The Mighty Angel

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 shorter 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:

“Excuse me, it’s coming up for six, but is that six in the morning or six in the evening?”

“Six noon,” replied the other man, and it’s for the beauty of that reply I tell the story, not for the time mix-up, which is obvious from the beginning.

In any case, the room was dark and it was probably evening after all. Alberta stood up, turned on the desk lamp, and came back to me.

“I don’t think that’s particularly hard to understand either.” At this point I had no idea what Alberta was saying, I had completely forgotten what we’d been speaking about a moment before. In the light of the lamp her yellow dress and her arms seemed to have taken on a moonlit glow.

“I don’t think that’s particularly hard to understand either,” she repeated, as if knowing that I needed a repetition. “Those people, your dire comrades in arms, shouldn’t talk about getting out, they shouldn’t look forward so desperately to getting out. They should sit there or lie there patiently and stay put till they’re cured.”

“Ala,” I replied, the way Dr. Granada would have said it, “Ala, you have the mind of a child. It’s true they shouldn’t be talking about getting out, because they shouldn’t ever get out. I don’t mean the alco ward should be some kind of life sentence, though it’s also true that life in general is a life sentence. I simply mean that for alcos the alco ward is the right place. Let me tell you in confidence, Ala: I’ve often felt I could live there forever. My comrades in arms are constantly telling war stories, there’s always talk of greater or lesser but always interesting adventures, the meals are regular and reasonably nutritious, the lack of radio, television, and games encourages juvenile but inspirational stratagems, the dominant mood there is a stifling melancholy, reflection decidedly prevails over any kind of activity — in a word, it’s an ideal atmosphere for an intellectual. .”

“Dear, dear Lord, how awfully ill you are. You’re saying unbelievable things. Are you in some kind of permanent delirium or something? Did you really — when you saw me that time at the ATM, if you actually saw me there, and if it really was me — did you actually run after me, or did you just think you did?”

“What about now,” I asked; my voice was once again quavering and unsure, as if the fortifying Becherovka was not yet running through my veins—“are you here now? Are you sitting next to me?”

“Yes, now I’m here, I’m sitting here and talking to you.”

“I love you, Ala,” I said, “I love you like I’ve never loved anyone else before.”

“You know what, sweetheart?” Ala chucked me under the chin and may even have stroked my cheek under its covering of drunken stubble. “You know what, my sweetest one, I know you’re deliriously drunk, I know you’re seeing things, I know that your head is all messed up, but setting all that aside, out of pure curiosity let me ask: how many women have you already said that to? How many times, you bastard, have you repeated your famous: ‘I love you more than life itself’?”

“I’ve only ever said it to you, that is, I’ve only said it to you in such a true and such an intense way. I may happen to have uttered similar or even identical phrases before, but that was just cynical rhetoric. I feigned love, like any male who’s hungry for copulation.”

“And they believed you? Did any one of them actually believe you? Who were these women? What kind of gullible idiots were they? Was every girl you met a pervert turned on by the smell of badly digested Żołądkowa Gorzka, or what?”

“Do you want to know the truth?”

“Yes, I do.”

“All right, but you should be aware that if I tell you the truth you may be put off me. . You may even be physically repulsed by me,” I added playfully.

“I have the feeling that so far I’m not especially enthralled by your quaking person. Of course, I liked the fact that you seemed enchanted by my poems, but even that may just have been drunken euphoria.”

“Let me ask you again: do you want to know the truth?”

“Yes, I do.”

“The truth?”

“Not only have I never met such an inveterate drunkard as you, I’ve also never met such a tiresome one.”

“Then listen, Ala-Alberta, to my shamefully true confession: my women ran individual drying-out facilities just for me. I treated my women like the managers of my own personal detox units. As a drunkard, I had a private network of drying-out facilities that were run by my successive or concurrent girlfriends. Whenever I needed to I’d call up and go there, and if I was in no state to do so alone, they’d come for me and take my corpse back to their place, and minister to it solicitously.

“The Seductive Movie Star ran a private drying-out facility for me, the Uruguayan Center Forward always had a fancy convalescent home for my exclusive use, and Joanna Scourge of the Asylum kept a similar institution for me, and Barb the Broker waited for me with a permanently available bed, and vitamins, and juice, and even an IV drip, and the Utterly Irresponsible Minx was also the director of my personal, extremely respectable detoxification center; I list only the most important names, for there was also a considerable number of short-lived temporary helpers.

“I also had she-angels who would fly down to me, or rather to my by now absolutely immovable cadaver, and would transform the room in which we presently find ourselves into an intensive care unit. It goes without saying that these unfortunate women possessed differing kinds of resources, from the sophisticated equipment, up-to-date medications, and practically unlimited financial reserves available to Barb the Broker, to the complete disorganization and lack of qualifications that marked Joanna Catastrophe, whom I have not yet mentioned in this regard.”

“You know what,” said Alberta, interrupting me just in time, “I’m wondering what is more terrible: the fact that you’re incapable of living normally, or the fact that you’re incapable of talking normally. I mean, your tongue is swollen from the booze and your throat is sore. You’re talking in this stilted way. Where did all those names come from? Talk normally, start to live normally why don’t you.”

“Where and when and by whom was it said”—a venomous note appeared in my voice and intensified—“where and when and by whom was it said, where and when and by whom was it written that I’m supposed to lead a normal life?”

“What sort of life are you supposed to lead? An abnormal one? An exceptional one? A brilliant one? A sick one?”

“Ala, I’m supposed to lead an exceptionally unhappy life.”

“Get a grip on yourself and start to live in moderation but happily.”

“In moderation but happily? That in itself is a contradiction in terms.”

“It’s not a contradiction in terms. When you understand that you’ll stop drinking.”

“Alberta-Ala, Alberta Lulaj, author of captivating poems, at first I thought you were the greatest love of my life, all the greater and more tragic because you disappeared for good round the corner of Jana Pawła and Pańska; then I thought you were a member of a band of mysterious gangsters, then, that you were an unworldly apparition; then during our conversation I thought you were the person closest to me in the whole world; but now I see you’re just the most ordinary inquisitive she-therapist, yes, you’re a she-wolf therapist, a chick therapist. .”

She looked at me a while in profound sorrow and said:

“I refuse to let you help in any way to get my poems published. I’ll manage on my own. I have an absolute inner certainty that I’ll manage on my own. And you, you poor wretch, all you need to do is have another drink.”

And Alberta poured me a full glass, and I knocked it back instantly in a single draft, because by now I was able to drink in single drafts again. I needed it. I was so infinitely empty and hollow that only infinite nothingness was capable of filling me up.