Jerzy Pilch: The Mighty Angel

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.

JERZY PILCH is one of Poland’s most important contemporary writers and journalists. In addition to his long-running satirical newspaper column, Pilch has published several novels, and has been nominated for Poland’s prestigious NIKE Literary Award four times; he finally won the Award in 2001 for The Mighty Angel . His novels have been translated into many languages, and in 2002, Northwestern University Press published His Current Woman, Pilch’s only other book in English translation.

BILL JOHNSTON is Director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University. In addition to Jerzy Pilch, he has translated the work of Witold Gombrowicz, Magdalena Tulli, and Stefan Zeromski, among others. In 1999 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship for Translation. In 2005 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and in 2008 he won the inaugural Found in Translation Award — presented annually to the translator of the finest Polish-English literary translation of the year — for Tadeusz Różewicz’s New Poems .