The Mighty Angel

Chapter 24. Simon’s Undescribed Escape

NIGHT HAS FALLEN over the alco ward. The routed army lies side by side, the hallway lit by a single bulb; they are sleeping. (One of them, however, is not sleeping; he sees freedom beyond the mist.) Simon Pure Goodness wakes from a shallow, vigilant doze, gets up, takes a canvas bag from under his bed and soundlessly, so as not to rouse his sleeping roommate, starts to pack. Simon Pure Goodness does not like his sleeping roommate. He struggles with this feeling, constantly repeating “love thine enemy” to himself, constantly reminding himself of the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous; but hostility is in his heart. His sleeping roommate snores, and Simon cannot sleep at nights. Simon’s sleeping roommate borrowed ten zloties from him, and Simon knows he will never see the money again, though now especially, when he has decided to escape, every penny would be worth its weight in gold. Simon’s sleeping roommate uses Simon’s cigarette lighter and pen without asking, and Simon lacks the inner strength to bring this up with him. The other man, however, has no qualms about reminding Simon to close his cabinet and to sweep the room properly when it’s his turn. At such moments Simon not only has hostility in his heart, he becomes the very embodiment of hostility.

“What is hostility?” asked the therapist Moses alias I Alcohol in one of his talks. “What is hostility?” he repeated, and when the silence in the lecture theater became unbearable he presented, and subsequently dictated, the definition of hostility to the forlorn alcos. “Hostility,” wrote the half-dead army in sluggish unison, “hostility is rage,” wrote Simon along with all the others, “hostility is rage directed against someone or something.” Simon read the definition he’d written down in a cheap sixty-page notebook; his mind cleared, and he suddenly felt uneasy. In Simon’s opinion, if he had been able to express his opinion, an excessive clarity of mind leads to nervous disorders. To know something fully means not to have any reserves of knowledge on a given subject, and when a person has no reserves they feel foolish; at such times a person feels as if they were about to run out of cigarettes. Not “a person” but I Simon, not “they” but I Jerzy. And not “feels,” but “drinks. .”

•

Could the cute young she-therapist Kasia have been right? Was it actually possible I no longer felt like writing about drinking? Or maybe I no longer felt like writing because I no longer felt like drinking? As I wrote I was trying to keep up with my writing about drinking and with my giving up drinking, and I lost the chase, or maybe I won the chase? Or maybe the same thing happened to me that happened to Marcel Proust? Pourquoi pas? Warum nicht? Pochemu nyet? In Proust — an interpretation I remember from Professor Błoński’s lectures twenty-eight years ago — in Proust then, the lost time of the hero is the recovered time of the narrator. With me it’s almost the same: I, Jerzy the narrator, am not only recovering the lost time of the Drunkard protagonist, I’ve also found the thing he has been looking for in vain from the very first sentence. On the way I’m recovering the wasted, drunk-away time of the other characters. Between myself and my characters there are at times very few differences. (There’s no contradiction here with what is said elsewhere in this epic poem.) Between myself and myself there are also only a few subtle distinctions; because of this it may even be the case that the Drunkard is the narrator, while Jerzy is searching in vain for a last love before death, and when it comes down to it they are interchangeable.

In other words not Don Juan the Rib but I Don Juan the Rib. Not Dr. Granada but I Dr. Granada. Not Nurse Viola but I Nurse Viola. Und so weiter.

I don’t speak any foreign languages, but the she-therapists exert such a profound influence on me that I sometimes have the feeling that any minute now I’m going to start speaking foreign languages. My German, sent to sleep in my childhood, will awaken; my schoolboy Russian will grow khorosho in both spoken and written form; my never properly learned English will become proper. Speaking in tongues would not be the strangest thing to happen on the alco ward.

Simon Pure Goodness looks around at the countenances of his comrades in arms gathered in the lecture theater and he sees how after a week, or three weeks, or a month, those countenances have become less puffy and more refined, while noses lose their redness and eyes acquire a twinkle. The Hero of Socialist Labor has changed beyond recognition. Just recently his head was still as tumid as a neon light, his tufts of gray hair in disorder, his clothing awry, his hands atremble. And now how does he look? A slim, tan masculine face, a mane of hair, a smart red-and-black checked flannel shirt, hands firmly and precisely gripping a cup of ersatz coffee. The Hero of Socialist Labor now looks like Clint Eastwood’s older brother.

The alcos recover their sight, their hearing, and their speech. The Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, par exemple. I don’t know if I mentioned this, but an additional obstacle in writing down the Terrorist’s chaotic stories was the fact that he spoke in a hoarse inaudible whisper. It was the famous voice of the actor Jan Himilsbach at the point where it had almost completely disappeared, the vocal chords reduced to ashes. And now? A few weeks later? Now the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World not only speaks in such a way that he can be understood, now the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World speaks in such a way that immortalizing his speech is a task of the first importance. He stops me in the hallway and whispers confidentially in my ear:

“Don’t worry, Jerzy, don’t worry, they’ll find a medicine to cure our illness. I mean, they found something for Johnson’s.”

“If the graduates of this academy can go from apathetic muteness to the lucid production of such memorable turns of phrase in the space of a few short weeks,” whispers Christopher Columbus the Explorer to himself in rapturous admiration, “if that’s the case, then from now on, in the box marked Education on forms, I’m going to write that I have two degrees: one in philosophy and one in alcohology.”

Or the Sugar King. I’ve not written much about him because I don’t much like him. But he too has one affecting characteristic: he’s sensitive to the beauty of nature and the fate of stray animals. The entire army of alcos is almost without exception sensitive to the beauty of nature and the fate of stray animals. At dusk, wandering shades can be seen in the fields — the alcos are picking wild flowers. Legs afflicted with polyneuropathy carry them across the steaming meadows between the dormitories of the insane. The luxuriant bouquets decorate nightstands; the scent of cornflowers, camomile, and mimosa fills the ward like tear gas. They sleep, stifled by the smell and by their own weeping. In the dormitories of the insane, orange lights burn all night long; caterwauling can be heard at the foot of the walls. The innumerable cats have it good at this infirmary for paranoids. It’s impossible to look out of a barred or unbarred window and not see a band of felines crossing from one wing to another or moving from the forensic building to the neurology ward. There are more cats here than alcos, schizos, and suicides put together. And in the depths of the Sugar King’s unfeeling soul there is a great love of cats. Every evening the Sugar King wraps the paltry remains of his hospital dinner in a torn-out page from Gazeta Wyborcza and sneaks off to the day ward. From the opposite direction, from behind the brick wall, he’s met by an almost completely black cat by the name of Sky Pilot — he’s almost completely black, but round his neck he has a white mark that really does look like a dog collar. As to whether Sky Pilot and the Sugar King are dear friends, the answer is unclear. It’s unclear because for the sake of the Sugar King it does not wish to be in the negative.

Sky Pilot eats the leftover cold frankfurters or plain sausage; he sniffs unenthusiastically at an undercooked piece of chicken and for a moment, as if out of distraction, he lets the Sugar King pick him up. From behind the dingy windows of the neurology ward the patients, motionless as cadavers, watch a thickset man in an emerald-green track suit stroking and cuddling a cat; he presses his face to the dark fur and cries, tears running down the animal’s pitch-black coat. The Sugar King has been reminded of sorry things — a life wasted, parties long over, women lost. When did the Sugar King last pick up a cat? During the occupation? Under Stalinism? Not any later than that, for sure.

The ritual scene of feeding and weeping repeats every evening. But for a few days now it has not repeated. Sky Pilot has disappeared; he failed to come out from behind the brick wall at the established time. The Sugar King has walked the entire area, round all the wings; he even went through the dark woods down to the Utrata. Sky Pilot is nowhere to be found.

We’re not brave enough to openly poke fun at the Sugar King’s childlike despair; we merely cast hypocritically commiserative glances in his direction, while he glares at us through eyes that are as dead as pebbles in the Utrata and shouts:

“What do you expect of a cat? Why would a cat look at a person when it’s got cat-whores on every side? Cats aren’t able to jerk off, and you can’t argue with that!”

I’m not fond of the Sugar King, but I admit the difference between him and me is not so great. The difference between me and Simon Pure Goodness, on the other hand, is fundamental. Simon is escaping.

From the point of view of the further drinking of Żołądkowa Gorzka you can’t argue with it. If Simon had graduated in alcohology, if he’d diligently attended the lectures and the seminars, if he’d conscientiously kept his emotional journal and written all his confessions and assignments, if he had persevered — then it would have been much harder for him to drink than it will be after he escapes. After an escape from the Department of Alcohology it’s not only easier to drink, after an escape drinking is a higher imperative — and after all, why does one escape? Because of a higher imperative.

To graduate in alcohology and then keep on drinking is something of a faux pas. What will people say? They’ll say so-and-so, he studied alcohology and then when he graduated he kept on drinking, he’s a corpse now. Though people are one thing, people often saw me as a stinking corpse and I the corpse remained alive, and the people remained alive too. People are one thing, but what would the specters say, the ones I’ve been summoning for years through the drinking of successive bottles of Żołądkowa Gorzka? What would they say as they crowd around me? What would the green-winged angel with the build of a wrestler say? What would my grandfather Old Kubica say? What would my alleged Sunday School pal say, the one who smelled of cheap cologne?

I felt waves of hot and cold washing over me; I rested my forehead against the frost-covered window pane and saw cankerous innards pulsating beneath skin that was covered with piglike stubble.

“Get your things together and run away, run away as fast as you can.” His voice was remarkably similar to that of the alleged Józef Cieślar — the same good-natured tone of a G.P. on a house visit, a slightly different, shriller coloration, but good-natured nevertheless. I listened to him and did not feel the cold.

“Get your things together, run away; at any moment you can go wherever the mood takes you.”

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

“Fine, just fine”—I believe he gave a convulsive giggle—“I’m staying, he’s leaving. You’re talking like a member of the Politburo, that’s the first comparison that comes to mind. ‘Comrade, our cause is lost. You have to leave; I’m staying.’”

“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 and 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.