Heavenly father of mine and drunken father of mine, and drunken father of my drunken father, and all my drunken forefathers, and all my drunken ancestors, and also all those unrelated fatalists who have seen and who know where the constellation of the Mighty Angel is located, all of you who were born and who died in its blue-and-gold glow — accept my greeting.
You would be standing by me, barely able to keep on your feet, yet, true to your pedagogical and parental mission, you’d be standing by me. There was Grandma Maria, the owner of the slaughterhouse; there was Granddad Jerzy, the postmaster; and there was Granddad Kubica, a big farm-owner; and my father, an ever-so-young soldier in the Wehrmacht; and my mother, a pharmacology student; and there was Doctor Swobodziczka. You were all standing by me and with trembling hands and shaking fingers you would point out the constellations and the stars: the North Star, the Plow and the Great Bear, and Berenice’s Hair, and Andromeda, and the Pleiades, and the trail of the Milky Way. The river roared, the trees soughed, the mountains stood as they have always stood, unmoved by your words or your breath, and over everything, the length and breadth of it all, was the constellation of the Mighty Angel. In the darkness I could clearly see all the stars that comprised it: Seven stars made up its swaying body, three its raised head, four its tipped-back hat; five bright stars showed its raised arm, nine indicated its wings, and ten stars, fiery as orange-flavored vodka, formed the bottle pressed to its thirsty lips, which were marked by a single dark, dark star. Beneath its feet were the Centaur, the Water Snake, and the Scales; at its right hand were the Lion, the Herdsman, and the Virgin; at its left was the Lyre; and above it was darkness.
Chapter 16. Pastorale
WE WERE SITTING at the table with the suicides, and the nurses weren’t letting us out of their sight. Simon Pure Goodness was recounting for the hundredth time his fever of the previous year, during which a sleigh had been ridden through the air by the Angel Gabriel, or possibly by God himself. The paper tablecloths rustled as if starched, the candles shone, the suicides were beautiful and lost in thought, but they had come to the Christmas Eve dinner empty-handed, my Lord, and we didn’t forget that. We were sitting at the table: me, Don Juan the Rib, Fanny Kapelmeister, the Queen of Kent, Simon Pure Goodness, Christopher Columbus the Explorer, and the other less determinate characters, which is to say the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, the scornful Sugar King, the venerable Hero of Socialist Labor, and the suicides. The nurses weren’t letting us out of their sight, and since all of them had already wetted their Christmas whistle they kept a close watch, staring at us with the well-known intensity of the drunkard.
Long ago, in Old Poland, before the Berlin Wall came down, when there was no segregation into alcos, schizophrenics, and suicides — many years ago, when I was rising from the dead here for the first or third time — what a to-do there would be when one of the suicides would go missing, when one of them would get lost in the labyrinth of hallways, which were built all the way back in the time of Tsar Nicholas or the Emperor Franz Joseph! The male and female nurses, the doctors, the orderlies, the auxiliaries, the ambulance drivers — they all went looking for him — even the kitchen staff would climb the wooden ladder into the attic! Everyone knew he was most likely up there, hanging from a rafter, or bleeding to death in the small room behind the laundry, having slit his wrists with a piece of glass. But that never happened. The missing suicide was quickly found; he was usually standing motionless by the last window at the end of the hallway, gazing through the untouched, half-transparent pane at a snow-covered field, at the brick walls of the Austrian or Russian barracks, at the dense smoke rising from the burning pajamas of the insane or from the furnaces of the Lenin Steel Mill. From that time on I had a soft spot for suicides; I liked them for the gravity with which they stared at the grass, a fragment of wall, a dark cloud.
They came to the Christmas Eve dinner with empty hands, in pajamas and dressing gowns; every second one of them had bandaged wrists. The nurses from the suicide ward who brought them here were beautiful, dark-complexioned, and tense as devils. They evidently believed it was easier to watch over a fragment of wall or grass or sky as it vanished from the mind, without moving from where one is — which, let it be said openly, is a classic delusion of the young.
They came with empty hands, but we were ready with hospitality. The little tables in the rec room had been arranged into one single long table; if their laminated tops hadn’t been as hard as granite they would have sagged under the weight of the food. First of all there was barszcz with potatoes, then breaded cod, then Chinese instant soups of various kinds, different sorts of cheese, six different kinds at the very least, pickled cucumbers, any amount of pretzel sticks, potato chips, four cans of sardines, two jars of rollmops, oranges, tangerines, apples, bread rolls, yeast buns, and a box of candies — whatever anyone happened to have, whatever anyone had been given, whatever could be bought at the little store on the first floor. Dr. Granada had already shared the traditional Christmas wafer with us earlier in the afternoon; he had wished each of us good health and all the best, then he’d thrown his everlasting sheepskin round his shoulders, climbed into his Ford Sierra, and set off for some part of the world that was uncertain, quite unnecessary and, from our point of view, in all probability non-existent. Good health and best wishes, we repeated now with childlike seriousness; the suicides weren’t even able to say good health and best wishes, but merely returned the softest of handshakes, while the barely perceptible shadow of a smile passed over their romantic countenances. We ate in silence; the meal took its course without elaborate orations and without animated conversation. Only the Sugar King, who was wearing a garish emerald-green track suit, retained his usual pathetic nonchalance; he was crumbling his third packet of Chinese soup into his bowl and dissolving the dry powder, with a kind of villainous dexterity, in boiling water from a kettle as huge as a nightstand.
“Soup is the most important thing,” the Sugar King was saying, “soup is the foundation. Well-prepared soup is an absolutely crucial matter. The soup makes the home, you might say. In my home, I’m telling you, in my home there were four different kinds of soup for Christmas Eve dinner. That’s right,” he would repeat exultingly, “four different kinds: clear barszcz, barszcz with dumplings, mushroom soup, and żurek. And of course, on top of that there was carp, pike in jelly, bigos, kutia . .”