“Say no more!” Marglewski cut him off, jumping to his feet. “Please forget this whole conversation! I thought it was my obligation to a colleague, that’s all. Do what you think best with what I’ve told you, but please, don’t say anything to anyone else!”
“Of course not,” said Stefan slowly. “If that’s what you want, I won’t tell anyone.”
“Let’s shake on that!”
Stefan held out his hand. He was shocked by what Marglewski had said, and even more by his undisguised panic. Could someone have put the man up to it? What about his anger? Could he have something to do with the underground? Some sort of—what did they call it?—connection?
Stefan left in confusion. It was so hot that he had to keep wiping the sweat off his forehead as he walked down the corridor. He heard a loud burst of laughter from the toilet. The door opened and Sekułowski appeared, wearing only pajama bottoms, shaking with laughter that had seized him like the hiccups. Drops of sweat hung on the fair hairs of his chest.
“Perhaps you could share the joke?” asked Stefan, squinting against the light that poured through the corridor’s glass roof and bounced off the walls, broken into rainbows.
Sekułowski leaned against the door, catching his breath.
“Doctor,” he hawked finally, “doctor, it’s just that…” He spoke in short bursts, gasping for breath. “It reminded me of our arguments, our learned… phenomena… the Upanishads, the stars, the soul, and when I saw that turd… I can’t!” He burst out laughing again. “Spirit? What is man? A turd! A turd!”
Gripped by his private delight, the poet walked away, still shaking with laughter. Stefan went to his room without a word.
His first inclination was to go to the substation and warn Woch. Stefan’s promise meant nothing if honoring it would expose the operator to danger, but he knew immediately that he would not go. Who would he warn Woch about? Marglewski? Ridiculous. Tell him that weapons were hidden in the woods? If it was true, Woch would know more about it than he would.
He spent several days concocting increasingly elaborate ways of warning Woch to be careful: an anonymous note, another nocturnal meeting, but none of it made sense. In the end he did nothing. He did not go back to the substation, feeling an obligation to Woch not to, but he did begin to wander in its vicinity again. On his way out early one morning, he saw Joseph on one of the highest hilltops. The nurse was sitting motionless on the grass, as if absorbed by the picturesque view, but nothing Stefan knew about him indicated any weakness for the beauties of nature. Stefan watched him covertly for a while and then, seeing nothing interesting, turned back. He was already close to the hospital when it occurred to him that Joseph might be Marglewski’s informant. After all, the man hung around with the peasants, and a village had no secrets. Besides, he worked on Marglewski’s ward, and the skeletal doctor might have taken him into his confidence in that acid way of his. But what could Joseph have to do with the London government? It made no sense; the details did not fit together into any sort of structure. Stefan again felt the urge to warn Woch. But every time he imagined an actual conversation with the operator, he lost his nerve.
In the meantime, something new was happening in the hospital. The apartment next to Stefan’s room, previously empty, was to receive a new occupant in the person of Professor Romuald Łądkowski, a former university dean. This scholar, known far beyond the borders of Poland for his research in electroencephalography, had headed his university’s psychiatric clinic for eight years before being ousted by the Germans. Now he was coming—unofficially—to the asylum as Pajączkowski’s guest. The director himself had driven to the station several times, serving as guard of honor for successive shipments of the professor’s baggage, Łądkowski was due in two days. Joseph flew up and down the stairs, gasping for breath, carrying a ladder, a rod, a worn carpet.
All day long, Stefan could hear, through the wall, hammering, the scraping of heavy trunks, and the bumping of furniture. The other doctors greeted Łądkowski’s impending arrival with indifference. During dinner silence reigned, highlighted by the furious buzzing of flies. Stefan hung a sheet of wet gauze in his window in an effort to cool the hot dry air. He lay on the bed with a psychology text, looking at people’s photographs, keenly aware that they were variants of the same type, their mass existence seeming to clash with his sense of his own unexampled uniqueness. Simple alterations in the basic proportions accounted for individual differences: one face was centered on the eyes, another on the jaw, while the cheeks dominated a third. When he had lived in town, Stefan loved to imagine the faces of people walking ahead of him, especially women. The streets—those moving collections of faces—allowed him to play his game.
Pajączkowski suddenly interrupted these ruminations. He asked what his “respected colleague” was reading and then launched into his favorite topic. “Well, you won’t see that anymore,” he said, sounding melancholy. “Unfortunately, one no longer encounters such great, classic hysterical attacks with l’arc de cercle. I remember, at Charcot’s in Paris…”
He was getting worked up.
He must have noticed the faint grimace on Stefan’s lips, for he added, “Well, in some sense I suppose it’s a good thing, though hysteria is still with us. The trend has simply shifted to… to… but what did I want to tell you?”
Stefan had been waiting for this explanation, since the visit surely heralded something exceptional. Pajpak said that the famous Łądkowski, the friend of the Americans Lashley and Goldschmidt, had been thrown into the street by the Germans. “Into the street,” he repeated, his voice breaking. “And in return we must do anything in our power…”
He asked Stefan to call on the dean when his turn came.
On the evening of the dean’s arrival, Marglewski accompanied Pajączkowski and Kauters on what he called a presentation of letters of accreditation. They three were the highest ranking. Nosilewski and Rygier went on the second day. Staszek and Stefan had their turn on the third. Staszek muttered something about antediluvian customs: they were supposed to be colleagues, working together, united against the enemy, yet when it came to these idiotic visits they had to line up according to their position.
Stefan dug an ancient black tie out of the bottom of his suitcase and put it on, hiding the stains under his jacket. They set out.
Łądkowski looked like a skinny lion with no neck. He had a knobby head, thick silver hair, a nose like a cauliflower with tufts of hair sticking out of the nostrils, and a face of sharp, irregular angles with lopsided gray eyebrows that wavered with his every move. Wrinkles ran down from his carefully shaved chin. His profile suggested Socrates—up to a point.
Having seen several doctors’ apartments in the building, Stefan was curious about the professor’s, however hastily equipped it may have been. After all, the wagon had made six trips to the station and back.
Shelves sagging under masses of books ran along the walls. Most of the books had black bindings with gold letters on the spines. Large folios of professional journals occupied the lower levels. A yellow or green volume shined here and there, as if to break up the monotony. The desk stood catty-corner under the window, a row of textbooks along its front edge. Carpets softened the harshness of what would otherwise have resembled a monk’s cell: one, having a deep pile, lay just inside the door; another hung on the wall as a tapestry, forming a background for Łądkowski’s silhouette.
Staszek and Stefan muttered obsequiously as they introduced themselves. The professor’s conversation was lively: while seeming to talk about everything, in fact he said nothing. The suggestion was that they had come to him for advice and enlightenment. He asked them about their work and their interests—professional interests, of course, personal relations in the asylum being conspicuously unmentioned. He behaved with simple, genuine equality. It was exactly this that put them at a great distance. A kind of noblesse prevented him from subduing his inner haughtiness. Stefan felt even smaller when he looked at two bronze heads stand
ing at opposite ends of a low shelf: Kant and a Neanderthal. He noticed with surprise that although the Neanderthal’s bulbous skull and vaulted eye-sockets hinted at a wildness absent from the other figure, both heads shared a weary loneliness, as though they embodied the life and death of entire generations.
Portraits hung on the walls: Lister, a Byronic pathos in his forsaken gaze; Pavlov, his jutting chin highlighting the brutal features of an inquisitive child; and Emil Roux, an old man racked by insomnia.
When he judged that he had given the youngsters their due, the professor initiated an exchange of bows and brief but warm handshakes with such breathtaking tact that Stefan and Staszek, slightly frustrated, found themselves in the corridor almost despite themselves.
“Damn,” Stefan reflected, “a great man!” He was suddenly overcome by a desire for one of those elemental discussions that shake the world’s foundations, but his friend let him down. The grace Staszek had shown with Łądkowski was gone. During their visit, it seemed as if he had left his troubles outside the professor’s door. Now he picked them up again. He was ill with Nosilewska worse than ever. But she, tanned and indifferent, answered his tragic questing gaze with a meaningless smile. She was ever the doctor, seeing a blush as a rush of blood to the face and a thumping heart as a symptom of pressure from the stomach. She was a charged battery of femininity, and her every movement tortured Staszek. Yet he dared not speak: silence afforded him the shreds of hope inherent in uncertainty. Stefan had long acted as comforter, serving so conscientiously that he sometimes savored his own skills. Now and then he struck a false note, bursting into raucous laughter at one of Staszek’s confidences or slapping his friend heartily on the back, but he always apologized immediately afterward.
July raced by. August was hot, and apples dropped in the starry darkness. One night, after an evening storm, as trees shaken by thunder settled into stillness in a dusk heavy with moisture, Marglewski appeared ceremoniously in Stefan’s room: he was organizing a scientific meeting and a show of patients.
“It will be fascinating,” he said. “But I don’t want to anticipate. You’ll see for yourself.”
That very evening Stefan had invited Nosilewska to his room—an attempt to resolve Staszek’s unbearable indecision once and for all. His scheme had misfired again.
Rows of plush red chairs had been set up in the library. Rygier entered first, followed by Kauters, Pajączkowski, Nosilewska, and finally Staszek. When it seemed time to start and everyone watched expectantly as Marglewski, standing behind a high lectern covered with papers, cleared his throat, Łądkowski arrived. That was a real surprise. The old man bowed at the doorway, sank into the large armchair Marglewski had prepared for him nearest the podium, crossed his arms over his chest, and sat motionless. Stefan tried to compensate Staszek for his disappointment by maneuvering the chairs so that Nosilewska sat between him and his friend. The lecturer stood behind the lectern, coughed again, and, having arranged his papers, swept the audience with the gleam of his steel-rimmed glasses.
This presentation, he explained, was actually an airing of materials that had not yet been worked up into their final form. Its theme was the specific influences exerted on the human mind by various mental diseases. He spoke of a phenomenon that could be described as the yearning of a convalescent patient for his former malady. It occurred especially among simple, unintelligent people whose inner life schizophrenia had enriched with states of ecstasy. Once cured, such patients mourned their disease.
Marglewski spoke with a discreet, sardonic smile, constantly folding and unfolding his hands. He grew more animated as he got into his subject, rustling his papers, sprinkling his phrases with Latin, building enormous sentences without glancing at his notes. Stefan observed with interest the lovely line of the thighs of Nosilewska’s crossed legs. He lost track of Marglewski’s deductions, surrendering instead to the rising and falling cadences of his voice. Suddenly the lecturer stepped back from the podium.
“Now, colleagues, I shall demonstrate how what I have called the mourning for his disease can be manifested in a convalescent patient. If you please!” He turned sharply to the open side door. An old man in a cherry-colored hospital robe came in. The white gown of a nurse waiting in the corridor could be seen outside the door.
“Come in, please,” said Marglewski with a poor attempt at amiability. “What’s your name?”
“Wincenty Łuka.”
“How long have you been in the hospital?”
“A long time, a very long time. A year, maybe. At least a year.”
“What was the problem?”
“What problem?”
“What brought you to the hospital?” asked Marglewski, holding his impatience in check. Stefan felt bad watching the scene. It was plain that Marglewski cared nothing for the man. All he wanted was to get the statements he needed out of him.
“My son brought me.”
The old man suddenly looked confused and lowered his eyes. When he raised them again, they had changed. Marglewski licked his lips and craned forward avidly, his eyes fixed on the patient’s sallow face. At the same time he made a brief, significant gesture to the audience, like a conductor holding the rest of the orchestra while evoking a pure solo from a single instrument.
“My son brought me,” the old man said in a more assured voice, “because I was seeing things.”
“What things?”
The old man waved his hands. His Adam’s apple bobbed twice in his dry neck. He was obviously trying to speak. He raised his hands several times, but no words came, and he did not complete the gesture.
“Things,” he finally repeated helplessly. “Things.”
“Were they beautiful?”
“Beautiful.”
“Tell us what it was you saw. Angels? The Lord God? The Blessed Virgin?” Marglewski asked in a matter-of-fact tone.
“No, no,” the old man interrupted. He looked at his own pale hands and said, quietly and slowly, “I’m an uneducated man. I don’t know how to… It started one day when I went out to mow hay, over near Rusiak’s farm. That was where it happened. All the trees in the orchard, and the barn, sir, they changed somehow.”
“Be more precise. What happened?”
“Everything around Rusiak’s farmyard. It was the same, only different.”
Marglewski turned quickly to the audience. Rapidly and distinctly, like an actor delivering an aside, he said, “Here we have a schizophrenic suffering disintegration of personality functions—but completely cured.”
He intended to go on, but the old man interrupted: “I saw, I saw so much.”
He moaned. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He tried to smooth a recalcitrant curl back onto his head.
“Good, very good. We know that. But you don’t see things anymore, do you?”
The patient looked down.
“Well?”
“No, I don’t,” he admitted, and seemed to grow slightly smaller.
“Please observe!” Marglewski addressed the audience. He went up to the old man and spoke to him slowly and emphatically, enunciating carefully. “You will not see things anymore. You are cured. You will go home now, because you don’t need us. Nothing is bothering you. Do you understand? You will go home to your son, to your family.”
“I won’t see things?” the old man repeated, standing motionless.
“No. You are cured.”
The old man in the cherry robe looked distressed—so distressed that Marglewski beamed, taking a step backward so he would not block the audience’s view, pointing surreptitiously at the old man.
The patient walked heavily to the podium. He put his square hands, pale from his stay in the asylum, on the stand.
“Gentlemen,” he said in a thin, pained voice. “Why do you have to do this to me? I’ve already… you can put me anywhere, even give me those electric shocks, only please let me stay. We’re so poor on the farm, my son has four mouths to feed, what am I supposed to do? If I could work�
��but my hands and my feet won’t listen. I don’t have much time left, and I’ll eat anything you give me, only let me stay. Please let me stay.”
Marglewski’s face went through a gamut of emotions as the man spoke. Satisfaction gave way to surprise, then to anxiety, and finally to anger. He gestured to the male nurse, who entered quickly and took the old man by the elbow. At first the patient jerked away like a free man, but then he sagged and let himself be led away unresisting.
Silence filled the room. Marglewski, white as a sheet, pushed his glasses back onto his nose with both hands and returned to the podium with a raucous squeaking of his new shoes. He opened his mouth to speak when Kauters commented from a seat in the back, “Well, there was mourning all right, but not so much for his disease as for three square meals a day.”
“Please save your remarks for the end,” snapped Marglewski. “I haven’t finished. That patient, respected colleagues, has experienced ecstatic states and intense feelings which he is now unable to recount. Before the onset of disease, he was subnormal, almost a cretin. I cured him. But, as they say, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. What you saw just now was the cunning often exhibited by cretins. I have observed the symptoms of his mourning for his disease for some time now,”
He went on and on in the same vein. Finally he wiped his glasses with a trembling hand, ran his tongue over his lips, rocked back on his heels, and announced, “Well, that’s all. Thank you, colleagues.”
The ex-dean left immediately. Stefan looked at his watch, leaned toward Nosilewska, and invited her to his room. She was surprised—“Isn’t it too late?”—but consented in the end.
As they left, they passed the other doctors gathered outside the door. Marglewski was perorating, holding Rygier by the lapel. Kauters stood silently biting his nails.
Back in his room, Stefan seated Nosilewska alongside Staszek, uncorked a bottle of wine, laid some crackers on a plate, and looked for the orange vodka Aunt Skoczyńska had sent him. After one round, he suddenly remembered something he absolutely had to check on in the third ward, cleared his throat, excused himself, and left with the feeling of having done what he was supposed to do.
Hospital of the Transfiguration Page 13
