Hospital of the Transfiguration

STASZEK

When Stefan opened his eyes, still bleary with sleep, he expected to see the oval mirror on gilt plaster lion’s paws that stood by his bed, the bay-front chest of drawers, and the green haze of asparagus out the window. He was surprised to find himself in a large, strange room filled with a clock’s sonorous chiming. He was lying very low, just above the floor, and dawn shined through a window frosted over with translucent ice. He could not understand why the old walls of the house next door seemed to be missing.

Only when he sat up and stretched did he recall the previous day’s events. He got up quickly, shivering, slipped into the vestibule, and found his coat on the rack. He put it on over his shirt and headed for the bathroom. Candlelight, orange in contrast to the violet light of dawn filtering into the vestibule through the glass of the veranda, shined from behind the unlocked door. Someone was in the bathroom. Stefan recognized Uncle Ksawery’s voice and immediately felt an urge to eavesdrop. He justified his curiosity on psychological grounds: he believed that there was a single, ultimate truth about people that could be discovered by watching them when they were alone.

He walked quietly to the bathroom and, without touching the door, peered inside through a crack as wide as his hand.

Two candles burned on the glass shelf. Clouds of steam, yellow in the light, rose from the tub against the wall and enveloped the ghostly figure of his uncle who, dressed in home-spun pants and a Ukrainian-style shirt, was shaving, making strange grimaces into the dripping mirror, and declaiming emphatically, but with a caution demanded by the razor, an obscene limerick.

Stefan, somewhat disenchanted, stood there wondering what to do when his uncle, as if he had felt his gaze (or perhaps he simply spotted him in the mirror), said in a totally different voice, without turning, “How are you, Stefan? It’s you, isn’t it? Come on in, you can wash. There’s enough hot water.”

Stefan said good morning to his uncle and obediently entered the bathroom. He washed hurriedly, somewhat inhibited by the presence of Ksawery, who went on shaving, not paying any attention to him. There was silence for a moment, until his uncle said, “Stefan.”

“Yes, Uncle?”

“Do you know how it happened?”

Stefan understood from his tone what Ksawery meant, but, reluctant to admit it, he asked, “With Uncle Leszek, you mean?”

Ksawery, shaving his upper lip, did not answer. After a long silence, he spoke abruptly: “He came here on the second of August. He was going fishing for trout there below the mill. You know the place. Naturally he didn’t say a word. I knew him so well. We had duck for dinner, just like yesterday. But with apples, which I don’t have anymore. The soldiers took them all in September. And he didn’t want any duck. He always liked duck. That made me wonder. And he had that face. Except it’s hardest to notice in someone close to you. A man won’t admit to himself that…”

“An aversion to meat, cachexia?” Stefan asked, realizing that he sounded ridiculous. His own knowledge somehow shamed him, even as it gave him a certain satisfaction. He stood up and dried himself quickly, not quite thoroughly, because he could sense what his uncle was going to say and he didn’t want to have to hear it naked. Because it made him feel defenseless? He didn’t try to decide. Ksawery was still looking in the mirror, his back to Stefan, and he went on without answering the question.

“He didn’t want to be examined. And I was terrible. I made jokes, said I was studying ticklishness, that I wanted to see if his belly was bigger than mine, stuff like that. It was a tumor the size of a fist, so hard you couldn’t even move it, metastasized and everything, hell…”

“Carcinoma scirrhosum,” Stefan said quietly, though he had no idea why. The Latin term for cancer was like an exorcism, a scientific spell that removed the uncertainty, the dread, the trembling, giving it the precision and tranquility of the inevitable.

“A textbook case,” Uncle Ksawery mumbled as he shaved the same spot on his cheek over and over. Stefan stood motionless at the door, wrapped in the short bathrobe, his trousers in his hand. What else could he do? He listened.

“Did you know he almost became a doctor? You didn’t? Well, he quit after the fourth year of medical school. He’d been an intern for a couple of years. We even started medical school at the same time, because I frittered away a couple of years after high school graduation. All because of a… well, never mind. Anyway, when he watched me examine him, he knew what it was. And I knew it was too late to operate, but when you’re a doctor the only other place you can send somebody is the undertaker’s. It’s never too late for that. What the hell, I thought, God knows what kind of pain he’s got. He agreed right off. I went to Hrubiński. A son of a bitch, but hands of gold. He agreed to operate but for dollars, because things were so uncertain and the złoty might go to hell. When he looked at the X rays he refused point-blank, but I begged him.”

Ksawery turned to Stefan, looked at him as if he were holding back a laugh, and asked, “Have you ever got down on your knees to anybody, Stefan?” He quickly added, “I don’t mean in church.”

“No.”

“Well, that’s what I did. Got down on my knees. You don’t believe it? Well I did, I’m telling you. Hrubiński operated on September twelfth. The German tanks were already in Topolów. The oats in the field were burning. The nurses had fled, so I was his assistant. The first time in years. He opened him up, sewed him up, and left. He was furious. I wasn’t surprised. But he cursed me. Everything was absurd that whole September, everywhere, and Poland, well…”

Ksawery began sharpening his straight-razor on a belt, deliberately, slower and slower, and without stopping he said, “Right before the operation, after the scopolamine, Leszek said, ‘This is the end, isn’t it?’ So naturally I started talking the way you talk to a patient. But he meant Poland, he wasn’t talking about himself. I should go to his grave and tell him that Poland will rise again. A dreamer he was. But who knows how to die anyway? When he woke up after the operation, I was with him and he asked what time it was. Like an idiot I told him the truth. I should have set the clock ahead, because with his medical training he knew that a radical operation has to last an hour at the very least, and this was all over in fifteen minutes. So he knew…”

“What happened then?” Stefan asked, not really wanting to know, just to fill a menacing silence.

“Afterward I took him to Anzelm’s, that’s where he wanted to go. I didn’t see him for three months, not until December. But that’s something I never understood.” Uncle Ksawery, moving slowly, blindly, put the razor down and, standing next to Stefan, stared as if seeing something unusual at his feet. “He was in bed, he looked like a skeleton. He could barely swallow milk, his voice was frail, a blind man could see the state he was in, but he… how can I put it? He was completely confident. He explained away everything, and I mean everything. He rationalized. The operation had been a success, he was getting stronger every day, he was getting better, soon he would be up and around again. He had his hands and legs massaged. Every morning he told Aniela how he felt, and she wrote it down for the doctor so he could treat him properly. Meanwhile, the tumor was the size of a loaf of bread. But he told them to keep his belly bandaged so he couldn’t touch it, as if to protect the scar. The illness he didn’t talk about, except to say that it had been just a minor thing, or even that there was nothing wrong with him anymore.”

“Do you think he was… abnormal?” Stefan asked in a whisper.

“Normal! Abnormal! What does that have to do with it? He was a normal dying man! He couldn’t tear the cancer out of his body, so he tore it out of his memory. Maybe he was lying, maybe he really believed it, maybe he just wanted others to believe. How should I know which? He said that he was feeling better and better, and cried more and more often.”

“He cried?” Stefan asked with childlike fear, remembering how strong Uncle Leszek looked on horseback, holding a double-barreled shotgun pointed at the ground.

“Yes. And do you know why? They prescribed morphine suppositories for the pain, and he was putting them in himself. But when the nurse had to, he broke down. ‘I can’t do anything myself,’ he said, ‘except put that suppository in, and now they take that away.’ He couldn’t get up, but he said he didn’t want to. When they gave him milk, he’d say it wasn’t worth waking up for, that it would be different if it was broth, but when they gave him broth, he didn’t want that either. God, being with him then, talking to him! He’d hold his hands up, they looked like twigs, and he’d say, ‘Look, I’m putting on weight.’ He got incredibly suspicious. ‘What are you whispering about?’ ‘What did the doctor really say?’ Finally, Aunt Skoczyńska got the priest. He showed up with the oil for extreme unction and I thought, oh no, what now, but Leszek took it in perfect calm. Except that later the same night he started whispering. I thought he was talking in his sleep, so I didn’t answer. But he whispered louder: ‘Ksaw, do something.’ I went closer, and again: ‘Ksaw, do something.’ You’re a doctor, Stefan, aren’t you? So you know I had the morphine all ready, just in case he wanted… I had the right dose with me, you know, carried it in my shirt pocket all the time. That night, I thought he wanted me to… you understand. But when I looked into his eyes, I realized that he wanted to live. So I didn’t do anything, and he said it again: ‘Ksaw, do something.’ The same thing over and over, until dawn. He didn’t say anything else, and then I had to leave. Well, yesterday Aniela told me that on the last night she went to take a nap and when she came back to see him, he was dead. But he was lying the wrong way.”

“What do you mean, the wrong way?” Stefan whispered in uncomprehending dread.

“The wrong way. With his feet at the head. Why? I have no idea. I guess he wanted to do something, something to stay alive.”

Standing there in his wrinkled pants, his shirt open at the chest and traces of soap on his face, Uncle Ksawery slowly lowered his head. Then he looked at Stefan. His quick black eyes were sharp and hot.

“I’m telling you this because you’re a doctor. It’s something you should know! I don’t know why, but I almost prayed. Unbelievable what a man can be driven to!”

Water dripped off the mirror and onto the floor. They both jerked when the drawing-room clock struck, loud, majestic, and deliberate.

Uncle Ksawery turned back to the basin and began splashing water on his face and neck, spitting loudly, snorting water out his nostrils. Stefan dressed hurriedly and somehow furtively, then slipped out of the bathroom without a word.

In the dining room the table was already set. Blue icicles outside the window absorbed the day’s brightness and sent golden flashes through the panes and onto the glass of the grandfather clock, breaking into rainbows on the cut-glass carafe on the table. Uncle Anzelm, Trzyniecki from Kielce with his daughter, Great-aunt Skoczyńska, and Aunt Aniela came in one by one.

There was a big pot of coffee on the table, a loaf of bread, pats of butter, honey. They ate in near-silence, everyone somehow subdued, looking at the sunny window and exchanging monosyllables. Stefan was careful to avoid getting the skin of the milk in his coffee. He hated that. Uncle Anzelm was thoughtful and gruff. Nothing really happened, but it took an effort to sit at the table. Stefan glanced once or twice at Uncle Ksawery, the last to appear, with no tie, his black jacket unbuttoned. Stefan felt that a secret covenant had been concluded between them, but his uncle ignored his meaningful glances, rolled pieces of bread into little balls and dropped them on the table. Then one of the village women who was helping out came in and announced loudly to the entire room, “A gentleman is here to see the younger Mr. Trzyniecki.”

That formal “younger Mr. Trzyniecki” reflected the efforts of Uncle Leszek, who had always drilled the help when he stayed at Ksawery’s. Stefan, taken by surprise, bolted from the table, mumbled an excuse, and ran for the hallway. It was bright there, and with the light streaming through the glass of the veranda he could not make out the newcomer’s face, just his silhouette against the glare. The stranger was wearing an overcoat, holding his cap, and it took Stefan a moment to recognize him.

“Staszek! What are you doing here—I wasn’t expecting you.”

He led the guest into the drawing room and almost violently pulled the fur-collared coat off him. He took it to the vestibule, came back, sat his guest in an armchair, and pulled up a chair for himself. “So, how are you? What’s new? Where’ve you been staying?”

Stanisław Krzeczotek, a classmate of Stefan’s at the university, smiled with a mixture of confusion and satisfaction. He was a little taken aback by Stefan’s animation. “Well, nothing much. I’m working not far from here, in Bierzyniec. Yesterday I happened to hear about the funeral, I mean, that your uncle… He paused for a second, avoiding Stefan’s gaze, then went on. “So I thought I might find you here. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, a long time,” Stefan said. “You’re working in Bierzyniec? No kidding! What are you, a district doctor? But Uncle Ksawery…”

“No, I’m working in the asylum. With Pajączkowski. Come on, you know the place.”

“Oh, the asylum. You mean you’re a psychiatrist? That’s a surprise.”

“For me, too, but there was a vacancy, and an advertisement by the Medical Association… before September, you know.”

Krzeczotek began explaining how he came to be in Bierzyniec. He told the story in his usual way: slowly, with innumerable unimportant details. As always, Stefan got impatient and urged him along with questions that ran ahead of the narrative. And all the while he looked at his friend with unconcealed delight. They had met in the first year of medical school, brought together by their mutual lack of enthusiasm for working with cadavers. Staszek lived near Stefan and suggested that they study together, since textbooks cost so much and it was not easy to study alone for long periods. Stefan had noticed Staszek, but had not approached him, sensing a touch of the star pupil in him, something he couldn’t stand. It wasn’t until they had been to some dances and parties together that he started to trust him. Staszek was always the life of the party. Once he got to know him better, though, Stefan realized that the boisterousness and cheer were only on the surface. Staszek was so full of anxieties, he could never make up his mind about anything. Examinations, classmates, cadavers, professors, women—he was afraid of everything. With great skill he had devised himself a mask of merriment, which he discarded with relief whenever he could. Stefan was especially fascinated to discover that although girls liked Staszek and laughed at his jokes, he could charm them only in a group. Even with just two girls he did well enough, bouncing back and forth between them with clever flirtation, but with only one girl he was hopeless. There comes a time when you have to forget the jokes and become serious, but Staszek just couldn’t do it. Everyone realized that dancing, flirting, and light banter were a sort of preparatory action, like a peacock reading its tail for the peahen. But that was as far as Staszek’s social talents went.

Stefan discovered this by tracing his friend’s amazing transformations: leaving a gathering where he had sparkled, he turned silent and morose. This was followed by long talks between the two of them, autumn walks in the park, evenings spent wrestling with philosophical conundrums: heated arguments, efforts to find “the ultimate truth” or “the meaning of life” and similar ontological deliberations. Neither of them was capable of such incisive reasoning on his own. They catalyzed, complemented each other. But not in personal matters. Staszek propounded a theory to explain his erotic defeats: he did not believe in love. He liked to read about love, but did not believe in its existence. “Look,” he said, “just read Abderhalden! If you inject a female monkey with prolactin and stick a puppy in the cage with her, she immediately starts caressing it and taking care of it. But two or three days later she’ll eat the beloved doggie. That’s mother love for you, the most sublime of all feelings—a few chemicals in the blood!”

Secretly Stefan felt superior to his classmate. Staszek had a round, plump moon-face, though his body was thin. He had a good-humored potato nose, the tip constantly plagued by a big pimple. He froze in winter because he considered going without long underwear a sign of manhood. And he spent three-quarters of every year hopelessly, obviously, and comically in love. They spoke a great deal about life in general, but very little about their own lives. Yet now, sitting on the damask seat-covers in Uncle Ksawery’s shadowy drawing room, it was hard to plunge straight into the refuge of philosophizing. When Staszek finished his story, there was an uncomfortable silence. In an effort to break it, he asked Stefan about his professional life.

“Me? Well, for the moment I’m not doing anything. Not working anywhere. And with the Germans now, the Occupation, I don’t know. I’m looking. I’ll have to find some position somewhere, but I haven’t really thought about it too specifically yet,” Stefan said, speaking more and more slowly as he went on. They both fell silent again. Stefan was disappointed at how little they had to say to each other, and desperately sought a subject. More to keep the conversation going than out of any real curiosity, he asked, “So how is it in the asylum? Do you like it there?”

“Ah, the asylum.”

Staszek perked up and seemed about to say something, when suddenly he stopped, his eyes wide, and his face lit up. “Stefan, listen! I just thought of it right now, but so what? Archimedes also, you know! Listen, why don’t you come to work at the asylum? Why not? It’s a good place, you’d get some specialization, you know the area here, it would be quiet, interesting work, and you’d have plenty of time to do research—I remember you always wanted to do research.”

“Me? The asylum?” Stefan asked in amazement. “Just like that? I only came here for the funeral, you know. But it really doesn’t matter to me…” He stopped, not sure whether the last words sounded wrong, but Staszek hadn’t noticed anything. They spent the next fifteen minutes going over the subject, discussing what it would be like if Stefan took the position, because there was indeed an opening for a doctor at the asylum. Staszek answered Stefan’s doubts one after the other: “So what if you didn’t specialize in psychiatry? Nobody’s born a specialist. Your colleagues would be first class, believe me! Well actually I guess doctors are like everybody else—some better, some worse. But they’re all interesting. And it’s such an easy place! It’s like being outside the Occupation, in fact it’s even like being outside the world!” Staszek got so excited that he turned the asylum into a kind of extraterrestrial observatory, a delicious solitude in which a man naturally endowed with a fine intellect could develop in peace. They talked and talked, Stefan totally unconvinced that anything would come of it but nonetheless encouraging his friend for fear of the vacuum that beckoned beyond the borders of this last topic.

There was a knock at the door. Uncle Anzelm and the aunts were leaving for the station. By rights, Stefan should have gone with them, but he managed to get out with a frantic kissing of hands and a barrage of bows. Aunt Aniela seemed to be in a good mood, which under different circumstances would have upset Stefan—he remembered what Ksawery had told him—but he was in too much of a hurry to get back to Staszek to be indignant. This renewed, albeit final contact with the family—Anzelm’s arrogance as he put his arms around Stefan for a kiss but only brushed his face with a stubbly cheek, the idiotic injunctions and advice of Aunt Melania—made Staszek’s proposition seem much more attractive. But when he returned to find his friend gazing at the old engravings on the drawing-room wall with affected nonchalance, he felt uncertain again. In the end, after carefully considering the pros and cons, he announced that he would go home to settle certain things (this was a fiction, there was nothing to settle, but it sounded plausible). Then—after a certain length of time (he emphasized this, so as not to look too much like a swine afterward)—he would come back to Bierzyniec.

At noon Stefan bid his uncle a polite but reserved farewell and left for the station. Staszek went with him; he could take the same train as far as Bierzyniec.

It was a warm spring-like day. The melting snow made gurgling streams that turned the road into a quagmire. Stefan and Staszek said little as they slogged along, partly because negotiating the puddles demanded attention, but also because there was nothing to say. They killed time at the station, smoking cigarettes the way they used to between lectures, the lighted ends cupped in their hands, until the train came. As the train pulled in, Staszek looked at it aghast and decided to go on foot. The ears were bursting with people. They were pressed against the windows, sitting on the roofs, hanging on to every rail, handle, and step. When the train stopped and was invaded by the mob of peasants and shoppers waiting to get on, it was an outright battle. Stefan vented an aggression he would not have expected of himself, pushing and shoving among the sheepskins as if his life depended on it. The train was already moving when he obtained a toehold on the edge of a wooden step. With both hands he grabbed the overcoats and furs of the people hanging from the door above him. But when he realized that he would not last more than a few minutes in that position, he jumped. The train was moving so fast that he nearly fell, but somehow he escaped with no more than a good spray of dirty snow and slush. When he turned from the tracks, flushed with effort and anger, he saw Staszek’s indulgent, amiable smile. This only fanned his anger, but his friend called from a distance, “Take it easy, Stefan. It’s fate, not me. Come on, we’ll walk to Bierzyniec together.”

Stefan stood there indecisive for a moment and was about to say something—not about the vague things he had to “settle,” but about clean clothes and soap. With an energy unusual for him, Staszek took him by the arm and told him that at the asylum he would find whatever he needed, and he did it so warmly that Stefan smiled, waved away his reservations, and slopped through the mud with his friend toward the three humps of the Bierzyniec Hills that loomed brightly on the horizon.