The Mighty Angel

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 stadium 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.