Hospital of the Transfiguration

THE GENIUS

From Nieczawy to Bierzyniec it was twelve kilometers of winding, sodden clay road. When they reached the top of the highest hill, the road dropped into a deep channel that led through a narrower but equally marshy passage until a gentle rise with young forest on the southern slope suddenly appeared from behind a clump of trees. Massive buildings ringed by a brick wall loomed on the ridge. An asphalt road led up to the main gate. Out of breath after their brisk hike, they stopped a few hundred meters short of their goal. From this height Stefan had a view of a wide, gently rolling space with fog creeping in here and there in the setting sun. The melting snow reflected strange colors. A notched stone arch with an indistinct inscription, both its ends hidden in bushes, rose in front of the black gate. When they got closer, Stefan made out the words CHRISTO TRANSFIGURATO.

Hastily crunching through puddles still frozen in shady spots, they reached the gate. A fat, bearded porter let them in. Staszek went into feverish but subdued action. He ordered Stefan to wait in an empty room on the ground floor while he looked for the head doctor. Stefan paced the flagstone floor staring vacantly at the patterns of a fresco partly covered by plaster; there was a sort of pale gold halo and, just where the blue plaster began, a mouth opened as if to scream or sing. He turned around when he heard steps. Staszek, already wearing a long white smock with cuffs beginning to fray from too much laundering, had returned sooner than he expected. He looked taller and thinner in the smock, and his round face beamed with satisfaction.

“Perfect,” he said, taking Stefan by the arm. “I’ve already talked everything over with Pajpak. He’s our boss. His name is Pajączkowski, but he stutters, so… but you must be hungry, admit it! Don’t worry, we’ll take care of everything right away.”

The doctors roomed in a separate building, attractive, cozy and bright. Comfort of a high order was the rule. In the room Staszek brought him to, Stefan found hot running water and a sink, a bed with something clinical about it, light, somewhat austere furniture, and even three snowdrops in a glass on the table. But the most important thing was the absence of the smell of iodine or any other hospital odors. As Staszek chattered on without stopping to take a breath, Stefan tried the spigots, inspected the bathroom, tested the delightfully roaring shower, came back into the room, drank coffee with milk, smeared something yellow and salty on a roll and ate it—all out of friendship, so that Staszek could savor the fruits of his provident care.

“Well? What do you think?” Staszek asked when Stefan had finally examined everything and finished eating.

“Of what?”

“Of everything. The world.”

“Is that an invitation to philosophize?” Stefan said, unable to hold back his laughter.

“What do you mean, philosophize? The world—these days, that means the Germans. Everybody says they’ll get it in the end, but I’m not so sure, I’m sorry to say. They’re already talking about management changes—apparently a Pole can’t be director. But nothing’s settled yet. Anyway, first of all you have to get to know the place. Then you can choose a department. There’s no hurry. Take a good look first.”

It occurred to Stefan that Staszek sounded just like Aunt Skoczyńska, but he only asked, “Where are… they?”

Through the window he could see misty flower beds, indistinct pavilions, and a tower in the distance, Turkish or Moorish, he wasn’t sure which.

“You’ll see them, don’t worry. They’re all over. But relax. You won’t be going on the wards today. I’ll explain it all to you, so you won’t get lost. This, my friend, is a madhouse.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think you do. You took a psychiatry course and observed one patient, a neurological case, true?”

“Yes.”

“So you see. Therapy? Nothing to it. Under the age of forty, a lunatic has dementia praecox. Cold baths, bromine, and scopolamine. Over forty, dementia senilis. Scopolamine, bromine, and cold showers. And electroshock. That’s all there is to psychiatry. But here we are just a tiny island in a really weird sea. Pm telling you, if it wasn’t for the personnel… Anyway, you’ll pick it up soon enough. It would be worth it to spend your life here. And not necessarily as a doctor.”

“As a patient, you mean?”

“As a guest. We have guests too. You can meet some eminent people here. Don’t laugh, I’m serious.”

“Such as?”

“Sekułowski.”

“The poet? The one who…”

“Yes, he’s here with us, more or less. That is, how should I put it? A drug addict. Morphine, cocaine, peyote even, but he’s off that now. He’s staying here, as if he was on vacation. Hiding from the Germans, in other words. He writes all day, and not poems either. Philosophical thunderbolts. You’ll see! Look, I have evening rounds now. I’ll see you in half an hour.”

Staszek left. Stefan stood at the window for a while, then walked around his new quarters again. He was somehow taking everything in, not by consciously focusing on objects, but just by standing there, passive. He felt a new layer of sensations settling over the experiences of the past few days, a geology of memory taking shape, a sunken lower stratum made of dreams, and an upper stratum, more fluid, susceptible to the influences of the outside world.

He stood in front of the mirror, looking intently at his own face. His forehead could have been higher, he thought, and his hair more definite, either completely blond or brown. Only his beard was really dark, making him look as though he always needed a shave. Then there were his eyes—some people called them chestnut, others brown. He was indeterminate. Except for the nose he had inherited from his father; sharp and hooked, “a greedy nose,” his mother called it. He relaxed and then tensed his face so that his features looked more noble. One grimace led to another, and he made face after face until finally he spun away and walked to the window.

“If I could just stop aping myself!” he thought angrily, “I should become a pragmatist. Action, action, action.” He remembered something his father used to say: “A man who has no goal in life must create one for himself.” It was better to have a whole set of goals, short- and long-term. Not vague ones like “be brave” or “be good,” but things like “fix the toilet.” He longed intensely for the lot of a simple person.

“God! If only I could plow, sow, reap, and plow again. Or hammer stools together or weave baskets and carry them to market.” The career of a village sculptor whittling saints or of a potter baking a red-glazed rooster struck him as the pinnacle of happiness. Peace. Simplicity. A tree would be a tree, period. None of that idiotic, pointless, exhausting thinking: Why the hell does it grow, what does it mean that it’s alive, why are there plants, why is it what it is and not something else, is the soul made of atoms? Just to be able to stop for once! He started pacing, getting more and more annoyed. Luckily, Staszek came back from his rounds. Stefan suspected that Staszek felt confident in this hospital, like a one-eyed man among the blind. He was a gentle lunatic, a lunatic on a small scale, and so must seem uncommonly well-adjusted in this background of raving madness.

The doctors’ dining room was on the top floor next to a large billiards room and a smaller room with what looked like card tables.

The food wasn’t bad: ground meat and grits with bean salad, followed by crisp bliny. Jugs of coffee at the end.

“War, my friend, à la guerre comme à la guerre’’ said Stefan’s neighbor to his left. Stefan observed the company. As usual when he saw new faces, they seemed undifferentiated, interchangeable, devoid of character.

The man who had made the crack about war—Doctor Dygier or Rygier, he had introduced himself unclearly—was short, with a big nose, dark face, and a deep scar in his forehead. He wore a small pince-nez with a golden frame, which kept slipping. He adjusted it with an automatic gesture that began to get on Stefan’s nerves. They spoke in low murmurs about indifferent subjects: whether winter had ended, whether they would run out of coal, whether there would be a lot of work, how much they were being paid. Doctor Rygier (not Dygier) took tiny sips of coffee, chose the most well-done bliny, and spoke through his nose, saying little of interest. As they spoke, they both watched Professor Pajączkowski. The old man, who looked like a dove chick with his sparse, feathery beard through which the pink skin underneath was visible, was tiny, had wrinkled hands with a slight tremor, stuttered occasionally, slurped his coffee, and shook his head when he began to speak.

“So, you would like to work with us?” he asked Stefan, shaking his head.

“Yes, I would.”

“Well certainly, certainly.”

“Because the practice… it would be most useful,” Stefan murmured. He felt a strong aversion to old men, official meetings, and boring conversation, and here he had all three at once.

“Well, we will… yes… exactly…” Pajpak went on, shaking his head again.

Beside him sat a tall, thin doctor wearing a dustcoat stained with silver nitrate. Strikingly but not unpleasantly ugly, he had a harelip scar, a flat nose, wide lips, and a yellow smile. When he put his hands on the table, Stefan was amazed by their size and handsome shape. He considered two things important, the shape of the fingernails and the proportions of the hand’s width and length, and on both counts Doctor Marglewski revealed a good pedigree.

There was one woman at the table. Stefan had noticed her when he came in. When they shook hands, her hand was surprisingly cold, narrow, and muscular. The thought of being caressed by that hand was unpleasant and exciting at the same time.

Doctor Nosilewska (Miss? Mrs.?) had a pale face enveloped in a storm of chestnut hair that burned with gold and honey highlights. Below her lucid arched forehead her eyebrows tilted toward her temples like wings above sharp blue eyes that seemed almost electric. She was a perfect beauty, which meant that she was almost invisible—there was no birthmark or mole to capture the eye. Her tranquility was tinged with the maternal touch that marked Aphrodite’s features, but her smile was enlivened by the glints in her hair, her eyes, and a small depression in her left cheek—not a dimple, but a playful hint of one.

There was also a younger doctor with a pimply face, dark hair, and a hooked nose. Nobody spoke to him. His name was Kuśniewicz.

Stefan gathered from the conversation that the work was demanding but interesting, that psychiatry, however tedious, was the finest of callings, although given the choice, most of those present would have changed specialties. The patients were awful even when peaceful and quiet, and should all be given shock therapy whether they needed it or not. No one said anything about politics. It was like being on the ocean floor: all motion was indolent and subdued, and the most powerful of storms on the surface would be felt here only as a ripple, cause for a professional diagnosis.

The next day Stefan found out that he had not met all the doctors. He was accompanying Doctor Nosilewska on morning rounds (he had been assigned to the women’s ward), and as they walked along a gravel path spotted with water from the dripping trees, they met a tall man in a white coat. The encounter was brief enough, but it engraved the man in Stefan’s memory. He had ugly yellow features that seemed chiseled in ivory, eyes screened by dark glasses, a large pointed nose, and thin lips that were stretched across his teeth. He reminded Stefan of a reproduction he had once seen of the mummy of Ramses II: an asceticism independent of age, features somehow timeless. His wrinkles did not indicate the years he had lived, but seemed to belong to the sculpture of his face. The doctor, who was the best surgeon in the asylum, was rail-thin and flat-footed. His feet were wide apart as he slopped through the mud, and after a perfunctory bow to Nosilewska, he trotted up the outside spiral staircase of the red pavilion.

Nosilewska held in her white hand the key that opened the doors between wards. Almost all the buildings were connected by long glass-topped galleries so that doctors on their rounds would not be exposed to frost and rain. These galleries were reminiscent of greenhouse antechambers. But that impression vanished inside the wards. All the walls were pale blue. There were no spigots, drains, plugs, or door handles—just smooth walls to the ceiling. Patients in cherry robes and clacking clogs strolled up and down the cold, bright rooms between rows of neat beds made up in what seemed a military style. The windows were discreetly barred or covered with screens behind wide flower boxes.

Nosilewska walked through the wards locking doors behind her and opening new ones with fluid, automatic, almost somnolent movements. Stefan had a key too, now, but could not handle it so deftly.

Faces loomed around him: some pale and drawn, as if shrunken down to the skull, others puffy, swollen, unhealthily flushed. The men’s individuality was erased by their shaved heads. The bumps and oddities of their denuded skulls were so ugly that they overwhelmed the expressions on their faces. Protruding ears, extreme myopia, or a gaze fixed on a random object—these were the patients’ most obvious features, at least at first glance. A male nurse was pushing a patient along in the corridor, his movements not brutal so much as inappropriate for dealing with a human being. They softened for a moment as Stefan and Nosilewska passed. There was a gentle cry somewhere in the distance, as if someone was shouting out of conviction, rather than compulsion or illness, as if practicing.

Nosilewska herself seemed strange. Stefan had noticed it earlier that morning. At breakfast, he had tried to memorize her features out of aesthetic interest, so that he could summon them up later. He noticed then that her eyes seemed vacant, staring at nothing, as she bent her head like a swan’s over the rim of a steaming mug. He watched all her other unconscious signs of life: the delicate pulse at the base of her neck, the peaceful clouding of her eyes, the trembling of her lashes. When she slowly turned her blue, piercing gaze on him, he was almost frightened, and a moment later he quickly drew his leg back when their knees touched—the contact struck him as dangerous.

Nosilewska had a neat office in the women’s ward. Though it contained no personal objects, a femininity more subtle than any perfume hung in the air. They sat at a white metal desk and Nosilewska took a card index from a drawer. Like all female doctors, she could not use nail polish, but the short, round ornamental shaping of her fingertips was boyishly beautiful. High on the wall hung a small black Christ, suspended from two disproportionately massive hooks. That fascinated Stefan, but he had to pay attention: she was giving him a rundown of his duties. Her voice seemed close to breaking, as if she were about to speak in a high-pitched trill. Stefan had never written a case history of a psychiatric examination; in medical school he had copied, of course. When he found that he would not have to start one from scratch but would be adding to old notes, he appreciated Nosilewska’s helpful suggestions. She understood, as he did, that all the writing was infernally boring and futile, but that it had to be done out of respect for tradition.

“So that’s it.”

He thanked her and got ready to try it himself. Later he wondered whether that elegant woman in sheer white stockings and the tailored white coat with gray mother-of-pearl buttons realized what a set piece they were playing out. She rang for the nurse, a stocky, towheaded girl.

“Usually you walk around and ask the patients how they are, and what they think about their—well, symptoms, you know what I mean? But right now I’d like to give you a tour of part of my kingdom.”

It was indeed her kingdom. Though he was not claustrophobic, he was keenly and unpleasantly aware of all the doors that had been locked behind him with the magic key. Bars darkened the window even here in the office, and behind the medicine locker, in the corner, lay a wrinkled fabric: a strait-jacket. The patient who was brought in was grotesquely deformed by pajama bottoms too long and tight. She wore black slippers. Her face was expressionless, but seemed to conceal some surprise. With makeup, she might have passed for attractive. Her eyebrows had been artificially blackened, apparently with coal. They extended all the way to her temples. This might have accounted for the sense of strangeness, but Stefan was so surprised by what she said, he had difficulty looking at her. She was asked in a subdued, uninterested way whether there was anything new. She smiled promisingly and replied in a reedy, melodic voice, “I had a visitor.”

“Who was it, Suzanna?”

“The Lord Jesus. He came at night.”

“Really?”

“Yes. He crawled into my bed and…” And she described sexual intercourse in the most vulgar terms, looking curiously at Stefan, as if to say, “And what do you think of that?”

Stefan froze and was so embarrassed that he didn’t know where to look. Nosilewska took out a small cigarette case, offered him one, took one for herself, and began asking the patient for details. Stefan’s hands shook so much as he tried to light her cigarette that he broke three matches. When Nosilewska asked him to check the patient’s reflexes, he did it awkwardly. Then the nurse, who had been standing by impassively, took the patient by the arm, lifted her out of her chair like a sack of laundry, and led her out.

“Paranoia,” said Nosilewska. “She has frequent hallucinations. You don’t have to write it all down, of course, but a few words would be in order.”

The next patient, a fat woman with reddish-gray hair, made countless fidgety gestures, as if trying to break free of the girl who held her from behind by the folds of her robe. She talked nonstop, a stream of nonsensically strung-together words that flowed on even when the doctor was asking her a question. Suddenly she jerked more violently, and despite himself Stefan flinched. Nosilewska ordered her taken away.

The third patient was barely human. A thick, cloying stench preceded her. It would not have been easy to guess the sex of the tall, wretched creature. Bluish skin on a shriveled frame showed through the holes in her robe. Her face was large, bony, and blunt as a scarecrow’s. Nosilewska said something Stefan couldn’t catch, and the patient, who had been standing stiffly with her arms at her sides, began to speak.

“Menin aeide thea…” She was reciting the Iliad, accenting the hexameters properly.

After the nurse took the patient away, Nosilewska told Stefan, “She has a Ph.D. For a while she was catatonic. I wanted you to see her, because she’s pretty much a textbook case: perfectly preserved memory.”

Stefan couldn’t help saying, “But the way she looked…”

“It’s not our fault. I used to give her clean clothes, but a few hours later she’d look exactly the same. You can’t have a nurse standing over every coprophagic, especially these days. I’m going over to the pharmacy now, but you write out the case histories. Enter the dates and numbers in the book. Unfortunately, we have to take care of that administrative formality ourselves.”

Stefan yearned to ask whether the sort of obscenity the first patient had used was common, but the question would have revealed his inexperience, so he held his tongue. Nosilewska left. He riffled through the papers. When he was finished, he had to force himself to get up and leave. Women were walking around. Some were giggling as they dressed up with scraps of paper, strips of rag, and string. In the comer was a bed with screens at the side and cords across the top. It was empty. As Stefan walked along the wall, instinctively trying to keep Ms back to the patients, he heard a scream of despair. He looked through a thick portal set into a small door. It was an isolation cell. The naked woman inside was throwing her body against the padded walls as if it were a sack. Her eyes met Stefan’s and she froze. For an instant she was a normal human being, ashamed of her terrible situation and her nakedness. Then she seemed to murmur something and came closer. When her face was up against the glass, her long gray hair falling across it, she opened her braised lips and licked the pane with her lacerated tongue, leaving streaks of pink-tinged saliva.

Stefan fled, unable to control himself. He heard a scream. In a bathroom, a nurse was trying to force a howling and fiercely struggling patient into a tub. Her legs glowed bright red: the water was too hot. Stefan told the nurse to make it cooler. He knew he had been too polite, but he felt he could not reprimand her. It was too soon for that, he thought.

A third room was filled with snoring, rattling, and wheezing. Women suffering from insulin shock lay in bed, covered with dark blankets. Here and there a pale blue eye followed Stefan with an insect’s vacant gaze. Someone’s fingers clutched his smock. Back in the corridor, he ran into Staszek.

Stefan’s face must have looked different, because his friend slapped him on the shoulder and said, “So how was it? For God’s sake don’t take it all so seriously.” He noticed wet stains under Stefan’s arms.

With relief Stefan told him about what the first patient said and how the others looked. It had been so horrible.

“Don’t be childish,” Staszek said. “It’s only the symptoms of disease.”

“I want to get out of here.”

“The women are always worse. I was just talking to Pajpak, because I could see it coming.” Stefan noticed with satisfaction that Staszek was using his influence. “But Nosilewska really is all alone here, and she needs help. Stay with her a week to make it look good, and then we’ll get you transferred to Rygier. Or maybe—wait a minute, that’s an idea. You assisted Włostowski as an anesthesiologist, didn’t you?”

In fact, Stefan had been good at anesthesia.

“The thing is, Kauters has been complaining that he doesn’t have anybody.”

“Who?”

“Doctor Orybald Kauters,” Staszek intoned. “Interesting name, isn’t it? He looks Egyptian, but supposedly he’s descended from the Courlandian nobility. A neurosurgeon. And not bad.”

“Yes, that would be better,” Stefan said. “At least I’d learn something. Because here…” he waved his hand.

“I wanted to warn you earlier, but there was no time. The nurses are completely unqualified, so they are a little callous, a little brutal. In fact, they do some pretty rotten things.”

Stefan interrupted to tell him about the nurse who almost scalded a patient.

“Yes, that happens. You have to keep an eye on them, but basically—well, you know how people are. Behind one’s choice of a profession, there can be aberrant emotions…”

“There’s an interesting question,” Stefan said. He was looking for an excuse not to go back to the ward and wanted to talk. They were standing under a corridor window. “A free choice of professions sounds like a good thing,” he said, “but really it’s only the law of random distribution in a large population that guarantees that all important social positions will be filled. Theoretically, it could happen that no one would want to work in the sewers, for example. Then what? Would they be drafted?”

“It’s worked so far. The random distribution hasn’t failed. Actually, this is one of Pajpak’s favorite themes. I’ll have to tell him.” Staszek smiled, showing teeth yellowed by nicotine. “He says it’s a good thing people are so unintelligent. ‘Nothing but university professors—that would be a n-n-nightmare. Who would sweep the streets?’” Staszek intoned, imitating the old man’s voice.

But Stefan was getting bored with this too.

“Will you come back to the ward with me? I want to take the case histories up to my room. I guess one should be able to write in the ward, but I can’t with that door behind me.”

“What door?”

“I keep feeling they’re standing behind me, looking through the keyhole.”

“Hang a towel over the door,” Staszek said so matter-of-factly that Stefan felt reassured; Staszek must have gone through the same thing.

“No, I’d rather do it this way.”

They went back to the duty room, and to get there they had to pass through the three women’s rooms. A tall blonde with a ruined, terrified face called Stefan aside as if he was a stranger she was asking for help on the street instead of a doctor.

“I see you’re new here,” she whispered, looking around nervously. “Can I talk to you for five minutes? Even two?” she begged. Stefan looked at Staszek, who stood smiling slightly, playing with a neurological rubber hammer.

“Doctor, I’m completely normal!”

Stefan knew that dissimulation was a classic symptom in some forms of madness, so he thought he knew how to handle her. “We’ll talk about it during rounds.”

“We will? Really?” She seemed to cheer up. “I can see you understand me, doctor.”

Then she leaned close and whispered, “Because there’s nothing but lunatics here. Nothing,” she added with emphasis.

He wondered why she had been so secretive. Who else did she expect to find in an asylum? But as he walked with Staszek, it suddenly struck him: she meant everybody, including the doctors! Nosilewska too? He tried to ask Staszek, as delicately as possible, whether Nosilewska was perhaps a little strange, but his friend snorted.

“Nosilewska?” Staszek launched into a heated defense: “Ridiculous! She comes from the best family.” He’s hopelessly in love with her, Stefan realized. Staszek suddenly looked different to him. He noticed the badly shaved spot on his bobbing Adam’s apple, his ugly teeth, an emerging pimple, the receding hairline where a few years ago there had been lush dark waves.

He doesn’t stand a chance, Stefan thought.

Stefan himself had no interest in her. She was beautiful, even very beautiful, with extraordinary eyes, but something about her repelled him.

As they walked, Staszek remembered Sekułowski and decided to introduce Stefan to him.

“A fantastically brilliant man,” Staszek explained, “but scatterbrained. You can have a great conversation, but don’t set him off. And watch your manners, will you? He’s very touchy.”

“I’ll be careful,” Stefan promised.

They went outside to get to the recovery wing. The skies were clearing, the wind tearing great holes in the gray, fluffy clouds. Fog wafted low over the trees.

They came across a man in a short coat pushing a wheelbarrow full of dirt. He was a Jew, powerfully built and dark-skinned, with a beard that started almost at his eyes.

“Good morning, sir,” he said to Stefan, ignoring Staszek. “Have you forgotten me, doctor? Yes, I see that you don’t remember me.”

“I’m not sure,” Stefan began as he stopped and returned the other man’s bow. Staszek stood by in obvious amusement, kicking at a weed with the tip of his shoe.

“Nagiel, Salomon Nagiel. I did your dad’s metalwork, don’t you remember?”

Something clicked in Stefan’s mind. In fact there had been a handyman with whom his father would sometimes disappear into the workshop to build a model.

“Do you know what I do here?” Nagiel continued. “I am the First Angel.”

Stefan felt foolish. Nagiel came closer and whispered earnestly, “A week from now there’s going to be a big assembly. The Lord God Himself will be there, and David, and all the Prophets and Archangels. Everyone. I have influence there, so if you need anything, doctor, just let me know, and I’ll take care of it.”

“No, I don’t need anything.”

Stefan grabbed Staszek by the arm and pulled him toward the door. The Jew stood watching, leaning on his shovel.

“Who knows what laymen think an asylum is,” Stefan was saying as they turned into a long corridor with yellow tiles. At a landing another corridor led off to the left, lighted by small, widely spaced lamps that somehow suggested a forest. They moved in and out of darkness as they walked.

“The symptoms you’ve seen so far are pretty typical. Delusions, hallucinations, motor excitement, dementia, catatonia, mania, and so on. But pay attention now.”

He stopped under a frosted-glass lamp at an ordinary door with a handle and lock.

They entered a small, airy room with a bed against the wall, a few white chairs, and a table with an orderly stack of thick books on top. Numerous sheets of paper crumpled into balls lay on the floor. A man in violet pajamas with silver stripes sat with his back to the door. When he turned around, Stefan recalled a photograph from an illustrated magazine. He was a tall man, almost handsome, but putting on weight that was obscuring his sharp, regular features. He had prominent eyebrows flecked with gray like his temples, and his eyes looked bright, lively, and strong, capable of staring relentlessly, now vacant with relaxation. They were colorless, and picked up the hues of their surroundings. They were light now. The poet’s skin, pale from his confinement indoors, seemed almost transparent; under his eyes it sagged into barely perceptible pockets.

“Allow me to introduce my colleague, Doctor Trzyniecki,” Staszek said. “He’s come to work with us for a while. An excellent participant in discussions of ideas.”

“But only as a dilettante,” said Stefan, pleased at Sekułowski’s brief, warm handshake. They sat. It might have looked strange: two men in white coats, stethoscopes and hammers sticking indiscreetly out of their pockets, and an older man in wild pajamas.

They chatted about this and that for a while, and then Sekułowski remarked, “Medicine can offer a pretty good window on infinity. Sometimes I regret not having studied it systematically.”

“You are speaking with an expert on psychopathology,” Staszek said to Stefan, who noted that his friend was more restrained and rigid than usual. He’s trying his best, Stefan thought.

Stefan said that no one had yet written a novel about medicine believably depicting the profession.

“A scribbler’s job,” the poet said, smiling politely but dismissively. “A mirror to everyday life? What does that have to do with literature? By that view, doctor—contrary to what Witkacy says—the novel would be the art form of the peeping Tom.”

“I was thinking of the whole complexity of the profession… the transformation of a person who enters the halls of the university knowing people only on the outside and… comes out a doctor.”

He knew that sounded stupid. To his unpleasant surprise, Stefan realized that he was having trouble formulating his thoughts and choosing his words, that he was confused, like a freshman in front of a professor, even though he felt no awe of Sekułowski.

“It seems to me that we have no more knowledge of our bodies than of the most distant star,” the poet said quietly.

“But we are discovering the laws that govern the body.”

“Not until the majority of biological theses have their antitheses. Scientific theory is intellectual chewing gum.”

“But allow me to ask,” Stefan replied, slightly impatient. “What did you do when you were sick?”

“I called the doctor.” Sekułowski smiled. His smile was as bright as a child’s. “But when I was eighteen years old, I realized how many morons became doctors. Since then I have had a panicky fear of illness, because how can you entrust your body to someone more stupid than yourself?”

“Sometimes that’s best. Haven’t you ever felt like confiding things you would conceal from those closest to you, to the first stranger that comes along?”

“And who, according to you, is close?”

“Well, your parents, for instance.”

“Mommy and Daddy know best?” Sekułowski asked. “Parents are supposed to be close? Why not the coelacanth? After all, your biology teaches us that they are the first link in the chain of evolution, so why shouldn’t intimacy extend to the whole family, lizards included? Do you know anyone who ever conceived a child with a warm thought to its future intellectual life?”

“Well, what about women?”

“You must be joking. The sexes deal with each other out of complicated motives, probably a consequence of some twisted protein that lacked something here and had something sticking out there, but how do we get from there to closeness? To intellectual closeness. Is your leg close to you?”

“What does my leg have to do with it?” Stefan could see that he wasn’t holding up his end; Sekułowski was batting the conversation around like a ball with a racket.

“Everything. Your leg is obviously close, because you can experience it in two ways, with your eyes closed as a ‘conscious feeling of possessing a leg,’ and when you look at it or touch it—in other words, as an object. Unfortunately, no other human being is ever more than an object.”

“That’s absurd. Surely you don’t mean to say that you’ve never had a friend, that you’ve never loved?”

“Now we’re getting somewhere!” Sekułowski exclaimed, “Let’s assume that I have. But what does that have to do with closeness? No one can be closer to me than I am to myself, and sometimes I am a stranger to myself.”

He lowered his eyelids heavily, as if resigning from the world. This conversation was like wandering in a labyrinth. Stefan decided to persevere and do his best. It might be fun.

“But your literature is no bargain. One takes hold of words too one-sidedly and glosses over details…”

“Go on,” the poet encouraged him.

“A literary work is a matter of conventions, and talent is the ability to break them. I’m not saying it has to be realism. Any literary style can be good, provided the author respects the internal logic of the work. If you have your hero walk through a wall once, you have to let him do it again…”

“Excuse me, but what is the purpose of literature, as you see it?” Sekułowski asked softly, as if he were falling asleep.

But Stefan had not finished; the interruption confused him and he lost his train of thought.

“Literature teaches…”

“Oh really?” The poet sighed. “And what does Beethoven teach?”

“What does Einstein teach?”

Stefan’s impatience now bordered on irritation. Sekułowski definitely had an overblown reputation. Why go easy on him?

The poet smiled quietly, very satisfied. “Nothing, naturally,” he said. “He’s playing, friend. Except that some people don’t know it. Turn on a light every time you give a dog a piece of kielbasa, and after a while the dog will salivate at the sight of the light. Show a man enough ink scrawled on paper, and after a while he’ll say it is a model for the universe. It’s neurology, obedience school, that’s all.”

“What’s the kielbasa in that example?” Stefan asked quickly, feeling like a fencer scoring a touch. But Sekułowski was not slow with his riposte.

“Einstein, or some other worthy authority, is the kielbasa. Isn’t mathematics a form of intellectual tag? And logic, chess played by the strictest rules. It’s like that child’s game with string, where two players twist it around their fingers in artful combinations, adding more and more twists until they come back to the starting point. Have you ever seen Peano and Russell’s proof that two plus two is four? It takes up an entire dense page of algebraic symbols. Everybody is playing, and so am I. Have you seen my play The Flower Garden? I call it a chemical drama. The flowers are bacteria, and the garden is the human body in which they multiply. A fierce battle between tuberculosis bacilli and the leukocytes is going on. Alter seizing the armor of the lipoids, which is a sort of magic cap of invisibility, the bacteria unite under the leadership of the Supermicrobe, defeat the leukocytes, and then, just as a blissful and blessed future is unfolding before them, the garden sinks under them. In other words, the human being dies and the poor little plants have to die along with it.”

Stefan did not know the play.

“Forgive me for talking about myself,” the poet said. “But each of us, after all, is a kind of blueprint for the world. The trouble is that the plan is not always well executed. An awful lot of bungling goes into the making of human beings. And the world,” he said, looking down through the window as if he saw something amusing, “is just a collection of the most fantastic oddities, whose existence no one can explain. The easiest thing, of course, is to make believe you don’t see anything, that whatever is, simply is. I do it myself all the time. But it isn’t enough. I cannot remember the exact figure—my memory is failing these days—but I once read the odds of one living cell arising out of the multitude of atoms. It was something like one in a trillion. And that those cells should come together in however many billions you need to make up the body of a living human being! Every one of us is a lottery ticket that hit the jackpot: a few dozen years of life, what fun! In a world of superheated gases, nebulae spiraling to whiteness, and the cosmic absolute zero, suddenly a protein pops up, some greasy jelly that immediately tends to decompose into a puff of bacteria and decay. A hundred thousand subterfuges sustain this weird field of energy, which divides matter into order and chaos. A node of space crawls across an empty landscape. And why? Haven’t you ever wondered why there are clouds and trees, golden-brown autumn and gray winter, why the scenery changes through the seasons, why the beauty of it all strikes us like a hammer-blow? Why does it happen that way? By rights we should all be black interstellar dust, shreds of the Magellanic Cloud. The normal state of things is the roaring of the stars, showers of meteors, vacuum, darkness, and death.”

He leaned back on his pillow exhausted and said in a deep, low voice:

Only the dead know the tunes

The live world dances to.

“What does literature mean to you, then?” Stefan dared to ask after a long pause.

“For the reader it is an attempt to escape. For the creator, an attempt at redemption.”

“You’re a mystic…” Stefan was not doing well in this conversation: he couldn’t play his best cards, because Sekułowski would snort and drop down from infinity.

“A mystic? Who told you that? Here in Poland you publish four poems and they pin a little card on you with a label that sticks beyond your death: ‘subtle lyricist,’ ‘stylist,’ ‘vitalist.’ Critics—or critins, as I sometimes call them—are the physicians of literature: they make wrong diagnoses just like you, and in just the same way they know how things ought to be but they can’t do anything. So they’ve mysticized me now, have they? Well, one more weirdness to add to the million others: though possessing brains, they can think with their intestines.”

“This conversation is slightly one-sided,” Stefan said, deciding to rally his forces for a frontal attack to conquer Sekułowski. He had completely forgotten about medicine. “Instead of a dialogue you’re having a double monologue with yourself. I do know your work. Somewhere you propose the existence of a consciousness different from the ‘Consciousness of Being.’ You describe the nonexistent worlds of Riemann. But as you say yourself, the world that surrounds us is interesting enough. Why do you write so little about it?”

“The world that surrounds us? Oh, so you think I dream up worlds? But you have no doubt about the identity of the world that surrounds—for example, the one you’re sitting at the center of, on that white chair?”

Stefan thought and said, “For the most part, no.”

Sekułowski heard only the “no,” which was all he needed.

“I see a different world. Recently Doctor Krzeczotek let me look into a microscope. As he later told me, in it he saw pink buffering epithelia, among which appeared, in a palisade configuration, dark diphtherial corynebacteria of the characteristic spadiceous configuration. Do I have it right?”

Staszek nodded.

“I saw an archipelago of brown islands and coral atolls in a sky-blue sea with pink icebergs drifting on a trembling, stream.”

“Those atolls were the bacteria,” Staszek remarked.

“Yes, but I didn’t see bacteria. So where is our common world? When you look at a book, do you see the same thing as a bookbinder?”

“So you doubt even the possibility of communication with another person?”

“This discussion is too academic. All I will admit is that I do exaggerate certain lines in my sketch of the world, and that the attempt to be consistent can lead to inconsistency. Nothing more.”

“Logical absurdity, in other words? That is a possibility, but I don’t know why…”

“Each of us is a possibility, one of many, that has emerged from necessity,” Sekułowski interrupted, and Stefan recalled an idea that had come to him in solitude one day. He voiced it, thinking it might be impressive.

“Did you ever think, ‘I, who was once one sperm and one egg’?”

“That’s interesting. Do you mind if I make a note of it? Unless, of course, you’re gathering your own literary material?” Sekułowski asked. Stefan said nothing, feeling robbed but unable to make a formal protest. The poet wrote several words in a large, sloping hand on a sheet of paper he took from a book. The book was Joyce’s Ulysses,

“You have been speaking, gentlemen, about consistency and its consequence,” said Staszek, who had been silent until now. “What do you have to say about the Germans? The consequence of their ideology would be the biological annihilation of our nation.”

“Politicians are too stupid for us to be able to predict their actions through reason,” answered Sekułowski as he carefully replaced the cap of his green and amber Pelikan pen. “But in this case your hypothesis cannot be ruled out.”

“What should be done, then?”

“Play the flute, collect butterflies,” retorted Sekułowski, who now seemed bored with the conversation. “We achieve our freedom in various ways. Some do it at the expense of others, which is ugly, but effective. Others try to find cracks in the situation through which they can escape. We should not be afraid of the word ‘madness.’ Let me tell you that I can perform acts that seem mad in order to manifest my freedom.”

“Such as?” asked Stefan, although he thought that Staszek, whom he glimpsed out of the comer of his eye, was making some sort of warning gesture.

“For example,” said Sekułowski amiably, at which he wrinkled his face, opened his eyes wide, and bellowed through distended lips like a cow. Stefan turned red. Staszek glanced off to the side with a grimace that bore the hint of a smile.

“Quod erat demonstrandum,” said the poet. “I was too lazy to resort to something more eloquent.”

Stefan suddenly regretted his effort. Why cast these pearls before swine?

“This has nothing to do with genuine madness,” Sekułowski said. “It was only a small demonstration. We should expand our potential, and not only toward the normal. We should also look for ways out of the situation that others don’t notice.”

“How about in front of a firing squad?” Stefan asked drily, but with inward passion.

“There it may be possible to distinguish oneself from the animals in the manner of meeting death. What would you do in such a situation, doctor?”

“Well, I’d… Stefan did not know what to say. Until then he felt that the words had been sliding off his tongue automatically, but now an emptiness filled his mouth. After a long pause he croaked, “It seems to me that we are marginal. This whole hospital—it isn’t a typical phenomenon. The atypical made typical.” His formulation cheered him. “The Germans, the war, the defeat, here it’s all felt very indirectly. At most, as a distant echo.”

“A yard full of wrecks, is that it? While undamaged ships sail the seas,” said Sekułowski, looking up at the ceiling. “You, gentlemen, try to mend the works of the Creator, who has botched more than one immortal soul.”

He got up from the bed and paced the room, loudly clearing his throat several times as though tuning his voice.

“Is there anything else I can demonstrate for you, gracious audience?” he asked, standing in the center of the room with his arms crossed. His face lit up. “It’s coming,” he whispered. He leaned forward slightly, looking up so intently that they all froze, drawn into a vortex of strange anticipation. When the tension became unbearable, the poet began to speak:

Place gently on my grave a ribboned spray

Of pearly worms. Let those worms crawl

Through my skull, a decaying ballet

Of ptomaine, raw flesh whitening, that’s all.

Then he bowed and turned toward the window, as if he could no longer see them.

“I thought I told you…” Staszek began as soon as they left.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You provoked him. You have to speak to him gently, and you put the pedal to the floor right away. You were more concerned with being right than with listening to him.”

“Did you like that poem?”

“In spite of everything, I have to say I did. God knows how much abnormality there is in genius sometimes, and vice versa.”

“So. Sekułowski the genius!” said Stefan, his feelings hurt as if he were the one being judged.

“I’ll give you his book. You haven’t read Blood without a Face, have you?”

“No.”

“It’ll knock you out.”

At that Staszek left Stefan, who realized that he was standing in front of his own door. He went inside to look for some piramidon in his drawer. He had a pounding headache.

During evening rounds, Stefan tried in vain to avoid the withered blonde. She pounced on him. He took her to Nosilewska’s office.

“Doctor, I want to tell you everything from the beginning,” she said, nervously wringing her emaciated fingers. “I was caught with lard on me. So I acted mad, because I was afraid they’d send me to a camp. But this is worse than a camp. I’m afraid of all these lunatics.”

Stefan asked her a series of questions.

“What’s your name?

“What’s the difference between a priest and a nun?

“What are windows for?

“What do you do in church?”

Her answers suggested that she was indeed completely normal.

“How did you manage to convince them?”

“Well, I have a sister-in-law at John the Divine’s, and I saw and heard. I pretend to talk to somebody who’s not there, I pretend to see him, and then the fun starts.”

“What am I supposed to do with you?”

“Let me out of here.” She reached out her hands to him.

“It’s not that simple, my dear lady. You’ll have to spend some time under observation.”

“How much time, doctor? Oh, why did I do it?”

“You wouldn’t be any better off in a camp.”

“But I can’t stand being with that woman who messes herself, doctor. Please. My husband will show his gratitude.”

“None of that,” Stefan said with professional indignation. Now he had hit upon the right tone. “I’ll have you transferred to the other room, where they’re more peaceful. You can go now.”

“It doesn’t even matter anymore now. They squeal and scream and sing and roll their eyes, and I’m afraid I’ll go crazy too.”

Over the next few days, Stefan got the hang of how to write a case history without thinking about it, stringing a few hackneyed phrases together. Almost everyone else did the same. He also figured Rygier out. The psychiatrist was undoubtedly an educated man, but his intelligence was like a Japanese garden: make-believe bridges and paths, very beautiful but quite narrow and purposeless. His understanding ran in grooves. The elements of his knowledge were cemented to each other so that he could use them only as if they were entries in a textbook.

After a week, Stefan no longer found the ward so revolting. Poor women, he thought, but some of them, especially the maniacs, prided themselves on a familiarity with the saints that went beyond the intent of church dogma.

Pajączkowski’s nameday fell on Sunday. The boss appeared in a freshly pressed coat, his sparse beard carefully combed. He blinked placidly behind his glasses like an old bird, as a woman schizophrenic from the convalescent wing recited a poem in his honor. Then an alcoholic sang. Last but not least was a choir of psychopaths, but they ruined the festivities by grabbing the old man and tossing him up toward the ceiling, above a net of upraised hands. With some effort, the old man was rescued from the patients. The doctors then formed up into a procession as in a cloister—the abbot at the front, the brothers behind—and went into the men’s ward, where a hypochondriac who was sure he had cancer made a speech, interrupted by three paralytics who suddenly broke into song—“The poor man died in an army hospital”—and could not be convinced to stop. Later there was a modest meal in the attic of the doctors’ building, and Pajpak tried to conclude the evening with a patriotic speech. It did not come off. The little old man’s head started trembling, he cried into his glass, spilled cumin-flavored vodka all over the table, and finally, to everyone’s relief, sat down.