Hospital of the Transfiguration

by Stanisław Lem

  That formal “younger Mr. Trzyniecki” reflected the efforts of Uncle Leszek, who had always drilled the help when he stayed at Ksawery’s. Stefan, taken by surprise, bolted from the table, mumbled an excuse, and ran for the hallway. It was bright there, and with the light streaming through the glass of the veranda he could not make out the newcomer’s face, just his silhouette against the glare. The stranger was wearing an overcoat, holding his cap, and it took Stefan a moment to recognize him.

  “Staszek! What are you doing here—I wasn’t expecting you.”

  He led the guest into the drawing room and almost violently pulled the fur-collared coat off him. He took it to the vestibule, came back, sat his guest in an armchair, and pulled up a chair for himself. “So, how are you? What’s new? Where’ve you been staying?”

  Stanisław Krzeczotek, a classmate of Stefan’s at the university, smiled with a mixture of confusion and satisfaction. He was a little taken aback by Stefan’s animation. “Well, nothing much. I’m working not far from here, in Bierzyniec. Yesterday I happened to hear about the funeral, I mean, that your uncle… He paused for a second, avoiding Stefan’s gaze, then went on. “So I thought I might find you here. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes, a long time,” Stefan said. “You’re working in Bierzyniec? No kidding! What are you, a district doctor? But Uncle Ksawery…”

  “No, I’m working in the asylum. With Pajączkowski. Come on, you know the place.”

  “Oh, the asylum. You mean you’re a psychiatrist? That’s a surprise.”

  “For me, too, but there was a vacancy, and an advertisement by the Medical Association… before September, you know.”

  Krzeczotek began explaining how he came to be in Bierzyniec. He told the story in his usual way: slowly, with innumerable unimportant details. As always, Stefan got impatient and urged him along with questions that ran ahead of the narrative. And all the while he looked at his friend with unconcealed delight. They had met in the first year of medical school, brought together by their mutual lack of enthusiasm for working with cadavers. Staszek lived near Stefan and suggested that they study together, since textbooks cost so much and it was not easy to study alone for long periods. Stefan had noticed Staszek, but had not approached him, sensing a touch of the star pupil in him, something he couldn’t stand. It wasn’t until they had been to some dances and parties together that he started to trust him. Staszek was always the life of the party. Once he got to know him better, though, Stefan realized that the boisterousness and cheer were only on the surface. Staszek was so full of anxieties, he could never make up his mind about anything. Examinations, classmates, cadavers, professors, women—he was afraid of everything. With great skill he had devised himself a mask of merriment, which he discarded with relief whenever he could. Stefan was especially fascinated to discover that although girls liked Staszek and laughed at his jokes, he could charm them only in a group. Even with just two girls he did well enough, bouncing back and forth between them with clever flirtation, but with only one girl he was hopeless. There comes a time when you have to forget the jokes and become serious, but Staszek just couldn’t do it. Everyone realized that dancing, flirting, and light banter were a sort of preparatory action, like a peacock reading its tail for the peahen. But that was as far as Staszek’s social talents went.

  Stefan discovered this by tracing his friend’s amazing transformations: leaving a gathering where he had sparkled, he turned silent and morose. This was followed by long talks between the two of them, autumn walks in the park, evenings spent wrestling with philosophical conundrums: heated arguments, efforts to find “the ultimate truth” or “the meaning of life” and similar ontological deliberations. Neither of them was capable of such incisive reasoning on his own. They catalyzed, complemented each other. But not in personal matters. Staszek propounded a theory to explain his erotic defeats: he did not believe in love. He liked to read about love, but did not believe in its existence. “Look,” he said, “just read Abderhalden! If you inject a female monkey with prolactin and stick a puppy in the cage with her, she immediately starts caressing it and taking care of it. But two or three days later she’ll eat the beloved doggie. That’s mother love for you, the most sublime of all feelings—a few chemicals in the blood!”

  Secretly Stefan felt superior to his classmate. Staszek had a round, plump moon-face, though his body was thin. He had a good-humored potato nose, the tip constantly plagued by a big pimple. He froze in winter because he considered going without long underwear a sign of manhood. And he spent three-quarters of every year hopelessly, obviously, and comically in love. They spoke a great deal about life in general, but very little about their own lives. Yet now, sitting on the damask seat-covers in Uncle Ksawery’s shadowy drawing room, it was hard to plunge straight into the refuge of philosophizing. When Staszek finished his story, there was an uncomfortable silence. In an effort to break it, he asked Stefan about his professional life.

  “Me? Well, for the moment I’m not doing anything. Not working anywhere. And with the Germans now, the Occupation, I don’t know. I’m looking. I’ll have to find some position somewhere, but I haven’t really thought about it too specifically yet,” Stefan said, speaking more and more slowly as he went on. They both fell silent again. Stefan was disappointed at how little they had to say to each other, and desperately sought a subject. More to keep the conversation going than out of any real curiosity, he asked, “So how is it in the asylum? Do you like it there?”

  “Ah, the asylum.”

  Staszek perked up and seemed about to say something, when suddenly he stopped, his eyes wide, and his face lit up. “Stefan, listen! I just thought of it right now, but so what? Archimedes also, you know! Listen, why don’t you come to work at the asylum? Why not? It’s a good place, you’d get some specialization, you know the area here, it would be quiet, interesting work, and you’d have plenty of time to do research—I remember you always wanted to do research.”

  “Me? The asylum?” Stefan asked in amazement. “Just like that? I only came here for the funeral, you know. But it really doesn’t matter to me…” He stopped, not sure whether the last words sounded wrong, but Staszek hadn’t noticed anything. They spent the next fifteen minutes going over the subject, discussing what it would be like if Stefan took the position, because there was indeed an opening for a doctor at the asylum. Staszek answered Stefan’s doubts one after the other: “So what if you didn’t specialize in psychiatry? Nobody’s born a specialist. Your colleagues would be first class, believe me! Well actually I guess doctors are like everybody else—some better, some worse. But they’re all interesting. And it’s such an easy place! It’s like being outside the Occupation, in fact it’s even like being outside the world!” Staszek got so excited that he turned the asylum into a kind of extraterrestrial observatory, a delicious solitude in which a man naturally endowed with a fine intellect could develop in peace. They talked and talked, Stefan totally unconvinced that anything would come of it but nonetheless encouraging his friend for fear of the vacuum that beckoned beyond the borders of this last topic.

  There was a knock at the door. Uncle Anzelm and the aunts were leaving for the station. By rights, Stefan should have gone with them, but he managed to get out with a frantic kissing of hands and a barrage of bows. Aunt Aniela seemed to be in a good mood, which under different circumstances would have upset Stefan—he remembered what Ksawery had told him—but he was in too much of a hurry to get back to Staszek to be indignant. This renewed, albeit final contact with the family—Anzelm’s arrogance as he put his arms around Stefan for a kiss but only brushed his face with a stubbly cheek, the idiotic injunctions and advice of Aunt Melania—made Staszek’s proposition seem much more attractive. But when he returned to find his friend gazing at the old engravings on the drawing-room wall with affected nonchalance, he felt uncertain again. In the end, after carefully considering the pros and cons, he announced that he would go home to settle certain things (t
his was a fiction, there was nothing to settle, but it sounded plausible). Then—after a certain length of time (he emphasized this, so as not to look too much like a swine afterward)—he would come back to Bierzyniec.

  At noon Stefan bid his uncle a polite but reserved farewell and left for the station. Staszek went with him; he could take the same train as far as Bierzyniec.

  It was a warm spring-like day. The melting snow made gurgling streams that turned the road into a quagmire. Stefan and Staszek said little as they slogged along, partly because negotiating the puddles demanded attention, but also because there was nothing to say. They killed time at the station, smoking cigarettes the way they used to between lectures, the lighted ends cupped in their hands, until the train came. As the train pulled in, Staszek looked at it aghast and decided to go on foot. The ears were bursting with people. They were pressed against the windows, sitting on the roofs, hanging on to every rail, handle, and step. When the train stopped and was invaded by the mob of peasants and shoppers waiting to get on, it was an outright battle. Stefan vented an aggression he would not have expected of himself, pushing and shoving among the sheepskins as if his life depended on it. The train was already moving when he obtained a toehold on the edge of a wooden step. With both hands he grabbed the overcoats and furs of the people hanging from the door above him. But when he realized that he would not last more than a few minutes in that position, he jumped. The train was moving so fast that he nearly fell, but somehow he escaped with no more than a good spray of dirty snow and slush. When he turned from the tracks, flushed with effort and anger, he saw Staszek’s indulgent, amiable smile. This only fanned his anger, but his friend called from a distance, “Take it easy, Stefan. It’s fate, not me. Come on, we’ll walk to Bierzyniec together.”

  Stefan stood there indecisive for a moment and was about to say something—not about the vague things he had to “settle,” but about clean clothes and soap. With an energy unusual for him, Staszek took him by the arm and told him that at the asylum he would find whatever he needed, and he did it so warmly that Stefan smiled, waved away his reservations, and slopped through the mud with his friend toward the three humps of the Bierzyniec Hills that loomed brightly on the horizon.

  THE GENIUS

  From Nieczawy to Bierzyniec it was twelve kilometers of winding, sodden clay road. When they reached the top of the highest hill, the road dropped into a deep channel that led through a narrower but equally marshy passage until a gentle rise with young forest on the southern slope suddenly appeared from behind a clump of trees. Massive buildings ringed by a brick wall loomed on the ridge. An asphalt road led up to the main gate. Out of breath after their brisk hike, they stopped a few hundred meters short of their goal. From this height Stefan had a view of a wide, gently rolling space with fog creeping in here and there in the setting sun. The melting snow reflected strange colors. A notched stone arch with an indistinct inscription, both its ends hidden in bushes, rose in front of the black gate. When they got closer, Stefan made out the words CHRISTO TRANSFIGURATO.

  Hastily crunching through puddles still frozen in shady spots, they reached the gate. A fat, bearded porter let them in. Staszek went into feverish but subdued action. He ordered Stefan to wait in an empty room on the ground floor while he looked for the head doctor. Stefan paced the flagstone floor staring vacantly at the patterns of a fresco partly covered by plaster; there was a sort of pale gold halo and, just where the blue plaster began, a mouth opened as if to scream or sing. He turned around when he heard steps. Staszek, already wearing a long white smock with cuffs beginning to fray from too much laundering, had returned sooner than he expected. He looked taller and thinner in the smock, and his round face beamed with satisfaction.

  “Perfect,” he said, taking Stefan by the arm. “I’ve already talked everything over with Pajpak. He’s our boss. His name is Pajączkowski, but he stutters, so… but you must be hungry, admit it! Don’t worry, we’ll take care of everything right away.”

  The doctors roomed in a separate building, attractive, cozy and bright. Comfort of a high order was the rule. In the room Staszek brought him to, Stefan found hot running water and a sink, a bed with something clinical about it, light, somewhat austere furniture, and even three snowdrops in a glass on the table. But the most important thing was the absence of the smell of iodine or any other hospital odors. As Staszek chattered on without stopping to take a breath, Stefan tried the spigots, inspected the bathroom, tested the delightfully roaring shower, came back into the room, drank coffee with milk, smeared something yellow and salty on a roll and ate it—all out of friendship, so that Staszek could savor the fruits of his provident care.

  “Well? What do you think?” Staszek asked when Stefan had finally examined everything and finished eating.

  “Of what?”

  “Of everything. The world.”

  “Is that an invitation to philosophize?” Stefan said, unable to hold back his laughter.

  “What do you mean, philosophize? The world—these days, that means the Germans. Everybody says they’ll get it in the end, but I’m not so sure, I’m sorry to say. They’re already talking about management changes—apparently a Pole can’t be director. But nothing’s settled yet. Anyway, first of all you have to get to know the place. Then you can choose a department. There’s no hurry. Take a good look first.”

  It occurred to Stefan that Staszek sounded just like Aunt Skoczyńska, but he only asked, “Where are… they?”

  Through the window he could see misty flower beds, indistinct pavilions, and a tower in the distance, Turkish or Moorish, he wasn’t sure which.

  “You’ll see them, don’t worry. They’re all over. But relax. You won’t be going on the wards today. I’ll explain it all to you, so you won’t get lost. This, my friend, is a madhouse.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t think you do. You took a psychiatry course and observed one patient, a neurological case, true?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you see. Therapy? Nothing to it. Under the age of forty, a lunatic has dementia praecox. Cold baths, bromine, and scopolamine. Over forty, dementia senilis. Scopolamine, bromine, and cold showers. And electroshock. That’s all there is to psychiatry. But here we are just a tiny island in a really weird sea. Pm telling you, if it wasn’t for the personnel… Anyway, you’ll pick it up soon enough. It would be worth it to spend your life here. And not necessarily as a doctor.”

  “As a patient, you mean?”

  “As a guest. We have guests too. You can meet some eminent people here. Don’t laugh, I’m serious.”

  “Such as?”

  “Sekułowski.”

  “The poet? The one who…”

  “Yes, he’s here with us, more or less. That is, how should I put it? A drug addict. Morphine, cocaine, peyote even, but he’s off that now. He’s staying here, as if he was on vacation. Hiding from the Germans, in other words. He writes all day, and not poems either. Philosophical thunderbolts. You’ll see! Look, I have evening rounds now. I’ll see you in half an hour.”

  Staszek left. Stefan stood at the window for a while, then walked around his new quarters again. He was somehow taking everything in, not by consciously focusing on objects, but just by standing there, passive. He felt a new layer of sensations settling over the experiences of the past few days, a geology of memory taking shape, a sunken lower stratum made of dreams, and an upper stratum, more fluid, susceptible to the influences of the outside world.

  He stood in front of the mirror, looking intently at his own face. His forehead could have been higher, he thought, and his hair more definite, either completely blond or brown. Only his beard was really dark, making him look as though he always needed a shave. Then there were his eyes—some people called them chestnut, others brown. He was indeterminate. Except for the nose he had inherited from his father; sharp and hooked, “a greedy nose,” his mother called it. He relaxed and then tensed his face so that his features looked more noble. One
grimace led to another, and he made face after face until finally he spun away and walked to the window.

  “If I could just stop aping myself!” he thought angrily, “I should become a pragmatist. Action, action, action.” He remembered something his father used to say: “A man who has no goal in life must create one for himself.” It was better to have a whole set of goals, short- and long-term. Not vague ones like “be brave” or “be good,” but things like “fix the toilet.” He longed intensely for the lot of a simple person.

  “God! If only I could plow, sow, reap, and plow again. Or hammer stools together or weave baskets and carry them to market.” The career of a village sculptor whittling saints or of a potter baking a red-glazed rooster struck him as the pinnacle of happiness. Peace. Simplicity. A tree would be a tree, period. None of that idiotic, pointless, exhausting thinking: Why the hell does it grow, what does it mean that it’s alive, why are there plants, why is it what it is and not something else, is the soul made of atoms? Just to be able to stop for once! He started pacing, getting more and more annoyed. Luckily, Staszek came back from his rounds. Stefan suspected that Staszek felt confident in this hospital, like a one-eyed man among the blind. He was a gentle lunatic, a lunatic on a small scale, and so must seem uncommonly well-adjusted in this background of raving madness.