The Mighty Angel

by Jerzy Pilch

  Long ago, in Old Poland, before the Berlin Wall came down, when there was no segregation into alcos, schizophrenics, and suicides—many years ago, when I was rising from the dead here for the first or third time—what a to-do there would be when one of the suicides would go missing, when one of them would get lost in the labyrinth of hallways, which were built all the way back in the time of Tsar Nicholas or the Emperor Franz Joseph! The male and female nurses, the doctors, the orderlies, the auxiliaries, the ambulance drivers—they all went looking for him—even the kitchen staff would climb the wooden ladder into the attic! Everyone knew he was most likely up there, hanging from a rafter, or bleeding to death in the small room behind the laundry, having slit his wrists with a piece of glass. But that never happened. The missing suicide was quickly found; he was usually standing motionless by the last window at the end of the hallway, gazing through the untouched, half-transparent pane at a snow-covered field, at the brick walls of the Austrian or Russian barracks, at the dense smoke rising from the burning pajamas of the insane or from the furnaces of the Lenin Steel Mill. From that time on I had a soft spot for suicides; I liked them for the gravity with which they stared at the grass, a fragment of wall, a dark cloud.

  They came to the Christmas Eve dinner with empty hands, in pajamas and dressing gowns; every second one of them had bandaged wrists. The nurses from the suicide ward who brought them here were beautiful, dark-complexioned, and tense as devils. They evidently believed it was easier to watch over a fragment of wall or grass or sky as it vanished from the mind, without moving from where one is—which, let it be said openly, is a classic delusion of the young.

  They came with empty hands, but we were ready with hospitality. The little tables in the rec room had been arranged into one single long table; if their laminated tops hadn’t been as hard as granite they would have sagged under the weight of the food. First of all there was barszcz with potatoes, then breaded cod, then Chinese instant soups of various kinds, different sorts of cheese, six different kinds at the very least, pickled cucumbers, any amount of pretzel sticks, potato chips, four cans of sardines, two jars of rollmops, oranges, tangerines, apples, bread rolls, yeast buns, and a box of candies—whatever anyone happened to have, whatever anyone had been given, whatever could be bought at the little store on the first floor. Dr. Granada had already shared the traditional Christmas wafer with us earlier in the afternoon; he had wished each of us good health and all the best, then he’d thrown his everlasting sheepskin round his shoulders, climbed into his Ford Sierra, and set off for some part of the world that was uncertain, quite unnecessary and, from our point of view, in all probability non-existent. Good health and best wishes, we repeated now with childlike seriousness; the suicides weren’t even able to say good health and best wishes, but merely returned the softest of handshakes, while the barely perceptible shadow of a smile passed over their romantic countenances. We ate in silence; the meal took its course without elaborate orations and without animated conversation. Only the Sugar King, who was wearing a garish emerald-green track suit, retained his usual pathetic nonchalance; he was crumbling his third packet of Chinese soup into his bowl and dissolving the dry powder, with a kind of villainous dexterity, in boiling water from a kettle as huge as a nightstand.

  “Soup is the most important thing,” the Sugar King was saying, “soup is the foundation. Well-prepared soup is an absolutely crucial matter. The soup makes the home, you might say. In my home, I’m telling you, in my home there were four different kinds of soup for Christmas Eve dinner. That’s right,” he would repeat exultingly, “four different kinds: clear barszcz, barszcz with dumplings, mushroom soup, and żurek. And of course, on top of that there was carp, pike in jelly, bigos, kutia . . .”

  Our heads and our entire selves drooped lower and lower; the Queen of Kent’s gray hair was touching the paper tablecloth, Christopher Columbus the Explorer took out his French translation of the New Testament and began thumbing through it, two more nurses left and two more returned from the nurses’ station. Those ever more angelic angels of ours kept going there and coming back the whole time, as if overcome by a mysterious urge to constantly be stretching their legs. Only the suicides remained impassive, sitting up straight like an Olympic team composing themselves before the game.

  “Talk about dull,” groaned the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World.

  The delivery of inappropriate monologues was, as it happened, the speciality of the Sugar King, in civilian life a wealthy entrepreneur; in every situation he managed to say something improper. More: Unaware of his own desperation, he would plow ahead and develop dangerous theses, and when he finally checked himself, realizing the extent of the faux pas he had committed, the worst would come: that burly sixty-year-old in the emerald-green track suit would burst into terrible tears of embarrassment, and often it was the longest time before he could be consoled. Now the tears came quickly. The inappropriate monologue had not even managed to attain the full extent of its inappropriateness when the emerald-clad shoulders began to quake. The Sugar King gave a cough and snorted like a wild boar; someone from a different world might have thought he was choking, but no, this was one of his tragic spasms, and the first teardrops fell into his third bowl of Chinese soup.

  “Talk about dull,” repeated the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World; the mocking distaste in his voice contained a curious note of admiration.

  “That’s not dull.” The Hero of Socialist Labor was the first to bring hurried consolation and to offer, with a greater or lesser level of superficiality, his approval of the Sugar King’s problematic speech. “That’s not dull, it’s simply concrete knowledge. Knowledge and experience. Take me, for instance”—the Hero of Socialist Labor performed a skillful imitation of vitality and of bliss flooding his entire being—“take me, for instance, whenever I would start drinking, first I’d make myself a big pot of soup, best of all cabbage soup . . .”

  “You’re lying, you’re lying for the other fellow’s sake.” This time, in the voice of the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World there could be heard a lazy yet unshakeable demur. “You’re a good person yourself and that’s why you’re lying, but you’re lying in a general sense. Either a person starts drinking or they make soup. Either-Or, as a certain philosopher used to say.”

  “Was I intending to drink or was I not?” As frequently happens to good-natured people, the Hero of Socialist Labor was gripped by sudden rage. “Was the need for drink rising within me relentlessly, or was it not? Before that need rose to the point of irresistibility, did I made soup, or did I not? It may be that that was not always the case, but it was the case sufficiently often for me to know what a consolation it is to have a mouthful of cabbage soup, even cold. After all, hunger doesn’t come often and it doesn’t last long; many times a person doesn’t even know he’s hungry, he doesn’t know for instance that he wakes in the night, gets up, goes to the kitchen, opens the refrigerator, sometimes a person doesn’t even know that he takes out the pot, there’s lots of things a person doesn’t know, but the refreshing mouthful of ice-cold broth going down his throat can always be felt. And later too”—the Hero of Socialist Labor’s good humor had returned with neurotic rapidity—“and later too, when he’s recovering, the soup is indispensable also. Take me, for instance, when I’m recovering, my favorite part is replenishing my mineral salts. And what’s the best thing for replenishing mineral salts?”

  The sound of music was heard. Don Juan the Rib had taken out his mouth organ and was playing the music from the Christmas carol Tiny Infant Jesus. The Hero of Socialist Labor continued speaking for a good time longer, in an ever quieter voice, accompanying the carol; he sang the praises of broths rich in mineral salts, the plaintive melody and the matter-of-fact parlando creating an extraordinary duet. If I had made the scene up I’d know how to describe it, but I was there, I saw it, I heard it, and thus I’m powerless. The simple music drifted across the rec room, past the nurses’ station and through all the rooms
of the alco ward; snippets of lines passed through our sieve-like heads, Don Juan the Rib (in civilian life a hairdresser, and additionally a musician, as he used to say about himself) played one carol after another, and we with our ravaged brains were unable to sing, we couldn’t recall a single verse, not even the first one, tiny infant Jesus. “God is born, the powers quail,” played Don Juan the Rib, “the fire is stilled, the light must fail,” not another word. It may have been during this carol, or perhaps during “Wise men of this world and kings, whither do you hasten,” or perhaps during “On Christmas day is sweet elation Felt through all of God’s creation,” that Simon Pure Goodness began for the hundredth time to tell the story of his Christmas delirium of the previous year. That is just how it was, I’m not relying on my sieve-like memory, but on the hundred-page lined notebook in which the following day, Christmas Day (horrified by my own condition, horrified by the fact that I didn’t remember the best-known carols, not a single word), I began to write everything, literally everything, down on paper. I wrote the whole of Simon’s Christmas story; admittedly I didn’t write down exactly which carol was playing when he began to tell it (when it comes down to it that is of little significance; and I didn’t write it down because the next day I didn’t remember), but I did write down the way the men overlapped one another, as if in a child’s counting-out rhyme—before the first had finished talking the second began to play, and before the second had finished playing, the third started to tell his story.

  •

  On the evening of Christmas Eve the preceding year Simon Pure Goodness had awakened from an unexpectedly deep sleep. For years he had not slept deeply; the dream of a deep sleep is the greatest dream of every drunkard. “What I personally think,” said Simon, ruffling his straight blond hair and gazing at us with those permanently surprised vitreous blue eyes of his, “what I personally think is that delirium can be explained by sleeplessness, that it’s a function of sleeplessness. Because I mean, many a person’ll get royally sozzled, many a person will get sozzled like each of us in our prime, or even worse, and what happens? Nothing. He sleeps. He sleeps the sleep of a righteous drunkard, he sleeps twelve hours, twenty-four hours, he sleeps a whole day or two whole days. Three days and three nights he sleeps like a dead man, and in his sleep he burns up all his drunken badness. Whereas here you have a person without sleep, a sleepless person, he’s gotten sozzled as the Devil intended, and he doesn’t sleep at all or, what’s even worse, he wakes up after two or three hours of unprincipled sleep, paradoxical sleep, sleep that’s unconscious even though it’s shallow. You wake after two or three hours and you’re neither sober nor drunk, you can’t stand but you can’t lie down either, your trembling hand won’t reach for a nineteenth-century novel so you can calm yourself with a little harmonious reading, you’re not capable of reading, the light dazzles you and you’re afraid of the darkness, there is nothing, nothing all around you, it’s as if you were inside a spinning shell of nothingness, there’s no succor from anywhere, no salvation, nothing but your hand crawling like an ignoble reptile, like an iniquitous snake, in search of the bottle that’s placed oh so providently at your bedside, and you raise the bottle, and you drink with despair in your heart, because you know that only bad things will come to you. And you drink there in the nothingness, in the darkness, in solitude, you drink for a phony and transient sense of relief, because amid all these worst things, it seems to you that the least worst of all is another hour of unprincipled sleep.”

  When Simon, then, woke from his unexpectedly deep sleep, he was amazed at what had happened, at how such a deep and such a calm sleep had been possible at such a time, when he was in such a condition? He rose, crossed to the window, and opened the window; it was a frosty Christmas night, with dawn not far away. The sky was composed of a billion evenly arranged bottles; a billion streams of clear Scandinavian vodka were pouring from a billion opened and at the same time forever full bottles, and a half-inch layer of alcohol covered everything: the moon, the stars, the snow; the universe smelled of clear Scandinavian vodka. The bottles clinked faintly; then there was a sleigh flying through the air like an airplane, and sitting in the sleigh, in a gold track suit, was God.

  “Why am I unhappy?” asked Simon.

  “That’s how things worked out,” replied God, “that’s how the accounts worked out. If you didn’t drink you’d be happy, but you wouldn’t understand much.”

  “I don’t want to understand. I want my hands to stop shaking and my heart to stop palpitating.”

  “Properly speaking it’s too late”—God tipped his gold baseball cap back on his head—“but if you wanted to, if you wanted to, then you could. The question of free will”—God gave a cough—“the question of free will has been analyzed from every angle to the point that my exegetes know me better than I know myself, though there’s nothing wrong with that, exegetes are supposed to know everything. I know everything, though I don’t know everything; for example I don’t know everything about my own subconscious, which is unmistakable proof that I have one. Does God have a subconscious? He does. He does, because he hasn’t the faintest idea about it; if he did, it wouldn’t be a subconscious . . .” God broke off and grew visibly dispirited; his thoughts must have been exceedingly bitter. “At every step, at every step there are these exhausting paradoxes . . . Yet things are simple, even the question of free will is simple.” God looked at Simon. “You don’t have to study it, there’s no need to read about it. Although”—God paused a moment—“although you might read Augustine one day when you’re a little less hung over than usual . . . Really it’s too late, but if you wanted to then you could. The effort required is considerably less than you think; the thing is, you have to truly make that small effort and see it through to the end. When the urge takes you and you say to yourself, I need a drink, think to yourself that you don’t need it, tell yourself you don’t need it, and do this: don’t force yourself to drink. Because the fact that you ‘need a drink’ means that you drink out of need; avoid that need, force yourself to not-need. Don’t drink the next day. Just don’t drink the next day. Don’t drink the next day, either in the morning, or in the afternoon, or in the evening. You don’t need to. Don’t drink the next day and that’s all it takes. Catch you later”—God clicked his tongue and the sleigh moved slowly off—“catch you later. We, by the grace of ourselves, are off to other hotspots around the globe.”

  This time Simon Pure Goodness (in civilian life a law student) told about an encounter with God, but in earlier variants of his story, the flying sleigh contained either the Angel Gabriel, or Santa Claus, or one of the wise men of this world and kings hastening to Bethlehem by this atypical means of transportation. Simon was not sure; it was only a year later, when he would go mad, when he would decide he was the incarnation of John the Baptist, don shabby small-town garb, and walk across Poland in the heat and rain and wind, announcing the Second Coming and the destruction, it would only be a year later that he would acquire absolute certainty that the sleigh contained the angel, the same Angel Gabriel who said to Zacharias: Your son shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost.

  The heavenly visitor was disappearing in the icy distance, while through Simon there passed a gentle torrent of benevolent movement, a kindly stream of mild clouds. He could clearly sense within himself a great commotion, and for the first time it occurred to him that that which was inside him was holy. Even if I’m only hearing the murmur of my own blood, that too means I am chosen. But it was not the murmur of his blood, nor disagreeable swings in blood pressure; this was not a stiffening of the innards that heralded a collapse, nor an asthmatic attack, nor a fever, nor the shivers. The Divine Mill was slowly starting to turn in Simon’s heart, while he comprehended fully that labors now awaited him, that he would have to serve the heavenly windmills and angelic millstones that had appeared in the depths of his soul.

  We were sitting at the table: myself, Don Juan the Rib, Fa
nny Kapelmeister, the Queen of Kent, Simon Pure Goodness, Columbus the Explorer, and the other less determinate characters. Don Juan the Rib, in civilian life a hairdresser, and, additionally, a musician, would die a few months later; I would attend his funeral. Simon Pure Goodness would go mad; the Queen of Kent’s ashen hair would in a short while turn completely to ash; Columbus the Explorer, in civilian life a professor of social sciences, would attempt to return to his former life, which no longer existed, in the hope that he might succeed.

  That’s right: civilian life, in civilian life, I keep desperately repeating this military phraseology. Our lives before the habit were civilian lives; in those lives we had undevastated homes, our mothers were alive, our wives and fiancées and children were by our side. We ate lunches and dinners and breakfasts. In those lives we could distinguish different dishes, different times of year, and different times of day. We fell asleep in the evening, woke in the morning, and pottered about in our workshops that were as yet undestroyed by fire. The comprehensible and impassive city stood there in its pigeon-gray cloud, the smell of coffee and exhaust fumes filled the streets, a young woman in a yellow dress was pausing in front of a window display, even if we only thought so; we existed. We read newspapers, browsed in bookstores, listened to music; we enjoyed ice cream with chocolate syrup, and watched soccer, and rode streetcars. But all that had passed, it had vanished; for many years now a great war had been going on, we were soldiers of a defeated and besieged self-styled army, against the dictates of common sense we refused to surrender, for many years now we had had nowhere to retreat to and no word came from our homes, while the dark ring of diabolic forces was inexorably closing in. We fell asleep with our forehead resting against the nearest earthworks; we were woken by the cannonade of our heart, we had been wearing the same uniform for who knew how long, we ate whatever we could find, it was only by some miracle that our canteens were always full, and an ever more primitive rotgut sustained our ever shorter lives. Don Juan the Rib started playing his mouth organ again; this time he played the melody of an uncommon, long-forgotten carol. I had heard it before—someone close to me used to sing that melody and play along on the piano. Perhaps my grandfather, Old Kubica, sang it as he walked across the square? Perhaps you are humming it as you lay an empty plate on the white tablecloth? Perhaps the almost completely black cat on the windowsill is listening to that carol in an unoccupied home?