Hospital of the Transfiguration

FATHER AND SON

It was late September. Heaps of manure were turning black like great molehills in the plowed fields. The aspen near Stefan’s window was diseased: dark spots covered its prematurely yellowing leaves. He sat motionless, watching the horizon sharp as a knife. He would sink into a torpor for hours on end, his eyes fixed on the sky, following the patterns of motes dancing in the empty light of the window.

Nosilewska asked him to write a report on a new patient. He agreed eagerly—anything to fill the time.

The patient was one of those slender androgynous girls who padded their busts with lace pillows to transfix men. But the whole beauty of this eighteen-year-old schizophrenic lay in her dark, quick gaze. Her hands fluttered near her face like small doves, lighting on her cheek or under her chin. Once she stopped looking at you, the spell was broken.

The obligation of calling on her became a pleasure for Stefan. The more he fought it, the more he liked her. After a tragic, unfortunate love affair (he was unable to find out exactly what had happened), she yearned to escape from the evil world that had hurt her, to escape into the mirror. She longed to live in her own reflection.

She approached Stefan willingly, knowing that he carried a small nickel mirror. He let her look.

“It’s so… so marvelous there,” she whispered, ceaselessly adjusting her eyelashes, her wavy hair. She could not take her eyes off the gleaming surface.

She reminded Stefan of a couple of other women he knew, the wives of friends in the city. They could sit in front of the mirror all day long, arranging their faces into every possible smile, investigating the sparkle of their eyes, peering at every freckle, every line, smoothing here and pushing there, like alchemists waiting for gold to precipitate in the alembic. The most obvious kind of abnormal obsession, and he had never thought of it before. Birdbrains, of course, but it was a mistake to assume that all neurasthenics were intelligent.

Neurotics could be idiots too, he thought, angry because it sounded almost like an admission: That’s what I am.

The girl would often sit in the bathroom, because there was a mirror there. Driven out, she would hang around near the door, stretch her hands out, and beg everyone who opened it to let her look at her own reflection. She tried to see herself in all the chrome fittings.

For some time Stefan had been suffering from insomnia. He would lie in bed reading, waiting for sleep, but it never seemed to come, and when it finally did, he thought he could feel someone standing motionless in the dark room. He knew there was no one, but he would wake up. Only when the first birdsong greeted the dawn could he doze off.

On the night of September 29, the sky sparkling with stars, he fell asleep earlier than usual. But he woke up terrified. A bright light flashed in the window. He got up in his underwear and looked out. Two big cars painted in irregular-shaped patches growled on the winding road, illuminated by the glare of their own headlights reflected off the hospital wall. Germans in dark helmets stood near the door. Several officers came out from under the small roof over the entrance. One of them shouted something. The motors roared, the officers got in, and soldiers jumped onto the running boards. The headlights swept the flower beds, and for an instant the beams of the second car fell on the one ahead. They lit up the passengers’ heads, and Stefan saw one bare head among the helmets. He recognized it. The headlights glared against the main gate, where the porter stood blinded, cap in hand. Then the motors roared louder as the cars turned onto the road. On a curve, the headlights picked out a clump of trees, a wreath of leaves, a trunk, and finally the white spine of a birch. Then it was quiet again, the chirping of crickets like a pulse in an enormous ear. Stefan grabbed his coat off the hook, squirmed into it unthinkingly, and ran barefoot down the hall.

All the doctors were gathered on the second floor, and the crossfire of questions was so chaotic that it seemed impossible to understand. The story emerged gradually. The soldiers were from an SS patrol group now stationed at Owsiany. They had arrested a worker at the electricity substation and were looking for others. Marglewski said loudly that no one should go into the woods, because the SS were searching the area, and there was no joking with them.

The soldiers had not searched the hospital, just walked through the wards and talked to Pajączkowski. “The officer had a riding crop, and he struck the table in front of me,” said Pajączkowski, pale, his eyes wide. Everyone gradually drifted away as the excitement died down. As he passed Stefan, Marglewski stopped as if to say something, but only nodded maliciously and disappeared down the corridor.

Stefan lay awake until morning. He was upset; he kept closing his eyes and reliving the brief nocturnal scene again and again. He could no longer pretend, as he had at first, that the man arrested was someone other than Woch. That large, square head was unmistakable. He groaned under the burden of responsibility he felt. He had to tell someone, had to confess the guilt that was tormenting him, so he went to see Sekułowski. It was early morning.

But the poet would not let him open his mouth. “Can’t you see I’m writing? What do you want from me? What am I supposed to do? ‘Take a stand’ again? Everyone does what he can. What a poet does is suffer beautifully. What about you? Are you waiting for the war to end so every Achilles in the woods can become a Cato? You’re as bad as the Furies—at least they make sense, they’re women! Leave me alone for a change!”

Brushed off, Stefan thought as he left. He wondered if it would do any good to go take a look at the substation. If there was still electricity in the hospital, somebody had to be working there. And that someone might know what had happened to Woch.

Seeking shelter from his own thoughts, Stefan walked to the farthest comer of the men’s ward. Some red spots on the floor caught his eye, but as he came closer, he saw that they were not blood.

A young schizophrenic was making a statue out of clay. Stefan watched him for a long time. The boy’s face betrayed nothing. His profile was sharply cut, yellowish, and slightly crooked, like a mobile mask. Sometimes he would close his eyes so peacefully that his eyelashes did not move, and raise his head as his fingertips fluttered like sparrows over the surface of the clay. There was a serenity to his downturned mouth. The demons had stopped tormenting him, sentences died on his lips, he could no longer communicate with strangers: he was absent. That supreme indifference which exists only in crowds or among the unconscious enabled the boy to work in solitude, as if he were in a desert. A tall angel rose from the mound of clay on the round table before him. Its wings, wide as a stricken bird’s, were somehow threatening. The long gothic face was beautiful and composed. The hands, held low as if in fear, were wringing a small child’s neck.

“What’s it called?” asked Stefan.

The boy did not answer. He wiped clay from his fingertips. Joseph spoke up from the corner; a patient was supposed to answer when a doctor talked to him.

“Go ahead and tell the doctor,” said Joseph, stepping heavily forward.

Joseph never backed down with patients—they got out of his way. But this boy did not move.

“I know you can talk. Say something or I’ll take care of that doll for you.” He moved as if he was going to tip the figure over. The boy did not flinch.

“No,” said Stefan, confused. “There’s no need for that. Joseph, please go to the supply room and fetch a tray of syringes and two ampules of scophetal. The nurse needs them.”

He wanted to make it up to the boy for the humiliation. “You know,” he said, “it’s very strange and beautiful.”

The patient stood with his shoulders hunched, hair sticking to his sweaty forehead. A shadow of contempt gathered under his lower lip.

“I don’t understand it, but maybe you’ll explain it to me someday,” said Stefan, slowly shedding his role of psychiatrist.

The boy stared glassy-eyed at his clay-stained fingers.

Then, helplessly, Stefan extended his hand in the simplest of gestures.

The boy seemed terrified: he moved to the other side of the table and hid his hands behind his back. Ashamed, Stefan looked around to make sure there were no staff members in the room. Then the boy reached out suddenly and awkwardly, almost knocking over the statue, and took hold of Stefan’s hand. He let go as if it burned him. Then he turned back to the figure and took no further notice of the doctor.

Joseph came up to Stefan during rounds the next day. “Doctor, do you know what that clay is called?”

“No, what?”

“Strangling Angel.”

“What?”

Joseph repeated the name.

“Interesting,” said Stefan.

“Very interesting. Besides which, the bastard bites,” said Joseph, displaying red marks on his large hand. Stefan was awed. He knew all the orderlies’ practiced throws. Their motto was: Break a patient’s arm before you let him put a scratch on you. The boy must really have been “acting up.” And he must have got a good beating too. Despite innumerable orders and reprimands, the orderlies applied a policy of revenge behind the doctors’ backs, and patients who made nuisances of themselves were beaten peasant-style, close-in, with the most deliberately painful blows. They were hit through blankets or in the bath, so no marks would show. Stefan knew all this and wanted to order a strict ban on any mistreatment of the boy, but he could not: his authority did not extend to officially forbidden “methods.”

“You know, that boy…”

“The one with the angel?”

“Right. Be careful he doesn’t get hurt.”

Joseph was offended. He said he was careful of all the patients. Stefan took a fifty-złoty note out of his pocket. Joseph softened. He got the point. He was always careful, but now he would be extra-careful.

They were standing in the doorway. Patients wandered nearby, but they might as well have been unattended. As Joseph unobtrusively put the folded banknote away, a determination that surprised him came over Stefan, and in a voice not his own he asked, “Joseph, you wouldn’t happen to know what happened to the man the Germans arrested that night? You know who I mean.”

They looked at each other. Stefan’s heart pounded. Joseph seemed to be stalling. The flash of interest that had appeared in his eyes was submerged in a servile smile. “The guy missing an ear, who worked on the electricity? Woch? Did you know him, doctor?”

“I knew him,” Stefan said, feeling that he was putting himself in Joseph’s hands. The effort of carrying on the conversation made him feel faint.

An unctuous smile, more and more explicit, crept across Joseph’s stupid-cunning face. His eyes widened. “So you knew him, doctor? They say he wasn’t the one keeping that stuff in the hole. They say it was his godson, Antek. Well, who knows? But he was a fox, I’ll say that. A fox,” he repeated, as if he liked the sound of the word. “He drank with the Germans and made deals with them, until he wouldn’t give a normal person the time of day, he thought he was so important. He figured he had the German all wrapped up, but the German is a fox, too, and came at night and took him away like a chicken! Today a car came from Owsiany, and they had to make two trips, there was so much stuff. It was hidden under the coils, packed in crates like merchandise!”

“Did you see it?”

“Me? How would I see it? But other people did. They saw it, and they knew. But Woch didn’t realize. Everyone else could see it coming.”

“What did they do to him?”

“How should I know? You know the sand pit at Rudzień? Where the lake used to be? If you follow the road through the woods and then go to the right… They give you a shovel and tell you to dig a hole and stand over it. Then they get a peasant from the road to come and fill it in. They don’t like to dirty their hands.”

Even though he had supposed as much—even though he knew it could not have been any other way—Stefan felt such rage, such hatred for Joseph, that he had to close his eyes.

“What about the others?” he asked dully.

“The Pościks? Disappeared like a stone in a lake. Nobody knows anything. They must have escaped into the forest. They won’t be found in the swamps and caves. And all because they were stupid, they didn’t think ahead. They had something there—all that ammunition.” His voice dropped on the last words.

Stefan nodded, turned, and went to his room. With a steady hand he shook out a luminal tablet, thought about it, added another, washed them down with water, and dropped onto his bed with his clothes on.

Late that evening he was awakened by a pounding on the door. It was Joseph with a telegram from Aunt Skoczyńska: Stefan’s father was seriously ill and he should come home immediately.

He asked Staszek to take over for him on the ward and had no trouble getting several days’ leave from Pajączkowski.

“It’ll be all right,” the old man croaked as he stroked Stefan’s hand warmly. “And as long as you’re going anyway, try to find out what the Germans are up to.”

“Excuse me?”

“Take a look around, see what people are saying. There’s been a lot of bad news lately.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing, really.”

When he went to say good-bye to Sekułowski, Stefan found the poet composing, his hair standing on end as if electrified. His eyes jerked every so often in a strange inward gaze. His sonorous, metallic voice carried into the corridor, and Stefan stood in the door listening:

My heart is a planet of red termites

Fleeing in horror down a narrow path

My body—a plaything of sluts and Stylites—

Is murdering me. My expiring breath

O Night, tears away the veil at last

As that dusky girl with bloody thighs, Death,

Touches my face, a desolate nest…

Stefan went in and the poet stopped. A moment later, Stefan was telling him about the sculptor.

“Strangling Angel?” said Sekułowski. “That’s interesting, very interesting.” He filled a page with his careful, impassioned script. “Blessed are the meek, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” he read.

Then he looked at Stefan with twinkling eyes. “Because you’ve helped me a little, I want to show you something.”

He shuffled through the sheets of paper covering his bedspread. “I’ve been dreaming of writing the history of the world from the point of view of another planetary system. This is a sort of introduction.” He began reading from a piece of paper. “It is a festering uterus of suns: the universe. It teems with trillions of stellar eggs. Furious procreation bursting forth in grit and black dust, moving beat by beat, darkness by darkness.” He was improvising—there were only a few sentences on the paper.

“Where is this other system?” Stefan could not resist asking.

“Nowhere. That’s the whole joke.”

“And you believe that?”

Sekułowski held his breath. When his bright eyes looked up, he seemed inspired and beautiful.

“No,” he said. “I don’t believe it. I know it.”

Stefan’s journey was a nightmare. The filthy dark railroad car smelling of sour sweat was searched three times for lard or butter. There were police, and wild crowds attacked the doors and windows. He could not maintain his personal dignity in the incredible crush, since he was invisible in the darkness and silence was taken as a sign of surrender. Within an hour he was cursing like a sailor.

The city had changed. The streets had German names now, and jackbooted patrols tramped along the cobblestones. Airplanes with black crosses on the wings appeared above the houses from time to time: the sky was German.

The usual smell of boiled cabbage greeted him as he entered the building, and on the second floor the sweet-rotten smell from the furrier’s workshop triggered a complex of memories.

He found it hard to control his emotions when he saw the scratched brown door with the lion’s head carved in the transom.

The entrance was full of tinware, shelves, and odds and ends, and the cobwebbed frame of his father’s unfinished projects rose to the ceiling like macabre animal prototypes. His mother, as Aunt Skoczyńska immediately told him in a dramatic whisper, had moved to the village a month before, since there wasn’t enough money to keep the household going. His aunt embraced him in the open doorway and he fell into the naphthalene abundance of her bosom. She kissed him, cried a little, and pushed him into the dining room for bread with jam and tea.

As she brought out the labeled jars of homemade preserves, she talked about the high cost of fat and about a local lawyer. It was a long time before she finally mentioned his father. But then she launched with satisfaction into a detailed account of the events of the past few months. She painted a picture of a misunderstood, unlucky man of greatness, tormented by kidney and heart disease. She alone had supported the great inventor, distant relative though she was. “Your father,” she kept repeating, until Stefan began to suspect her of malice, as though she was accusing Stefan of coldness. But no—apparently she was simply expressing heartfelt sympathy. Years ago she had been beautiful. Stefan had even fallen in love with an old photograph of her that he had stolen from her room. But now accretions of flesh drowned what remained of her looks.

After eating and washing, Stefan was at last admitted to the bedroom.

His aunt played the envoy, scurrying back and forth on tiptoe, her hands rowing at her sides as though she was fighting the air resistance. The atmosphere was charged: the Return of the Prodigal Son, thought Stefan as he entered quietly, at which point the Rembrandtian contours in his mind dissolved.

The first thing that struck him was that his mother’s collection of cactus, asparagus, and other plants had been mercilessly crammed into the darkest comer of the room. His father lay in bed with a blanket drawn up to his chin. His lemon-colored hands with their gnarled fingers looked like ugly dead ornaments on the blanket border.

“How are you, Father?” he croaked.

His father said nothing, and Stefan yearned for a pleasant, rapid conclusion to the visit. It flashed through his mind that it would be convenient if his father died right at that moment. Then Stefan would be able to kneel at that pathetic spot at the bedside, say a prayer, and leave. That would make everything so much easier.

But his father did not die. On the contrary, he lifted his head and said in a whisper that turned into a groan, “Stefek, Stefek, Stefek,” in disbelief and then in joy.

“Father, I heard you weren’t feeling well, and I was so upset,” he lied.

“Oh,” said his father dismissively. He tried to sit up. He needed help and Stefan found the task terribly awkward. He could feel the bones under his touch, the gaps between his father’s ribs just beneath the skin, and the feeble remnants of warmth for which the emaciated, helpless body fought.

“Does it hurt?” he asked with sudden concern.

“Sit on the bed. Sit,” his father repeated with some impatience.

Stefan perched obediently on the edge of the bedframe; it was uncomfortable, but also very touching. What could he talk about?

He could remember only one expression on his father’s face; a vacant gaze into that other world where his inventions took shape. His hands had always been scratched by wire, burned by acid, or dyed some exotic color. Now all that was gone. The last of life trembled gently in the thick dark veins under his freckled skin.

It was painful for Stefan to see.

“I’m so tired,” his father said. “It would be better to just go to sleep and not wake up.”

“Father, how can you say that?” Stefan blurted, but at the same time he thought: What else is there for a body like this, for a skull that seems to rattle like the meat in a dried-up walnut? His joints are squeaky hinges, his lungs asthmatic moss, his heart a jammed, leaky pump. The body was a decrepit tenement whose inhabitants feared it would collapse on their heads. Stefan recalled Sekułowski’s poem: it was our bodies that murdered us, obeying the only law they knew—not our will, but nature.

“Father, would you like to eat something?” he asked uncertainly, disturbed by the lightness of the hand now stroking his own. It sounded so stupid, he felt ashamed.

“I don’t eat. I don’t need anything now. I wanted to tell you so many things, but now… I lie awake all night. I can’t even sleep anymore,” he complained.

“Well, I’ll give you a prescription,” said Stefan, reaching into his pocket for his pad. “Who’s treating you, Marcinkiewicz?”

“Forget it. Don’t bother. Yes, Marcinkiewicz. It doesn’t matter now.” He burrowed deeper into his pillow. “Stefan, this time comes for everyone. When it really hurts, you wish a vein would burst in the brain at night. It might sound stupid, but I wouldn’t want to go all at once. It’s better to know what’s coming. But this doesn’t make sense.”

Stroking Stefan’s hand, he paused as if confused.

“We didn’t know each other well. I never had the time. Now I see that it doesn’t make any difference. The ones who hurry and the ones who take their time all end up in the same place. Just don’t have any regrets. No regrets.”

He fell silent, then added, “Never regret that you’re in one place and not another. Or that you could have done something but didn’t. Don’t believe it. You didn’t do it because you couldn’t do it. Everything makes sense when it ends. Not before. Always and everywhere, when you come down to it, are the same as never and nowhere. No regrets, remember!”

He was quiet again, breathing more deeply than before.

“That’s not what I really wanted to tell you. But my head won’t obey me anymore.”

“Father, can I get you anything? Are you taking any medicine?”

“They keep sticking me with needles,” his father said. “Don’t worry about it. You regret the life I led, don’t you? Tell me.”

“But Father.”

“It’s too late for lying now. You regretted the life I led, and you still do, I know that. There was never time. We were strangers. The thing is, I never wanted to give you up. Obviously, I didn’t love you, because that would have been… I don’t know. Stefan, are you doing all right?”

Now it was Stefan who could not find words.

“I’m not asking if you’re happy. You know if you’re happy only afterward, when it’s over. Man lives by change. Tell me, do you have a girl? Do you plan to get married?”

Something caught in Stefan’s throat. Here’s a man who’s dying, almost a stranger, and he’s thinking of me. Would I be able to do that? he wondered, but was unable to answer.

“Say something! You have a girl, then?”

Stefan shook his hanging head. His father’s eyes were blue, bloodshot, but most of all tired.

“Well. Advice doesn’t help. But let me tell you this. We Trzynieckis need women. That’s the way we are. We can’t handle things on our own. To live a clean life, a person has to be clean himself. You were always pigheaded—maybe I’m not saying it right, but you never knew how to forgive, and that’s everything. You don’t need to know anything else. I don’t know if you can learn now. But anyway, you don’t have to look for beauty or intelligence in a woman. Just tenderness. Feeling. The rest comes by itself. But without tenderness…”

He closed his eyes.

“Without tenderness it’s worth nothing. And tenderness is so easy.”

Then he added in his old, strong voice, “Forget all this if you want. Don’t listen to my advice. That’s wisdom too. But in that case don’t listen to anybody’s. Now what did I want to tell you? Oh yes, there are three envelopes in the desk.”

Stefan was stunned.

“And in the bottom drawer there’s a roll of paper with a ribbon around it. That’s the blueprint for my pneumomotor. The whole plan. Are you listening? Don’t forget. As soon as the Germans leave, take it to Frąckowiak. Someone has to make a model. He’ll know how.”

“But Dad,” said Stefan. “You’re talking like you’re making a will. You’re not feeling that bad, are you?”

“I’m not feeling that good either.” He did not want comforting. “That pneumomotor is worth a fortune. Believe me. I know what I’m talking about. So take it. It would be better if you took it right now.”

With his neck outstretched he whispered, “Aunt Mela is impossible. Absolutely impossible! I can’t trust her any farther than I can throw her. Take it now. I’ll give you the key.”

He almost fell out of bed reaching for his trousers, draped over the chair. In the pocket they found—under a dirty handkerchief, a roll of wire, and a pair of pliers—a bunch of keys. His father held them up to Stefan’s face and looked for a small Wertheim key. He handed it to Stefan, who took it and went to the desk. His father dozed off again.

He woke up when Stefan came back. “Well, did you get it?”

Then he looked at Stefan sharply, as if he had just remembered something. “I was not good to your mother,” he finally said. “She doesn’t even know that I’m… I didn’t want to tell her.”

And he added, “But you, remember! Remember!”

As Stefan got ready to leave, his father asked, “Will you come back?”

“Of course, Dad. I’m not going away. I just have to go into town to take care of a few things. I’ll be back for dinner.”

His father fell back on the pillow.

Doctor Marcinkiewicz had an office of glass and white walls. There was a Solux lamp and three quartz ones, whose presence may have been connected with the resettlement of Jewish doctors in the ghetto. Every third word he said to Stefan was “Doctor,” but Stefan felt nevertheless that he was not being taken seriously. Their dislike was mutual. Marcinkiewicz gave Stefan an unadorned description of his father’s condition: really just a simple case of angina pectoris, except that the pain was weak and not radiating. The changes in coronary circulation, however, were bad news, as bad as could be. He unrolled an electrocardiogram on the polished desktop and began explaining it, but Stefan interrupted him angrily. Only later did he become polite and ask Marcinkiewicz to take good care of his father. Marcinkiewicz declined Stefan’s offer of payment, but so feebly that Stefan put some money on the desk anyway. By the time he left, it had disappeared into the drawer.

When he left the doctor’s office, Stefan went to several bookshops, looking for Gargantua and Pantagruel. It was an old favorite of his, and now that he had some money, he wanted to buy Boy’s translation. But he could not find it anywhere: times were hard for bookshops. He finally got lucky in a secondhand store. Through an old acquaintance he also picked up some textbooks that were sold only to Germans, and got a copy of the latest issue of a German scholarly journal for Pajpak. Since he now had a fairly heavy load, he decided to go home by tram. A grotesquely overcrowded tram stopped; people pressed against the sweaty windows like fish in an aquarium. He grabbed a rail outside the door with his free hand and jumped onto the step. But he felt someone grab his collar from behind and pull him down. He jumped onto the sidewalk to avoid falling, and found himself looking right into the face of a young, smooth-cheeked German who unceremoniously elbowed him out of the way. When Stefan tried to climb up after him, a second German, accompanying the first, pushed him aside even more violently.

“Mein Herr!” Stefan shouted, giving him a shove of his own in return. The second German kicked Stefan in the backside with his polished boot. The bell rang and the car moved off.

Stefan stood on the sidewalk. Several passersby had stopped. He felt terribly confused and walked away, pretending that something across the street had caught his eye. He would not wait for the next tram. The incident left him so depressed that he gave up on his idea of visiting an old friend from school. Instead he walked home through the dry, rustling leaves.

His father was sitting up in bed smacking his lips as he ate curls of scrambled egg from an aluminum pan. Stefan told him what had happened.

“Yes, that’s the way they are,” his father said. “Volk der Dichter. Well, too bad. You see what their young people are like. Until last September I used to correspond with Volliger—you remember, the firm that was interested in my automatic tie presser. Then they just stopped answering. It’s a good thing I didn’t send them the plans. They got vulgar and uncivilized. In the end we’re all getting vulgar and uncivilized.”

He suddenly leaned over and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Melania! Melaniaaa!”

Stefan was amazed, but there was a shuffling of feet and his aunt’s face appeared around the door.

“Give me a little more herring, but more onion this time. What about you, Stefan? Something to eat?”

“No.” He felt disenchanted. When he left Marcinkiewicz, he had been ready to see his father again, had felt more affectionate, but now the old man had ruined his appetite.

“Father, I really have to get back today.” He launched into a complex description of the hospital, making it clear that his responsibilities were enormous.

“Be careful, watch yourself,” said his father, looking around for a piece of herring that had slipped off his plate. He found it, ate it with a big mouthful of bread, and concluded: “Don’t get too wrapped up in things there. I don’t know what to think, after what happened in Koluchów.”

“What happened?” Stefan asked, recognizing the name.

“Haven’t you heard?” asked his father, wiping his plate with bread. “There’s an insane asylum there,” he said, glancing obliquely at his son to make sure he hadn’t offended him.

“Yes, it’s a small private hospital. So what happened?”

“The Germans took it over and turned it into a military hospital. All the lunatics—I mean patients—were deported. To the camps, they say.”

“What are you talking about?” exclaimed Stefan, incredulous. The latest German treatise on therapy for paranoia, printed since the outbreak of the war, was in his briefcase.

“I don’t know, but that’s what they say. Oh, Stefan, I forgot! I meant to tell you right away. Uncle Anzelm is angry at us.”

“So?” Stefan said. He didn’t care.

“He says you’ve been living right there in Ksawery’s backyard for the better part of a year, and you haven’t gone to visit him once.”

“Then Uncle Ksawery ought to be angry, not Anzelm.”

“You know how Anzelm is. Let’s not get him going. You could stop in there someday. Ksawery likes you, he really does.”

“Fine, Father. I will.”

By the time Stefan was ready to leave, his father’s mind was on his latest inventions: soy caviar and cutlets made from leaves.

“Chlorophyll is very healthy. Just think, some trees live for six hundred years. There’s no meat in them at all, but let me tell you, with my extract these cutlets are delicious. Too bad I ate the last ones yesterday. When that stupid Melania sent you the telegram.”

Stefan learned that the telegram had been prompted by a sudden deterioration of relations between his father and his aunt, who had decided to leave. But they made up before Stefan arrived.

“I’ll give you a jar of my caviar. You know how it’s made? First you boil the soy, then color it with carbon—carbo animalis, you know what I mean?—then salt and my extract.”

“The same extract as in the cutlets?” asked Stefan, his expression serious.

“Of course not! A different one—special—and you use olive oil for flavor. A Jew was going to get me a whole barrel, but they stuck him in a camp.”

Stefan kissed his father’s hand and was about to leave.

“Wait, wait, I haven’t told you about the cutlets.”

The old man is completely senile, thought Stefan, with some tenderness, but without a trace of the morning’s emotion.

Stefan went to the station to go back to the asylum. But it was impossible: the crowd and the turmoil were horrendous. People crawled like bugs through the cars, while a bearded giant barricaded in a toilet pulled bulging suitcases in one after another. People even clambered on the roof. Stefan was still not used to traveling that way. He tried in vain to get into the car by explaining that he had to get to Bierzyniec. He was told to run along behind the train. He was ready to give up and go home to his father’s when somebody tugged at his sleeve. A stranger in a stained cap and a coat sewn from a plaid blanket. “Are you going to Bierzyniec?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t have a platzkart?”

“No.”

“We can go together, but it’ll cost you.”

“Fair enough,” Stefan said. The stranger disappeared into the crowd and returned a moment later clutching a conductor by the elbow.

“You give him a hundred,” he said to Stefan. Stefan paid, and the conductor opened a notebook, adding the banknote to a stack of others. He wet his finger, rubbed his pocket flap, and pulled out a key. They followed him as he crawled under the car to the other side of the train and led them to a tiny compartment. “Have a good trip,” said the conductor politely, stroking his mustache and saluting.

“Thanks very much,” said Stefan, but his traveling companion suddenly lost interest in him and turned to the window. The man’s face was not so much old as desolate, with dark skin and a thin, sunken mouth. When he took off his coat and hung it up, Stefan saw that he had large, heavy hands with fingers that looked as though they were used to gripping angular objects. His fingernails were thick and dark, like pieces of a nutshell. He pulled his cap down over his eyes and sat in the corner. The train began to move. Two more passengers could have fit into their compartment, which did not endear them to the people jammed in the corridor. Their faces were twisted into scowls. Against the glass stood an elegant man with a delicate, plump face that seemed eternally moist. He rattled the handle and knocked loudly several times. Finally he started to shout, and when his voice failed to carry through the glass, he took out a document with a German stamp and pressed it to the glass.

“Open up right now,” he roared.

For a while Stefan’s companion pretended not to hear anything, then he leaped to his feet and pounded back on the glass: “Shut up! This is a crew compartment, asshole!”

The elegant man mouthed something to save face and withdrew. The rest of the trip passed without incident. When they reached the hills approaching Bierzyniec, the stranger stood up and put on his coat. When its folds bumped the wooden partition, they made a hollow sound as if there was metal inside. The train came around the turn to the empty platform and the brakes shrieked. Stefan and the stranger jumped out as the locomotive rounded the bend, huffing to get up steam for the hill. They slipped through a gap in the iron barrier. A sentimental autumn landscape unfolded behind the station. Stefan blinked up at the sun.

The stranger walked along beside him. They went through the town and turned on to the road that ran through the gorge. The stranger seemed to hesitate for a moment.

“Are you going to the asylum?” Stefan asked, curious.

For a moment the stranger did not reply. Then he said, “No, I just want to get some fresh air.”

They walked on for a few hundred meters. At the head of the gorge, where the trees still blocked the view of the little brick building, something occurred to Stefan. “Excuse me,” he mumbled, stopping.

The stranger also stopped and looked at him.

“You wouldn’t by any chance be going to the substation? Don’t say anything, but, well—please don’t go there!”

The stranger watched him warily, neither joking nor disbelieving; the grimace of a half-smile was on his lips and his eyes were wide and unblinking. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t move either.

“There are Germans there,” Stefan said quickly, his voice hushed. “Don’t go there. They took Woch away. He was arrested. They probably…” He broke off.

“Who are you?” asked the stranger. His face had turned gray as a stone. He put his hand in his pocket, and the hint of a smile that remained on his face became an empty twist of his mouth.

“I’m a doctor at the asylum. I knew him.” He could not go on.

“There are German at the substation?” asked the stranger. He spoke like a man carrying a heavy weight. “Well, it’s none of my business,” he added slowly. He was clearly mulling something over. Then he gave a start and leaned so close that Stefan could feel his breath. “What about the others?”

“The Pościks?” Stefan caught on eagerly. “They got away. The Germans didn’t get them. They’re in the woods, with the partisans. That’s what I heard, anyway.”

The stranger looked around, grabbed Stefan’s hand and gave it a short painful squeeze, and walked straight ahead.

Before he reached the turn, he climbed the hill alongside the road and disappeared into the trees, Stefan took a deep breath and started up the hill toward the hospital. When he neared the stone arch, he turned his head and looked back, down into the woods, searching for his traveling companion. At first he was fooled by the tree trunks that showed among the bright yellow and reddish leaves. Then he spotted him. The stranger was far away, standing still, black against the background of the landscape. But only for an instant: he vanished among the trees.

Pajączkowski stood before the door of the men’s wing, a rare sight in the yard. Father Niezgłoba was with him. The priest had been feeling well for several weeks and could have returned to his pastoral duties, but his substitute from the diocese would be at his parish until the end of the year. Besides, he admitted that he had no desire to spend Christmas with his parishioners.

“It’s funny,” he said, “but they get angry if you don’t have a drink with every one of them. It’s the same thing at New Year’s, and Easter, with the blessed food, is the worst of all. I’m not supposed to drink now, but you think they care about my health? I’m in no hurry. It’s better if I stay here, professor,” he told Pajączkowski, “if you don’t throw me out.”

Pajączkowski had a weakness for the Church. It was only thanks to him that two Sisters of Charity notorious for their merciless treatment of patients had not been dismissed years ago when a ministerial commission came to investigate the death of a patient who had been scalded in the bathtub. Actually, they left a few weeks later, under his covert pressure. At least that was the story.

Now the priest was trying to talk Pajączkowski into letting him hold Mass next Sunday in the little chapel against the north wall of the yard. He had already checked to make sure there would be no problems with the local parish, and he had everything he needed, except for Pajączkowski’s permission. The director wanted to go ahead, but was afraid of what his colleagues might say. Everyone knew that Mass in an insane asylum was a circus. It was all right for the staff, but the priest thought that the healthier patients at least would be up to it as well.

Pajączkowski was sweating, but when he finally agreed, he calmed down at once. Then he remembered some pressing business and excused himself.

That was when Stefan arrived. “Well, Father, no more visits from the Princess?” he asked, looking around the unkempt garden. The leaves were falling from the trees on the ridge faster than from those on lower ground. At first Stefan did not realize that he had hurt the priest’s feelings.

“My mind, dear doctor, may be compared to a musical instrument with a few strings out of tune. The soul, that marvelous artist, was therefore unable to play the proper melody. But now, since you gentlemen have treated me, I am completely healthy. And grateful.”

“In other words, Father, you are comparing us to piano-tuners,” said Stefan with an inward smile, though he maintained his serious expression. “Perhaps you’re right,” he went on. “A nineteenth-century theologian is said to have stated that the telodendria, the edges of nerve cells, are immersed in the universal ether—except that physics had already disproved the existence of the ether.”

“Not long ago there was a different note in your voice,” the priest said sadly. “Please excuse the obsession of a former patient, doctor, but it seems to me that Mr. Sekułowski has acted on you like wormwood. You are naturally good-hearted, but seeing him has given you a bitter streak that, I am sure, is foreign to you.”

“Good-hearted?” Stefan laughed. “Me? That is a compliment I have usually been spared, Father.”

“I do hope that you will come on Sunday. It only remains for you to give me your recommendation as to which of the patients should be allowed to take part in the Mass. On the one hand I would like as many of them as possible to be there, since it has been so many years, while on the other…” He hesitated.

“I understand,” said Stefan. “In my view, however, the plan is inadvisable.”

“Inadvisable?” The priest was visibly disheartened. “Don’t you think that…”

“I think there are times when even God could compromise Himself.”

The priest looked down. “Indeed. Unfortunately, I know full well that I will be unable to find the right words, because I am just an ordinary village priest. I admit that when I was in school I dreamed of meeting an unbelieving but powerful spirit. So that I could harness it and lead it…”

“Harness it? That sounds strange, Father.”

“I was thinking of harnessing it with love, but that was a sin. I only realized that later: the sin of pride. Then I discovered that living among people teaches us many other things. I know very well how little I am worth. Every one of you doctors has a whole battery of arguments that could demolish my priestly wisdom.”

Stefan was annoyed by the priest’s mawkish tone. He looked around.

The patients were walking along the paths to the building; it was dinner time.

“Let’s keep this between us,” Stefan said, starting to leave. “And you know, Father, our bond of secrecy is as strict as yours, leaving heaven out of it. But tell me something. Have you ever had doubts, Father?”

“What kind of answer do you want, doctor?”

“I would like to hear the truth.”

“Forgive me: it seems that you seldom open the Gospels. Please take a look at chapters 27 and 46 of Saint Matthew. More than once, those have been my words,”

The priest left. The yard was almost empty. The cherry-colored robes moved so evenly that an unseen force might have been combing them out of the gold-tinged gardens. Last of all came an orderly smoking a cigarette. As Stefan walked past a bare lilac bush, he saw someone crouching behind it. He wanted to call the orderly, but stopped himself. The patient, bent low, was clumsily stroking the silvery grass with a stiff hand.