Pajączkowski looked yellow and parched. His pupils were as wide as buttons.
“Professor,” whispered Stefan. And then louder: “Professor.”
Pajączkowski walked to the cabinet and took out a small bottle with a worn cork—spiritus vini concentratus. He splashed some into a tumbler, because there was no proper glass, drank it, and choked. Then he sat down in an armchair and held his head in his hands.
“The whole way there,” he said, “I kept going over what I would say. If he told me the deranged were useless, I was going to appeal to the work of two deranged Germans, Bleuler and Moebius. If he talked about the Nuremberg legislation, I would explain that we were an occupied country and our legal status would not be clarified until a peace treaty was signed. If he demanded that we turn over the incurables, I would say that in medicine there is no such thing as a hopeless case. You never rule out the unknown: that is one of the obligations of a doctor. If he said that this was an enemy country and he was a German, I would remind him that he was a doctor above all else.”
“Please, professor,” whispered Stefan, pleading.
“Yes, I know you don’t want to hear this. When I got there, I don’t know if I said three words. I was slapped in the face.”
“What?” croaked Stefan.
“The Ukrainian on duty told me that Obersturmführer Hutka had gone to the asylum to check on the population and work out the tactical plan. That’s how he put it. I hope you gave false numbers.”
“No, I… I mean, he saw them himself.”
“Yes, I see. Yes, yes.”
Pajpak poured himself some bromine with luminal from a second bottle, drank it, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Then he asked Stefan to summon all the doctors to the library.
“The dean too?”
“What? Yes. Well, maybe not. No.”
The lights were already on in the library when Stefan entered with Nosilewska and Rygier. Then Kauters, Marglewski, and Staszek appeared. Pajączkowski waited until they were all seated. Tersely and without the usual digressions he announced that the German and Ukrainian unit that had pacified—in other words, burned and slaughtered—the village of Owsiany planned to exterminate the patients of the asylum. The Germans had organized a labor gang for next morning, since they had learned from experience that mental patients—unlike peasants, who would usually dig their own graves—were incapable of organized tasks. He had learned all he needed to know from his attempt to approach Doctor Thiessdorff.
“Barely had I informed him of the purpose of my call when he slapped me. I wanted to believe that he was outraged at my slanderous suggestion of his intentions, but the Ukrainian duty officer informed me that they had already received orders: they are getting extra ammunition today. This duty officer seemed honest enough, if that word has any meaning under the circumstances.”
Pajączkowski concluded by explaining the true purpose of Obersturmführer Hutka’s afternoon visit.
“I would like you, ladies and gentlemen, to think all this over, to make certain decisions, and take steps… I am the director, but I am simply… simply not man enough to…”
His voice failed.
“We could release the patients into the woods and let them get away by themselves. There’s a local train to Warsaw at two in the morning,” Stefan began, but stopped when he met dead silence.
Pajpak shrugged. “I thought of that. But it seems unlikely to work. The patients would be rounded up easily. And they would never survive in the forest anyway. It would be the simplest thing, but it’s not a solution.”
“I believe,” said Marglewski, his tone categorical, “that we have to yield to superior force. Like Archimedes. We should leave, just leave the hospital.”
“With the patients?”
“Just leave.”
“In other words, escape. That, of course, is one way out,” the old man said softly, strangely patient. “The Germans can hit me in the face, throw us out of here, do whatever they like. But I am not just the director of this institution. I am a doctor. As are all of you.”
“Nonsense,” Marglewski muttered, resting his chin on his hand.
“Haven’t you tried… any other method?” asked Kauters. Everyone looked at him.
“What do you have in mind?”
“Well, some sort of appeasement.”
Pajączkowski finally caught on. “A bribe?”
“When will they be here?”
“Between seven and eight in the morning.”
Marglewski, who had been squirming strangely, suddenly pushed his chair back, leaned forward, his hands spread wide on the table, and said, “I regard it as my duty to preserve the scholarly work that is the common property of everyone, not only mine. I see no other course open to me. Farewell, ladies and gentlemen.”
Head high, he walked out without looking at anyone.
“Wait a minute!” shouted Staszek.
Pajączkowski made a gesture of helplessness. They all looked at the door.
“So,” Pajpak said in a fragile voice. “He works here for twenty years, and now this. I didn’t know, I never would have supposed—I, a psychologist, a specialist in personalities…”
Then he screamed, “We must not think of ourselves! We must think of them!” He struck the table with his fist, and began to weep, coughing and shaking.
Nosilewska led him to a chair, and he sat down reluctantly. The light struck her hair in golden streaks as she bent over the old man and discreetly held his wrist to check his pulse. She hurried back to her chair.
Suddenly everyone began talking at once.
“It’s still not certain.”
“I’m going to call the pharmacist.”
“In any case we have to hide Sekułowski.” (That was Stefan.)
“And the priest too.”
“But wasn’t he discharged?”
“No, that’s the point.”
“Well, let’s go to the office.”
“The Germans have already checked the numbers,” said Stefan dully. “And made me—I mean all of us—responsible.”
Kauters maintained his silence.
Pajączkowski, now calm, stood up again. His eyes were red. Stefan approached him. “Professor, we have to decide. Some of them must be hidden.”
“We must hide all the patients who are conscious,” said the director.
“Maybe a few of the more valuable ones could be…” Rygier hesitated.
“Perhaps we can let all the convalescents go?”
“They have no papers. They’d be picked up at the station.” “So which ones do we hide?” asked Staszek with nervous boldness.
“I’m telling you, the most valuable ones,” Rygier repeated.
“I cannot make decisions about value. Just as long as they don’t betray the others,” said Pajpak. “That’s all.”
“So we are supposed to make a selection?”
“Gentlemen, please go to the wards. Doctor Nosilewska, you will want to inform the nursing staff.”
Everyone headed for the door. Pajpak stood off to the side, leaning with both hands on the back of a chair. Stefan, the last to leave, heard him whispering.
“Excuse me?” he asked, assuming that Pajączkowski was speaking to him. But the old man did not even hear him.
“They’ll be so afraid,” he was whispering almost breathlessly.
No one slept that night. The selection yielded dubious results: about twenty patients, but no one could vouch for their nerves. The supposedly secret news somehow spread through the hospital. Young Joseph ran around in an open robe, not leaving Pajączkowski’s side.
In the women’s ward, a half-naked crowd danced in a blur of limbs amid a thin, relentless wailing. Stefan and Staszek nearly emptied the stock of drugs in the space of two hours, dispensing the carefully hoarded luminal and scopolamine right and left. To the amusement of Rygier, who was guzzling pure alcohol, Stefan took two swigs from the big bottle of bromine. Marglewski was seen heading for
the gate lugging two suitcases and a knapsack crammed with his index cards on geniuses. Kauters disappeared into his apartment before midnight. Chaos mounted by the minute. Each ward howled in a different voice, creating a random, polyphonic scream. Stefan passed the dean’s room several times in hasty and needless trips up and down the stairs. A sliver of light showed under the door, but there was no sound from within.
It seemed impossible to find a place to hide patients on the hospital grounds. Then Pajączkowski presented the doctors with a fait accompli; he took eleven schizophrenics in remission and three manics into his apartment. He moved a wardrobe in front of the door to conceal them, but it had to be taken away temporarily when the healthiest-looking schizophrenic had a sudden attack. A big chunk of plaster was chipped off when the wardrobe was hurriedly replaced, and Pajączkowski covered the spot with a curtain. Stefan looked in several times. Under other circumstances he would have been amused at the sight of the old man, his mouth full of nails, teetering on a chair supported by Joseph, putting up a curtain rod with a neurological hammer. It was announced that only those with at least two rooms could hide patients. That meant Kauters and Rygier. The latter, now thoroughly drunk, agreed to take a few. Stefan went to the ward to bring out the boy sculptor. He opened the door on a storm of screaming people.
Long strips of bedding whirled around the few remaining light bulbs. Crowing, whistles, and a repetitive hoarse chant of “The Punic War in the Closet!” rose above the general roar. Stefan groped along the wall unnoticed. Twice he was kicked by Paścikowiak, who paced back and forth with long, vigorous strides, as if trying to break free of gravity.
Patients blind with madness spun in demonic pinwheels, threw themselves against walls, and crawled by twos and threes under beds from which their jerking legs stuck out. Stefan at last reached the boy’s room. Once he found him, he had to use his fists to try to clear a path to the door. The boy resisted and dragged Stefan into a comer. There he took a large canvas bundle from under a straw pallet. Only then did he let himself be led out.
When they reached the corridor, Stefan stopped for breath. He was missing several buttons and his nose was bleeding. The wailing behind the doors rose an octave. He handed the boy over to Joseph, who was helping to arrange a hiding place in Marglewski’s apartment, and went back downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs he noticed that he was holding something: the bundle the boy had given him. He tucked it under his arm, reached for a cigarette, and was frightened at how his hands shook as he struck a match.
After the third attack among his stowaways, Pajpak gave each of them a dose of luminal. Dawn was breaking as the last of thirty drugged patients were closed into an apartment.
Pajpak, who seemed to be everywhere at once, was personally destroying files, ignoring Stefan’s warnings. Wiping his hands after burning papers in a stove, he said, “I’ll take the responsibility for this.”
Nosilewska, pale but composed, shadowed the director. A fictional post, “chaplain,” was created for Father Niezgłoba, who stood in the darkest comer of the pharmacy praying in a piercing whisper.
As he ran aimlessly through the corridor, Stefan bumped into Sekułowski. “Doctor,” the poet cried, clutching Stefan’s smock, “perhaps I could—why don’t you lend me a doctor’s coat? After all, you know I’m familiar with psychiatry.”
He ran along with Stefan as if they were playing tag. Stefan stopped, gathered his wits, and thought it over. “Why not? It hardly matters at this point. We took care of the priest, so I guess we can do something for you. But…”
Sekułowski did not let him finish. They ran to the stairs, shouting back and forth. Pajpak stood on the landing giving the nurses final instructions.
“I say we should just poison them all!” cried Staszek, red as a beet.
“That’s not only nonsense, it’s criminal,” said Pajączkowski. Large drops of sweat ran down his forehead and glistened in his bushy gray eyebrows. “God might change everything at the last minute, and what then?”
“Ignore him,” said Rygier contemptuously from the shadows. A bottle peeped out of his pocket.
“You’re drunk!”
“Professor,” Stefan joined in, Sekułowski shoving him toward the old man, “there’s one more thing.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Pajpak, when he heard Stefan’s suggestion. “Why don’t you want to come to… to my apartment?” He wiped his forehead with a large handkerchief. “All right, of course. Right away. Doctor Nosilewska, you know how to arrange it.”
“I’ll falsify the records right away,” she said in her clear, pleasant voice. “Come with me.”
Sekułowski went with her.
“Now, one more thing,” said Pajpak. “Someone has to go to see Doctor Kauters. But I can’t go alone, it’s too awkward.”
He waited for Nosilewska to come back from the office. Sekułowski was bustling around the building in Stefan’s white coat, and had even appropriated a stethoscope to adorn his pocket. But when he came near enough to the door of the next building to hear the gathering howls, he retreated to the library.
Stefan felt weary. He looked around the corridor, waved his hand, peered through the window to see if it was morning yet, and walked to the pharmacy to take some more bromine. As he was putting the bottle back on the shelf, he heard someone come in.
It was Łądkowski, wearing a loose black suit.
The dean seemed unhappy to find Stefan there. He stood awkwardly in the doorway.
Stefan thought that perhaps Łądkowski was not feeling well. He was pale and seemed not to want to meet Stefan’s gaze. He hesitated as if about to leave, even putting his hand on the doorknob, but turned back and came close to Stefan. “Is there any cyanide here?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Is there any potassium cyanide in the pharmacy?”
“Well, yes,” mumbled Stefan, unable to collect his thoughts. In his amazement he dropped the bottle of luminal, which shattered on the floor. He bent to pick up the pieces, but then stood and looked expectantly at the dean.
“The key is hanging right there, Excellency. Yes, that one.” The cyanide and other poisons were kept under lock and key in a small cabinet on the wall.
Łądkowski opened a drawer and took out a small glass tube that had contained piramidon. Then he took a jar off the shelf, uncorked it with tongs, and carefully poured white crystals into the tube. He corked it and put it in the upper pocket of his coat. He locked the cabinet, hung the key back on its nail, and turned to go. But he stopped and hung the key back on its nail, and turned to go. But he stopped and said to Stefan, “Please don’t tell anyone about this…”
He gripped Stefan’s hand, squeezed it with his cold fingers, and said in a half-whisper, “Please.”
He hurried out, closing the door softly.
Stefan stood leaning on the table, still feeling Łądkowski’s fingers on the back of his hand. He looked around, went back to the cabinet to pour himself some bromine. With the bottle in his hand, he froze.
He had caught a momentary glimpse of Łądkowski’s frail old chest through his unbuttoned shirt. It reminded him of a fairy tale about a powerful king, a story that had once obsessed him.
This monarch ruled an enormous kingdom. People for a thousand miles around obeyed him. Once, when he had fallen asleep on his throne in boredom, his courtiers decided to undress him and carry him to the bedchamber. They took off his burgundy coat, under which shined a purple, gold-embroidered mantle. Under that was a silk robe, all stars and suns. Then a bright robe woven with pearls. Then a robe shining with rubies. They removed one robe after another until a great shimmering heap stood beside the throne. They looked around in terror. “Where is our king?” they cried. A wealth of precious robes lay before them, but there was no trace of a living being. The title of the story was “On Majesty, or, Peeling an Onion.”
The conference in Kauters’s apartment lasted an hour. In the end the surgeon opted for nonintervention: he w
ould know nothing, do nothing. He would admit to familiarity with the operating room alone. Sekułowski would pose as the doctor on his ward. When Nosilewska told Stefan about the discussion, she mentioned that Sister Gonzaga was in Kauters’s apartment, sleeping on two armchairs pulled together. Sister Gonzaga? Stefan no longer had the strength to be astonished. He felt numb. He saw everything through a light fog. It was almost six. He saw Rygier in the corridor sitting in a special wheelchair used to transport paralytics. Rygier put the bottle on the floor in front of him and delicately kicked at it, as though delighted by the pure sound of glass.
Stefan was struck by the tension on his face, which seemed to presage an outbreak of tears at any moment. He did not dare say anything, but Rygier suddenly started hiccupping.
“Do you know where Pajączkowski is?” Stefan asked.
“He went out into the garden,” said Rygier, hiccupping.
“What for?”
“He’s with the priest. They must be praying.”
“I see.”
Sekułowski emerged from the library and spotted Stefan.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m all in. I think I’ll lie down. We’ll need our strength in the morning.”
Sekułowski seemed heavier in the white coat. The belt was too short to tie until he added a length of bandage.
“I admire, doctor. I couldn’t do it.”
“Don’t be silly. Come to my room.”
Stefan noticed a bundle on the radiator in the stairwell. Then he remembered that the boy had given it to him. He picked it up and, curious, unwrapped it. He saw the head of a man wearing a helmet, submerged to the upper lip in a block of stone. The eyes bulged and the cheeks were distended. The invisible mouth, lost in the stone, seemed to scream.
He put the statue on the table in his room, pulled the blanket off the bed, moved the chair, and fell onto his pillow. At that moment, Rygier burst in.
“Listen,” he said. “Young Pościk’s here. He’s taking six patients through the woods to Nieczawy. Do you want to go along, Mr. Sekułowski?”
Hospital of the Transfiguration Page 18
