The Mighty Angel

by Jerzy Pilch

  Chapter 13

  Passages

  They drank on Thursday too. And how! And now he was shouting day and night, and he had gone hoarse; now he was dying.

  —Yuri Tynyanov

  After first fortifying myself amply, very amply, I started to assemble all my belongings on the roof of the shack, where I could reach them: first my briefcase, then one bottle after another: a Saxon rye, then four unopened Black Forest slivovitzes and one opened one, all carefully placed in a row at the edge of the roof.

  —Hans Fallada

  The man is killing time—there’s nothing else.

  No help now from the fifth of Bourbon

  chucked helter-skelter into the river.

  —Robert Lowell

  “Brandy?” Danny cried. “Thou hast brandy? Perhaps it is for some sick old mother,” he said naïvely. “Perhaps thou keepest it for Our Lord Jesus when He comes again. Who am I, thy friend, to judge the destination of this brandy?”

  —John Steinbeck

  Do you know, do you know, my good sir, that I even drank away her stockings?

  —Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Do I not have feelings? Of course I do. The more I drink, the more I feel. That’s exactly why I drink—in drink I’m seeking compassion and sympathy. I’m not looking for joy, only for pain . . . I drink because I want to suffer more intensely!

  —Fyodor Dostoevsky

  God neither wants nor does not want the sins that actually happen; He merely permits them.

  —Gottfried Wilhem Leibnitz

  And that was how I spent the whole night, drinking and vomiting in turn.

  —Hans Fallada

  He enters the church; his lips move in something resembling a prayer. Inside it’s cool; on the walls are pictures of the stations of the cross. No one seems to be looking. He especially likes to drink in churches.

  —Malcolm Lowry

  But there were also topers who, sensing an excess of drink within themselves, and unwilling to give up when the merriment continued after dinner, would go behind the house, deliberately make themselves vomit, then return to the company and start drinking all over again.

  —Jędrzej Kitowicz

  Don’t you find it a little tiresome living with a drunk? You haven’t seen the worst yet. I knock everything over. I puke the whole time. It’s a miracle I’ve felt so good these last few days. You’re like an antidote that’s mixed with the alcohol to maintain my equilibrium; but it won’t last forever.

  —John O’Brien

  And He will pass sentence on everyone justly, and He will forgive the good and the evil, the arrogant and the humble . . . And when He is done with everyone, then He will say unto us too: “You too come hither,” he will say. “Come, all you thoroughly drunk ones! Come, you weak, weak ones! Come, you disgraced ones!” And we will all come without shame and stand before Him. And He will say: “You are swine! In the image and likeness of beasts! But come to me, you too!”

  —Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Only a second-rate mind is unable to choose between literature and a true night of the soul.

  —E. M. Cioran

  Yet I cannot comprehend how someone was able to extend the pleasure of drinking beyond his thirst, and create in his imagination as it were an artificial and unnatural appetite.

  —Michel de Montaigne

  Lord, grant all us drunkards such a gentle and beautiful death.

  —Joseph Roth

  “I think I feel like a drink.”

  “Almost everyone feels like a drink, it’s just they don’t know it.”

  —Charles Bukowski

  I was terrified and drank more than ever. I was attempting my first novel. I drank a pint of whiskey and two six packs of beer each night while writing. I smoked cheap cigars and typed and drank and listened to classical music on the radio until dawn. I set a goal of ten pages a night but I never knew until the next day how many pages I had written. I’d get up in the morning, vomit, then walk to the front room and look on the couch to see how many pages there were. I always exceeded my ten.

  —Charles Bukowski

  And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write . . .

  —Revelation

  This shaking keeps me steady.

  —Theodore Roethke

  And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud . . .

  —Revelation

  Hard drink is the gateway to all immorality:

  To quarrels and insults, to stealing, vulgarity,

  And other things too; for the drunken man’s sin

  Is the devil within.

  —Song Against Drunkenness

  (from Heczka’s hymnal, no. 443)

  Why don’t you sing us that little drunken aria?

  —(from Samuel B. Linde’s dictionary)

  As a biologist, as a social thinker concerned with power and world projects, the molding of a universal order, as a furnisher of interpretation and opinion to the educated masses—as all of these he appeared to need a great amount of copulation.

  —Saul Bellow

  Vodka’s a strange thing. It’s a fiendishly sharp drink, a mysterious concoction of herbs, which has some peculiar relation to the stars.

  —Herman Broch

  We walked side by side down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and in front of the window of the anti-alcohol league, which as usual contained a display of desiccated brains, I said:

  “At this point, of course, it’s best to cross to the other side.”

  —Philippe Soupault

  A real man is one who desires repetition.

  —Søren Kierkegaard

  At sixteen, while still at school, I began to visit more regularly than before a pleasantly informal bawdy house; after sampling all seven girls, I concentrated my attention on roly-poly Polymnia, with whom I used to drink lots of foamy beer at a wet table in an orchard—I simply adore orchards.

  —Vladimir Nabokov

  My soul is among lions . . .

  —Psalm 57

  Vats of porter wonderful. Rats get in too. Drink themselves bloated as big as a collie floating. Dead drunk on the porter. Drink till they puke again like christians.

  —James Joyce

  While I was in the helicopter whopping over Manhattan, viewing New York as if I were passing in a glass-bottomed boat over a tropical reef, Humboldt was probably groping among his bottles for a drop of juice to mix with his morning gin.

  —Saul Bellow

  Life is possible only as a result of discontinuities.

  —E. M. Cioran

  My Lord, I loved strawberry jam

  And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body.

  Also well-chilled vodka.

  —Czesław Miłosz

  If it weren’t for the thought of suicide, I’d have killed myself long ago.

  —E. M. Cioran

  They that sit in the gate speak against me; and I was the song of the drunkards.

  —Psalm 69

  Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known.

  —Psalm 77

  And now help me decide: what should I drink?

  —Venedikt Erofeev

  Chapter 14

  The Poems of Alberta

  LOVELY, LOVELY AS a dream were the poems of Alberta. Light, or perhaps shadow, a ray of light, or the shadow of a child, a mysterious and unclear little soul moved through those poems from line to line. It abided in the old homestead, and in a husky soprano it sang a song for all the objects and furnishings that had ever belonged there. Alberta recited a poem about a tin kettle on the stove top that had once been used to boil water; she recited a poem about the water of yesteryear, about the stove top itself, about the candle on the Christmas table; she recited a beautiful love poem about the woolen cap of a boy who passed beneath her window every day on his way to school.

  How long it lasted I couldn’t say; how long Alberta’s recitation went on I couldn’t really say; it was s
horter rather than longer and I’m pretty sure that during this time I did not lapse into a shorter or longer admiration-filled nap. In any case she recited her poems standing in the center of the room as if in the center of a stage, and everything suggested then and suggests now that it ought to have been ridiculous, whereas in fact it was not only not ridiculous, it made the experience even more affecting. I listened to the poems of Alberta as she stood there on the linoleum like a statue, and I felt I was reclining on a cloud.

  Afterwards she sat on the edge of the cloud, which had now gone back to being the alluring edge of the mattress, and she placed her warm hand on my icy-cold hand, and she asked me the question I had heard a thousand times before, she asked me the question I have been asked by thousands, millions of people, she asked me the question I’ve been asked by Europeans, Asians, Americans, Africans, Australians, and possibly even Eskimos, she asked me the question that at this point only the Lord God may never have asked me.

  “Why do you drink?” asked Alberta.

  “Alberta,” I replied, choking up, “if I’d met you twenty years ago I wouldn’t drink at all.”

  “First of all, twenty years ago I was four years old and if you’d actually met me then, then you’d really have knocked it back, you’d have knocked it back two times or a hundred times more,” she responded. “But call me Ala, I prefer it. Why do you drink?” she repeated.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “I don’t know, or rather, I know a thousand answers. None of them is entirely true and each of them contains a grain of truth. But nor can it be said that together they comprise some single whole great truth. I drink because I drink. I drink because I like to. I drink because I’m afraid. I drink because I’m genetically predisposed to. All my progenitors drank. My great-grandparents and grandparents drank, my father drank and my mother drank. I have no sisters or brothers, but I’m certain that if I did, all my sisters would drink and all my brothers would drink too. I drink because I have a weak character. I drink because there’s something wrong with my head. I drink because I’m too quiet and I’m trying to be more lively. I drink because I’m the nervous type and I’m trying to calm my nerves. I drink because I’m sad and I’m trying to raise my spirits. I drink when I’m happily in love. I drink because I’m searching for love in vain. I drink because I’m too normal and I need a little craziness. I drink when I’m in pain and I need to ease the pain. I drink out of longing for someone. I drink from an excess of fulfillment when I’m with someone. I drink when I listen to Mozart and when I read Leibnitz. I drink out of sensual pleasure and I drink out of sexual hunger. I drink when I finish my first glass and I drink when I finish my last glass; at such times I drink all the more, because I’ve never yet drunk my last glass.”

  “Listen,” said Ala-Alberta with visible impatience, “are there any moments at all when you don’t drink?”

  “I guess I don’t drink when I’m so terribly drunk that I don’t have the strength to drink, though truth be told, I always find the strength to continue drinking; or I don’t drink when I’m having a terrible drunken dream, though who knows, maybe at those times I drink too. I guess I drink both asleep and awake.”

  “Maybe you should just get treatment. I mean, the doctors could help you, they’d help you to find the answer. Maybe you should go see someone who knows more about these things.”

  “I do see doctors. Dr. Granada is like a father to me. Eighteen times I’ve been on the alco ward and listened to the reasons why my brothers in addiction drank. They all drank for the same reasons, though sometimes for different ones too. They drank because their father was too hard on them, and they drank because their mother was too soft on them. They drank because everyone around them was drinking. They drank because they came from families of drunkards, and they drank because they came from families whose lips had not touched a drop in generations. They drank because Poland was under the Muscovite yoke, and they drank out of euphoria when it was liberated. They drank because a Polish man became Pope, and they drank because a Polish man won the Nobel Prize, and they drank because a Polish woman won the Nobel Prize. They drank the health of the interned, and with their drinking they honored the memory of the murdered. They drank when they were alone and they drank whenever anyone appeared next to them. They drank when the Polish team won, and they drank when the Polish team lost. And Dr. Granada would listen to all these answers with superhuman patience, shake his head, and say what I said at the beginning: ‘You drink because you drink.’”

  “Snap out of it, wake up.” Maybe Alberta was speaking in a general sense, or maybe in a specific sense, or maybe, in the course of the long sleep I had been immersed in for years, I had additionally dozed off. Alberta was shaking my arm gently: “Wake up.”

  “Why should I wake up when in the waking world things are even worse? The waking world is one immense reason to drink.”

  “If you drink when you’re asleep and also when you’re awake, then actually you’ve no idea what the waking world is like.”

  “Look, if I’d been sober back on that July afternoon I never would have spotted you by the ATM, I never would have thought that you are wise and beautiful, it never would have occurred to me that you’re the greatest love of my life, I never would have run after you, I never would have experienced such ecstasy . . .”

  I was unable to go on, because I was filled with emotion. Seeing that my eyes were glazing over and I was about to break down in tears, Alberta poured a dose that in her view was the right amount, and in mine was insufficient. But I didn’t insist on being topped up, the missing amount being in any case minimal, because I could see she was doing it out of the goodness of her heart, and out of obedience to the gangsters who had brought her here, but also because she wanted to keep on talking with me.

  “Fine,” she said, “you experienced a fiery ecstasy, in connection with me furthermore, which is always agreeable for a woman. But tell me, how did it end? Tell me, if you remember that is.”

  “It ended on the alco ward,” I said after a moment of inevitable silence.

  “Exactly. In my view fiery ecstasies that end on the alco ward aren’t worth very much. Truth be told, they’re not worth shit. You have to get out of it.”

  “The thing is, Ala, do you know what the alcos talk about the whole time on the alco ward? Do you know the principal subject of their most serious conversations?”

  “You said yourself a moment ago that they’re constantly talking about drinking and their reasons for drinking.”

  “That too, of course, they speak constantly about how they drank and why they drank; but their first topic of conversation is getting out. They deliver lengthy treatises on the art of getting out. They’re constantly going on about getting out. They’re constantly asking: When will we get out of here? I wonder when they’ll let us out? I wonder when a person will get out? In a month, or maybe two? Maybe tomorrow? Tomorrow no, because tomorrow is Sunday, and on Sunday there are no discharges. But Monday for sure. On Monday for sure we’ll get out.”

  Alberta looked at me with the kind of tenderness with which a woman looks at a man who is by nature more foolish than she is.

  “I’m not talking about getting out of the hospital, I’m talking about getting out of the addiction.”

  “Let me tell you, Ala: only the naïve think that there are different kinds of getting out. The wise and the experienced know: every kind of getting out is the same.”

  “Wise and experienced drunkards, maybe.”

  “I’m tempted to reply that there are no wiser or more experienced people than wise and experienced drunkards, but that would be a typical drunken aphorism, and of late I’ve been avoiding drunken aphorisms. You get out of the hospital, in other words you get out of your illness, and re-enter the world, which itself is one big illness. Do you see?”

  The room was slowly growing darker; evening was evidently coming, though it may equally have been morning that was slowly coming, it may have been entirely dark for
a long time, and it may just have seemed to me that it was only now getting darker. I had no idea what time of day it was, and I was embarrassed to ask. I remembered a story the Hero of Socialist Labor told about losing track of time, one of a hundred thousand drunken parables about losing track of time.

  The Hero of Socialist Labor started work at the Sendzimir (formerly Lenin) Steel Mill at six in the morning. The incident he was recounting, that is to say, his great drinking bout, took place in the winter, when, as is common knowledge, at six in the morning and six in the evening it is equally dark. The Hero of Socialist Labor woke up in the dark; it was half past five. With all the usual drunken melodrama he realized he would barely make it to work. Fortunately he still had something left in the bottle; he knocked back a restorative hair of the dog, and on the way to the bus stop he went in to the store and drank a beer as well. He was a little surprised at the store being open at such an early hour, since it usually opened at seven, but there it was, open before six . . . Then at the bus stop something was wrong too, the people waiting were not the usual ones, and on top of that they were too numerous and animated for an early winter’s morning . . . A terrible suspicion finally formed in the Hero of Socialist Labor’s heart, but he was embarrassed to ask anyone; he began to search the crowd for a fellow tribesperson, which, incidentally, did not take long. In the appropriate place, right on the curb, there was a person swaying on his feet in the appropriate manner. His swaying was extremely appropriate, it was in fact slight and barely perceptible; this person, though he was swaying on his feet, was also sure to know what time of day it was. The Hero of Socialist Labor went up to him and asked: