Hospital of the Transfiguration

by Stanisław Lem

  All the doctors were gathered on the second floor, and the crossfire of questions was so chaotic that it seemed impossible to understand. The story emerged gradually. The soldiers were from an SS patrol group now stationed at Owsiany. They had arrested a worker at the electricity substation and were looking for others. Marglewski said loudly that no one should go into the woods, because the SS were searching the area, and there was no joking with them.

  The soldiers had not searched the hospital, just walked through the wards and talked to Pajączkowski. “The officer had a riding crop, and he struck the table in front of me,” said Pajączkowski, pale, his eyes wide. Everyone gradually drifted away as the excitement died down. As he passed Stefan, Marglewski stopped as if to say something, but only nodded maliciously and disappeared down the corridor.

  Stefan lay awake until morning. He was upset; he kept closing his eyes and reliving the brief nocturnal scene again and again. He could no longer pretend, as he had at first, that the man arrested was someone other than Woch. That large, square head was unmistakable. He groaned under the burden of responsibility he felt. He had to tell someone, had to confess the guilt that was tormenting him, so he went to see Sekułowski. It was early morning.

  But the poet would not let him open his mouth. “Can’t you see I’m writing? What do you want from me? What am I supposed to do? ‘Take a stand’ again? Everyone does what he can. What a poet does is suffer beautifully. What about you? Are you waiting for the war to end so every Achilles in the woods can become a Cato? You’re as bad as the Furies—at least they make sense, they’re women! Leave me alone for a change!”

  Brushed off, Stefan thought as he left. He wondered if it would do any good to go take a look at the substation. If there was still electricity in the hospital, somebody had to be working there. And that someone might know what had happened to Woch.

  Seeking shelter from his own thoughts, Stefan walked to the farthest comer of the men’s ward. Some red spots on the floor caught his eye, but as he came closer, he saw that they were not blood.

  A young schizophrenic was making a statue out of clay. Stefan watched him for a long time. The boy’s face betrayed nothing. His profile was sharply cut, yellowish, and slightly crooked, like a mobile mask. Sometimes he would close his eyes so peacefully that his eyelashes did not move, and raise his head as his fingertips fluttered like sparrows over the surface of the clay. There was a serenity to his downturned mouth. The demons had stopped tormenting him, sentences died on his lips, he could no longer communicate with strangers: he was absent. That supreme indifference which exists only in crowds or among the unconscious enabled the boy to work in solitude, as if he were in a desert. A tall angel rose from the mound of clay on the round table before him. Its wings, wide as a stricken bird’s, were somehow threatening. The long gothic face was beautiful and composed. The hands, held low as if in fear, were wringing a small child’s neck.

  “What’s it called?” asked Stefan.

  The boy did not answer. He wiped clay from his fingertips. Joseph spoke up from the corner; a patient was supposed to answer when a doctor talked to him.

  “Go ahead and tell the doctor,” said Joseph, stepping heavily forward.

  Joseph never backed down with patients—they got out of his way. But this boy did not move.

  “I know you can talk. Say something or I’ll take care of that doll for you.” He moved as if he was going to tip the figure over. The boy did not flinch.

  “No,” said Stefan, confused. “There’s no need for that. Joseph, please go to the supply room and fetch a tray of syringes and two ampules of scophetal. The nurse needs them.”

  He wanted to make it up to the boy for the humiliation. “You know,” he said, “it’s very strange and beautiful.”

  The patient stood with his shoulders hunched, hair sticking to his sweaty forehead. A shadow of contempt gathered under his lower lip.

  “I don’t understand it, but maybe you’ll explain it to me someday,” said Stefan, slowly shedding his role of psychiatrist.

  The boy stared glassy-eyed at his clay-stained fingers.

  Then, helplessly, Stefan extended his hand in the simplest of gestures.

  The boy seemed terrified: he moved to the other side of the table and hid his hands behind his back. Ashamed, Stefan looked around to make sure there were no staff members in the room. Then the boy reached out suddenly and awkwardly, almost knocking over the statue, and took hold of Stefan’s hand. He let go as if it burned him. Then he turned back to the figure and took no further notice of the doctor.

  Joseph came up to Stefan during rounds the next day. “Doctor, do you know what that clay is called?”

  “No, what?”

  “Strangling Angel.”

  “What?”

  Joseph repeated the name.

  “Interesting,” said Stefan.

  “Very interesting. Besides which, the bastard bites,” said Joseph, displaying red marks on his large hand. Stefan was awed. He knew all the orderlies’ practiced throws. Their motto was: Break a patient’s arm before you let him put a scratch on you. The boy must really have been “acting up.” And he must have got a good beating too. Despite innumerable orders and reprimands, the orderlies applied a policy of revenge behind the doctors’ backs, and patients who made nuisances of themselves were beaten peasant-style, close-in, with the most deliberately painful blows. They were hit through blankets or in the bath, so no marks would show. Stefan knew all this and wanted to order a strict ban on any mistreatment of the boy, but he could not: his authority did not extend to officially forbidden “methods.”

  “You know, that boy…”

  “The one with the angel?”

  “Right. Be careful he doesn’t get hurt.”

  Joseph was offended. He said he was careful of all the patients. Stefan took a fifty-złoty note out of his pocket. Joseph softened. He got the point. He was always careful, but now he would be extra-careful.

  They were standing in the doorway. Patients wandered nearby, but they might as well have been unattended. As Joseph unobtrusively put the folded banknote away, a determination that surprised him came over Stefan, and in a voice not his own he asked, “Joseph, you wouldn’t happen to know what happened to the man the Germans arrested that night? You know who I mean.”

  They looked at each other. Stefan’s heart pounded. Joseph seemed to be stalling. The flash of interest that had appeared in his eyes was submerged in a servile smile. “The guy missing an ear, who worked on the electricity? Woch? Did you know him, doctor?”

  “I knew him,” Stefan said, feeling that he was putting himself in Joseph’s hands. The effort of carrying on the conversation made him feel faint.

  An unctuous smile, more and more explicit, crept across Joseph’s stupid-cunning face. His eyes widened. “So you knew him, doctor? They say he wasn’t the one keeping that stuff in the hole. They say it was his godson, Antek. Well, who knows? But he was a fox, I’ll say that. A fox,” he repeated, as if he liked the sound of the word. “He drank with the Germans and made deals with them, until he wouldn’t give a normal person the time of day, he thought he was so important. He figured he had the German all wrapped up, but the German is a fox, too, and came at night and took him away like a chicken! Today a car came from Owsiany, and they had to make two trips, there was so much stuff. It was hidden under the coils, packed in crates like merchandise!”

  “Did you see it?”

  “Me? How would I see it? But other people did. They saw it, and they knew. But Woch didn’t realize. Everyone else could see it coming.”

  “What did they do to him?”

  “How should I know? You know the sand pit at Rudzień? Where the lake used to be? If you follow the road through the woods and then go to the right… They give you a shovel and tell you to dig a hole and stand over it. Then they get a peasant from the road to come and fill it in. They don’t like to dirty their hands.”

  Even though he had supposed as much�
�even though he knew it could not have been any other way—Stefan felt such rage, such hatred for Joseph, that he had to close his eyes.

  “What about the others?” he asked dully.

  “The Pościks? Disappeared like a stone in a lake. Nobody knows anything. They must have escaped into the forest. They won’t be found in the swamps and caves. And all because they were stupid, they didn’t think ahead. They had something there—all that ammunition.” His voice dropped on the last words.

  Stefan nodded, turned, and went to his room. With a steady hand he shook out a luminal tablet, thought about it, added another, washed them down with water, and dropped onto his bed with his clothes on.

  Late that evening he was awakened by a pounding on the door. It was Joseph with a telegram from Aunt Skoczyńska: Stefan’s father was seriously ill and he should come home immediately.

  He asked Staszek to take over for him on the ward and had no trouble getting several days’ leave from Pajączkowski.

  “It’ll be all right,” the old man croaked as he stroked Stefan’s hand warmly. “And as long as you’re going anyway, try to find out what the Germans are up to.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Take a look around, see what people are saying. There’s been a lot of bad news lately.”

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “Oh, nothing, nothing, really.”

  When he went to say good-bye to Sekułowski, Stefan found the poet composing, his hair standing on end as if electrified. His eyes jerked every so often in a strange inward gaze. His sonorous, metallic voice carried into the corridor, and Stefan stood in the door listening:

  My heart is a planet of red termites

  Fleeing in horror down a narrow path

  My body—a plaything of sluts and Stylites—

  Is murdering me. My expiring breath

  O Night, tears away the veil at last

  As that dusky girl with bloody thighs, Death,

  Touches my face, a desolate nest…

  Stefan went in and the poet stopped. A moment later, Stefan was telling him about the sculptor.

  “Strangling Angel?” said Sekułowski. “That’s interesting, very interesting.” He filled a page with his careful, impassioned script. “Blessed are the meek, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” he read.

  Then he looked at Stefan with twinkling eyes. “Because you’ve helped me a little, I want to show you something.”

  He shuffled through the sheets of paper covering his bedspread. “I’ve been dreaming of writing the history of the world from the point of view of another planetary system. This is a sort of introduction.” He began reading from a piece of paper. “It is a festering uterus of suns: the universe. It teems with trillions of stellar eggs. Furious procreation bursting forth in grit and black dust, moving beat by beat, darkness by darkness.” He was improvising—there were only a few sentences on the paper.

  “Where is this other system?” Stefan could not resist asking.

  “Nowhere. That’s the whole joke.”

  “And you believe that?”

  Sekułowski held his breath. When his bright eyes looked up, he seemed inspired and beautiful.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t believe it. I know it.”

  Stefan’s journey was a nightmare. The filthy dark railroad car smelling of sour sweat was searched three times for lard or butter. There were police, and wild crowds attacked the doors and windows. He could not maintain his personal dignity in the incredible crush, since he was invisible in the darkness and silence was taken as a sign of surrender. Within an hour he was cursing like a sailor.

  The city had changed. The streets had German names now, and jackbooted patrols tramped along the cobblestones. Airplanes with black crosses on the wings appeared above the houses from time to time: the sky was German.

  The usual smell of boiled cabbage greeted him as he entered the building, and on the second floor the sweet-rotten smell from the furrier’s workshop triggered a complex of memories.

  He found it hard to control his emotions when he saw the scratched brown door with the lion’s head carved in the transom.

  The entrance was full of tinware, shelves, and odds and ends, and the cobwebbed frame of his father’s unfinished projects rose to the ceiling like macabre animal prototypes. His mother, as Aunt Skoczyńska immediately told him in a dramatic whisper, had moved to the village a month before, since there wasn’t enough money to keep the household going. His aunt embraced him in the open doorway and he fell into the naphthalene abundance of her bosom. She kissed him, cried a little, and pushed him into the dining room for bread with jam and tea.

  As she brought out the labeled jars of homemade preserves, she talked about the high cost of fat and about a local lawyer. It was a long time before she finally mentioned his father. But then she launched with satisfaction into a detailed account of the events of the past few months. She painted a picture of a misunderstood, unlucky man of greatness, tormented by kidney and heart disease. She alone had supported the great inventor, distant relative though she was. “Your father,” she kept repeating, until Stefan began to suspect her of malice, as though she was accusing Stefan of coldness. But no—apparently she was simply expressing heartfelt sympathy. Years ago she had been beautiful. Stefan had even fallen in love with an old photograph of her that he had stolen from her room. But now accretions of flesh drowned what remained of her looks.

  After eating and washing, Stefan was at last admitted to the bedroom.

  His aunt played the envoy, scurrying back and forth on tiptoe, her hands rowing at her sides as though she was fighting the air resistance. The atmosphere was charged: the Return of the Prodigal Son, thought Stefan as he entered quietly, at which point the Rembrandtian contours in his mind dissolved.

  The first thing that struck him was that his mother’s collection of cactus, asparagus, and other plants had been mercilessly crammed into the darkest comer of the room. His father lay in bed with a blanket drawn up to his chin. His lemon-colored hands with their gnarled fingers looked like ugly dead ornaments on the blanket border.

  “How are you, Father?” he croaked.

  His father said nothing, and Stefan yearned for a pleasant, rapid conclusion to the visit. It flashed through his mind that it would be convenient if his father died right at that moment. Then Stefan would be able to kneel at that pathetic spot at the bedside, say a prayer, and leave. That would make everything so much easier.

  But his father did not die. On the contrary, he lifted his head and said in a whisper that turned into a groan, “Stefek, Stefek, Stefek,” in disbelief and then in joy.

  “Father, I heard you weren’t feeling well, and I was so upset,” he lied.

  “Oh,” said his father dismissively. He tried to sit up. He needed help and Stefan found the task terribly awkward. He could feel the bones under his touch, the gaps between his father’s ribs just beneath the skin, and the feeble remnants of warmth for which the emaciated, helpless body fought.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked with sudden concern.

  “Sit on the bed. Sit,” his father repeated with some impatience.

  Stefan perched obediently on the edge of the bedframe; it was uncomfortable, but also very touching. What could he talk about?

  He could remember only one expression on his father’s face; a vacant gaze into that other world where his inventions took shape. His hands had always been scratched by wire, burned by acid, or dyed some exotic color. Now all that was gone. The last of life trembled gently in the thick dark veins under his freckled skin.

  It was painful for Stefan to see.

  “I’m so tired,” his father said. “It would be better to just go to sleep and not wake up.”

  “Father, how can you say that?” Stefan blurted, but at the same time he thought: What else is there for a body like this, for a skull that seems to rattle like the meat in a dried-up walnut? His joints are squeaky hinges, his lungs asthmatic moss, his heart a jammed, leaky pum
p. The body was a decrepit tenement whose inhabitants feared it would collapse on their heads. Stefan recalled Sekułowski’s poem: it was our bodies that murdered us, obeying the only law they knew—not our will, but nature.

  “Father, would you like to eat something?” he asked uncertainly, disturbed by the lightness of the hand now stroking his own. It sounded so stupid, he felt ashamed.

  “I don’t eat. I don’t need anything now. I wanted to tell you so many things, but now… I lie awake all night. I can’t even sleep anymore,” he complained.

  “Well, I’ll give you a prescription,” said Stefan, reaching into his pocket for his pad. “Who’s treating you, Marcinkiewicz?”

  “Forget it. Don’t bother. Yes, Marcinkiewicz. It doesn’t matter now.” He burrowed deeper into his pillow. “Stefan, this time comes for everyone. When it really hurts, you wish a vein would burst in the brain at night. It might sound stupid, but I wouldn’t want to go all at once. It’s better to know what’s coming. But this doesn’t make sense.”

  Stroking Stefan’s hand, he paused as if confused.

  “We didn’t know each other well. I never had the time. Now I see that it doesn’t make any difference. The ones who hurry and the ones who take their time all end up in the same place. Just don’t have any regrets. No regrets.”

  He fell silent, then added, “Never regret that you’re in one place and not another. Or that you could have done something but didn’t. Don’t believe it. You didn’t do it because you couldn’t do it. Everything makes sense when it ends. Not before. Always and everywhere, when you come down to it, are the same as never and nowhere. No regrets, remember!”