Hospital of the Transfiguration

MARGLEWSKI’S DEMONSTRATION

In the hot days of July, the hospital finally caught up with the influx of wartime casualties, A balance between admissions and discharges was reached. At noon, the overhead sun truncating the stubby shadows of the trees in the yard, patients wandered in their underwear. A primitive shower was arranged for them in the evenings with a pump worked by Joseph, the big peasant nurse with an old face and a young body.

Stefan was sitting in the ambulatorium, where sparks of sunshine glimmered like filaments in a quartz lamp. He was writing up the admission of an ex-prisoner from a concentration camp. Some stroke of luck had opened doors for this man that usually swung in only one direction.

Marglewski came down the corridor and looked in. He seemed interested in the case. He whistled. “A beautiful cachexia,” and laid his hand on the head of the ragged little man, who looked like a pile of old linen in the room’s shining whiteness. The man sat immobile on a swivel stool. Two lopsided furrows cut across his cheeks from his eyes and disappeared into his beard.

“Debility? An idiot?” asked Marglewski, keeping his hand on the poor man’s head. Stefan stopped writing and looked up in surprise.

Bright tears rolled down the patient’s cold, purplish cheeks and into his beard.

“That’s right,” Stefan said, “an idiot.”

He stood up, pushed the papers into a comer of the desk, and went to see Sekułowski. He began awkwardly, saying that he had changed his mind on certain points and that it was high time to shed some of his intellectual baggage.

“Some concepts are obsolescent,” he said, trying to sweeten an avowal of cynicism. “I have just experienced a small catharsis.”

“Last year” Sekułowski said, “Woydziewicz gave me some cherry vodka that produced a genuine catharsis on a large scale. I suspect him of having thrown in some cocaine.” But when he saw Stefan’s expression, he said, “But go on, doctor. I’m listening. You are seeking and you have hit the target. Insane asylums have always distilled the spirit of the age. Deviation, abnormality, and weirdness are so widespread in normal society that it is hard to get a handle on them. Only here, concentrated as they are, do they reveal the true face of the times.”

“No, that’s not what I’m talking about,” said Stefan, suddenly feeling terribly lonely. He searched for words but could not find them. “No, in fact it’s nothing,” he said, backing up and leaving in a hurry, as if he feared the poet would detain him.

But Sekułowski was absorbed by a spider climbing the wall behind his bed. He swatted it with a book, and when it fell to the floor, he sat staring at the blot of fluttering, threadlike legs.

Returning along the corridor, Stefan ran into Marglewski, who invited him to his apartment. “I have a bottle of Extra Dry,” he said. “Why don’t you drop in, and we can get rinsed out.”

Stefan declined, but Marglewski took the rejection for mere politeness. “No, come on, don’t be silly.”

Marglewski’s apartment was at the opposite end of the same corridor as Stefan’s. It had gleaming furniture: a glass-topped desk one side of which leaned on prism-shaped drawers, the other on bent steel tubing that matched the frames of the chairs. It reminded Stefan of a dentist’s waiting room. The pictures on the walls were framed in metal tubes. Pedantically arranged books, each with a white number on its spine, filled two walls. As Marglewski set the low table, Stefan mechanically pulled a book from the shelves and leafed through it. It was Pascal’s Provinciales. Only the first two pages had been cut. His host opened a drawer in a contemporary sideboard to reveal sandwiches on white plates. After his third drink Marglewski got talkative. Vodka exaggerated his already vigorous gestures. He wrung his hands like a washerwoman when he said he had stained his coat and would have to have it cleaned. He pointed out boxes labeled with index cards along the windowsill. Sheets of cardboard were held together with colored clips. Marglewski, it turned out, was engaged in scientific research. With a show of reluctance, he opened a folder bursting with papers analyzing the effect of Napoleon’s kidney stones on the outcome of the battle of Waterloo and the influence of hormones on the visions of the saints—here he drew a circle, meant to represent a halo, in the air above his head and laughed. He was sorry that Stefan was not a believer; what he needed was pure, naive people steeped in dogma.

“You spend all that time talking to Sekułowski?” he exclaimed. “Ask him why literature has its head in the clouds. Believe me, more than one great love has gone down the drain because the guy had to take a leak and, afraid to mention it to his dearly beloved, expressed a sudden longing for solitude and sprinted off into the bushes. I’ve seen it happen.”

Out of boredom more than interest, Stefan reached into the files. There were heaps of typescript in stiff covers. Marglewski kept talking, but disconnectedly, as if his mind was somewhere else. Sitting there hunched over, his nostrils flared as though he were sniffing for something, Marglewski looked like an old maid eager to confess the story of her one indiscretion.

He launched into a discourse so pompously laden with Latin that Stefan understood nothing. Marglewski’s thin, nervous hands stroked the cover of one of the boxes impatiently before finally opening it. Curious, Stefan glanced inside. He saw a long list like a table of contents, and skimmed down it: “Balzac—hypomanic psychopath, Baudelaire—hysteric, Chopin—neurasthenic, Dante—schizoid, Goethe—alcoholic, Hölderlin—schizophrenic…”

Marglewski unveiled his secret. He had embarked on a great investigation of geniuses, and had even intended to publish portions of it, but unfortunately the war intervened.

He began to lay out large sheets with drawings depicting genealogies. He got more excited as he spoke, and his cheeks grew flushed. As he passionately enumerated the perversions, suicide attempts, hoaxes, and psychoanalytic complexes of great men, it occurred to Stefan that Marglewski himself might well be suffering from an abnormality that afforded him a dubious kinship with his subjects, a kind of ticket to the family of geniuses. He had scrupulously collected descriptions of their every lapse, researching and cataloguing their failures, tragedies, misfortunes, and catastrophes. He swelled with joy at the discovery of the slightest hint of impropriety among anyone’s posthumous papers.

At one point, as Marglewski rummaged in a lower drawer for his latest treasure, Stefan interrupted him. “It seems to me,” he said, “that great works arise not out of madness, but in spite of it.”

He took one look at Marglewski and immediately regretted having spoken. The man looked up over the papers and glared at him. “In spite of?” he sneered. Suddenly he gathered up the scattered papers, jerked a tattered chart away from Stefan, and nervously stuffed it back into a folder.

“My dear colleague,” he said, interlacing his fingers, “you are still inexperienced. But this is no longer the age of the Renaissance man. For that matter, thoughtless actions could have fatal consequences even then. Of course you fail to understand this, but things that can be justified subjectively often look different in the light of the facts.”

“What are you talking about?” Stefan asked.

Marglewski did not look at him. He wrung his long, thin fingers and stared at them. Finally, he said, “You take walks a lot. But those power-station operators in Bierzyniec with that building of theirs can only get the hospital into trouble. It’s not only that they’re hiding weapons, but that young one, Pościk’s son, is nothing but a common bandit.”

“How do you know?” Stefan interrupted.

“Don’t ask.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t?” Marglewski peered through his glasses with an expression of pure hatred. “Haven’t you heard of the Polish underground? The government-in-exile in London?” he asked in a shrill whisper, his long fingers running lightly over his white smock. “The army left weapons in the forest in September. That Pościk was in charge of them. And when he was ordered to tell where they were, he refused! Said he was waiting for the Bolsheviks!”

“He said that? How do you know?” Stefan asked, dazed by the unexpected turn of the conversation and by the way Marglewski was trembling.

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything! It’s got nothing to do with me!” he said, still whispering. “Everyone knows about it—everyone except you!”

“I shouldn’t go there anymore, is that what you mean?” Stefan stood up. “It’s true I walked over there once, during a storm…”

“Say no more!” Marglewski cut him off, jumping to his feet. “Please forget this whole conversation! I thought it was my obligation to a colleague, that’s all. Do what you think best with what I’ve told you, but please, don’t say anything to anyone else!”

“Of course not,” said Stefan slowly. “If that’s what you want, I won’t tell anyone.”

“Let’s shake on that!”

Stefan held out his hand. He was shocked by what Marglewski had said, and even more by his undisguised panic. Could someone have put the man up to it? What about his anger? Could he have something to do with the underground? Some sort of—what did they call it?—connection?

Stefan left in confusion. It was so hot that he had to keep wiping the sweat off his forehead as he walked down the corridor. He heard a loud burst of laughter from the toilet. The door opened and Sekułowski appeared, wearing only pajama bottoms, shaking with laughter that had seized him like the hiccups. Drops of sweat hung on the fair hairs of his chest.

“Perhaps you could share the joke?” asked Stefan, squinting against the light that poured through the corridor’s glass roof and bounced off the walls, broken into rainbows.

Sekułowski leaned against the door, catching his breath.

“Doctor,” he hawked finally, “doctor, it’s just that…” He spoke in short bursts, gasping for breath. “It reminded me of our arguments, our learned… phenomena… the Upanishads, the stars, the soul, and when I saw that turd… I can’t!” He burst out laughing again. “Spirit? What is man? A turd! A turd!”

Gripped by his private delight, the poet walked away, still shaking with laughter. Stefan went to his room without a word.

His first inclination was to go to the substation and warn Woch. Stefan’s promise meant nothing if honoring it would expose the operator to danger, but he knew immediately that he would not go. Who would he warn Woch about? Marglewski? Ridiculous. Tell him that weapons were hidden in the woods? If it was true, Woch would know more about it than he would.

He spent several days concocting increasingly elaborate ways of warning Woch to be careful: an anonymous note, another nocturnal meeting, but none of it made sense. In the end he did nothing. He did not go back to the substation, feeling an obligation to Woch not to, but he did begin to wander in its vicinity again. On his way out early one morning, he saw Joseph on one of the highest hilltops. The nurse was sitting motionless on the grass, as if absorbed by the picturesque view, but nothing Stefan knew about him indicated any weakness for the beauties of nature. Stefan watched him covertly for a while and then, seeing nothing interesting, turned back. He was already close to the hospital when it occurred to him that Joseph might be Marglewski’s informant. After all, the man hung around with the peasants, and a village had no secrets. Besides, he worked on Marglewski’s ward, and the skeletal doctor might have taken him into his confidence in that acid way of his. But what could Joseph have to do with the London government? It made no sense; the details did not fit together into any sort of structure. Stefan again felt the urge to warn Woch. But every time he imagined an actual conversation with the operator, he lost his nerve.

In the meantime, something new was happening in the hospital. The apartment next to Stefan’s room, previously empty, was to receive a new occupant in the person of Professor Romuald Łądkowski, a former university dean. This scholar, known far beyond the borders of Poland for his research in electroencephalography, had headed his university’s psychiatric clinic for eight years before being ousted by the Germans. Now he was coming—unofficially—to the asylum as Pajączkowski’s guest. The director himself had driven to the station several times, serving as guard of honor for successive shipments of the professor’s baggage, Łądkowski was due in two days. Joseph flew up and down the stairs, gasping for breath, carrying a ladder, a rod, a worn carpet.

All day long, Stefan could hear, through the wall, hammering, the scraping of heavy trunks, and the bumping of furniture. The other doctors greeted Łądkowski’s impending arrival with indifference. During dinner silence reigned, highlighted by the furious buzzing of flies. Stefan hung a sheet of wet gauze in his window in an effort to cool the hot dry air. He lay on the bed with a psychology text, looking at people’s photographs, keenly aware that they were variants of the same type, their mass existence seeming to clash with his sense of his own unexampled uniqueness. Simple alterations in the basic proportions accounted for individual differences: one face was centered on the eyes, another on the jaw, while the cheeks dominated a third. When he had lived in town, Stefan loved to imagine the faces of people walking ahead of him, especially women. The streets—those moving collections of faces—allowed him to play his game.

Pajączkowski suddenly interrupted these ruminations. He asked what his “respected colleague” was reading and then launched into his favorite topic. “Well, you won’t see that anymore,” he said, sounding melancholy. “Unfortunately, one no longer encounters such great, classic hysterical attacks with l’arc de cercle. I remember, at Charcot’s in Paris…”

He was getting worked up.

He must have noticed the faint grimace on Stefan’s lips, for he added, “Well, in some sense I suppose it’s a good thing, though hysteria is still with us. The trend has simply shifted to… to… but what did I want to tell you?”

Stefan had been waiting for this explanation, since the visit surely heralded something exceptional. Pajpak said that the famous Łądkowski, the friend of the Americans Lashley and Goldschmidt, had been thrown into the street by the Germans. “Into the street,” he repeated, his voice breaking. “And in return we must do anything in our power…”

He asked Stefan to call on the dean when his turn came.

On the evening of the dean’s arrival, Marglewski accompanied Pajączkowski and Kauters on what he called a presentation of letters of accreditation. They three were the highest ranking. Nosilewski and Rygier went on the second day. Staszek and Stefan had their turn on the third. Staszek muttered something about antediluvian customs: they were supposed to be colleagues, working together, united against the enemy, yet when it came to these idiotic visits they had to line up according to their position.

Stefan dug an ancient black tie out of the bottom of his suitcase and put it on, hiding the stains under his jacket. They set out.

Łądkowski looked like a skinny lion with no neck. He had a knobby head, thick silver hair, a nose like a cauliflower with tufts of hair sticking out of the nostrils, and a face of sharp, irregular angles with lopsided gray eyebrows that wavered with his every move. Wrinkles ran down from his carefully shaved chin. His profile suggested Socrates—up to a point.

Having seen several doctors’ apartments in the building, Stefan was curious about the professor’s, however hastily equipped it may have been. After all, the wagon had made six trips to the station and back.

Shelves sagging under masses of books ran along the walls. Most of the books had black bindings with gold letters on the spines. Large folios of professional journals occupied the lower levels. A yellow or green volume shined here and there, as if to break up the monotony. The desk stood catty-corner under the window, a row of textbooks along its front edge. Carpets softened the harshness of what would otherwise have resembled a monk’s cell: one, having a deep pile, lay just inside the door; another hung on the wall as a tapestry, forming a background for Łądkowski’s silhouette.

Staszek and Stefan muttered obsequiously as they introduced themselves. The professor’s conversation was lively: while seeming to talk about everything, in fact he said nothing. The suggestion was that they had come to him for advice and enlightenment. He asked them about their work and their interests—professional interests, of course, personal relations in the asylum being conspicuously unmentioned. He behaved with simple, genuine equality. It was exactly this that put them at a great distance. A kind of noblesse prevented him from subduing his inner haughtiness. Stefan felt even smaller when he looked at two bronze heads standing at opposite ends of a low shelf: Kant and a Neanderthal. He noticed with surprise that although the Neanderthal’s bulbous skull and vaulted eye-sockets hinted at a wildness absent from the other figure, both heads shared a weary loneliness, as though they embodied the life and death of entire generations.

Portraits hung on the walls: Lister, a Byronic pathos in his forsaken gaze; Pavlov, his jutting chin highlighting the brutal features of an inquisitive child; and Emil Roux, an old man racked by insomnia.

When he judged that he had given the youngsters their due, the professor initiated an exchange of bows and brief but warm handshakes with such breathtaking tact that Stefan and Staszek, slightly frustrated, found themselves in the corridor almost despite themselves.

“Damn,” Stefan reflected, “a great man!” He was suddenly overcome by a desire for one of those elemental discussions that shake the world’s foundations, but his friend let him down. The grace Staszek had shown with Łądkowski was gone. During their visit, it seemed as if he had left his troubles outside the professor’s door. Now he picked them up again. He was ill with Nosilewska worse than ever. But she, tanned and indifferent, answered his tragic questing gaze with a meaningless smile. She was ever the doctor, seeing a blush as a rush of blood to the face and a thumping heart as a symptom of pressure from the stomach. She was a charged battery of femininity, and her every movement tortured Staszek. Yet he dared not speak: silence afforded him the shreds of hope inherent in uncertainty. Stefan had long acted as comforter, serving so conscientiously that he sometimes savored his own skills. Now and then he struck a false note, bursting into raucous laughter at one of Staszek’s confidences or slapping his friend heartily on the back, but he always apologized immediately afterward.

July raced by. August was hot, and apples dropped in the starry darkness. One night, after an evening storm, as trees shaken by thunder settled into stillness in a dusk heavy with moisture, Marglewski appeared ceremoniously in Stefan’s room: he was organizing a scientific meeting and a show of patients.

“It will be fascinating,” he said. “But I don’t want to anticipate. You’ll see for yourself.”

That very evening Stefan had invited Nosilewska to his room—an attempt to resolve Staszek’s unbearable indecision once and for all. His scheme had misfired again.

Rows of plush red chairs had been set up in the library. Rygier entered first, followed by Kauters, Pajączkowski, Nosilewska, and finally Staszek. When it seemed time to start and everyone watched expectantly as Marglewski, standing behind a high lectern covered with papers, cleared his throat, Łądkowski arrived. That was a real surprise. The old man bowed at the doorway, sank into the large armchair Marglewski had prepared for him nearest the podium, crossed his arms over his chest, and sat motionless. Stefan tried to compensate Staszek for his disappointment by maneuvering the chairs so that Nosilewska sat between him and his friend. The lecturer stood behind the lectern, coughed again, and, having arranged his papers, swept the audience with the gleam of his steel-rimmed glasses.

This presentation, he explained, was actually an airing of materials that had not yet been worked up into their final form. Its theme was the specific influences exerted on the human mind by various mental diseases. He spoke of a phenomenon that could be described as the yearning of a convalescent patient for his former malady. It occurred especially among simple, unintelligent people whose inner life schizophrenia had enriched with states of ecstasy. Once cured, such patients mourned their disease.

Marglewski spoke with a discreet, sardonic smile, constantly folding and unfolding his hands. He grew more animated as he got into his subject, rustling his papers, sprinkling his phrases with Latin, building enormous sentences without glancing at his notes. Stefan observed with interest the lovely line of the thighs of Nosilewska’s crossed legs. He lost track of Marglewski’s deductions, surrendering instead to the rising and falling cadences of his voice. Suddenly the lecturer stepped back from the podium.

“Now, colleagues, I shall demonstrate how what I have called the mourning for his disease can be manifested in a convalescent patient. If you please!” He turned sharply to the open side door. An old man in a cherry-colored hospital robe came in. The white gown of a nurse waiting in the corridor could be seen outside the door.

“Come in, please,” said Marglewski with a poor attempt at amiability. “What’s your name?”

“Wincenty Łuka.”

“How long have you been in the hospital?”

“A long time, a very long time. A year, maybe. At least a year.”

“What was the problem?”

“What problem?”

“What brought you to the hospital?” asked Marglewski, holding his impatience in check. Stefan felt bad watching the scene. It was plain that Marglewski cared nothing for the man. All he wanted was to get the statements he needed out of him.

“My son brought me.”

The old man suddenly looked confused and lowered his eyes. When he raised them again, they had changed. Marglewski licked his lips and craned forward avidly, his eyes fixed on the patient’s sallow face. At the same time he made a brief, significant gesture to the audience, like a conductor holding the rest of the orchestra while evoking a pure solo from a single instrument.

“My son brought me,” the old man said in a more assured voice, “because I was seeing things.”

“What things?”

The old man waved his hands. His Adam’s apple bobbed twice in his dry neck. He was obviously trying to speak. He raised his hands several times, but no words came, and he did not complete the gesture.

“Things,” he finally repeated helplessly. “Things.”

“Were they beautiful?”

“Beautiful.”

“Tell us what it was you saw. Angels? The Lord God? The Blessed Virgin?” Marglewski asked in a matter-of-fact tone.

“No, no,” the old man interrupted. He looked at his own pale hands and said, quietly and slowly, “I’m an uneducated man. I don’t know how to… It started one day when I went out to mow hay, over near Rusiak’s farm. That was where it happened. All the trees in the orchard, and the barn, sir, they changed somehow.”

“Be more precise. What happened?”

“Everything around Rusiak’s farmyard. It was the same, only different.”

Marglewski turned quickly to the audience. Rapidly and distinctly, like an actor delivering an aside, he said, “Here we have a schizophrenic suffering disintegration of personality functions—but completely cured.”

He intended to go on, but the old man interrupted: “I saw, I saw so much.”

He moaned. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He tried to smooth a recalcitrant curl back onto his head.

“Good, very good. We know that. But you don’t see things anymore, do you?”

The patient looked down.

“Well?”

“No, I don’t,” he admitted, and seemed to grow slightly smaller.

“Please observe!” Marglewski addressed the audience. He went up to the old man and spoke to him slowly and emphatically, enunciating carefully. “You will not see things anymore. You are cured. You will go home now, because you don’t need us. Nothing is bothering you. Do you understand? You will go home to your son, to your family.”

“I won’t see things?” the old man repeated, standing motionless.

“No. You are cured.”

The old man in the cherry robe looked distressed—so distressed that Marglewski beamed, taking a step backward so he would not block the audience’s view, pointing surreptitiously at the old man.

The patient walked heavily to the podium. He put his square hands, pale from his stay in the asylum, on the stand.

“Gentlemen,” he said in a thin, pained voice. “Why do you have to do this to me? I’ve already… you can put me anywhere, even give me those electric shocks, only please let me stay. We’re so poor on the farm, my son has four mouths to feed, what am I supposed to do? If I could work—but my hands and my feet won’t listen. I don’t have much time left, and I’ll eat anything you give me, only let me stay. Please let me stay.”

Marglewski’s face went through a gamut of emotions as the man spoke. Satisfaction gave way to surprise, then to anxiety, and finally to anger. He gestured to the male nurse, who entered quickly and took the old man by the elbow. At first the patient jerked away like a free man, but then he sagged and let himself be led away unresisting.

Silence filled the room. Marglewski, white as a sheet, pushed his glasses back onto his nose with both hands and returned to the podium with a raucous squeaking of his new shoes. He opened his mouth to speak when Kauters commented from a seat in the back, “Well, there was mourning all right, but not so much for his disease as for three square meals a day.”

“Please save your remarks for the end,” snapped Marglewski. “I haven’t finished. That patient, respected colleagues, has experienced ecstatic states and intense feelings which he is now unable to recount. Before the onset of disease, he was subnormal, almost a cretin. I cured him. But, as they say, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. What you saw just now was the cunning often exhibited by cretins. I have observed the symptoms of his mourning for his disease for some time now,”

He went on and on in the same vein. Finally he wiped his glasses with a trembling hand, ran his tongue over his lips, rocked back on his heels, and announced, “Well, that’s all. Thank you, colleagues.”

The ex-dean left immediately. Stefan looked at his watch, leaned toward Nosilewska, and invited her to his room. She was surprised—“Isn’t it too late?”—but consented in the end.

As they left, they passed the other doctors gathered outside the door. Marglewski was perorating, holding Rygier by the lapel. Kauters stood silently biting his nails.

Back in his room, Stefan seated Nosilewska alongside Staszek, uncorked a bottle of wine, laid some crackers on a plate, and looked for the orange vodka Aunt Skoczyńska had sent him. After one round, he suddenly remembered something he absolutely had to check on in the third ward, cleared his throat, excused himself, and left with the feeling of having done what he was supposed to do.

He wandered in the corridors, thought about going to see Sekułowski, until Joseph caught him standing at a window. “Doctor, oh, it’s a good thing you’re here. Paścikowiak—you know, in seventeen—is acting up.”

Joseph had his own terminology. If a patient was getting restless, he was “misbehaving.” “Acting up” meant something more serious.

Stefan went into the ward.

About a dozen patients watched with mild interest as a man in a bathrobe jumped up and down like a frog, emitting menacing screams that frightened no one, clenching his teeth and waving his arms and legs. Finally he fell onto a bed and began tearing at the sheets.

“Paścikowiak, what’s all this?” Stefan began jovially. “Such a peaceful, civilized man, and all of a sudden you start raising hell?”

The deranged man peered out from under his eyebrows. He was short and thin, with the fingers and skull of a hunchback, but without the hump. “Oh, you’re on duty today, doctor?” he murmured with embarrassment. “I thought it was Doctor Rygier. I’m sorry, I won’t do it again.”

Stefan, who disliked Rygier, smiled and asked, “What do you have against Doctor Rygier?”

“Well, just… I won’t do it again. If you’re on duty, doctor, not a peep.”

“I’m not on duty. I just happened to be passing by,” Stefan said. But that sounded a little too informal, so he corrected himself: “Come on, no more fooling around. Doctor Rygier or me, it’s all the same. Otherwise they’ll send you right to electroshock.”

Paścikowiak sat on the bed, covering the hole in the sheet, and showed his narrow teeth in a silly smile. The records said he was subnormal, but his cleverness did not fit into any diagnostic pigeonhole.

On his way out, Stefan glanced into the next ward. An idiot, a longtime hospital resident, lay murmuring on the nearest bed, covered with a blanket. A few patients were sitting nearby, and one was walking around his bed.

Stefan went in.

“What’s going on?” he asked the man who was murmuring. A beggar’s face with a red beard, yellowish eyes, and a toothless mouth peeked out from under the blanket. “All right, how much is a hundred and thirteen thousand two hundred and five times twenty-eight thousand six hundred and thirty?”

This was an act of kindness: now the crouched figure murmured in a different tone, fervently, almost prayerfully. A moment later he jabbered, “…illion… forty-one million… ifty-nine thousand… dred and fifty.”

Stefan did not have to check. He knew that the man could multiply and divide six-digit numbers in seconds. When he first arrived at the asylum, Stefan had asked the patient how he did it. The reply was an irate mutter. Once, tempted by Stefan’s offer of a piece of chocolate, the idiot promised to tell his secret. Stammering and drooling on the chocolate, he said, “I’ve got… drawers in my head. Click, click. Thousands here, millions here, click click. Snap. And there it is.”

“There what is?” asked Stefan, disappointed.

Now the mathematician lowered the blanket, and his face beamed. He was big. “Pump me up!” he lisped.

That meant that he wanted to be given two large numbers.

“Well…” Stefan scrupulously counted out the thousands and told him to multiply. The idiot drooled, whispered, hiccuped, and gave the answer. Stefan stood at the foot of the bed, thinking.

The idiot was silent for a moment, then pleaded again, “Pump me up!”

Stefan recited another pair of numbers. Was this what the idiot mathematician needed to be reassured of his own worth? There were times when Stefan felt a sudden fear, as if he should fall to his knees and beg everyone to forgive him for being so normal, for sometimes feeling self-satisfied, for forgetting about them.

He had nowhere to go. In the end he went to see Sekułowski.

The poet was shaving. Noticing a volume of Bernanos on the table, Stefan started to say something about Christian ethics, but Sekułowski did not give him a chance. Standing at the mirror, his face lathered, he shook the shaving brush several times, sending suds flying across the room.

“Doctor, it makes no sense. The church, that old terrorist organization, has been acquiring souls for two thousand years now, and what has come of it? Salvation for some, symptoms for others.”

Sekułowski was more interested in the problem of genius. Stefan supposed that he thought of it “from the inside,” regarding himself as a genius.

“Well, then take van Gogh or Pascal. It’s an old story. On the other hand, you garbagemen of the soul know nothing about us.”

(Aha! thought Stefan.)

“I remember, from the days of my apprenticeship, a few interesting, pure forms nourished by various literary circles. There was this young writer. Things came easy to him. He had his picture in the papers, interviews, translations, reprints. I was green with envy. I could savor hatred the way the Buddha savored nothingness. Once we ran into each other when both of us were drunk. All his inhibitions were gone. He broke down crying, told me that he envied me my elitism and my high standards. That I had been so protective of what I wrote. That my solitude was so productive and proud. The next day we weren’t talking to each other anymore. Soon after, he published an essay on my poems: ‘An Abortion Signifying Nothing.’ A masterpiece of applied sadism. If you want to listen, please come into the bathroom because I’m going to take a shower.”

Lately Sekułowski had been admitting Stefan to his evening ablutions, perhaps as a new way of humiliating him.

He climbed naked into the shower and went on talking. “When I started, I had doubts when my friends praised me. When they didn’t, I thought: Aha! And when they started giving out advice—that I was in a rut, a blind alley, that I was burning myself out—then I knew I was on the right track.”

He ran a washcloth over his hairy backside.

“There were a couple of old men back then. The first was supposed to be an epic poet—he had never published a single epic, but that was his reputation. They believed in him, but I didn’t. He collected mottoes like butterflies. Said he needed them for his ‘life’s work.’ He had been writing this life’s work since his youth, constantly correcting it and comparing it to Flaubert’s manuscripts. Forever making changes and never getting it right. He would put down three words a week. When he died, somebody lent me his manuscript for a couple of days. Well, not to put too fine a point on it: fluff. Nothing that would last, no effort, no desire. Never trust blowhards—you have to have talent. Don’t tell me about Flaubert’s endlessly worked-over manuscripts, because I’ve seen Wilde’s work. That’s right, Oscar. Did you know that he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray in two weeks?”

He stuck his head under the shower and blew his nose thunderously.

“The other one was famous in partibus infidelium. A member of the PEN Club. He read the Upanishads in the original and could write as fluently in French as in Polish. Even the critics respected him. He feared me alone, and hated me because I knew his limits. I could sense them like a hollow bottom in everything he wrote. He would get off to a great start, establish the situation, inject life into the characters, and the action would roll along, until he got to the point where he had to rise above the level of merely putting things down on paper, to step beyond stupidity. But he couldn’t do it. That was as far as he could go. Nobody else could hear the false note, so he thought of himself like that naked emperor in Hans Christian Andersen. Do you understand? For me, someone else’s writing is like a weight on the floor. All I have to do is walk up to it and decide whether I can pick it up or not. In other words, could I do better or not?”

“And could you?”

Sekułowski scratched his soapy back luxuriantly.

“Almost always. Every so often, when the waves receded, I’d read what I’d written—with some admiration. It’s mostly a question of style. The difference in generations comes down to this: once they used to write, ‘the dawn smelled of roses.’ Then a new wave comes, and for a while they write, ‘the morning smelled of piss.’ But the device is the same. That’s not reform. That’s not innovation.”

He barked like a seal under the hot stream of water.

“All writing has to have a skeleton, like a woman, but not one you can feel. Also like a woman. Wait a second—I just remembered a great story. Yesterday, Doctor Rygier lent me a couple of old literary journals. What a riot! That pack of critics uttering each word convinced that history was speaking through their mouths, when at best it was yesterday’s vodka. Ouch!” His hair had gotten tangled.

He rubbed his belly and went on, “I have a particularly painful memory from that period, on which fate has poured balm. I’ll leave names out of it. May he rest peacefully in his grave, upon which I relieve myself,” Sekułowski said with a vulgar laugh that may have had something to do with his own nakedness.

He rinsed himself off, reached for his bathrobe, and said calmly, “I pretended to be the most impudent man alive, but actually it was only uncertainty. That’s when you pick an ideology like choosing a tie off the rack—whichever seems most colorful and expensive. I was the most defenseless nobody, and above us all, like the brightest of stars, shined a certain critic of the older generation. He wrote like Hafiz praising the locomotive. He was the nineteenth century incarnate. He couldn’t breathe in our atmosphere, he could see no one of greatness. He had not yet noticed us, the young. Individually, we didn’t matter; if there were ten of us, he’d say good morning. He was a curious type, doctor, a born writer. He had talent, an apt metaphor for every occasion, and humor—and he was completely merciless. For one good metaphor, he was willing to annihilate a book and its author. And did he do it honestly? Don’t be naive.” Sekułowski combed his wet hair with great attention. “Today I’m absolutely sure that he believed in nothing. Why should he? He was like a beautiful watch missing one tiny screw, a writer with no counterweight. He wasn’t foolish enough to become the Polish Conrad, but there was no remedy for that.”

He put on his shirt.

“At the time, I had lost God. I don’t mean I stopped believing—I lost Him the way some men lose women, for no reason and with no hope of recovery. I suffered, because I needed an oracle. Well, it wouldn’t have taken much for that critic to finish me off. But he did believe in one thing. Himself. He oozed that belief the way some women ooze sex. Besides which, he was so famous that he was always right. He read a couple of poems that I sent him, and passed judgment. We were about as much alike as the sun and a shovel”—he laughed, knotting his tie—“and I was a dirty shovel. He talked in terms of first causes, fumbled around, and finally explained to me why my poems were worthless. He hesitated for a while, but in the end he let me go on writing. He let me, do you understand?” Sekułowski made an ugly face. “Well, it’s an old story. But when I think that today his name is meaningless to the young, I’m delighted. It’s revenge and I didn’t even have to lift a finger. It was prepared by life itself. It ripened slowly like a fruit—I know of nothing sweeter,” said the poet with great satisfaction, tying the silver belt of his camel smoking jacket.

“Can his contemporaries ever judge a man of genius? Is the van Gogh story fated to be repeated forever?”

“How should I know? Come into the room; it’s so humid in here, you could suffocate.”

“I think that more than one lunatic is an undiscovered genius. Just missing a counterweight, as you put it. Like Morek, for instance.” Stefan told him about the idiot mathematician.

Sekułowski cut him off angrily: “Morek is as much a genius as your Pajączkowski, but without such a good job.”

“Be that as it may, Pajączkowski has a doctorate in psychiatry… his work on manic-depression,” said Stefan, upset.

“Sure. Most academics are exactly like that mathematician. Maybe they don’t drool, but they can’t see anything outside their own fields. I knew a lichenologist once. You might not know what that is,” he added unexpectedly.

“I do,” retorted Stefan, who in fact did not.

“A lichenologist is a specialist in mosses,” Sekułowski explained. “This tow-headed scarecrow knew enough Latin to classify, enough physiology to write articles, and enough politics to carry on a conversation with the janitor. But if the discussion turned to fungus, he was lost. This world is crawling with idiot mathematicians. If they cultivate their poor skills in a socially useful direction, they’re tolerated. Literature is full of writers who are read by washerwomen but worry over their style with an eye to a posthumous edition of their letters. And what about doctors?”

Stefan tried to steer clear of the sensitive issue of medical practice, hoping to draw some more interesting formulations out of Sekułowski, but all he got was an invitation to kiss his ass. He went upstairs angry. All he knows is how to insult me, he thought.

Stefan decided to eavesdrop at his own door. The corridor was dark and empty as he approached on tiptoe. Silence. A rustling—her dress? The sheets? Then a sound like the plunger being pulled from a syringe. A slap. Then total silence, broken by sobbing. Yes, somebody was definitely crying. Nosilewska? He could not imagine that. He tapped the door lightly, and when no one answered, he knocked once and entered.

All the lights were out except the small lamp on the nightstand, which filled the room with a pale-lemon glow that reflected off the mirror to the wall and the bed. The bottle of orange vodka was half-empty: a good sign. The bed looked like a tornado had hit it, but where was Nosilewska? Staszek was lying there alone, in his clothes, his face buried in the pillow. He was crying.

“Staszek, what happened? Where is she?” asked Stefan, rushing to the bed.

Staszek only groaned more loudly.

“Tell me. Come on, what happened?”

Staszek raised his wet, red, snotty face; the emblem of dispair.

“If you… If I can… If you have…”

“Come on, tell me,”

“I won’t. If you feel any friendship for me at all, you’ll never ask me about it.”

“But what happened?” Stefan demanded, curiosity overcoming discretion.

“I feel miserable,” moaned Staszek.

Then suddenly he shouted: “I won’t tell you! Don’t talk to me!” And he ran out, holding the pillow to his chest.

“Give me back my pillow, you maniac!” Stefan shouted after him, but Staszek’s footsteps were already thumping down the stairs.

Stefan sat in the armchair, looked around, even lifted the covers and smelled the sheets, but he found out nothing. He was so curious that he wanted to go see Nosilewska, but he restrained himself. Maybe Staszek would calm down by morning. Maybe she would give something away, he thought, but he knew there was little chance of that.