to earn you that billion old zloties. Though if you really listened to me, if you wrote everything down faithfully, that seemingly unattainable amount would not have to be imaginary. If you put your mind to it, you could earn it, you could sell our co-authored work at a good price, you could make a packet and—think about it—you could carry on drinking. But don’t write on your own. Don’t write on your own, Jerzy. I’m begging you: don’t write. Leave Simon’s artificial escape undescribed.”

  •

  Simon Pure Goodness walks down the hallway that is lit by a single bulb. He opens the door to the smoking room, goes up to the unbarred window, and tosses his duffle bag out onto the grass at the foot of the wall, then he climbs onto the window ledge and jumps down lightly. It’s a warm August night; a plane is coming in to land at Okęcie, and there’s a smell of cornflowers, camomile, and mimosa. Simon Pure Goodness passes between the brick-built dormitories. He sees an orange glow and hears the rumble of the local train. An almost completely black cat runs across the grass. Behind Simon, a green-winged angel treads at a slow pace; behind the angel come the shades of the dead in blue and white pajamas. They follow behind him; there are more and more of them. Tempt me not, Satan.

  Chapter 25

  The Eternal Awakening

  AND MY ADDICTION was dropping from me the way the snake’s skin drops from the snake; the last shadows of tangible specters fell across the wall. She was with me, holding my hand, and I felt within myself a spring-like renewal of strength. Only six months before I’d been preparing for a different ending; in the quiet of my heart I was certain that I would finish writing the somber chronicle of my addiction, I’d inscribe the last period on the damp paper, and with the aid of a few modest, truly modest doses of Żołądkowa Gorzka I’d dispatch myself to the next world. I had calculated that to reach the finishing line I needed at the very most five bottles, two and a half liters to my last breath; of this I was absolutely certain. Aside from anything else, aside from this not approximate but precise calculation, there was an additional possibility and hope: it was not out of the question, it was entirely conceivable, that I would give up the ghost after only three bottles. (In such an eventuality I would bequeath the remaining two bottles to the mourners attending my wake.)

  But now (now, meaning when? now! now, when you’re running toward me in your black blouse and green slacks), now there was no quiet in my heart; now my heart was churning like the greatest waterfall in the world.

  I’ve so often wanted to write the story of someone bringing themselves back from ruin, so often, such an untold number of times, that when finally, by an incomprehensible coincidence I myself was bringing myself back from ruin, when I myself was being brought back from ruin, when someone’s visible or invisible hand was lifting me out of that cavernous pit, I could not keep pace with my own recovery. I’m not capable of describing my own liberation as a series of plausible events; I lack the ability to convey the evolutionary history of my own resurrection—I present only these epiphanic stanzas, though my resurrection too was like an epiphany, like a haiku; it was like a single line of poetry, unerring as lightning.

  For decades I boozed like an unclean beast; for decades I was drunk as an unclean beast, and in the course of a few hours, to no one’s credit, I got sober. To no one’s credit? No, I utterly reject any kind of coyness. To my credit was my despair; to my credit were my prayers, and to my credit is my love.

  Just six months ago, or maybe only a week ago, I was swimming deep below the ice in a frozen pond; the water was dense with thorns of frost and the serried floes drifted above my frigid head. There was not a scrap of light. I was a skeleton chilled to the bone, and I was disillusioned by the stereotypical story-line of my own death throes; everything was proceeding just as I had read about it a thousand times: I closed my freezing eyelids and began to remember my entire wasted life. By a stroke of good fortune, however, the first thing I remembered was soccer, and I remembered all the goals I’d scored in my childhood, and I saw the yellow Hungarian soccer ball flying into the goalmouth from my kick at the Start stadi
um in Wisła, and between all the makeshift goalposts set up on the Błonie in Kraków; and I remembered the header I scored on the meadow in front of the hostel in Markowe Szczawiny; and I remembered the goals I’d scored in the gym in Powązki. I remembered all my soccer dreams and nightmares, all my hallucinations, and even in my last dream before death I instinctively drew back my right foot, as if for one last time I wished to send a spectral ball into a spectral goalmouth, and my heel touched the frozen sideline of the last circle, and I rebounded, that’s right, whatever it sounds like, and it doesn’t sound good: I rebounded. Yet I repeat: I was disillusioned with the story-line of dying, and the story-line of salvation was not turning out any better; it too was as unsophisticated as a novel for cooks.

  My foot touched the sideline; I rebounded and at first slowly, then faster and faster I rose upwards, and after a short while I knew. I knew that I would break through the darkest layers, that without any help I would make it through the frozen floes. And I broke through them, I made it through, and here I am. Here I am amid vast August fields, and you are with me.

  In the late afternoon we will drink tea on a porch with a sweeping view. Our souls will never leave here and will never fall asleep.

  Author Bio

  JERZY PILCH is one of Poland’s most important contemporary writers and journalists. In addition to his long-running satirical newspaper column, Pilch has published several novels, and has been nominated for Poland’s prestigious NIKE Literary Award four times; he finally won the Award in 2001 for The Mighty Angel. His novels have been translated into many languages, and in 2002, Northwestern University Press published His Current Woman, Pilch’s only other book in English translation.