Jerzy Pilch - The Mighty Angel

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Quieting ourselves was the goal of our lives; it was our prayer and our God (or alternatively, in the local lingo: our higher power, however we chose to understand that). Quieting ourselves was our Promised Land, toward which we were guided by our she-therapists, under the leadership of the therapist Moses alias I Alcohol. Dr. Granada engaged us in philosophical debates about life and death. Nurse Viola and the other nurses did what nurses do: they administered drips, gave injections, and distributed vitamins and sedatives and mineral complexes for our thoroughly depleted bodies; whereas the therapists guided us toward the Promised Land of quiet. All the therapists had themselves long ago become exceptionally quiet; they were professionally quiet, they were virtuosos of quietness. They could tell at a single glance the extent of our quietness, so as to determine, to an inch, the distance that still separated us from the Promised Land of absolute quiet. The therapist Quasi Moses alias I Alcohol (the first part of his name came from his role as a leader, not from his faith) was perceptive to a god-like degree. The therapist Quasi Moses alias I Alcohol had undoubtedly met with the God of quiet on the mountaintop, and the Almighty had imparted to him all there is to know on the subject of quieting oneself. The therapist Quasi Moses alias I Alcohol looked at a person who had not sufficiently quieted himself and said to the insufficiently quieted person: “Quiet yourself!” And the person immediately quieted himself.

I remember as if it were yesterday the precise day of my face-to-face meeting with the therapist Moses alias I Alcohol. It was on Thursday, July 6, 2000 precisely. I remember precisely that it was on that very day I had written the first paragraphs in the emotional journal of the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, in civilian life a long-haul truck driver who transported fruit to countries east of us. The Most Wanted Terrorist in the World had given me an exceedingly cursory account of his life story; he had spoken disjointedly and it was impossible to follow. Dictation, even subconscious dictation, was in this case out of the question, as was the notion that he himself should write anything. I hesitated to take on the task of writing for him in the fullest sense, both mechanically and mentally; I was reluctant to assume the character of the narrator — a long-haul truck driver transporting fruit to countries east of us. I hesitated, but the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World offered me a small bottle of Polo Sport cologne, and I could not resist the temptation. All colognes and deodorants were strictly forbidden on the alco ward, but I was obsessed during this particular stay of mine by the idea that my whole body, and my whole expensive track suit, were permeated with the odor of madmen’s pajamas.

All around the alco ward were the brick-built residences of the insane, set amid untended, overgrown gardens. At the height of noon these gardens would fill with noisy throngs of schizophrenics and suicides clad in striped pajamas; dense yellowish-gray clouds of odor from the blue-and-white pajamas and the farinaceous bodies they contained drifted over the gardens; I was unable to rid myself of the notion that one of these clouds had encircled me and soaked into me.

I accepted the small bottle of Polo Sport cologne from the shaking hands of the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World; I promised myself I would use it discreetly, in any case in such a way as to evade the matchless sense of smell of Nurse Viola, who from a distance of several dozen yards (and, I repeat, by smell alone) was capable of determining what kind of alcohol, consumable or non-consumable, a person had had (internal or external) contact with. I accepted the small bottle, hiding it in a hiding place the whereabouts of which I will not reveal, and in return I undertook to keep a journal of someone else’s emotions.

On July 6th, at four-thirty in the morning, I sat down at the table in the writing room, and in the upper left-hand corner of a blank sheet of A4 paper I wrote the date: 7/6/2000.

“I’ve come to the end of the first week of my stay. It’s half past five in the morning. It’s raining. In half an hour the wake-up bell will ring. I’m sitting in the quiet room and writing my emotional journal. At the moment in my heart I’m feeling despair. What is the state of soul of a person who wakes up at the beginning of July on an alco ward, knowing he has to spend the whole summer here? The rain outside the window depresses me and at the same time it’s a relief. It depresses me because if it keeps raining till Sunday, then on Sunday when my girlfriend comes to visit I won’t know where to go with her. The rain is a relief because if the weather were hot I’d regret even more the vacation I already paid for but wasted because of my drinking rampage. I’d always be imagining my girlfriend and me lying on the beach, and my despair would be even greater.

“Yesterday at the evening community meeting we said goodbye to the people who were leaving. I was jealous and I wanted to be one of them. Homeless Czesław, who was supposed to give the last farewell speech, read a poem he had written instead of giving a speech. When he finished, Nurse Viola told him he would have to repeat the whole cure from the beginning. It’s just as well I don’t know how to write poetry.”

I felt suddenly tired. I felt that writing alcos’ confessions, assignments, and emotional journals exhausted me in general, while in particular I felt that writing the counterfeit journal of the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World was beyond my strength. For some time I had suspected, and at this moment I became certain, that the unending labor of reproducing the crude style of the alcos was having an impact on my own exquisite turn of phrase. Further hours of struggle over the composition of further syntactically challenged simple sentences would be harmful to my work, and in addition, as I already said, I no longer had the heart for it. True, I could have raised the price of my writing services, but then the alcos, who were poor as church mice as it was, would be completely wiped out, and when all was said and done the payment they offered in the form of five-zloty coins, or cigarettes, or other sorts of fees, was my only source of income. I chose a more honorable way out: I decided to write freely, I decided not to put a stranglehold on my own song and not to hold back with my own personal éclat ; at the very end, though, I planned to edit the text by filtering out its stylistic elegance and erudite references in such a way as to make it look like a genuine alco manuscript scribbled laboriously by a trembling hand.

“By profession I am a truck driver. The last few years I worked for a company that delivers fruit to countries east of us. The work was dangerous but paid well. You also had to do a lot of drinking in all kinds of places. A truck carrying fruit can’t wait for too long. A truck carrying fruit can’t just stand for a week either when it’s being loaded up, or on the way, or at the border. To move things along, to get things going, to allow my truck with its fruit to be on its way, I’d have to buy vodka for the loaders, the warehouse men, the policemen, and the customs officials. I drank with the Poles, and I drank with the Russkies. My boss — the head of shipping for the company that delivers fruit to countries east of us — would reimburse me for the money I had to spend on vodka so as to clear my way. He was a good man, though he didn’t drink at all. So I feel all the worse about what I did. And what I did was, the last time I came back from Russia I was completely drunk. Actually, that in itself was nothing special, things like that had happened to me before. But this time, when I came back from Russia in a state of intoxication, I had a yen (right away! right away!) to have a chat with my boss, I had a yen to clear my head a little in the aura of amiable sobriety that surrounded the man, and I knocked on the door of the head of shipping, and I went in, and sat down, and began a conversation that I don’t remember. My boss saw the condition I was in and gave me coffee. I downed the coffee in one go and suddenly felt sick. An important fact was that outside there was a severe frost, while in my boss’s office it was very hot; the change of temperature must have had a debilitating effect on me. My boss spoke to me in an amiable manner, yet I, ignoring the likelihood that my behavior would be construed as impolite, rose from my seat because I thought I would make it. Unfortunately I did not make it. As I stood up I felt myself gripped by a fearful inner spasm, and a frothy stream of puke issued forth from me, and I threw up all over a map of the Polish-Russian border that was lying on my boss’s desk. My boss watched in dismay as brown trickles of my puke traversed the River Bug, speeding like long-haul trucks over the border crossings at Brześć and Medyka and Terespol, sneaking like masterful smugglers across the unpatrolled sectors of the frontier, engulfing the watchtowers and the contrabandists’ hideaways, streaming into the outskirts of Sokółka, flooding the market square in Bobrowniki, and flowing through Siemiatycze.