He wandered in the corridors, thought about going to see Sekułowski, until Joseph caught him standing at a window. “Doctor, oh, it’s a good thing you’re here. Paścikowiak—you know, in seventeen—is acting up.”
Joseph had his own terminology. If a patient was getting restless, he was “misbehaving.” “Acting up” meant something more serious.
Stefan went into the ward.
About a dozen patients watched with mild interest as a man in a bathrobe jumped up and down like a frog, emitting menacing screams that frightened no one, clenching his teeth and waving his arms and legs. Finally he fell onto a bed and began tearing at the sheets.
“Paścikowiak, what’s all this?” Stefan began jovially. “Such a peaceful, civilized man, and all of a sudden you start raising hell?”
The deranged man peered out from under his eyebrows. He was short and thin, with the fingers and skull of a hunchback, but without the hump. “Oh, you’re on duty today, doctor?” he murmured with embarrassment. “I thought it was Doctor Rygier. I’m sorry, I won’t do it again.”
Stefan, who disliked Rygier, smiled and asked, “What do you have against Doctor Rygier?”
“Well, just… I won’t do it again. If you’re on duty, doctor, not a peep.”
“I’m not on duty. I just happened to be passing by,” Stefan said. But that sounded a little too informal, so he corrected himself: “Come on, no more fooling around. Doctor Rygier or me, it’s all the same. Otherwise they’ll send you right to electroshock.”
Paścikowiak sat on the bed, covering the hole in the sheet, and showed his narrow teeth in a silly smile. The records said he was subnormal, but his cleverness did not fit into any diagnostic pigeonhole.
On his way out, Stefan glanced into the next ward. An idiot, a longtime hospital resident, lay murmuring on the nearest bed, covered with a blanket. A few patients were sitting nearby, and one was walking around his bed.
Stefan went in.
“What’s going on?” he asked the man who was murmuring. A beggar’s face with a red beard, yellowish eyes, and a toothless mouth peeked out from under the blanket. “All right, how much is a hundred and thirteen thousand two hundred and five times twenty-eight thousand six hundred and thirty?”
This was an act of kindness: now the crouched figure murmured in a different tone, fervently, almost prayerfully. A moment later he jabbered, “…illion… forty-one million… ifty-nine thousand… dred and fifty.”
Stefan did not have to check. He knew that the man could multiply and divide six-digit numbers in seconds. When he first arrived at the asylum, Stefan had asked the patient how he did it. The reply was an irate mutter. Once, tempted by Stefan’s offer of a piece of chocolate, the idiot promised to tell his secret. Stammering and drooling on the chocolate, he said, “I’ve got… drawers in my head. Click, click. Thousands here, millions here, click click. Snap. And there it is.”
“There what is?” asked Stefan, disappointed.
Now the mathematician lowered the blanket, and his face beamed. He was big. “Pump me up!” he lisped.
That meant that he wanted to be given two large numbers.
“Well…” Stefan scrupulously counted out the thousands and told him to multiply. The idiot drooled, whispered, hiccuped, and gave the answer. Stefan stood at the foot of the bed, thinking.
The idiot was silent for a moment, then pleaded again, “Pump me up!”
Stefan recited another pair of numbers. Was this what the idiot mathematician needed to be reassured of his own worth? There were times when Stefan felt a sudden fear, as if he should fall to his knees and beg everyone to forgive him for being so normal, for sometimes feeling self-satisfied, for forgetting about them.
He had nowhere to go. In the end he went to see Sekułowski.
The poet was shaving. Noticing a volume of Bernanos on the table, Stefan started to say something about Christian ethics, but Sekułowski did not give him a chance. Standing at the mirror, his face lathered, he shook the shaving brush several times, sending suds flying across the room.
“Doctor, it makes no sense. The church, that old terrorist organization, has been acquiring souls for two thousand years now, and what has come of it? Salvation for some, symptoms for others.”
Sekułowski was more interested in the problem of genius. Stefan supposed that he thought of it “from the inside,” regarding himself as a genius.
“Well, then take van Gogh or Pascal. It’s an old story. On the other hand, you garbagemen of the soul know nothing about us.”
(Aha! thought Stefan.)
“I remember, from the days of my apprenticeship, a few interesting, pure forms nourished by various literary circles. There was this young writer. Things came easy to him. He had his picture in the papers, interviews, translations, reprints. I was green with envy. I could savor hatred the way the Buddha savored nothingness. Once we ran into each other when both of us were drunk. All his inhibitions were gone. He broke down crying, told me that he envied me my elitism and my high standards. That I had been so protective of what I wrote. That my solitude was so productive and proud. The next day we weren’t talking to each other anymore. Soon after, he published an essay on my poems: ‘An Abortion Signifying Nothing.’ A masterpiece of applied sadism. If you want to listen, please come into the bathroom because I’m going to take a shower.”
Lately Sekułowski had been admitting Stefan to his evening ablutions, perhaps as a new way of humiliating him.
He climbed naked into the shower and went on talking. “When I started, I had doubts when my friends praised me. When they didn’t, I thought: Aha! And when they started giving out advice—that I was in a rut, a blind alley, that I was burning myself out—then I knew I was on the right track.”
He ran a washcloth over his hairy backside.
“There were a couple of old men back then. The first was supposed to be an epic poet—he had never published a single epic, but that was his reputation. They believed in him, but I didn’t. He collected mottoes like butterflies. Said he needed them for his ‘life’s work.’ He had been writing this life’s work since his youth, constantly correcting it and comparing it to Flaubert’s manuscripts. Forever making changes and never getting it right. He would put down three words a week. When he died, somebody lent me his manuscript for a couple of days. Well, not to put too fine a point on it: fluff. Nothing that would last, no effort, no desire. Never trust blowhards—you have to have talent. Don’t tell me about Flaubert’s endlessly worked-over manuscripts, because I’ve seen Wilde’s work. That’s right, Oscar. Did you know that he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray in two weeks?”
He stuck his head under the shower and blew his nose thunderously.
“The other one was famous in partibus infidelium. A member of the PEN Club. He read the Upanishads in the original and could write as fluently in French as in Polish. Even the critics respected him. He feared me alone, and hated me because I knew his limits. I could sense them like a hollow bottom in everything he wrote. He would get off to a great start, establish the situation, inject life into the characters, and the action would roll along, until he got to the point where he had to rise above the level of merely putting things down on paper, to step beyond stupidity. But he couldn’t do it. That was as far as he could go. Nobody else could hear the false note, so he thought of himself like that naked emperor in Hans Christian Andersen. Do you understand? For me, someone else’s writing is like a weight on the floor. All I have to do is walk up to it and decide whether I can pick it up or not. In other words, could I do better or not?”
“And could you?”
Sekułowski scratched his soapy back luxuriantly.
“Almost always. Every so often, when the waves receded, I’d read what I’d written—with some admiration. It’s mostly a question of style. The difference in generations comes down to this: once they used to write, ‘the dawn smelled of roses.’ Then a new wave comes, and for a while they write, ‘the morning smelled of piss
.’ But the device is the same. That’s not reform. That’s not innovation.”
He barked like a seal under the hot stream of water.
“All writing has to have a skeleton, like a woman, but not one you can feel. Also like a woman. Wait a second—I just remembered a great story. Yesterday, Doctor Rygier lent me a couple of old literary journals. What a riot! That pack of critics uttering each word convinced that history was speaking through their mouths, when at best it was yesterday’s vodka. Ouch!” His hair had gotten tangled.
He rubbed his belly and went on, “I have a particularly painful memory from that period, on which fate has poured balm. I’ll leave names out of it. May he rest peacefully in his grave, upon which I relieve myself,” Sekułowski said with a vulgar laugh that may have had something to do with his own nakedness.
He rinsed himself off, reached for his bathrobe, and said calmly, “I pretended to be the most impudent man alive, but actually it was only uncertainty. That’s when you pick an ideology like choosing a tie off the rack—whichever seems most colorful and expensive. I was the most defenseless nobody, and above us all, like the brightest of stars, shined a certain critic of the older generation. He wrote like Hafiz praising the locomotive. He was the nineteenth century incarnate. He couldn’t breathe in our atmosphere, he could see no one of greatness. He had not yet noticed us, the young. Individually, we didn’t matter; if there were ten of us, he’d say good morning. He was a curious type, doctor, a born writer. He had talent, an apt metaphor for every occasion, and humor—and he was completely merciless. For one good metaphor, he was willing to annihilate a book and its author. And did he do it honestly? Don’t be naive.” Sekułowski combed his wet hair with great attention. “Today I’m absolutely sure that he believed in nothing. Why should he? He was like a beautiful watch missing one tiny screw, a writer with no counterweight. He wasn’t foolish enough to become the Polish Conrad, but there was no remedy for that.”
He put on his shirt.
“At the time, I had lost God. I don’t mean I stopped believing—I lost Him the way some men lose women, for no reason and with no hope of recovery. I suffered, because I needed an oracle. Well, it wouldn’t have taken much for that critic to finish me off. But he did believe in one thing. Himself. He oozed that belief the way some women ooze sex. Besides which, he was so famous that he was always right. He read a couple of poems that I sent him, and passed judgment. We were about as much alike as the sun and a shovel”—he laughed, knotting his tie—“and I was a dirty shovel. He talked in terms of first causes, fumbled around, and finally explained to me why my poems were worthless. He hesitated for a while, but in the end he let me go on writing. He let me, do you understand?” Sekułowski made an ugly face. “Well, it’s an old story. But when I think that today his name is meaningless to the young, I’m delighted. It’s revenge and I didn’t even have to lift a finger. It was prepared by life itself. It ripened slowly like a fruit—I know of nothing sweeter,” said the poet with great satisfaction, tying the silver belt of his camel smoking jacket.
“Can his contemporaries ever judge a man of genius? Is the van Gogh story fated to be repeated forever?”
“How should I know? Come into the room; it’s so humid in here, you could suffocate.”
“I think that more than one lunatic is an undiscovered genius. Just missing a counterweight, as you put it. Like Morek, for instance.” Stefan told him about the idiot mathematician.
Sekułowski cut him off angrily: “Morek is as much a genius as your Pajączkowski, but without such a good job.”
“Be that as it may, Pajączkowski has a doctorate in psychiatry… his work on manic-depression,” said Stefan, upset.
“Sure. Most academics are exactly like that mathematician. Maybe they don’t drool, but they can’t see anything outside their own fields. I knew a lichenologist once. You might not know what that is,” he added unexpectedly.
“I do,” retorted Stefan, who in fact did not.
“A lichenologist is a specialist in mosses,” Sekułowski explained. “This tow-headed scarecrow knew enough Latin to classify, enough physiology to write articles, and enough politics to carry on a conversation with the janitor. But if the discussion turned to fungus, he was lost. This world is crawling with idiot mathematicians. If they cultivate their poor skills in a socially useful direction, they’re tolerated. Literature is full of writers who are read by washerwomen but worry over their style with an eye to a posthumous edition of their letters. And what about doctors?”
Stefan tried to steer clear of the sensitive issue of medical practice, hoping to draw some more interesting formulations out of Sekułowski, but all he got was an invitation to kiss his ass. He went upstairs angry. All he knows is how to insult me, he thought.
Stefan decided to eavesdrop at his own door. The corridor was dark and empty as he approached on tiptoe. Silence. A rustling—her dress? The sheets? Then a sound like the plunger being pulled from a syringe. A slap. Then total silence, broken by sobbing. Yes, somebody was definitely crying. Nosilewska? He could not imagine that. He tapped the door lightly, and when no one answered, he knocked once and entered.
All the lights were out except the small lamp on the nightstand, which filled the room with a pale-lemon glow that reflected off the mirror to the wall and the bed. The bottle of orange vodka was half-empty: a good sign. The bed looked like a tornado had hit it, but where was Nosilewska? Staszek was lying there alone, in his clothes, his face buried in the pillow. He was crying.
“Staszek, what happened? Where is she?” asked Stefan, rushing to the bed.
Staszek only groaned more loudly.
“Tell me. Come on, what happened?”
Staszek raised his wet, red, snotty face; the emblem of dispair.
“If you… If I can… If you have…”
“Come on, tell me,”
“I won’t. If you feel any friendship for me at all, you’ll never ask me about it.”
“But what happened?” Stefan demanded, curiosity overcoming discretion.
“I feel miserable,” moaned Staszek.
Then suddenly he shouted: “I won’t tell you! Don’t talk to me!” And he ran out, holding the pillow to his chest.
“Give me back my pillow, you maniac!” Stefan shouted after him, but Staszek’s footsteps were already thumping down the stairs.
Stefan sat in the armchair, looked around, even lifted the covers and smelled the sheets, but he found out nothing. He was so curious that he wanted to go see Nosilewska, but he restrained himself. Maybe Staszek would calm down by morning. Maybe she would give something away, he thought, but he knew there was little chance of that.
FATHER AND SON
It was late September. Heaps of manure were turning black like great molehills in the plowed fields. The aspen near Stefan’s window was diseased: dark spots covered its prematurely yellowing leaves. He sat motionless, watching the horizon sharp as a knife. He would sink into a torpor for hours on end, his eyes fixed on the sky, following the patterns of motes dancing in the empty light of the window.
Nosilewska asked him to write a report on a new patient. He agreed eagerly—anything to fill the time.
The patient was one of those slender androgynous girls who padded their busts with lace pillows to transfix men. But the whole beauty of this eighteen-year-old schizophrenic lay in her dark, quick gaze. Her hands fluttered near her face like small doves, lighting on her cheek or under her chin. Once she stopped looking at you, the spell was broken.
The obligation of calling on her became a pleasure for Stefan. The more he fought it, the more he liked her. After a tragic, unfortunate love affair (he was unable to find out exactly what had happened), she yearned to escape from the evil world that had hurt her, to escape into the mirror. She longed to live in her own reflection.
She approached Stefan willingly, knowing that he carried a small nickel mirror. He let her look.
“It’s so… so marvelous there,” she whispered,
ceaselessly adjusting her eyelashes, her wavy hair. She could not take her eyes off the gleaming surface.
She reminded Stefan of a couple of other women he knew, the wives of friends in the city. They could sit in front of the mirror all day long, arranging their faces into every possible smile, investigating the sparkle of their eyes, peering at every freckle, every line, smoothing here and pushing there, like alchemists waiting for gold to precipitate in the alembic. The most obvious kind of abnormal obsession, and he had never thought of it before. Birdbrains, of course, but it was a mistake to assume that all neurasthenics were intelligent.
Neurotics could be idiots too, he thought, angry because it sounded almost like an admission: That’s what I am.
The girl would often sit in the bathroom, because there was a mirror there. Driven out, she would hang around near the door, stretch her hands out, and beg everyone who opened it to let her look at her own reflection. She tried to see herself in all the chrome fittings.
For some time Stefan had been suffering from insomnia. He would lie in bed reading, waiting for sleep, but it never seemed to come, and when it finally did, he thought he could feel someone standing motionless in the dark room. He knew there was no one, but he would wake up. Only when the first birdsong greeted the dawn could he doze off.
On the night of September 29, the sky sparkling with stars, he fell asleep earlier than usual. But he woke up terrified. A bright light flashed in the window. He got up in his underwear and looked out. Two big cars painted in irregular-shaped patches growled on the winding road, illuminated by the glare of their own headlights reflected off the hospital wall. Germans in dark helmets stood near the door. Several officers came out from under the small roof over the entrance. One of them shouted something. The motors roared, the officers got in, and soldiers jumped onto the running boards. The headlights swept the flower beds, and for an instant the beams of the second car fell on the one ahead. They lit up the passengers’ heads, and Stefan saw one bare head among the helmets. He recognized it. The headlights glared against the main gate, where the porter stood blinded, cap in hand. Then the motors roared louder as the cars turned onto the road. On a curve, the headlights picked out a clump of trees, a wreath of leaves, a trunk, and finally the white spine of a birch. Then it was quiet again, the chirping of crickets like a pulse in an enormous ear. Stefan grabbed his coat off the hook, squirmed into it unthinkingly, and ran barefoot down the hall.
Hospital of the Transfiguration Page 14
