Hospital of the Transfiguration

by Stanisław Lem

“Not by itself,” the old man in the window said.

  “All right, not by itself,” Woch loyally corrected himself. “I ate pea soup so thick you could stand the spoon in it, with sausage, marjoram, and a shot of whiskey, and it went away. My friend’s advice—the guy there.”

  “Very good,” said Stefan, nodding to each of them and walking quickly away, because he was afraid that Woch would ask him what the illness had been.

  He looked back when he got to the top of the first hill. The little red house stood there at the bottom of the gorge, seemingly uninhabited. The low humming from the open window, fading steadily, stayed with him most of the way back to the asylum, until it could no longer be distinguished from the buzzing of the insects above the warm grass.

  This incident stuck in Stefan’s memory, as if it had some hidden meaning. So distinctly did he remember it that it divided the past into two parts and was his reference point for the chronology of hospital events. He told no one about it: that would have been pointless. Perhaps Sekułowski might have found some literary merit in Woch’s description of his illness, but that hardly mattered to Stefan. What did matter? He could not say.

  After his morning rounds he would go for walks, carrying The History of Philosophy. But since he was making slow progress (unwilling to admit that ontological subtleties bored him, he blamed the hot weather), he began carrying another book: a thick edition of the Thousand and One Nights in a beautiful pale binding. It was from Kauters’s library. He would sit in that picturesque spot in the woods under the three tall beeches with their smooth, tight bark, imagining that a rubber tree must be similar. Feet propped on a log overgrown with blueberries, squinting at the flashes of sun that danced above the yellowed pages, he read the adventures of the peddlers, barbers, and wizards of Baghdad while The History of Philosophy lay beside him on a clump of dried moss. He no longer even bothered to open it, but carried it along like a guilty conscience.

  One day when it was oppressively hot even deep in the forest, he was reading the story in which the caliph Harun al-Rashid disguised himself as a poor water-carrier to loiter in the marketplace and find out more about his subjects. Stefan suddenly thought how much fun it would be to go to the substation disguised as a worker. He rejected the idea with embarrassment, but regretted having no one to share it with.

  In the evenings, when the sun went down and a breeze began to flutter between the hills, Stefan would leave the sanitorium again. With a spark of hidden excitement, he would turn off the path and circle the substation at a distance. But he never ran into anyone.

  He never headed straight for the little brick house; it was enough to catch a remote glimpse of its red walls and the open window from which the steady hum came. These wanderings showed up in his dreams: several times he saw the house in the meadow; it called to him with a sound of oriental music. One morning he walked out earlier than usual to look at the substation from the ridge. Before he got there, he saw someone coming toward him along the path. It was the young, copper-haired worker, wearing lime-spotted trousers, stripped to the waist, carrying two buckets of earth but tramping energetically under the load. Stefan wasn’t sure whether he wanted to meet him, but he slowed down. The other man’s muscles rippled under his skin as he came down the path, but his face was indifferent, expressionless. So deliberately did he fail to look at Stefan as he passed that Stefan, certain that he had been recognized, dared not look back as the man continued in the other direction.

  About a week later, Stefan was on his way back from the nearby town, where he had done some afternoon shopping. The heat was stifling. There had been rumbling from beyond the horizon for an hour, but the sky overhead was clear. The dirt road felt as hard as concrete after baking in the sun for days. Stefan suddenly noticed a wall of clouds above a clump of firs. The landscape was darkening before his eyes, and he quickened his steps in the gloom, until he came panting around a bend and saw Woch the Operator up ahead of him. Woch was going in the same direction but more slowly, pushing a bicycle along by the handlebars. When he heard steps behind him, he turned, recognized Stefan, and said hello. They walked side by side in silence for some time.

  Woch was wearing dirty boots, a sweater, and a jacket with the collar turned up. Though Stefan was sweating heavily in a shirt and linen trousers, the man showed no sign of discomfort. His face was as expressionless and gray as usual, except for the red flap where his ear had been. Yellow clouds roiled above them. Stefan would happily have broken into a run, but it somehow inhibited him that Woch was marching along at such an even pace.

  The road widened and came up even with its banks. They had turned off onto a sandy path when the first big drops began pocking the dust at their feet. The substation was in sight.

  “Why don’t you come with me? It’s going to pour,” Woch said. Stefan agreed. They made for the substation without a word. Heavy drops hit Stefan’s hands and face and blotted his shirt and trousers.

  A few steps from the door, Woch stopped and looked back, leaning on the handlebars. Stefan also turned. A shelf of turbulent black-bottomed cloud was heading toward them, streams of it reaching down toward the ground.

  “Where I come from, they call that a male cloud,” Woch said, squinting at the sky. Stefan wanted to laugh, but Woch’s face was gloomy. Then the downpour broke with a roar.

  Stefan got inside the substation in two bounds. Woch, water streaming off him, seemed to defy the rain and deliberately lifted first the front, then the rear wheel of the bicycle into the building. Only when it rested against the wall did he take out a handkerchief and carefully wipe his eyes and cheeks.

  Through the open door they could see the gray deluge drowning everything in sight. Stefan inhaled the wonderfully cool air deeply, delighted to have escaped the flood. Only when Woch opened a second, inner, door did he realize that he had been granted a unique opportunity.

  He followed Woch into the building’s main, modestly sized room. Rain beat against the three windows, and it would have been dark but for the ceiling lamps. Their steady light revealed a stand against one wall and a control board with gauges; the opposite wall looked like a zoo. It consisted of cages made of wire screens painted gray; they stood side by side and extended to the ceiling. Stefan could not tell what was in the narrow cages, but it was certainly nothing alive, for there was no movement. In the middle of the room stood a small table, two chairs, and several boxes. A rubber mat covered the stone floor.

  “Isn’t there anyone here?” Stefan asked.

  “Pościk’s here. It’s his shift. Please wait. And don’t touch anything!”

  Woch went to a door in the corner of the room where the screens ended, opened it, looked inside, and said something. Stefan heard a muffled reply. Woch went in and closed the door behind him. Stefan was alone for perhaps a minute. The dull indeterminate hum filled the air, which was thick with the smell of hot oil, and the rain whipped across the tin roof in waves.

  As he looked around, Stefan noticed something shining behind the metal screens. He moved closer and in the darkness saw vertical copper rails and the knobs of porcelain insulators. Then he heard voices from behind the wall.

  “Have you been drinking, Władek?” Woch was saying. “You want to take it out now?”

  “Let’s wait outside,” said a second, lower voice.

  “Outside. If it doesn’t work, we’re dead anyway. Do you realize how much there is? Get out, right now!”

  “Okay, Jasiu, okay. Jasiu, in the woods maybe?”

  “In the woods, wonderful! Come on, we have a guest.”

  “What?”

  The voices dropped to an indistinct murmur. Stefan quickly moved back to the center of the room. Woch and old Pościk came in. They both looked at the gauges. The operator said something, but a crash of thunder drowned him out. Woch took a few steps, stopped on tiptoe, and looked again at the apparatus.

  “Well?” asked the old man.

  The answer was a wave of the hand that signaled: forget it. Woc
h bowed his head, held his own shoulders with his hands across his chest, and slowly rocked back on his heels, standing as Stefan imagined a ship’s captain would when braving a storm. Then Woch noticed Stefan and gave a start. He picked up a chair, carried it through the door, and put it down in the corridor saying, “Please sit here. You’ll be safe here.”

  Stefan obeyed. The door to the room was open, creating a strange sort of stage, Stefan sitting in the dark narrow corridor, the only spectator.

  The two men inside weren’t doing anything. The old man sat on a box, while Woch remained standing. No longer watching the apparatus, they seemed to be waiting for something. Their faces glowed more and more brightly in the yellow lamplight; Stefan felt nauseated from the oppressive smell of oil; outside, the storm roared and thundered with steady intensity. At one point Woch rushed to the black stand and looked closely at a gauge, then at another, before returning to his place and sinking back into immobility. Stefan began to feel disappointed—but then he sensed some changes, though he did not know how. His uneasy impression mounted until he suddenly discovered its source.

  There was movement in the depths of the cages along the wall. He heard a kind of scraping, a hiss; it grew to an impatient gnashing, fell quiet, then came back. Woch and Pościk must have heard it, for they both looked around, and the old man glanced at Woch with what Stefan thought was fear. Yet neither of them moved.

  Minutes passed as the rain beat on the roof and the low electric hum persisted, but the noise coming from the cages did not let up. Something was rustling, scraping, buzzing, as if a living being was dashing about and pushing in all directions: the strange sounds came from opposite ends of the cage in turn, from the bottom and then from the top near the ceiling. The mysterious thing seemed to be jerking more and more violently behind the steel screen. A blue flash suddenly filled two of the cages, grew stronger, casting distorted shadows of the two men against the opposite wall, then vanished. An acrid, searing smell burned Stefan’s nostrils. There was another sharp hiss and a crackling flame winked in the depths of another cage; a flurry of sparks shot from the metal bar that stuck out under the screen.

  Old Pościk stood up, stuffed his pipe into his apron pocket, and, standing rigidly erect, looked silently at Woch. The operator grabbed him tightly by the arm and, his face twisted into what could have been anger, shouted something that was swallowed up by the clap of a nearby thunderbolt. A sudden flash ripped through three of the cages, extinguishing the lights for an instant, and the whole wall looked as if it was on fire. Woch pushed the old man toward Stefan and with his hands in front of him slowly went to the control panel. It sounded as though someone was shooting a pistol in the cages, and blue and red flames poured through the screens. Choking on the smell of ozone, Stefan backed off down the corridor, stopping at the door. The old man hunched beside him and Woch, after taking a last look at the apparatus, sprang after them with a youthful stride. They stood together in the corridor. Things quieted down behind the screens. A few small blue flames still danced in the comers. The thunder was receding, but the rain still drummed steadily on the roof.

  “It’s over,” the old man finally said, taking the pipe out of his pocket. His hands seemed to be trembling, but it was too dark to tell.

  “Well, we’re still alive,” Woch said. He walked back into the room, stretched as though awakening from a good sleep, slapped his hands against his hips, and sat down abruptly on a stool.

  “It’s all right now,” he nodded to Stefan, “you can come in.”

  The thunder stopped completely but the rain still fell as though it might go on forever. The old man shuffled around the room, making notes on a sheet of graph paper. Then, opening a door in the comer that Stefan had not noticed, he disappeared inside and rummaged around, making a lot of noise that sounded like metal clattering. He came back carrying a frying pan, a spirit stove, and a pot of peeled potatoes. He put things on the table and the floor and set about preparing a meal. Murmuring “What can I offer you” over and over, he tiptoed around, disappeared, came back, put the pan on, and, enveloped in a cloud of burning fat, broke and sniffed the eggs with an expression of devout concentration. In the meantime, Woch formally invited Stefan to wait out the rain in the substation.

  Stefan asked what had happened. Woch explained about the lightning rods that protected them, about circuit breakers, and about the excess current, and although Stefan did not understand everything, he felt that something else had happened and that Woch was minimizing the danger for reasons known only to himself. Stefan had no doubt that there had been danger—he could tell that from the way the two operators had acted. Woch showed him around the room, naming all the equipment, and even let him look into the back room where he had first gone to talk to Pościk. An iron drum hung on the wall with copper rails leading down from it, and on the floor was a large container full of coils which, Woch explained, would protect against fire if the drum, which was a breaker, sprayed out burning oil.

  “What’s under the coils?” asked Stefan, trying to sound reasonable and relevant.

  Woch looked at him coolly. “Why should anything be under the coils? There’s nothing.”

  They went back to the room. A small bottle of eighty-proof vodka and a sliced pickle had appeared on the table. Woch poured out tiny glasses, drank to Stefan’s health, then corked the bottle and hid it behind a pillar, announcing: “Vodka is bad for us.”

  He said nothing more about what had happened during the storm, but he got friendlier. He ignored the old man, as if he were not even there. He took off his jacket and hung it over" the back of his chair. His gray sweater stretched across his chest. He took out a tin tobacco box and some cigarette papers and offered them to Stefan. “It’s strong,” he warned.

  Stefan tried to roll a cigarette, eventually producing a crooked weed whose ragged ends he licked so hard that the tobacco fell out. Woch, who had been pretending not to watch, took a paper and a pinch of sawdust-like tobacco between two stubby fingers, snapped his thumb up, and handed Stefan a cigarette ready to be licked. Stefan thanked him and bent over Woch’s lighter. The flame nearly burned his eyebrows, but Woch deftly moved it aside. The first puff choked Stefan, tears came to his eyes, but he tried his best to look natural. Woch pretended not to notice again. He made another cigarette for himself, lit it, and they sat silently as the smoke merged into a single blue cloud under the lamp above their heads.

  “How long have you been working in this field?” Stefan asked, realizing that the question might sound foolish but unable to think of anything else. The operator puffed on his cigarette as if he had not heard, then suddenly slapped his hand down.

  “I went to work when I was a boy this high,” he said, holding out his hand. “No, this high,” he said, lowering it. “In Małachowice. They didn’t have electricity yet. The French came to set up the turbines. The foreman was an honest man. When he shouted in the boiler room, you could hear him out on the ramp. But he didn’t scream at kids, he was patient and tried to teach them. The first time you went up on the high-tension circuit-breaker to dust it off—because that’s how you start—he’d show you the brush with the dead man’s hand on it. You never forgot that.”

  “I don’t understand,” Stefan said.

  “Just a regular paintbrush. Horsehair. That’s what you use to dust. But the current has to be off in the cables, no tension. If you forget and touch a live cable, flame shoots out and that’s it. Anyway, this was a brush from someone who forgot. A guy fresh from the village. I didn’t know him, he was before my time. His fingerprints were burned into the handle, black as coal. In fact, the corpse was black as coal from head to toe. Burned to a crisp.

  “Anyway,” Woch went on, “that’s the way to do it. Nobody ever learned our trade from talking. Good eyes, good hands—that’s what you need. And always look alive. I liked the work. And my boss liked me. I went from low voltage to high voltage. I worked on the lines for a while, but my heart wasn’t in it. The lines aren�
��t for me. Put on the irons, climb up, climb down, pull the lines, over and over again, from pole to pole. Everyone gets sick of it, so they have to keep hiring new people. Vodka is the only joy in that work. One mistake, one wrong cable, and bang! Everlasting glory.”

  The half-finished cigarette stuck to his lip so he had both hands free, though he wasn’t using them at the moment.

  “I worked with a guy named Józef Fijałka. All he did was drink. He was already drunk by the time he got to work and he never talked, just mumbled, but he was a good worker as long as he was on his feet. He drank from payday until his money was gone. The first half of the month, he was an angel, the second half, the hell with him. Once he disappeared right after payday. They looked everywhere and finally found him in the switching station. He’d gone to sleep right between the high-tension cables, but he was drunk and nothing happened. They picked him up by the legs and pulled him out. Very carefully. Eventually he got himself killed. It was on a transformer. I went to see him in the hospital, and he was covered with bandages. He asked me to lift up his arm, and when I did, there was nothing in his armpit. Just bones. All the flesh was gone. He died fast.”

  Woch paused and took a drag of his cigarette. He fell into a reverie.

  “The union paid for the funeral, and they did right by his family too. That’s how it used to be. Later on, in the thirties, they started laying men off.”

  He crushed out his cigarette with a look of disgust.

  “I had a repair crew working under me. You sit around all night waiting. A bird lands on a line and gets fried, a branch falls and knocks something down, a kid shorts something out flying a kite. All that stuff is natural. But then in the thirties this new thing started. I’ll never forget the first one. Not as long as I live. Suicide. A kid tied a wire around a stone, held the other end of the wire in his hand, and threw the stone over the cables. He was burned completely black, his hand fell off, and the fat that melted off him was strewn all around. If I hadn’t known him—but I did. He worked in the railroad yards, but they laid him off because he wasn’t married. They laid the bachelors off first. The girls liked him, he was a nice kid. People hadn’t known that electrocution was a quick death, but now they found out. And it was easy too, especially since the French ran the cables next to footbridges. It was cheaper that way. Very economical, the French. All you needed was a stone, a wire, and an easy toss.”