Place gently on my grave a ribboned spray
Of pearly worms. Let those worms crawl
Through my skull, a decaying ballet
Of ptomaine, raw flesh whitening, that’s all.
Then he bowed and turned toward the window, as if he could no longer see them.
“I thought I told you…” Staszek began as soon as they left.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You provoked him. You have to speak to him gently, and you put the pedal to the floor right away. You were more concerned with being right than with listening to him.”
“Did you like that poem?”
“In spite of everything, I have to say I did. God knows how much abnormality there is in genius sometimes, and vice versa.”
“So. Sekułowski the genius!” said Stefan, his feelings hurt as if he were the one being judged.
“I’ll give you his book. You haven’t read Blood without a Face, have you?”
“No.”
“It’ll knock you out.”
At that Staszek left Stefan, who realized that he was standing in front of his own door. He went inside to look for some piramidon in his drawer. He had a pounding headache.
During evening rounds, Stefan tried in vain to avoid the withered blonde. She pounced on him. He took her to Nosilewska’s office.
“Doctor, I want to tell you everything from the beginning,” she said, nervously wringing her emaciated fingers. “I was caught with lard on me. So I acted mad, because I was afraid they’d send me to a camp. But this is worse than a camp. I’m afraid of all these lunatics.”
Stefan asked her a series of questions.
“What’s your name?
“What’s the difference between a priest and a nun?
“What are windows for?
“What do you do in church?”
Her answers suggested that she was indeed completely normal.
“How did you manage to convince them?”
“Well, I have a sister-in-law at John the Divine’s, and I saw and heard. I pretend to talk to somebody who’s not there, I pretend to see him, and then the fun starts.”
“What am I supposed to do with you?”
“Let me out of here.” She reached out her hands to him.
“It’s not that simple, my dear lady. You’ll have to spend some time under observation.”
“How much time, doctor? Oh, why did I do it?”
“You wouldn’t be any better off in a camp.”
“But I can’t stand being with that woman who messes herself, doctor. Please. My husband will show his gratitude.”
“None of that,” Stefan said with professional indignation. Now he had hit upon the right tone. “I’ll have you transferred to the other room, where they’re more peaceful. You can go now.”
“It doesn’t even matter anymore now. They squeal and scream and sing and roll their eyes, and I’m afraid I’ll go crazy too.”
Over the next few days, Stefan got the hang of how to write a case history without thinking about it, stringing a few hackneyed phrases together. Almost everyone else did the same. He also figured Rygier out. The psychiatrist was undoubtedly an educated man, but his intelligence was like a Japanese garden: make-believe bridges and paths, very beautiful but quite narrow and purposeless. His understanding ran in grooves. The elements of his knowledge were cemented to each other so that he could use them only as if they were entries in a textbook.
After a week, Stefan no longer found the ward so revolting. Poor women, he thought, but some of them, especially the maniacs, prided themselves on a familiarity with the saints that went beyond the intent of church dogma.
Pajączkowski’s nameday fell on Sunday. The boss appeared in a freshly pressed coat, his sparse beard carefully combed. He blinked placidly behind his glasses like an old bird, as a woman schizophrenic from the convalescent wing recited a poem in his honor. Then an alcoholic sang. Last but not least was a choir of psychopaths, but they ruined the festivities by grabbing the old man and tossing him up toward the ceiling, above a net of upraised hands. With some effort, the old man was rescued from the patients. The doctors then formed up into a procession as in a cloister—the abbot at the front, the brothers behind—and went into the men’s ward, where a hypochondriac who was sure he had cancer made a speech, interrupted by three paralytics who suddenly broke into song—“The poor man died in an army hospital”—and could not be convinced to stop. Later there was a modest meal in the attic of the doctors’ building, and Pajpak tried to conclude the evening with a patriotic speech. It did not come off. The little old man’s head started trembling, he cried into his glass, spilled cumin-flavored vodka all over the table, and finally, to everyone’s relief, sat down.
DOCTOR ANGELICUS
Webs of intrigue were spread through the hospital, discreetly awaiting any newcomer’s first misstep. Someone was trying to oust Pajączkowski, weaving rumors about an imminent change of directors, rejoicing in every conflict, but Stefan observed this landscape of dwarfed personalities like someone staring into an aquarium, interested but detached.
He was drawn to the company of Sekułowski. They always parted amiably, but it annoyed Stefan that the poet felt so at home in his world of phantoms. Sekułowski treated him as no more than a sparring partner, regarding his own mind as the measure of all things.
Reports of mass arrests in Warsaw came in. There were rumors of the hurried creation of ghettos. Filtered through the hospital walls, however, such stories sounded misty and implausible. Many veterans of the September campaign who had temporarily lost their mental bearings during the fighting were now leaving the asylum. This made things slightly roomier; in some of the wards patients had been sleeping two and three to a bed.
But problems with provisions—especially medicines—were growing. Pajpak considered the problem carefully and then issued the most far-reaching measures of economy. Scopolamine, morphine, barbiturates, and even bromine were placed under lock and key. Insulin, which had been used for shock therapy, was replaced by cardiazol, and what was left of that was doled out sparingly. Statistics were vague. No clear trend in the census of the community of the mad had yet emerged from the oscillating figures. Numbers in some classifications shrank, others stagnated or rose. It was a time of indecision.
April arrived. Days of bright rain and greenery were interrupted by snowy spells that seemed to have been borrowed from December. Stefan woke early one Sunday with an emphatic sun dyeing his dreams purple through his eyelids. He looked out the window. The view was like a great painter’s sketch with a broad brush, and new variations of the same sketch followed, each containing fresh color and detail. Fleece-like fog crept through the long valley between ridges like the backs of sleeping animals, and black brushstrokes of branches were covered in the swell. Dark irregular shapes showed through the fog here and there, as if the brush had slipped. Then a trace of gold filtered into the white from above, there was an unsettled moment when white spirals appeared and drifted out to become a cloud on the horizon that soon thinned and receded until day shined through as pure as a bare chestnut.
Stefan went out for a walk. He left the road. Every scrap of ground was covered with green: it seethed in the ditches and spurted from beneath stones; blossoms were bursting, covering the distant trees in delicate celadon clouds. Exposed to the warm breeze, he tramped up a hill and reached its ridge through last year’s dry, rustling grass. The fields lay below like slightly soiled stripes in a peasant costume. Water droplets, blue and white, shimmered on every stalk, each one holding fragments of the image of the world. The distant forest angled toward the horizon like an underwater silver sculpture. The tops of trees on the slope below stood out against the sky, brown constellations of sticky buds. He walked in their direction. A mass of bushes blocked his way, and as he detoured around it, he heard heavy breathing.
He drew close to an entangled thicket. Sekułowski was kneeling inside it. Stefan could barely hear his laugh,
but it made his skin crawl.
“Come here, doctor,” the poet said without looking up.
Stefan pushed through the branches. In the middle was a circular clearing. Sekułowski was looking at a small mound of earth where thin files of ants moved around a reddish earthworm.
Stefan said nothing. Sekułowski looked him up and down, then stood up and commented, “This is only a model.”
He took Stefan by the arm and led him out of the thicket. The hospital was gray and small in the distance. The surgical wing shined like a child’s red block that had been dropped. Sekułowski sat in the grass and began to scribble rapidly in a notebook.
“Do you like to watch ants?” Stefan asked.
“I don’t like it, but sometimes I have to. Were it not for us, insects would be the most horrifying thing in nature. Because life is the opposite of mechanism, and mechanism the opposite of life. But insects are living mechanisms, a mockery, nature’s joke. Midges, caterpillars, beetles—we should tremble before them. Dread, the greatest dread.”
He bent his head and went on writing. Stefan looked over his shoulder and read out the last words: “…the world—battle between God and nothingness.”
He asked if it was going to be a poem.
“How should I know?”
“Who would know if not you?”
“And you want to be a psychiatrist?”
“Poetry takes a stand about two worlds: the one we can see and the one we have lived through,” Stefan began hesitantly. “Mickiewicz wrote, ‘Our nation, like lava…’”
“This is not a classroom,” Sekułowski interrupted in a murmur. “Mickiewicz could say what he wanted because he was a romantic, but our nation is like cow flop: dry on the outside and you know what on the inside. And not just ours, either. But please don’t talk to me about taking a stand, because it makes me sick.”
He surveyed the sunlit scene for a while.
“What is a poem, then?”
Sekułowski sighed.
“I see a poem as a multicolored strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments. I try to connect hands and horizons, glances and the objects imprisoned in them. That’s how it is in daylight. At night—because sometimes it happens at night—poems are like spiraling curves that grow to completeness by themselves. The hardest thing is to hold onto them through waking into consciousness.”
“That poem you recited the first time we met, was it day or night?”
“That was a day poem.”
Stefan tried to praise it, but was rebuffed sharply.
“Nonsense. You don’t understand at all. What do you know about poetry anyway? Writing is a damnable compulsion. Someone who can stand and watch the person he loves most die and, without wanting to, pick out everything worth describing to the last convulsion, that’s a real writer. A philistine would protest: how awful! But it’s not awful, it’s just suffering. It’s not a career, not something you pick like a desk job. The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don’t write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another. I have to create an artificial certainty. When those flakes of plaster fall away, I sense that deep down, behind the golden fragments, lies an unspeakable abyss. It’s there, for sure, but every attempt to reach it ends in failure. And my terror…”
He fell silent and took a deep breath.
“Every word I feel is the last. That I won’t be able to go on. Of course you don’t understand. You can’t. The fear—how can I explain it? Because words pour out of me like water coming under a door in a flood. I don’t know what’s behind the door. I don’t know if it’s the last wave. I can’t control the force of the flow. And you want me to take a stand. I can be free only through the people I write about, but that too is illusion.
“Who am I writing for? The days of the caveman are past. He ate the hot brains out of his friends’ skulls, and used his blood to draw works of art on the cave walls that have not been equaled since. The renaissance is gone, with its geniuses and heretics sizzling at the stake. The hordes who learned to ride the seas and winds have come and gone. Now we are in the era of dwarves quartered in barracks, music in tin cans, and helmets under which you cannot see the stars. Then, they say, equality and brotherhood will come. Why equality, why freedom, when lack of equality gives birth to visionary scenes and fires of despair, when danger can squeeze something out of man worth more than well-tended surfeit. I don’t want to give up these colossal differences, these tensions. If it was up to me, I would keep the palaces and the slums, and the fortresses!”
“Someone once told me,” Stefan said, “the story of a Russian prince of very tender spirit. He had a beautiful view from the window of his palace on a hill overlooking the village. But a few thatch-roofed cottages were in the way, so he ordered them burned down, and the charred rafters that remained provided just the touch he had been looking for.”
“Don’t blame me,” Sekułowski said. “Are we supposed to work for the masses? I’m not Mephisto, doctor, but I like to think things through. Philanthropy? Tutored virgins with dried-up hormones are condemned to do good works, and if you want to talk about the theory of revolution, beggars don’t have time for it. That is the vocation of well-fed rebels. It’s always bad for the people. Anyone who wants peace, quiet, and comfort will find it in the grave, but not in this life. But why be so abstract? I myself grew up in poverty, doctor, that you could not imagine. I had my first job when, I was three months old, you know? My mother lent me to a beggar woman who thought she could do better with a baby in her arms. When I was eight, I used to hang around in front of a nightclub, and when the elegant crowd came out, I would pick the most beautifully dressed couple and follow right behind them, spitting on their sealskins and beavers and muskrats, spitting as hard as I could on those perfumed furs and on those women until my mouth went dry. What I’ve got now, I fought for. People with real ability always make it.”
“And geniuses are supposed to regard everybody else as fertilizer?”
Stefan sometimes thought that way himself. He might have been talking to himself. He had forgotten that when the poet was irritated, he could be abusive.
“Ah, yes,” Sekułowski said, leaning back on his elbows and looking up at the flaring clouds with a contemptuous smile. “Would you rather be fertilizer for future generations? Lay your bones at the altar? Leave me alone, doctor. The one thing I can’t stand is boredom.”
Stefan’s feelings were hurt. “And what about the mass arrests in Warsaw and the deportations to Germany? Doesn’t that bother you? Are you going back there when you leave here?”
“Why should the arrests bother me any more than the Tartar invasions of the thirteenth century? Because of the accidental coincidence of time?”
“Don’t argue with history. History is always right. You can’t hide your head in the sand.”
“History will win. Survival of the fittest,” said the poet. “It’s true that even though I’m a world unto myself, I’m just a speck of dust in the avalanche of events. But nothing will ever force me to think like a speck of dust!”
“Do you know that the Germans are talking about liquidating the mentally ill?”
“They say there are about twenty million lunatics in the world. What they need is a slogan that can unite them—there’s going to be a holy war,” Sekułowski said, lying down on his back. The sun shined more brightly. Sensing that the poet was trying to escape, Stefan decided to pin him down. “I don’t understand you. The first time we talked you spoke of the art of dying.”
“I don’t see any contradiction,” Sekułowski said, his good mood obviously gone. “I don’t care about the state’s independence. The important thing is internal independence.”
“So you think the fate of other people…”
Sekułowski interrupted, his face trembling.
“Pig,” he shouted. “Idiot!”
He suddenly ran off, loping down the hillside. Confused, the blood rushing to his face, Stefan ran after him. The poet pulled away and yelled, “Clown!”
By the time they got to the asylum, Sekułowski had calmed down. Looking at the wall, he remarked, “Doctor, you are ill-bred. I would even go so far as to say that you’re vulgar, since you try to offend me whenever we talk.”
Stefan was furious, but acted the doctor forgiving a patient’s outburst.
Three weeks later, Stefan was transferred to Kauters’s division. Before starting work he called on his new superior. The surgeon came to the door wearing a loose-fitting dark blue smoking jacket with silver stripes. As they walked down the long dark hallway to the apartment, Stefan explained his visit, but then he fell silent, stunned.
His first impression was of brown punctuated with black and throbbing violet. Something vaguely resembling a rosary of pale shells hung from the ceiling, and the floor was covered with a black and orange oriental carpet depicting gondolas, flames, or salamanders. The walls were covered with engravings, pictures in black frames, and a narrow glass cabinet on legs of buffalo horns, A crocodile’s snout with bared teeth hung on the wall above a Venus flytrap. A low octagonal glass table was inlaid with garish amber flowers. Bookcases on either side of the door were carelessly strewn with leather-bound books and moldy incunabula with yellowed pages. Enormous atlases and gray albums with blood-red and multicolored spines stuck out among the trinkets lining the edges of the shelves.
Kauters seated his guest, who could not take his eyes off the Japanese woodcuts, ancient Indian figurines, and gaudy porcelain baubles. The surgeon said he was glad Stefan had come and asked him to tell him something about himself. Stefan found it hard to answer such an insipid request with anything intelligent. Kauters asked if he planned to specialize.
Hospital of the Transfiguration Page 7
