Woch was holding onto the edge of the table, as if he wanted to lift it.
“After that, every time the telephone rang when I was on duty, my heart stopped. By the time the third goddamned one did it, the whole city knew. There was an employment office right near the power station. We’d go out there, and they were lined up like sheep—the unemployed. Somebody once shouted, ‘There go the pallbearers!’ Pieluch, my assistant, shouted back, ‘Jump in the goddamn river, and we won’t have to bother.’ When they heard that, that was it. It’s a good thing we had a good driver, because the stones were flying. That Pieluch and I had words after that. He was no operator, but he had a sick wife. I could have had a hundred better men instead of him, and that made me angry. ‘You were rotting away down there a week ago yourself,’ I told him, ‘and now that you’ve had a couple of days’ work you say the hell with the rest of them.’ He was hot-tempered. He came back at me. So I busted him in the mouth. Later he came in begging for his job because his wife was dying and he didn’t have any money, but what could I do? And his wife really did die on him. That fall. When he came back from the funeral, he stuck his head through the window—I was on duty—and said, very quietly, ‘Die a slow death!’ Less than a week later, we got another call to go out to the bridge for a suicide, and damned if it wasn’t him. Baked like a goose. You could’ve stuck your finger in his chest. It was roasted crisp.”
The old man put two tin bowls of thick soup on the table and sat on a box nearby, balancing a steaming pot on his knees. They ate slowly. Stefan burned his tongue on the first spoonful. He blew on the next one. When they finished, Woch brought the tin box of tobacco out again. They smoked. Stefan was hoping that the operator would keep on telling stories, but he didn’t seem to feel like it. He sat there gray, massive, and gloomy, breathing heavily, exhaling smoke, parrying Stefan’s questions with monosyllables. When Stefan found that Woch had worked at the power station in his home town for a few years, he remarked, “So it was thanks to you that I had lights at home.” He wanted to emphasize this as a bond that would always connect them.
Woch said nothing, as if he had not heard. The rain had almost stopped, just a few drops falling from the eaves outside the window. Stefan hesitated to leave; he did not want to part from Woch in the mood of distance that had arisen. The conversation had petered out, and Stefan, looking for a new theme, picked up Woch’s engraved nickel lighter from the table. “Andenken aus Dresden” was engraved on one side in Gothic script. He turned it over and read, “Für gute Arbeit.”
“A beautiful lighter,” he said. “Did you work in Germany too?”
“No,” said Woch, staring straight ahead, his eyes blank. “The boss gave it to me.”
“German?” Stefan asked, a bit unpleasantly.
“German,” Woch confirmed, looking closely at Stefan.
“For good work,” Stefan said with a barely perceptible sneer, though he was well aware that this was not going to improve the mood.
“That’s right, for good work,” Woch replied emphatically, almost belligerently. Stefan had lost any sense of how to approach Woch. He stood up and, feigning nonchalance, strolled around the room, walking close to the equipment, willing to expose himself to a harsh rebuke about safety, anything to break the hostile silence. But in vain. The old man noisily gathered up the dirty dishes, carried them away, came back, and started speaking to Woch in indistinct syllables that Stefan could not follow. Woch sat there, bent forward, leaning his heavy chest against the edge of the table. The electricity hummed and the fresh cool of evening blew in through the open window. The young worker Stefan had seen twice before came in from the corridor. The army coat, turned inside out, covered his back; his copper hair stuck to his skull and streams of water ran down his face. A little puddle formed at his feet where he stood in the doorway. Though no one spoke, it was clear they were expecting him. They exchanged meaningful glances, the old man shuffled off to the comer, and Woch stood up briskly and walked over to Stefan. “I’ll show you out, doctor,” he said. “You can go now.”
It was so blunt, so completely devoid of politeness, that all Stefan’s efforts to appear to leave of his own volition collapsed. Hurt, angry, he let himself be led outside. Woch pointed toward the hospital. Stefan blurted, “Mr. Woch, you know why I came, I…”
It was so dark that they could not see each other’s faces. “Don’t worry,” Woch said quietly, “I couldn’t let you get soaked. It was only natural. Otherwise, there’s really nothing much to see here. Unless… You understand.” He put his hand lightly on Stefan’s shoulder, not as a gesture of confidence, but simply to make sure where he was in the darkness between them.
Stefan, who did not understand, said, “Yes, yes. Well, thanks, and good night.” He felt a brief squeeze of the other man’s hand, turned; and walked straight ahead.
He trudged up the dirt path. Gusts of wind bore scattered raindrops. He felt flushed after his adventure—a few hours that loomed larger than his months at the hospital. His anger at Woch had dissolved when they parted in the darkness, and now he only regretted that he had been so stupid, but what else could he have done but ask naive questions? He felt like a child trying to decipher the mysterious actions of adults. Just when he thought he had been initiated into the first mystery, they had thrown him out. For a moment he longed to go back and watch the three of them through the window. Of course he would not have dared, but the thought testified to his state of mind. He told himself that nothing unusual would be going on at the substation, that the others would be asleep and Woch would be sitting in the bright light among the equipment, getting up to look at the gauges now and then, entering some note on graph paper, and sitting down again. It was futile and uninteresting. But why did his thoughts keep returning to that silent, monotonous work? He suddenly found himself at the dark main gate, fumbling with his key in the wet lock. Blindly he followed the path that was a shade lighter than the surrounding dark grass and made his way to his room. He undressed without turning on the light and jumped under the covers. When he touched the cold sheets, he felt that it would not be easy to fall asleep. He was right.
Of all the people who used to come to his father’s workshop when he was a child, it was the workers who interested him most—the machinists, locksmiths, and electricians who made various parts to order. He had been intimidated by them—they were so different from everyone he knew. They were always patient, listening to his father with silent attention, looking at the blueprints carefully, almost respectfully. But beneath the cautious politeness lay something closed and hard. Stefan noticed that although his father liked to go on at the dinner table about people he had met, he never mentioned the workers, as if they, in contrast to the lawyers, engineers, and merchants, had no personality. Stefan had the illusion then that their life—“real life,” as he called it—was shrouded in mystery. For some time he racked his brains over the puzzle of that “real life,” before finally concluding that the idea was foolish.
Now, lying awake in the darkness, the memory surfaced. There had been some sense in that boyish dreaming after all: there was a real life for people like Woch!
Where Uncle Ksawery propounded atheism, Anzelm held grudges, his father invented, and Stefan read philosophy and talked to Sekułowski, reading and talking for months on end to recognize “real life”—that life was out there maintaining their world, shouldering it like Atlas, as inconspicuous as the ground beneath their feet. But no, he was mythologizing, because something like a mutual exchange of services went on: Anzelm knew about architecture, Sekułowski wrote, he and Ksawery treated the sick. Stefan suddenly realized that nothing would really change if all of them disappeared. Whereas without Woch and others like him, the world could not go on.
He rolled over, and some obscure impulse made him turn on the nightstand lamp. It was nothing, of course, but the light struck him as a symbol, a sign that Woch was on the job. The yellow light filling the impersonal room was somehow soothing; it ensured freedom
for all tasks and thought. As long as it shined, it was possible to fantasize about worlds beyond the existing one.
I ought to get some sleep, he thought. This is going nowhere. As he reached for the switch again, he noticed an open book on the table—Lord Jim, which he had been reading. He flicked the switch and darkness surrounded him again. In a quick leap of association, he wondered whether Woch would ever read that book, but the idea was so ludicrous that he smiled in the gloom. Woch would never pick up such a book; he had no need to sail the oceans with Lord Jim. He would look on Conrad with contempt for solving on paper problems that he himself solved in reality. Who could say what it cost him, how much suffering and care went into his vigil over electric current? The “real life” of guarding the lamplight did not seem to bother him. And it was better for Stefan not to reach out to him or to think about him too much, because it only made it hard to fall asleep.
Stefan’s thoughts drifted. In his mind he saw the little house struck by bolts of lightning in a raging storm. He saw Woch’s sad gray face, his thick fingers instantly quelling an overload, and then he saw nothing at all.
MARGLEWSKI’S DEMONSTRATION
In the hot days of July, the hospital finally caught up with the influx of wartime casualties, A balance between admissions and discharges was reached. At noon, the overhead sun truncating the stubby shadows of the trees in the yard, patients wandered in their underwear. A primitive shower was arranged for them in the evenings with a pump worked by Joseph, the big peasant nurse with an old face and a young body.
Stefan was sitting in the ambulatorium, where sparks of sunshine glimmered like filaments in a quartz lamp. He was writing up the admission of an ex-prisoner from a concentration camp. Some stroke of luck had opened doors for this man that usually swung in only one direction.
Marglewski came down the corridor and looked in. He seemed interested in the case. He whistled. “A beautiful cachexia,” and laid his hand on the head of the ragged little man, who looked like a pile of old linen in the room’s shining whiteness. The man sat immobile on a swivel stool. Two lopsided furrows cut across his cheeks from his eyes and disappeared into his beard.
“Debility? An idiot?” asked Marglewski, keeping his hand on the poor man’s head. Stefan stopped writing and looked up in surprise.
Bright tears rolled down the patient’s cold, purplish cheeks and into his beard.
“That’s right,” Stefan said, “an idiot.”
He stood up, pushed the papers into a comer of the desk, and went to see Sekułowski. He began awkwardly, saying that he had changed his mind on certain points and that it was high time to shed some of his intellectual baggage.
“Some concepts are obsolescent,” he said, trying to sweeten an avowal of cynicism. “I have just experienced a small catharsis.”
“Last year” Sekułowski said, “Woydziewicz gave me some cherry vodka that produced a genuine catharsis on a large scale. I suspect him of having thrown in some cocaine.” But when he saw Stefan’s expression, he said, “But go on, doctor. I’m listening. You are seeking and you have hit the target. Insane asylums have always distilled the spirit of the age. Deviation, abnormality, and weirdness are so widespread in normal society that it is hard to get a handle on them. Only here, concentrated as they are, do they reveal the true face of the times.”
“No, that’s not what I’m talking about,” said Stefan, suddenly feeling terribly lonely. He searched for words but could not find them. “No, in fact it’s nothing,” he said, backing up and leaving in a hurry, as if he feared the poet would detain him.
But Sekułowski was absorbed by a spider climbing the wall behind his bed. He swatted it with a book, and when it fell to the floor, he sat staring at the blot of fluttering, threadlike legs.
Returning along the corridor, Stefan ran into Marglewski, who invited him to his apartment. “I have a bottle of Extra Dry,” he said. “Why don’t you drop in, and we can get rinsed out.”
Stefan declined, but Marglewski took the rejection for mere politeness. “No, come on, don’t be silly.”
Marglewski’s apartment was at the opposite end of the same corridor as Stefan’s. It had gleaming furniture: a glass-topped desk one side of which leaned on prism-shaped drawers, the other on bent steel tubing that matched the frames of the chairs. It reminded Stefan of a dentist’s waiting room. The pictures on the walls were framed in metal tubes. Pedantically arranged books, each with a white number on its spine, filled two walls. As Marglewski set the low table, Stefan mechanically pulled a book from the shelves and leafed through it. It was Pascal’s Provinciales. Only the first two pages had been cut. His host opened a drawer in a contemporary sideboard to reveal sandwiches on white plates. After his third drink Marglewski got talkative. Vodka exaggerated his already vigorous gestures. He wrung his hands like a washerwoman when he said he had stained his coat and would have to have it cleaned. He pointed out boxes labeled with index cards along the windowsill. Sheets of cardboard were held together with colored clips. Marglewski, it turned out, was engaged in scientific research. With a show of reluctance, he opened a folder bursting with papers analyzing the effect of Napoleon’s kidney stones on the outcome of the battle of Waterloo and the influence of hormones on the visions of the saints—here he drew a circle, meant to represent a halo, in the air above his head and laughed. He was sorry that Stefan was not a believer; what he needed was pure, naive people steeped in dogma.
“You spend all that time talking to Sekułowski?” he exclaimed. “Ask him why literature has its head in the clouds. Believe me, more than one great love has gone down the drain because the guy had to take a leak and, afraid to mention it to his dearly beloved, expressed a sudden longing for solitude and sprinted off into the bushes. I’ve seen it happen.”
Out of boredom more than interest, Stefan reached into the files. There were heaps of typescript in stiff covers. Marglewski kept talking, but disconnectedly, as if his mind was somewhere else. Sitting there hunched over, his nostrils flared as though he were sniffing for something, Marglewski looked like an old maid eager to confess the story of her one indiscretion.
He launched into a discourse so pompously laden with Latin that Stefan understood nothing. Marglewski’s thin, nervous hands stroked the cover of one of the boxes impatiently before finally opening it. Curious, Stefan glanced inside. He saw a long list like a table of contents, and skimmed down it: “Balzac—hypomanic psychopath, Baudelaire—hysteric, Chopin—neurasthenic, Dante—schizoid, Goethe—alcoholic, Hölderlin—schizophrenic…”
Marglewski unveiled his secret. He had embarked on a great investigation of geniuses, and had even intended to publish portions of it, but unfortunately the war intervened.
He began to lay out large sheets with drawings depicting genealogies. He got more excited as he spoke, and his cheeks grew flushed. As he passionately enumerated the perversions, suicide attempts, hoaxes, and psychoanalytic complexes of great men, it occurred to Stefan that Marglewski himself might well be suffering from an abnormality that afforded him a dubious kinship with his subjects, a kind of ticket to the family of geniuses. He had scrupulously collected descriptions of their every lapse, researching and cataloguing their failures, tragedies, misfortunes, and catastrophes. He swelled with joy at the discovery of the slightest hint of impropriety among anyone’s posthumous papers.
At one point, as Marglewski rummaged in a lower drawer for his latest treasure, Stefan interrupted him. “It seems to me,” he said, “that great works arise not out of madness, but in spite of it.”
He took one look at Marglewski and immediately regretted having spoken. The man looked up over the papers and glared at him. “In spite of?” he sneered. Suddenly he gathered up the scattered papers, jerked a tattered chart away from Stefan, and nervously stuffed it back into a folder.
“My dear colleague,” he said, interlacing his fingers, “you are still inexperienced. But this is no longer the age of the Renaissance man. For that matter, thoughtless
actions could have fatal consequences even then. Of course you fail to understand this, but things that can be justified subjectively often look different in the light of the facts.”
“What are you talking about?” Stefan asked.
Marglewski did not look at him. He wrung his long, thin fingers and stared at them. Finally, he said, “You take walks a lot. But those power-station operators in Bierzyniec with that building of theirs can only get the hospital into trouble. It’s not only that they’re hiding weapons, but that young one, Pościk’s son, is nothing but a common bandit.”
“How do you know?” Stefan interrupted.
“Don’t ask.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You don’t?” Marglewski peered through his glasses with an expression of pure hatred. “Haven’t you heard of the Polish underground? The government-in-exile in London?” he asked in a shrill whisper, his long fingers running lightly over his white smock. “The army left weapons in the forest in September. That Pościk was in charge of them. And when he was ordered to tell where they were, he refused! Said he was waiting for the Bolsheviks!”
“He said that? How do you know?” Stefan asked, dazed by the unexpected turn of the conversation and by the way Marglewski was trembling.
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything! It’s got nothing to do with me!” he said, still whispering. “Everyone knows about it—everyone except you!”
“I shouldn’t go there anymore, is that what you mean?” Stefan stood up. “It’s true I walked over there once, during a storm…”
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