The Mighty Angel. Jerzy Pilch

good, namely good will (albeit unintentionally), since it was not inconceivable that the two writers recognized in each other’s work a certain close similarity of events and shared fortunes. Dr. Granada and the therapist Moses Alias I Alcohol were silent.

      “In 1985 no one could have bought any kind of bottle for fifty zloties,” Don Juan the Rib finally pronounced from his seat by the wall, seemingly resolving the dispute in favor of Joanna.

      I listened to the verdict with bated breath and did not say a single word, though I should have, I indubitably should have, in every respect I should have spoken up; after all, I was the author of both contested pieces of writing.

      When I was brought to the alco ward I was wearing a shirt that stank of vomit and a pair of pants fit only to be burned in the boiler-room incinerator. I did not have a penny on me, not a single cigarette; I had no underwear, no soap, no toothbrush, nothing. And yet after only a week, or at the very most two, I began to wallow in possessions. Now, after six months (not counting the breaks after which I returned here unconscious), I am wearing a stylish grass-green track suit. Five-zloty coins jingle in the breast pocket of the jacket; on my nightstand there are piles of bananas, oranges, chocolate candies, and other edibles. When I open the drawer, I see utterly endless supplies of cigarettes. Every chocolate, every five-zloty coin, every pack of Camels, every tin of pineapple compote represents at least one drinking confession or one emotional journal that I have written.

      When the news went round the ward (and it went round, if not at the speed of lightning, then at least at the speed of a speeding arrow) that in civilian life I was a writer, the alcos, who had little proficiency in that department, collectively began to turn to me for help, not of a disinterested kind of course. I helped them, though, with a clear conscience. I didn’t write for them so much as commit their speech to paper. (Of course there were cases where it was necessary to alter something on someone else’s behalf—for example on behalf of the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World everything had to be written from A to Z—but usually I just wrote down what they recounted. They told me stories from their lives, while I, introducing only minor stylistic improvements, in practical terms recorded their speech word for word.) After all, it’s no great literary or existential secret that everyone knows how to talk, whereas very few people are able to write down what they say. True, I sometimes adapted their overly smooth language to give it a necessary, and thus believable, unevenness of style; but if those adaptations had any meaning for anyone, and if they had an influence on anyone, that person was me and not them.

      Thus, I was not a writer creating fictions which were then signed with other people’s names. I was the secretary of their minds. Both Joanna and Marianna had dictated their nightmares to me, while I—of this I am certain—had transcribed both nightmares literally. And I am also certain that Marianna had spoken with great feeling, with great certainty, and still with great fear of the fifty-zloty bill she had taken from her husband’s pocket.

      Chapter 5

      Prolegomena to Ideal Order

      It’s said that an excessive fondness for order indicates a poor condition of the nerves, and in my case this is in fact true: I have an excessive fondness for order and my nerves are in a state of utter disintegration. Physical objects are continually on the offensive, and they need to be opposed. Sooner or later this battle turns into a futile tilting at windmills, but for a while, in the modest confines of five hundred and twenty square feet (two rooms and a kitchen), objects can be tamed. In addition, a person quite simply forgets, forgets where things were put. In saying this I am not presenting some smug argumentation, I’m not puffing myself up like a third-rate thespian and announcing that for a mind preoccupied with inquiries of the greatest significance it is harmful to be thinking constantly of trivialities—this I am not saying, though it may be the truth, this I am not saying, though it almost certainly is not the truth. Take the apple that fell on Sir Isaac Newton’s head—was it or was it not a triviality? A cosmic triviality? There is no other kind of triviality than the cosmic kind. But, by a hundred thousand truckloads of beer! There’s no need to invoke the principles of the universe in defense of perpetually disappearing cigarette lighters, coin purses, documents, fountain pens and ball-point pens, manuscripts, typescripts, books, socks, ashtrays, scarves, gloves, et cetera. Just as there is no need to adduce in this matter, the matter of the disarray of objects, an argument concerning “inquiries of the greatest significance.” Constant attention to trivialities needn’t always disturb “inquiries of the greatest significance,” it’s enough for it to disturb everyday inquiries, and it does disturb them, it disturbs them calamitously, if one conducts one’s inquiries in complete sentences. I, for example, conduct my inquiries in complete sentences. More: with desperate obstinacy I keep myself alive by thinking in complete sentences. And this is no graphomaniac literary workout, though thinking in whole sentences is of prime significance for literature. It is with an acute sense of distress that I imagine the moment when the last paragraphs, sentences, and fragments of sentences will vanish from my head and the only thing left there will be illegible manuscripts, phantoms of names, specters, nothing more. The heroic-comic choice between dementia and death does not amuse me in the slightest.

      When one thinks in whole sentences, then, however isolated, simple, and underdeveloped they may be, it is quite impossible to be thinking constantly about trivialities, about where one put one’s keys. One’s keys should always be where they are supposed to be. It may be that the constant formulation of sentences about lost keys would constitute a remarkable form of literature for the chosen few, but remarkable forms of literature for the chosen few need to be produced in moderation. Keys should be where they’re supposed to be. Keys should be where they’re supposed to be? Dear Lord, dear Lord, you who do everything for me, dear Lord, it that the reason I’m composing this treatise on my despair? Is it for this that I fritter away hours of my time with pen in hand? So my addled brain can discover the Newtonian truth that keys should be where they’re supposed to be? It’s for such a truth that I’ve wasted my life? It’s for such a truth that my hands shake and my liver horripilates? It’s for such a truth that I’ve descended to the bottom of the abyss? On the other hand, keys should be where they’re supposed to be. If Joanna Catastrophe had kept her keys where they were supposed to be, I would have loved her, she would have been the love of my life, the love of the evening of my life; we would have been together.

      Chapter 6

      Joanna Catastrophe

      Joanna Catastrophe was beautiful, wise, and tall. Nothing but pluses. Besides—something that for me is of first-rate importance—she wore first-rate clothes and used first-rate cosmetics. But Joanna Catastrophe would come into my apartment and plop down her coat, plop down her pumps, and plop down her handbag. After fifteen minutes of Joanna Catastrophe on my territory (the territory she herself inhabited—her girlhood room in a suburban dwelling—is beyond description), my territory would start to resemble . . . My first instinct was to write: the apocalypse, but no. First of all, to my ear that would sound too comical: the apocalypse after the arrival of the catastrophe; second, it would not be the truth, since it was not the beginning of an apocalypse but the beginning of a carnival, which incidentally was a hundred times worse than an apocalypse—after an apocalypse there would be little left to tidy up, whereas after Joanna Catastrophe I and the objects that belonged to me took the longest time to regain our composure.

      Plop went the muffler, plop went the headscarf, plop went the coffee cup, plop went the blouse, plop went the newspaper, plop went the book, plop went the skirt. “Joanna,” I explained patiently, “freedom isn’t about leaving your best moccasins in the middle of the room.”

      Had this disorder simply been a token of voracious sensuality, it wouldn’t have mattered so much. Our bodies fling themselves on one another hungrily, tear off their clothing, and, like in a French or American romantic movie, shoes, dress, panty hose, shirt, black jeans, frilly undies, and boxer shorts form a path across the thick emerald-green carpet to the Hollwoodesque bed. Joanna, however, didn’t create chaos around herself only on the way to bed. On the way to bed, as it happened, she (we) created the least chaos; our sensuality was indeed voracious, but we were both familiar with the principles of the art and in the interests of intensifying its sensuality we moderated its