Hospital of the Transfiguration

DOCTOR ANGELICUS

Webs of intrigue were spread through the hospital, discreetly awaiting any newcomer’s first misstep. Someone was trying to oust Pajączkowski, weaving rumors about an imminent change of directors, rejoicing in every conflict, but Stefan observed this landscape of dwarfed personalities like someone staring into an aquarium, interested but detached.

He was drawn to the company of Sekułowski. They always parted amiably, but it annoyed Stefan that the poet felt so at home in his world of phantoms. Sekułowski treated him as no more than a sparring partner, regarding his own mind as the measure of all things.

Reports of mass arrests in Warsaw came in. There were rumors of the hurried creation of ghettos. Filtered through the hospital walls, however, such stories sounded misty and implausible. Many veterans of the September campaign who had temporarily lost their mental bearings during the fighting were now leaving the asylum. This made things slightly roomier; in some of the wards patients had been sleeping two and three to a bed.

But problems with provisions—especially medicines—were growing. Pajpak considered the problem carefully and then issued the most far-reaching measures of economy. Scopolamine, morphine, barbiturates, and even bromine were placed under lock and key. Insulin, which had been used for shock therapy, was replaced by cardiazol, and what was left of that was doled out sparingly. Statistics were vague. No clear trend in the census of the community of the mad had yet emerged from the oscillating figures. Numbers in some classifications shrank, others stagnated or rose. It was a time of indecision.

April arrived. Days of bright rain and greenery were interrupted by snowy spells that seemed to have been borrowed from December. Stefan woke early one Sunday with an emphatic sun dyeing his dreams purple through his eyelids. He looked out the window. The view was like a great painter’s sketch with a broad brush, and new variations of the same sketch followed, each containing fresh color and detail. Fleece-like fog crept through the long valley between ridges like the backs of sleeping animals, and black brushstrokes of branches were covered in the swell. Dark irregular shapes showed through the fog here and there, as if the brush had slipped. Then a trace of gold filtered into the white from above, there was an unsettled moment when white spirals appeared and drifted out to become a cloud on the horizon that soon thinned and receded until day shined through as pure as a bare chestnut.

Stefan went out for a walk. He left the road. Every scrap of ground was covered with green: it seethed in the ditches and spurted from beneath stones; blossoms were bursting, covering the distant trees in delicate celadon clouds. Exposed to the warm breeze, he tramped up a hill and reached its ridge through last year’s dry, rustling grass. The fields lay below like slightly soiled stripes in a peasant costume. Water droplets, blue and white, shimmered on every stalk, each one holding fragments of the image of the world. The distant forest angled toward the horizon like an underwater silver sculpture. The tops of trees on the slope below stood out against the sky, brown constellations of sticky buds. He walked in their direction. A mass of bushes blocked his way, and as he detoured around it, he heard heavy breathing.

He drew close to an entangled thicket. Sekułowski was kneeling inside it. Stefan could barely hear his laugh, but it made his skin crawl.

“Come here, doctor,” the poet said without looking up.

Stefan pushed through the branches. In the middle was a circular clearing. Sekułowski was looking at a small mound of earth where thin files of ants moved around a reddish earthworm.

Stefan said nothing. Sekułowski looked him up and down, then stood up and commented, “This is only a model.”

He took Stefan by the arm and led him out of the thicket. The hospital was gray and small in the distance. The surgical wing shined like a child’s red block that had been dropped. Sekułowski sat in the grass and began to scribble rapidly in a notebook.

“Do you like to watch ants?” Stefan asked.

“I don’t like it, but sometimes I have to. Were it not for us, insects would be the most horrifying thing in nature. Because life is the opposite of mechanism, and mechanism the opposite of life. But insects are living mechanisms, a mockery, nature’s joke. Midges, caterpillars, beetles—we should tremble before them. Dread, the greatest dread.”

He bent his head and went on writing. Stefan looked over his shoulder and read out the last words: “…the world—battle between God and nothingness.”

He asked if it was going to be a poem.

“How should I know?”

“Who would know if not you?”

“And you want to be a psychiatrist?”

“Poetry takes a stand about two worlds: the one we can see and the one we have lived through,” Stefan began hesitantly. “Mickiewicz wrote, ‘Our nation, like lava…’”

“This is not a classroom,” Sekułowski interrupted in a murmur. “Mickiewicz could say what he wanted because he was a romantic, but our nation is like cow flop: dry on the outside and you know what on the inside. And not just ours, either. But please don’t talk to me about taking a stand, because it makes me sick.”

He surveyed the sunlit scene for a while.

“What is a poem, then?”

Sekułowski sighed.

“I see a poem as a multicolored strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments. I try to connect hands and horizons, glances and the objects imprisoned in them. That’s how it is in daylight. At night—because sometimes it happens at night—poems are like spiraling curves that grow to completeness by themselves. The hardest thing is to hold onto them through waking into consciousness.”

“That poem you recited the first time we met, was it day or night?”

“That was a day poem.”

Stefan tried to praise it, but was rebuffed sharply.

“Nonsense. You don’t understand at all. What do you know about poetry anyway? Writing is a damnable compulsion. Someone who can stand and watch the person he loves most die and, without wanting to, pick out everything worth describing to the last convulsion, that’s a real writer. A philistine would protest: how awful! But it’s not awful, it’s just suffering. It’s not a career, not something you pick like a desk job. The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don’t write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another. I have to create an artificial certainty. When those flakes of plaster fall away, I sense that deep down, behind the golden fragments, lies an unspeakable abyss. It’s there, for sure, but every attempt to reach it ends in failure. And my terror…”

He fell silent and took a deep breath.

“Every word I feel is the last. That I won’t be able to go on. Of course you don’t understand. You can’t. The fear—how can I explain it? Because words pour out of me like water coming under a door in a flood. I don’t know what’s behind the door. I don’t know if it’s the last wave. I can’t control the force of the flow. And you want me to take a stand. I can be free only through the people I write about, but that too is illusion.

“Who am I writing for? The days of the caveman are past. He ate the hot brains out of his friends’ skulls, and used his blood to draw works of art on the cave walls that have not been equaled since. The renaissance is gone, with its geniuses and heretics sizzling at the stake. The hordes who learned to ride the seas and winds have come and gone. Now we are in the era of dwarves quartered in barracks, music in tin cans, and helmets under which you cannot see the stars. Then, they say, equality and brotherhood will come. Why equality, why freedom, when lack of equality gives birth to visionary scenes and fires of despair, when danger can squeeze something out of man worth more than well-tended surfeit. I don’t want to give up these colossal differences, these tensions. If it was up to me, I would keep the palaces and the slums, and the fortresses!”

“Someone once told me,” Stefan said, “the story of a Russian prince of very tender spirit. He had a beautiful view from the window of his palace on a hill overlooking the village. But a few thatch-roofed cottages were in the way, so he ordered them burned down, and the charred rafters that remained provided just the touch he had been looking for.”

“Don’t blame me,” Sekułowski said. “Are we supposed to work for the masses? I’m not Mephisto, doctor, but I like to think things through. Philanthropy? Tutored virgins with dried-up hormones are condemned to do good works, and if you want to talk about the theory of revolution, beggars don’t have time for it. That is the vocation of well-fed rebels. It’s always bad for the people. Anyone who wants peace, quiet, and comfort will find it in the grave, but not in this life. But why be so abstract? I myself grew up in poverty, doctor, that you could not imagine. I had my first job when, I was three months old, you know? My mother lent me to a beggar woman who thought she could do better with a baby in her arms. When I was eight, I used to hang around in front of a nightclub, and when the elegant crowd came out, I would pick the most beautifully dressed couple and follow right behind them, spitting on their sealskins and beavers and muskrats, spitting as hard as I could on those perfumed furs and on those women until my mouth went dry. What I’ve got now, I fought for. People with real ability always make it.”

“And geniuses are supposed to regard everybody else as fertilizer?”

Stefan sometimes thought that way himself. He might have been talking to himself. He had forgotten that when the poet was irritated, he could be abusive.

“Ah, yes,” Sekułowski said, leaning back on his elbows and looking up at the flaring clouds with a contemptuous smile. “Would you rather be fertilizer for future generations? Lay your bones at the altar? Leave me alone, doctor. The one thing I can’t stand is boredom.”

Stefan’s feelings were hurt. “And what about the mass arrests in Warsaw and the deportations to Germany? Doesn’t that bother you? Are you going back there when you leave here?”

“Why should the arrests bother me any more than the Tartar invasions of the thirteenth century? Because of the accidental coincidence of time?”

“Don’t argue with history. History is always right. You can’t hide your head in the sand.”

“History will win. Survival of the fittest,” said the poet. “It’s true that even though I’m a world unto myself, I’m just a speck of dust in the avalanche of events. But nothing will ever force me to think like a speck of dust!”

“Do you know that the Germans are talking about liquidating the mentally ill?”

“They say there are about twenty million lunatics in the world. What they need is a slogan that can unite them—there’s going to be a holy war,” Sekułowski said, lying down on his back. The sun shined more brightly. Sensing that the poet was trying to escape, Stefan decided to pin him down. “I don’t understand you. The first time we talked you spoke of the art of dying.”

“I don’t see any contradiction,” Sekułowski said, his good mood obviously gone. “I don’t care about the state’s independence. The important thing is internal independence.”

“So you think the fate of other people…”

Sekułowski interrupted, his face trembling. “Pig,” he shouted. “Idiot!”

He suddenly ran off, loping down the hillside. Confused, the blood rushing to his face, Stefan ran after him. The poet pulled away and yelled, “Clown!”

By the time they got to the asylum, Sekułowski had calmed down. Looking at the wall, he remarked, “Doctor, you are ill-bred. I would even go so far as to say that you’re vulgar, since you try to offend me whenever we talk.”

Stefan was furious, but acted the doctor forgiving a patient’s outburst.

Three weeks later, Stefan was transferred to Kauters’s division. Before starting work he called on his new superior. The surgeon came to the door wearing a loose-fitting dark blue smoking jacket with silver stripes. As they walked down the long dark hallway to the apartment, Stefan explained his visit, but then he fell silent, stunned.

His first impression was of brown punctuated with black and throbbing violet. Something vaguely resembling a rosary of pale shells hung from the ceiling, and the floor was covered with a black and orange oriental carpet depicting gondolas, flames, or salamanders. The walls were covered with engravings, pictures in black frames, and a narrow glass cabinet on legs of buffalo horns, A crocodile’s snout with bared teeth hung on the wall above a Venus flytrap. A low octagonal glass table was inlaid with garish amber flowers. Bookcases on either side of the door were carelessly strewn with leather-bound books and moldy incunabula with yellowed pages. Enormous atlases and gray albums with blood-red and multicolored spines stuck out among the trinkets lining the edges of the shelves.

Kauters seated his guest, who could not take his eyes off the Japanese woodcuts, ancient Indian figurines, and gaudy porcelain baubles. The surgeon said he was glad Stefan had come and asked him to tell him something about himself. Stefan found it hard to answer such an insipid request with anything intelligent. Kauters asked if he planned to specialize.

Stefan half muttered something, enjoying the touch of the raw silk cover on the arm of the chair, a colossus upholstered in rich leather. Gradually he began to get his bearings: near the window was the working area of the room. Reproductions and plaster masks hung above the large desk. He recognized some of them. There was the iconography of the cretin: a flabby, snail-like body with no neck and a bug-eyed face, a worm-like tongue peeking out of the half-open mouth. Several of Leonardo’s hideous faces were framed in glass. One of them, with a chin protruding like the toe of an old shoe and with nests of wrinkles for eye sockets, seemed to stare at Stefan. There were distorted skulls and Goya’s monster with ears like folded bat wings and a clenched, twisted jaw. Between the windows hung a large alabaster mask from the church of Santa Maria Formosa: on the right side the face looked like a leering drunk, while the left half was a swollen mess with a bulging eye and a few shovel-shaped teeth.

Noting Stefan’s interest, Kauters began showing him around with evident satisfaction. He was a passionate collector. He had an oversized album of Meunier prints illustrating early devices for treating the deranged: great wooden drums, ingenious torturous leg-irons that were said to do wonders for the beclouded mind, and a pear-shaped iron gag secured by chains to prevent the patient from screaming.

Returning to his chair, Stefan noticed a row of tall jars on top of a cabinet. Murky purple and blue shapes floated in them.

“Ah, my display set,” said Kauters, pointing to them with a black cane. “This is a cephalothoracopagus, and a craniopagus parietalis, a beautiful example that, and a rare epigastrium. This last embryo is a perfect diprosopus; there’s a kind of leg growing out of the palate, slightly damaged during delivery, I’m afraid. There are a few others too, but not as interesting.”

He excused himself and opened the door. Mrs. Kauters came in carrying a black lacquered tray with a steaming poppy-colored china coffee service with silver rims. Stefan was astounded again.

Amelia Kauters had a large, soft mouth and austere eyes not unlike her husband’s. She smiled, showing convex, slightly dull teeth. You could not call her beautiful, but she was definitely striking. Her black hair was in heavy braids that swung when she moved. Aware that she had beautiful shoulders, she wore a sleeveless blouse with an amethyst triangle pin at the neck.

“How do you like our figurines?” the surgeon asked, offering Stefan a sugarbowl shaped like a Viking ship. “Well, people who have given up as much as we have are entitled to originality.”

“It’s a comfortably padded nest,” Amelia said, petting a fluffy cat that had climbed noiselessly into her lap. The full, languid lines of her thighs disappeared into the black folds of her dress.

Stefan was no longer stunned. He took it all in. The coffee was superb, the best-tasting he had had in years. Some of the furniture looked like what a Hollywood director might use for the “salon of a Hungarian prince”—if he knew nothing about Hungary. The doors of Kauters’s apartment were like a knife cutting off the ubiquitous hospital atmosphere of spotless white walls and shiny radiators.

Looking at the surgeon’s sallow face, his eyelids fluttering behind his glasses like impatient butterflies, Stefan decided that the room had to represent its owner’s mind. That’s what he was thinking when Sekułowski’s name came up.

“Sekułowski?” The surgeon shrugged. “You mean Sekuła.”

“He changed his name?”

“No, why should he? He took a pseudonym—what was that book called?” he asked, turning to his wife.

Amelia Kauters smiled. “Reflections on Statebuilding. Haven’t you read it, doctor? No? Well, we don’t have a copy. There was such a furor. How can I describe it? Well, it was a sort of essay. Supposedly about everything, but mainly about communism. The left attacked him, which was good publicity. He got very popular.”

Stefan was examining his fingernails.

“But I don’t remember it myself,” Amelia Kauters suddenly said. “After all, I was just a child. I heard about it later. I like his poetry.”

She got up to show Stefan a book of poems. As she did so, she knocked over another book, thin, in a soft pale binding. Stefan bent over to pick it up, and as he did Kauters pointed at it. “Beautiful binding, isn’t it? Skin from the inside of a woman’s thigh.”

Stefan pulled his hand away, and the surgeon took the book from him.

“My husband has a funny sense of humor,” Amelia Kauters said. “But it’s so soft. Look. Touch it.” As she spoke in her low voice, she delicately raised her hand and touched the corners of her mouth and eyes with nimble, furtive movements.

Stefan mumbled something and went back to his chair, sweating.

He felt that this strange scene was a microcosm of the people locked up in the wards. Peculiarity flourished in human beings who were removed from the usual city soil, like mutated flowers grown in special greenhouses. Then he changed his mind. Perhaps Kauters had shunned the city and created this dusky, violet interior because he was different to begin with.

On his way out, Stefan noticed an aquarium full of reflected rainbows standing behind a small screen. A goldfish floated belly-up on the surface. The image stayed with him, and he felt as if he had just completed some taxing intellectual task. He did not feel like going straight to supper, but was afraid someone might notice his absence, so he forced himself. Nosilewska sat there as always, somnolent, polite, occasionally flashing that priceless smile. Staszek—the fool—devoured her with his eyes, thinking that no one noticed.

That night Stefan could not fall asleep and finally took luminal. He dreamed of Mrs. Kauters carrying a basket of headless fish. She kept trying to give it to him. He woke up with his heart pounding and could not get to sleep until morning.

Sekułowski, it turned out, was not at all offended. He told Staszek to ask Stefan to drop in sometime before noon. Stefan went right after breakfast. The writer was sitting at the window looking at a large photograph showing a ballroom full of amused, relaxed people.

“Look at these faces,” he said. “Typical Americans. Look how self-satisfied they are, their lives all worked out: lunch, dinner, bed, and subway. No time for metaphysics, for contemplating the brutality of Things. Truly, the Old World has a special destiny: we must choose between less or more noble varieties of suffering.”

Stefan talked about his visit to Kauters. He realized that by discussing a colleague with Sekułowski he was violating an unwritten law, but he had a justification: he and the poet were both above such conventions. But of course he did not mention what Kauters had said about Sekułowski.

“Don’t be upset,” the poet said affably. “What is hideousness, after all? In art something can be well or poorly done, no more. Van Gogh paints a couple of old chamberpots and you feel like falling to your knees in awe, while some amateur makes the most beautiful woman look trite. What does it all come down to, anyway? The flash of the world, Glory, catharsis, that’s all.”

But Stefan thought that living in that kind of museum was too strange.

“You don’t like it? You could be wrong. Would you close the window for me, please?” asked the poet.

He looked especially pale in the strong light. The breeze carried the fragrance of magnolia blossoms.

“Remember,” Sekułowski went on, “that everything contains everything else. The most distant star swims at the rim of a chalice. Today’s morning dew contains last night’s mist. Everything is woven into a universal interdependence. No one thing can elude the power of others. Least of all man, the thinking thing. Stones and faces echo in your dreams. The smell of flowers bends the pathways of our thoughts. So why not freely shape that which has an accidental form? Surrounding yourself with gold and ivory trinkets can be like charging a battery. A statue the size of your finger is the expression of the artist’s fantasy, distilled over the years. And those hundreds of hours are not futile—we can warm ourselves in front of a statue as though it were a fire.”

He stopped and added with a sigh, “Sometimes I am happy gazing at a stone… that’s not me, that’s Chang Kiu-Lin. A great poet.”

“How early?”

“Eighth century.”

“You said, ‘the thinking thing.’ You’re a materialist, aren’t you?” Stefan asked.

“A materialist? Oh yes, the magic wand of classification. I think that man and the world are made of the same substance, but I don’t know what that substance is—it is beyond the reach of words. But they are two arches that hold each other up. Neither can stand alone. I can tell you that the table over there will continue to exist after our death. But for whom? For the flies? It cannot be ‘our table,’ and there is no such thing as ‘being’ in general. The object immediately disintegrates. Without people, what is the table? A varnished board on four legs? A mass of mummified tree cells? A chemical conglomeration of celluloid chains? A whirlpool of electron clouds? No, it must always be something for somebody. That tree outside the window exists for me, and also for the microbes that feed on its sap. For me it is a fragment of forest, a branch against the sky. For them, a single leaf is a green ocean, and a branch an entire universe. Do we—the microbe and I—share a common tree? Not at all. So what makes our point of view any better than the microbe’s?”

“But we are not microbes,” said Stefan.

“Not yet, but we will be. We will become nitrogenous bacteria in the soil, we will enter the roots of trees, become part of an apple that someone will eat while philosophizing, just as we are philosophizing now, and while enjoying the sight of rosy clouds that contain the water of our former bodies. And so on, in an endless circle. The number of permutations is infinite.”

Satisfied, Sekułowski lit a cigarette.

“So you’re an atheist?” Stefan asked.

“Yes, but I do have a small chapel.”

“A chapel?”

“Have you read ‘A Litany to My Body’?”

Indeed, Stefan remembered that hymn to the lungs, liver, and kidneys. “An original essay.”

“No, it’s a poem. I keep my philosophical views and my creative work strictly separate, and I forbid anyone to judge me on what I have already written,” Sekułowski announced with sudden obstinacy. Dropping his cigarette on the floor, he went on, “But I do pray sometimes. My prayer used to be, ‘O God, Who art not.’ That once sounded all right. But lately it’s the Blind Powers.”

“What do you mean?”

“I pray to the Blind Powers. Because it is they who rule our bodies, the world, and even the words I am speaking right now. I know they don’t listen to prayers,” he said, smiling, “but it can’t hurt.”

It was almost eleven o’clock. Stefan had to start his rounds.

For several weeks Father Niezgłoba, a short, gaunt man with bluish veins along his arms had been in Room 8. He looked as if he had once been a laborer.

“How are you, Father?” Stefan asked softly as he came in.

The priest had been allowed to retain his cassock, which made an irregular dark blot against the white hospital walls. Stefan wanted to be delicate, because he knew that Marglewski, the thin doctor who was in charge of the ward, sometimes called the priest “the ambassador of the kingdom of heaven” and treated him to anecdotes from the lives of church dignitaries. The doctor had considerable knowledge of the subject.

“It’s torture, doctor.”

The priest’s voice was pleasant, though perhaps a bit too soft. He suffered from hallucinations of unchanging content: at a baptismal party, he heard a woman’s voice behind him. But when he turned, the voice seemed to come from a place his eye could not see.

“Is the Arabian princess still with you?”

“Yes.”

“You realize that it’s only a vision, Father, a hallucination?”

The priest shrugged. His eyes were heavy with sleeplessness, tiny lines covering his lids.

“This conversation with you, doctor, might be equally unreal. I hear that voice as clearly as I hear yours.”

“Well, don’t worry. It’ll pass. But no more alcohol ever again.”

“I would never have done that,” he said with remorse, looking down at the floor. “But my parishioners are such terrible sinners.” He sighed. “They were always offended, angry, and persistent, so I…”

Stefan checked the man’s reflexes mechanically, put the hammer back in his smock, and asked just before he left, “What do you do all day, Father? You must be climbing the walls. Do you want a book?’

“I have a book.”

And indeed he took out a dog-eared tome with a black cover.

“Really? What is it?”

“I’m praying.”

Stefan suddenly remembered the Blind Powers and stood in the door for a moment. Then, perhaps too abruptly, he left.

He no longer visited Nosilewska’s ward. He had lost interest in the fates of the individual patients, as he had in the gruesome pictures in Uncle Ksawery’s anatomical atlas, which had fascinated him as a child. He exchanged a few words with Pajpak now and then, and occasionally assisted him on morning rounds.

Working with Kauters, he became acquainted with a ward nurse named Gonzaga. Big-boned and fat, she looked threatening in her wide skirts. But the threat was only potential, for no one had ever seen her angry. She affected people as a scarecrow did sparrows. Her cheeks dropped in heavy folds to the blue line of her mouth. Her enormous hands always held the key in its leather ring, a clipboard of medical records, or a pack of compresses. She never dealt with trays of syringes: there were orderlies for that. Handy with instruments, quiet and solitary, she seemed to have no private life. Kauters appeared to respect her. Once Stefan saw the tall surgeon standing in front of her with both hands on his chest, his shoulders moving nervously, as if he were trying to justify himself, convince her of something, or ask a favor. Sister Gonzaga stood there large and immobile, unblinking, the light from the window falling across her face. The scene was so unusual that it stuck in Stefan’s mind. He never found out what it was about. Sister Gonzaga could be found in the corridor at any time of day or night, moving like the moon with even steps invisible under her skirt, her lace cap brightening the dim hallway.

Stefan spoke to her only when ordering procedures or medication for the patients. Once, when he had just come back from seeing Sekułowski and was looking for a bottle in the supply-room cabinet, Sister Gonzaga, who was jotting something down in a notebook, suddenly said, “Sekułowski is worse than a madman. He’s a comedian.”

Stefan turned around. “Were you speaking to me, Sister?”

“No. I was speaking in general,” she replied, and said no more.

Stefan did not recount the incident, but he did ask the poet whether he knew Sister Gonzaga. Sekułowski, however, took no interest in the auxiliary personnel, though he did have a succinct opinion of Kauters: “Have you noticed what a stage decorator’s mentality he has?”

“How do you mean?”

“Two-dimensional.”

In a far comer of the grounds stood the neglected, nearly forgotten ward for catatonics, overgrown with morning glories that had not yet sprouted leaves. Stefan seldom went there. At first he had yearned to clean out those Augean stables—a gloomy hall with an oppressive blue ceiling in which the patients stood, lay, or knelt in frozen positions. But his reforming impulse had faded quickly.

The catatonics lay on bedframes without mattresses. Their bodies, caked with dirt, were covered with sores caused by the wires and springs of the bedding. Piercing smells of ammonia and excrement filled the air. This lowest circle of hell, as Stefan called it, rarely saw a nurse. Some unknown force seemed to sustain the existence of these mindless people.

Two young boys attracted Stefan’s attention. A Jew from a small town, who had a round head capped with dry, red hair, sat endlessly in his cubicle, bent over on the bed, always naked, with a blanket pulled up over his head. All day long, tirelessly, he called out two words of gibberish. Whenever anyone approached, he raised his voice to a prayerful complaint and shivered. His blue eyes stared permanently at the iron bedframe. The other boy, whose hair was the color of rye, walked up and down the passageway between the main hall and the Jew’s cubicle, from the bed in the comer to the wall and back again. In this eight-step Golgotha he always banged against the bed rail, but he was unaware of it. A discolored sore swelled above his hip. He held his hands crossed on his chest or over his face, but he never stopped walking. When someone came in, he would utter a childlike moan that sounded strange coming from a man. And he was becoming a man. Freed of the rule of the intellect, his body led an independent existence, and the arcs of muscle on his slender, statuesque torso shined under his open shirt. His face was as pale as the wall he bounced off, his blue eyes set in an alternating expression of curiosity and entreaty.

Once Stefan went to the catatonics’ ward at an unusual hour, after dinner, to check on a suspicion that an orderly named Ewa was doing something improper with the boys, who were always highly agitated after she had been there. The Jew would tremble so violently that the bedframe shook, and the thin boy raced down the narrow corridor, hitting his hip on the bed, bouncing off, and smacking into the wall.

The room was filled with misty twilight. The wind rattled a branch against the windowpane. Stefan stopped in the corridor; Nosilewska was standing at the Jew’s bed, slowly pulling the blanket off his head. For a moment he tried to resist, tugging with his thick fingers. With an infinitely light and gentle hand, she stroked his stiff, bristly hair. Her face was turned to the window, and she seemed to be looking far off into the distance, but the irregular cracks of the outside wall were only four feet beyond the windowpane.

Stefan looked off to the side; in a patch of shadow he saw the other boy, who, having interrupted his endless journey, was pressed into the embrasure, staring at the woman’s silhouette outlined against the window. Stefan wanted to go in and ask for an explanation, but he withdrew and left as quietly as he had come.