The Mighty Angel

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BEFORE THE MAFIOSI appeared in my apartment in the company of the dark-complexioned poetess Alberta Lulaj, before they wrenched me from my drunken sleep and set about demanding — first with dissembling pleas, then with ruthless threats — that I arrange for Alberta Lulaj’s poetry to be published in the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, before there began the tempestuous events I wish to recount, there was the eve of those events, there was the morning and the evening of the preceding day, and I, from the morning to the evening of the preceding day, had been drinking peach vodka. Yes indeed, I had been drinking peach vodka, brutishly longing for one last love before death, and immersed up to my ears in a life of dissolution.

Before midday nothing had happened; moderation, even a certain measured asceticism had held sway. Before midday I laid on the couch, read the newspapers, and listened to a record by the Czech tenor saxophonist Feliks Slovák. Yet around midday, of the broad range of melodies performed by Slovák one alone began to penetrate my consciousness; it was a composition by Karel Svoboda entitled “Where’ve you got your nest, little bird?” I listened and wondered to myself how it was in the original Czech: “Kde je tvoje hnízdo, ptáčátko?”, or “Kde je tvoje hnízdo, ptáčku?” I was, however, unable to determine which of the two diminutives—ptáčku, the weaker one, or ptáčátko, the stronger — sounded better and more appropriate, and thus with a feeling of linguistic helplessness (though still enraptured) I rose over and over again from the couch, went up to the record player, and kept playing the piece that had moved me to the core.

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