Hospital of the Transfiguration

WOCH THE SUBSTATION OPERATOR

June was edging toward a heat wave. The forests, malachite green and fawn, shaded the view of the hills. There were silver birches, sodden evenings, and crystal dawns. Birds chirped endlessly. One evening the first thunderstorm struck. The landscape gleamed in the flashes of lightning.

Stefan went for long walks in the fields near the woods. The telegraph poles hummed like drunken tuning forks.

When he tired, he would rest under a tree or sit on a bed of pine needles. One day, as he wandered, he found a place where three great beech trees grew above a bare patch of ground. They rose from a single stump and leaned gently away from one another. Nearby was an oak tree, not as tall, its branches forming horizontal, Japanese lines. It seemed to be standing on tiptoe, for the spring rains had washed the earth from between its roots. The forest ended a few hundred feet farther on. A row of beehives painted green and red like roadside shrines seemed to march up the hill. There was an echo; Stefan clapped his hands and the hot air answered several times. The buzzing of the bees underlined the silence. Now and then, a hive would sing more insistently. He walked on and was surprised to find that the buzzing of the beehives, far from fading, was growing louder. A deep humming filled the air.

When the gorge he was walking through rose to the level of the surrounding meadow, Stefan found himself near a square brick building that looked like a box on short concrete legs. Rows of wooden poles strung with wires led away from the building in three directions; the sound was coming from an open window. As he came closer, Stefan saw two men sitting on the grass in the shade below the window. He gave a start because at first he thought that one of them was his cousin Grzegorz, whom he had not seen since the funeral in Nieczawy. But then he realized that it was the stranger’s fair hair, the way he held his head, and his soldier’s uniform with the insignia ripped off that accounted for the resemblance. Stefan left the path and walked across the grass, gazing into the distance so as to look like an aimless wanderer. The others did not notice him until he was quite close. Then they looked up and Stefan met two pairs of eyes. He stopped. There was an uncomfortable silence. The man he had taken for Grzegorz sat still, his arms resting on his knees and his muddy boots crossed; a bronze triangle of naked chest was visible under his unbuttoned shirt, and his coppery hair covered his head like a helmet. He squinted as he turned his thin, hard face toward Stefan. The other man was older. Big but not fat, he had ash-colored skin. He wore a cap with the visor turned to the back, and he was missing an ear. In its place was a tiny, twisted flap of red flesh, sticking out like a flower petal.

“Is this a power station?” Stefan finally asked to end the silence. The only sound was the humming from the window. Then he noticed that a third person, a pale old man, was standing inside the window. His dark blue work-suit made him almost invisible against the dim interior. The young man glanced up at him and then back at Stefan. Without looking him in the eye, he said ominously, “You better stay away from here.”

“What?” Stefan said.

“I said you better stay away. Or there might be trouble.”

But the man missing an ear cut him off. “Hold it. Where are you from, sir?”

“The hospital. I’m a doctor. Why?”

“Aaah,” drawled the man without the ear, settling down with his elbow on the grass so he could talk more comfortably. “Do you take care of those—you know?” He pointed a finger to his temple and made a rotating gesture.

“Yes.”

The man without the ear laughed. “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“I’m not allowed to walk here?” Stefan asked.

“Sure. Why not?”

“I mean,” Stefan said, completely confused, “isn’t this a power station?”

“No,” said the old man in the window. Copper wires shined behind him. He leaned out the window to clean his pipe, and his forearms, covered with a tracing of veins, poked out beyond his short sleeves. “No, it’s only a sixty-kilowatt substation,” he said, concentrating on his pipe.

Stefan pretended that he knew what that meant and asked, “You supply current to the hospital, then?”

“Mmm,” answered the old man, sucking in his cheeks as he tried his pipe.

“Look, can I walk around here or not?” Stefan asked, not knowing why he needed reassurance.

“Why not?”

“Because he said…” and Stefan turned to the young man, who broke into a wide smile that showed his sharp teeth.

“So I did,” he said.

When Stefan did not leave, the man without the ear apparently decided to clear things up. “How was he supposed to know who you were, sir?” he said. “You made a mistake, kid. But if I may say so, sir, your face is pretty dark. That’s why.”

Seeing that Stefan still hadn’t got the point, he touched him amiably on the knee. “He thought you were from Bierzyniec. That you were one of the ones being shipped out all over the place.” He gestured as if he was draping something over his right shoulder and it finally dawned on Stefan: He thought I was a Jew. That had happened before.

The man without the ear was watching Stefan’s reaction closely, but Stefan said nothing. He only blushed slightly. The other man made conversation to cover the awkward silence.

“You work in the hospital, doctor?” he asked. “Well I work here. My name’s Woch. Operator. But not lately, because I’ve been sick. Too bad I didn’t know about you, doctor,” he added. “I would have asked for some advice.”

“Were you sick?” Stefan asked pleasantly. He stood there, for some reason unable to walk away. It was his misfortune never to know how to strike up a conversation with a stranger or how to end one.

“I was sick. The way it happened, first one eye pointed this way and the other one that way, then everything started to go around and around, and my sense of smell got so—ah!”

“And then?” Stefan felt foolish listening to the description.

“Nothing. It just went away by itself.”

“Not by itself,” the old man in the window said.

“All right, not by itself,” Woch loyally corrected himself. “I ate pea soup so thick you could stand the spoon in it, with sausage, marjoram, and a shot of whiskey, and it went away. My friend’s advice—the guy there.”

“Very good,” said Stefan, nodding to each of them and walking quickly away, because he was afraid that Woch would ask him what the illness had been.

He looked back when he got to the top of the first hill. The little red house stood there at the bottom of the gorge, seemingly uninhabited. The low humming from the open window, fading steadily, stayed with him most of the way back to the asylum, until it could no longer be distinguished from the buzzing of the insects above the warm grass.

This incident stuck in Stefan’s memory, as if it had some hidden meaning. So distinctly did he remember it that it divided the past into two parts and was his reference point for the chronology of hospital events. He told no one about it: that would have been pointless. Perhaps Sekułowski might have found some literary merit in Woch’s description of his illness, but that hardly mattered to Stefan. What did matter? He could not say.

After his morning rounds he would go for walks, carrying The History of Philosophy. But since he was making slow progress (unwilling to admit that ontological subtleties bored him, he blamed the hot weather), he began carrying another book: a thick edition of the Thousand and One Nights in a beautiful pale binding. It was from Kauters’s library. He would sit in that picturesque spot in the woods under the three tall beeches with their smooth, tight bark, imagining that a rubber tree must be similar. Feet propped on a log overgrown with blueberries, squinting at the flashes of sun that danced above the yellowed pages, he read the adventures of the peddlers, barbers, and wizards of Baghdad while The History of Philosophy lay beside him on a clump of dried moss. He no longer even bothered to open it, but carried it along like a guilty conscience.

One day when it was oppressively hot even deep in the forest, he was reading the story in which the caliph Harun al-Rashid disguised himself as a poor water-carrier to loiter in the marketplace and find out more about his subjects. Stefan suddenly thought how much fun it would be to go to the substation disguised as a worker. He rejected the idea with embarrassment, but regretted having no one to share it with.

In the evenings, when the sun went down and a breeze began to flutter between the hills, Stefan would leave the sanitorium again. With a spark of hidden excitement, he would turn off the path and circle the substation at a distance. But he never ran into anyone.

He never headed straight for the little brick house; it was enough to catch a remote glimpse of its red walls and the open window from which the steady hum came. These wanderings showed up in his dreams: several times he saw the house in the meadow; it called to him with a sound of oriental music. One morning he walked out earlier than usual to look at the substation from the ridge. Before he got there, he saw someone coming toward him along the path. It was the young, copper-haired worker, wearing lime-spotted trousers, stripped to the waist, carrying two buckets of earth but tramping energetically under the load. Stefan wasn’t sure whether he wanted to meet him, but he slowed down. The other man’s muscles rippled under his skin as he came down the path, but his face was indifferent, expressionless. So deliberately did he fail to look at Stefan as he passed that Stefan, certain that he had been recognized, dared not look back as the man continued in the other direction.

About a week later, Stefan was on his way back from the nearby town, where he had done some afternoon shopping. The heat was stifling. There had been rumbling from beyond the horizon for an hour, but the sky overhead was clear. The dirt road felt as hard as concrete after baking in the sun for days. Stefan suddenly noticed a wall of clouds above a clump of firs. The landscape was darkening before his eyes, and he quickened his steps in the gloom, until he came panting around a bend and saw Woch the Operator up ahead of him. Woch was going in the same direction but more slowly, pushing a bicycle along by the handlebars. When he heard steps behind him, he turned, recognized Stefan, and said hello. They walked side by side in silence for some time.

Woch was wearing dirty boots, a sweater, and a jacket with the collar turned up. Though Stefan was sweating heavily in a shirt and linen trousers, the man showed no sign of discomfort. His face was as expressionless and gray as usual, except for the red flap where his ear had been. Yellow clouds roiled above them. Stefan would happily have broken into a run, but it somehow inhibited him that Woch was marching along at such an even pace.

The road widened and came up even with its banks. They had turned off onto a sandy path when the first big drops began pocking the dust at their feet. The substation was in sight.

“Why don’t you come with me? It’s going to pour,” Woch said. Stefan agreed. They made for the substation without a word. Heavy drops hit Stefan’s hands and face and blotted his shirt and trousers.

A few steps from the door, Woch stopped and looked back, leaning on the handlebars. Stefan also turned. A shelf of turbulent black-bottomed cloud was heading toward them, streams of it reaching down toward the ground.

“Where I come from, they call that a male cloud,” Woch said, squinting at the sky. Stefan wanted to laugh, but Woch’s face was gloomy. Then the downpour broke with a roar.

Stefan got inside the substation in two bounds. Woch, water streaming off him, seemed to defy the rain and deliberately lifted first the front, then the rear wheel of the bicycle into the building. Only when it rested against the wall did he take out a handkerchief and carefully wipe his eyes and cheeks.

Through the open door they could see the gray deluge drowning everything in sight. Stefan inhaled the wonderfully cool air deeply, delighted to have escaped the flood. Only when Woch opened a second, inner, door did he realize that he had been granted a unique opportunity.

He followed Woch into the building’s main, modestly sized room. Rain beat against the three windows, and it would have been dark but for the ceiling lamps. Their steady light revealed a stand against one wall and a control board with gauges; the opposite wall looked like a zoo. It consisted of cages made of wire screens painted gray; they stood side by side and extended to the ceiling. Stefan could not tell what was in the narrow cages, but it was certainly nothing alive, for there was no movement. In the middle of the room stood a small table, two chairs, and several boxes. A rubber mat covered the stone floor.

“Isn’t there anyone here?” Stefan asked.

“Pościk’s here. It’s his shift. Please wait. And don’t touch anything!”

Woch went to a door in the corner of the room where the screens ended, opened it, looked inside, and said something. Stefan heard a muffled reply. Woch went in and closed the door behind him. Stefan was alone for perhaps a minute. The dull indeterminate hum filled the air, which was thick with the smell of hot oil, and the rain whipped across the tin roof in waves.

As he looked around, Stefan noticed something shining behind the metal screens. He moved closer and in the darkness saw vertical copper rails and the knobs of porcelain insulators. Then he heard voices from behind the wall.

“Have you been drinking, Władek?” Woch was saying. “You want to take it out now?”

“Let’s wait outside,” said a second, lower voice.

“Outside. If it doesn’t work, we’re dead anyway. Do you realize how much there is? Get out, right now!”

“Okay, Jasiu, okay. Jasiu, in the woods maybe?”

“In the woods, wonderful! Come on, we have a guest.”

“What?”

The voices dropped to an indistinct murmur. Stefan quickly moved back to the center of the room. Woch and old Pościk came in. They both looked at the gauges. The operator said something, but a crash of thunder drowned him out. Woch took a few steps, stopped on tiptoe, and looked again at the apparatus.

“Well?” asked the old man.

The answer was a wave of the hand that signaled: forget it. Woch bowed his head, held his own shoulders with his hands across his chest, and slowly rocked back on his heels, standing as Stefan imagined a ship’s captain would when braving a storm. Then Woch noticed Stefan and gave a start. He picked up a chair, carried it through the door, and put it down in the corridor saying, “Please sit here. You’ll be safe here.”

Stefan obeyed. The door to the room was open, creating a strange sort of stage, Stefan sitting in the dark narrow corridor, the only spectator.

The two men inside weren’t doing anything. The old man sat on a box, while Woch remained standing. No longer watching the apparatus, they seemed to be waiting for something. Their faces glowed more and more brightly in the yellow lamplight; Stefan felt nauseated from the oppressive smell of oil; outside, the storm roared and thundered with steady intensity. At one point Woch rushed to the black stand and looked closely at a gauge, then at another, before returning to his place and sinking back into immobility. Stefan began to feel disappointed—but then he sensed some changes, though he did not know how. His uneasy impression mounted until he suddenly discovered its source.

There was movement in the depths of the cages along the wall. He heard a kind of scraping, a hiss; it grew to an impatient gnashing, fell quiet, then came back. Woch and Pościk must have heard it, for they both looked around, and the old man glanced at Woch with what Stefan thought was fear. Yet neither of them moved.

Minutes passed as the rain beat on the roof and the low electric hum persisted, but the noise coming from the cages did not let up. Something was rustling, scraping, buzzing, as if a living being was dashing about and pushing in all directions: the strange sounds came from opposite ends of the cage in turn, from the bottom and then from the top near the ceiling. The mysterious thing seemed to be jerking more and more violently behind the steel screen. A blue flash suddenly filled two of the cages, grew stronger, casting distorted shadows of the two men against the opposite wall, then vanished. An acrid, searing smell burned Stefan’s nostrils. There was another sharp hiss and a crackling flame winked in the depths of another cage; a flurry of sparks shot from the metal bar that stuck out under the screen.

Old Pościk stood up, stuffed his pipe into his apron pocket, and, standing rigidly erect, looked silently at Woch. The operator grabbed him tightly by the arm and, his face twisted into what could have been anger, shouted something that was swallowed up by the clap of a nearby thunderbolt. A sudden flash ripped through three of the cages, extinguishing the lights for an instant, and the whole wall looked as if it was on fire. Woch pushed the old man toward Stefan and with his hands in front of him slowly went to the control panel. It sounded as though someone was shooting a pistol in the cages, and blue and red flames poured through the screens. Choking on the smell of ozone, Stefan backed off down the corridor, stopping at the door. The old man hunched beside him and Woch, after taking a last look at the apparatus, sprang after them with a youthful stride. They stood together in the corridor. Things quieted down behind the screens. A few small blue flames still danced in the comers. The thunder was receding, but the rain still drummed steadily on the roof.

“It’s over,” the old man finally said, taking the pipe out of his pocket. His hands seemed to be trembling, but it was too dark to tell.

“Well, we’re still alive,” Woch said. He walked back into the room, stretched as though awakening from a good sleep, slapped his hands against his hips, and sat down abruptly on a stool.

“It’s all right now,” he nodded to Stefan, “you can come in.”

The thunder stopped completely but the rain still fell as though it might go on forever. The old man shuffled around the room, making notes on a sheet of graph paper. Then, opening a door in the comer that Stefan had not noticed, he disappeared inside and rummaged around, making a lot of noise that sounded like metal clattering. He came back carrying a frying pan, a spirit stove, and a pot of peeled potatoes. He put things on the table and the floor and set about preparing a meal. Murmuring “What can I offer you” over and over, he tiptoed around, disappeared, came back, put the pan on, and, enveloped in a cloud of burning fat, broke and sniffed the eggs with an expression of devout concentration. In the meantime, Woch formally invited Stefan to wait out the rain in the substation.

Stefan asked what had happened. Woch explained about the lightning rods that protected them, about circuit breakers, and about the excess current, and although Stefan did not understand everything, he felt that something else had happened and that Woch was minimizing the danger for reasons known only to himself. Stefan had no doubt that there had been danger—he could tell that from the way the two operators had acted. Woch showed him around the room, naming all the equipment, and even let him look into the back room where he had first gone to talk to Pościk. An iron drum hung on the wall with copper rails leading down from it, and on the floor was a large container full of coils which, Woch explained, would protect against fire if the drum, which was a breaker, sprayed out burning oil.

“What’s under the coils?” asked Stefan, trying to sound reasonable and relevant.

Woch looked at him coolly. “Why should anything be under the coils? There’s nothing.”

They went back to the room. A small bottle of eighty-proof vodka and a sliced pickle had appeared on the table. Woch poured out tiny glasses, drank to Stefan’s health, then corked the bottle and hid it behind a pillar, announcing: “Vodka is bad for us.”

He said nothing more about what had happened during the storm, but he got friendlier. He ignored the old man, as if he were not even there. He took off his jacket and hung it over" the back of his chair. His gray sweater stretched across his chest. He took out a tin tobacco box and some cigarette papers and offered them to Stefan. “It’s strong,” he warned.

Stefan tried to roll a cigarette, eventually producing a crooked weed whose ragged ends he licked so hard that the tobacco fell out. Woch, who had been pretending not to watch, took a paper and a pinch of sawdust-like tobacco between two stubby fingers, snapped his thumb up, and handed Stefan a cigarette ready to be licked. Stefan thanked him and bent over Woch’s lighter. The flame nearly burned his eyebrows, but Woch deftly moved it aside. The first puff choked Stefan, tears came to his eyes, but he tried his best to look natural. Woch pretended not to notice again. He made another cigarette for himself, lit it, and they sat silently as the smoke merged into a single blue cloud under the lamp above their heads.

“How long have you been working in this field?” Stefan asked, realizing that the question might sound foolish but unable to think of anything else. The operator puffed on his cigarette as if he had not heard, then suddenly slapped his hand down.

“I went to work when I was a boy this high,” he said, holding out his hand. “No, this high,” he said, lowering it. “In Małachowice. They didn’t have electricity yet. The French came to set up the turbines. The foreman was an honest man. When he shouted in the boiler room, you could hear him out on the ramp. But he didn’t scream at kids, he was patient and tried to teach them. The first time you went up on the high-tension circuit-breaker to dust it off—because that’s how you start—he’d show you the brush with the dead man’s hand on it. You never forgot that.”

“I don’t understand,” Stefan said.

“Just a regular paintbrush. Horsehair. That’s what you use to dust. But the current has to be off in the cables, no tension. If you forget and touch a live cable, flame shoots out and that’s it. Anyway, this was a brush from someone who forgot. A guy fresh from the village. I didn’t know him, he was before my time. His fingerprints were burned into the handle, black as coal. In fact, the corpse was black as coal from head to toe. Burned to a crisp.

“Anyway,” Woch went on, “that’s the way to do it. Nobody ever learned our trade from talking. Good eyes, good hands—that’s what you need. And always look alive. I liked the work. And my boss liked me. I went from low voltage to high voltage. I worked on the lines for a while, but my heart wasn’t in it. The lines aren’t for me. Put on the irons, climb up, climb down, pull the lines, over and over again, from pole to pole. Everyone gets sick of it, so they have to keep hiring new people. Vodka is the only joy in that work. One mistake, one wrong cable, and bang! Everlasting glory.”

The half-finished cigarette stuck to his lip so he had both hands free, though he wasn’t using them at the moment.

“I worked with a guy named Józef Fijałka. All he did was drink. He was already drunk by the time he got to work and he never talked, just mumbled, but he was a good worker as long as he was on his feet. He drank from payday until his money was gone. The first half of the month, he was an angel, the second half, the hell with him. Once he disappeared right after payday. They looked everywhere and finally found him in the switching station. He’d gone to sleep right between the high-tension cables, but he was drunk and nothing happened. They picked him up by the legs and pulled him out. Very carefully. Eventually he got himself killed. It was on a transformer. I went to see him in the hospital, and he was covered with bandages. He asked me to lift up his arm, and when I did, there was nothing in his armpit. Just bones. All the flesh was gone. He died fast.”

Woch paused and took a drag of his cigarette. He fell into a reverie.

“The union paid for the funeral, and they did right by his family too. That’s how it used to be. Later on, in the thirties, they started laying men off.”

He crushed out his cigarette with a look of disgust.

“I had a repair crew working under me. You sit around all night waiting. A bird lands on a line and gets fried, a branch falls and knocks something down, a kid shorts something out flying a kite. All that stuff is natural. But then in the thirties this new thing started. I’ll never forget the first one. Not as long as I live. Suicide. A kid tied a wire around a stone, held the other end of the wire in his hand, and threw the stone over the cables. He was burned completely black, his hand fell off, and the fat that melted off him was strewn all around. If I hadn’t known him—but I did. He worked in the railroad yards, but they laid him off because he wasn’t married. They laid the bachelors off first. The girls liked him, he was a nice kid. People hadn’t known that electrocution was a quick death, but now they found out. And it was easy too, especially since the French ran the cables next to footbridges. It was cheaper that way. Very economical, the French. All you needed was a stone, a wire, and an easy toss.”

Woch was holding onto the edge of the table, as if he wanted to lift it.

“After that, every time the telephone rang when I was on duty, my heart stopped. By the time the third goddamned one did it, the whole city knew. There was an employment office right near the power station. We’d go out there, and they were lined up like sheep—the unemployed. Somebody once shouted, ‘There go the pallbearers!’ Pieluch, my assistant, shouted back, ‘Jump in the goddamn river, and we won’t have to bother.’ When they heard that, that was it. It’s a good thing we had a good driver, because the stones were flying. That Pieluch and I had words after that. He was no operator, but he had a sick wife. I could have had a hundred better men instead of him, and that made me angry. ‘You were rotting away down there a week ago yourself,’ I told him, ‘and now that you’ve had a couple of days’ work you say the hell with the rest of them.’ He was hot-tempered. He came back at me. So I busted him in the mouth. Later he came in begging for his job because his wife was dying and he didn’t have any money, but what could I do? And his wife really did die on him. That fall. When he came back from the funeral, he stuck his head through the window—I was on duty—and said, very quietly, ‘Die a slow death!’ Less than a week later, we got another call to go out to the bridge for a suicide, and damned if it wasn’t him. Baked like a goose. You could’ve stuck your finger in his chest. It was roasted crisp.”

The old man put two tin bowls of thick soup on the table and sat on a box nearby, balancing a steaming pot on his knees. They ate slowly. Stefan burned his tongue on the first spoonful. He blew on the next one. When they finished, Woch brought the tin box of tobacco out again. They smoked. Stefan was hoping that the operator would keep on telling stories, but he didn’t seem to feel like it. He sat there gray, massive, and gloomy, breathing heavily, exhaling smoke, parrying Stefan’s questions with monosyllables. When Stefan found that Woch had worked at the power station in his home town for a few years, he remarked, “So it was thanks to you that I had lights at home.” He wanted to emphasize this as a bond that would always connect them.

Woch said nothing, as if he had not heard. The rain had almost stopped, just a few drops falling from the eaves outside the window. Stefan hesitated to leave; he did not want to part from Woch in the mood of distance that had arisen. The conversation had petered out, and Stefan, looking for a new theme, picked up Woch’s engraved nickel lighter from the table. “Andenken aus Dresden” was engraved on one side in Gothic script. He turned it over and read, “Für gute Arbeit.”

“A beautiful lighter,” he said. “Did you work in Germany too?”

“No,” said Woch, staring straight ahead, his eyes blank. “The boss gave it to me.”

“German?” Stefan asked, a bit unpleasantly.

“German,” Woch confirmed, looking closely at Stefan.

“For good work,” Stefan said with a barely perceptible sneer, though he was well aware that this was not going to improve the mood.

“That’s right, for good work,” Woch replied emphatically, almost belligerently. Stefan had lost any sense of how to approach Woch. He stood up and, feigning nonchalance, strolled around the room, walking close to the equipment, willing to expose himself to a harsh rebuke about safety, anything to break the hostile silence. But in vain. The old man noisily gathered up the dirty dishes, carried them away, came back, and started speaking to Woch in indistinct syllables that Stefan could not follow. Woch sat there, bent forward, leaning his heavy chest against the edge of the table. The electricity hummed and the fresh cool of evening blew in through the open window. The young worker Stefan had seen twice before came in from the corridor. The army coat, turned inside out, covered his back; his copper hair stuck to his skull and streams of water ran down his face. A little puddle formed at his feet where he stood in the doorway. Though no one spoke, it was clear they were expecting him. They exchanged meaningful glances, the old man shuffled off to the comer, and Woch stood up briskly and walked over to Stefan. “I’ll show you out, doctor,” he said. “You can go now.”

It was so blunt, so completely devoid of politeness, that all Stefan’s efforts to appear to leave of his own volition collapsed. Hurt, angry, he let himself be led outside. Woch pointed toward the hospital. Stefan blurted, “Mr. Woch, you know why I came, I…”

It was so dark that they could not see each other’s faces. “Don’t worry,” Woch said quietly, “I couldn’t let you get soaked. It was only natural. Otherwise, there’s really nothing much to see here. Unless… You understand.” He put his hand lightly on Stefan’s shoulder, not as a gesture of confidence, but simply to make sure where he was in the darkness between them.

Stefan, who did not understand, said, “Yes, yes. Well, thanks, and good night.” He felt a brief squeeze of the other man’s hand, turned; and walked straight ahead.

He trudged up the dirt path. Gusts of wind bore scattered raindrops. He felt flushed after his adventure—a few hours that loomed larger than his months at the hospital. His anger at Woch had dissolved when they parted in the darkness, and now he only regretted that he had been so stupid, but what else could he have done but ask naive questions? He felt like a child trying to decipher the mysterious actions of adults. Just when he thought he had been initiated into the first mystery, they had thrown him out. For a moment he longed to go back and watch the three of them through the window. Of course he would not have dared, but the thought testified to his state of mind. He told himself that nothing unusual would be going on at the substation, that the others would be asleep and Woch would be sitting in the bright light among the equipment, getting up to look at the gauges now and then, entering some note on graph paper, and sitting down again. It was futile and uninteresting. But why did his thoughts keep returning to that silent, monotonous work? He suddenly found himself at the dark main gate, fumbling with his key in the wet lock. Blindly he followed the path that was a shade lighter than the surrounding dark grass and made his way to his room. He undressed without turning on the light and jumped under the covers. When he touched the cold sheets, he felt that it would not be easy to fall asleep. He was right.

Of all the people who used to come to his father’s workshop when he was a child, it was the workers who interested him most—the machinists, locksmiths, and electricians who made various parts to order. He had been intimidated by them—they were so different from everyone he knew. They were always patient, listening to his father with silent attention, looking at the blueprints carefully, almost respectfully. But beneath the cautious politeness lay something closed and hard. Stefan noticed that although his father liked to go on at the dinner table about people he had met, he never mentioned the workers, as if they, in contrast to the lawyers, engineers, and merchants, had no personality. Stefan had the illusion then that their life—“real life,” as he called it—was shrouded in mystery. For some time he racked his brains over the puzzle of that “real life,” before finally concluding that the idea was foolish.

Now, lying awake in the darkness, the memory surfaced. There had been some sense in that boyish dreaming after all: there was a real life for people like Woch!

Where Uncle Ksawery propounded atheism, Anzelm held grudges, his father invented, and Stefan read philosophy and talked to Sekułowski, reading and talking for months on end to recognize “real life”—that life was out there maintaining their world, shouldering it like Atlas, as inconspicuous as the ground beneath their feet. But no, he was mythologizing, because something like a mutual exchange of services went on: Anzelm knew about architecture, Sekułowski wrote, he and Ksawery treated the sick. Stefan suddenly realized that nothing would really change if all of them disappeared. Whereas without Woch and others like him, the world could not go on.

He rolled over, and some obscure impulse made him turn on the nightstand lamp. It was nothing, of course, but the light struck him as a symbol, a sign that Woch was on the job. The yellow light filling the impersonal room was somehow soothing; it ensured freedom for all tasks and thought. As long as it shined, it was possible to fantasize about worlds beyond the existing one.

I ought to get some sleep, he thought. This is going nowhere. As he reached for the switch again, he noticed an open book on the table—Lord Jim, which he had been reading. He flicked the switch and darkness surrounded him again. In a quick leap of association, he wondered whether Woch would ever read that book, but the idea was so ludicrous that he smiled in the gloom. Woch would never pick up such a book; he had no need to sail the oceans with Lord Jim. He would look on Conrad with contempt for solving on paper problems that he himself solved in reality. Who could say what it cost him, how much suffering and care went into his vigil over electric current? The “real life” of guarding the lamplight did not seem to bother him. And it was better for Stefan not to reach out to him or to think about him too much, because it only made it hard to fall asleep.

Stefan’s thoughts drifted. In his mind he saw the little house struck by bolts of lightning in a raging storm. He saw Woch’s sad gray face, his thick fingers instantly quelling an overload, and then he saw nothing at all.