He stopped and added with a sigh, “Sometimes I am happy gazing at a stone… that’s not me, that’s Chang Kiu-Lin. A great poet.”
“How early?”
“Eighth century.”
“You said, ‘the thinking thing.’ You’re a materialist, aren’t you?” Stefan asked.
“A materialist? Oh yes, the magic wand of classification. I think that man and the world are made of the same substance, but I don’t know what that substance is—it is beyond the reach of words. But they are two arches that hold each other up. Neither can stand alone. I can tell you that the table over there will continue to exist after our death. But for whom? For the flies? It cannot be ‘our table,’ and there is no such thing as ‘being’ in general. The object immediately disintegrates. Without people, what is the table? A varnished board on four legs? A mass of mummified tree cells? A chemical conglomeration of celluloid chains? A whirlpool of electron clouds? No, it must always be something for somebody. That tree outside the window exists for me, and also for the microbes that feed on its sap. For me it is a fragment of forest, a branch against the sky. For them, a single leaf is a green ocean, and a branch an entire universe. Do we—the microbe and I—share a common tree? Not at all. So what makes our point of view any better than the microbe’s?”
“But we are not microbes,” said Stefan.
“Not yet, but we will be. We will become nitrogenous bacteria in the soil, we will enter the roots of trees, become part of an apple that someone will eat while philosophizing, just as we are philosophizing now, and while enjoying the sight of rosy clouds that contain the water of our former bodies. And so on, in an endless circle. The number of permutations is infinite.”
Satisfied, Sekulowski lit a cigarette.
“So you’re an atheist?” Stefan asked.
“Yes, but I do have a small chapel.”
“A chapel?”
“Have you read ‘A Litany to My Body’?”
Indeed, Stefan remembered that hymn to the lungs, liver, and kidneys. “An original essay.”
“No, it’s a poem. I keep my philosophical views and my creative work strictly separate, and I forbid anyone to judge me on what I have already written,” Sekulowski announced with sudden obstinacy. Dropping his cigarette on the floor, he went on, “But I do pray sometimes. My prayer used to be, ‘O God, Who art not.’ That once sounded all right. But lately it’s the Blind Powers.”
“What do you mean?”
“I pray to the Blind Powers. Because it is they who rule our bodies, the world, and even the words I am speaking right now. I know they don’t listen to prayers,” he said, smiling, “but it can’t hurt.”
It was almost eleven o’clock. Stefan had to start his rounds.
For several weeks Father Niezgloba, a short, gaunt man with bluish veins along his arms had been in Room 8. He looked as if he had once been a laborer.
“How are you, Father?” Stefan asked softly as he came in.
The priest had been allowed to retain his cassock, which made an irregular dark blot against the white hospital walls. Stefan wanted to be delicate, because he knew that Marglewski, the thin doctor who was in charge of the ward, sometimes called the priest “the ambassador of the kingdom of heaven” and treated him to anecdotes from the lives of church dignitaries. The doctor had considerable knowledge of the subject.
“It’s torture, doctor.”
The priest’s voice was pleasant, though perhaps a bit too soft. He suffered from hallucinations of unchanging content: at a baptismal party, he heard a woman’s voice behind him. But when he turned, the voice seemed to come from a place his eye could not see.
“Is the Arabian princess still with you?”
“Yes.”
“You realize that it’s only a vision, Father, a hallucination?”
The priest shrugged. His eyes were heavy with sleeplessness, tiny lines covering his lids.
“This conversation with you, doctor, might be equally unreal. I hear that voice as clearly as I hear yours.”
“Well, don’t worry. It’ll pass. But no more alcohol ever again.”
“I would never have done that,” he said with remorse, looking down at the floor. “But my parishioners are such terrible sinners.” He sighed. “They were always offended, angry, and persistent, so I…”
Stefan checked the man’s reflexes mechanically, put the hammer back in his smock, and asked just before he left, “What do you do all day, Father? You must be climbing the walls. Do you want a book?’
“I have a book.”
And indeed he took out a dog-eared tome with a black cover.
“Really? What is it?”
“I’m praying.”
Stefan suddenly remembered the Blind Powers and stood in the door for a moment. Then, perhaps too abruptly, he left.
He no longer visited Nosilewska’s ward. He had lost interest in the fates of the individual patients, as he had in the gruesome pictures in Uncle Ksawery’s anatomical atlas, which had fascinated him as a child. He exchanged a few words with Pajpak now and then, and occasionally assisted him on morning rounds.
Working with Kauters, he became acquainted with a ward nurse named Gonzaga. Big-boned and fat, she looked threatening in her wide skirts. But the threat was only potential, for no one had ever seen her angry. She affected people as a scarecrow did sparrows. Her cheeks dropped in heavy folds to the blue line of her mouth. Her enormous hands always held the key in its leather ring, a clipboard of medical records, or a pack of compresses. She never dealt with trays of syringes: there were orderlies for that. Handy with instruments, quiet and solitary, she seemed to have no private life. Kauters appeared to respect her. Once Stefan saw the tall surgeon standing in front of her with both hands on his chest, his shoulders moving nervously, as if he were trying to justify himself, convince her of something, or ask a favor. Sister Gonzaga stood there large and immobile, unblinking, the light from the window falling across her face. The scene was so unusual that it stuck in Stefan’s mind. He never found out what it was about. Sister Gonzaga could be found in the corridor at any time of day or night, moving like the moon with even steps invisible under her skirt, her lace cap brightening the dim hallway.
Stefan spoke to her only when ordering procedures or medication for the patients. Once, when he had just come back from seeing Sekulowski and was looking for a bottle in the supply-room cabinet, Sister Gonzaga, who was jotting something down in a notebook, suddenly said, “Sekulowski is worse than a madman. He’s a comedian.”
Stefan turned around. “Were you speaking to me, Sister?”
“No. I was speaking in general,” she replied, and said no more.
Stefan did not recount the incident, but he did ask the poet whether he knew Sister Gonzaga. Sekulowski, however, took no interest in the auxiliary personnel, though he did have a succinct opinion of Kauters: “Have you noticed what a stage decorator’s mentality he has?”
“How do you mean?”
“Two-dimensional.”
In a far comer of the grounds stood the neglected, nearly forgotten ward for catatonics, overgrown with morning glories that had not yet sprouted leaves. Stefan seldom went there. At first he had yearned to clean out those Augean stables—a gloomy hall with an oppressive blue ceiling in which the patients stood, lay, or knelt in frozen positions. But his reforming impulse had faded quickly.
The catatonics lay on bedframes without mattresses. Their bodies, caked with dirt, were covered with sores caused by the wires and springs of the bedding. Piercing smells of ammonia and excrement filled the air. This lowest circle of hell, as Stefan called it, rarely saw a nurse. Some unknown force seemed to sustain the existence of these mindless people.
Two young boys attracted Stefan’s attention. A Jew from a small town, who had a round head capped with dry, red hair, sat endlessly in his cubicle, bent over on the bed, always naked, with a blanket pulled up over his head. All day long, tirelessly, he called out two words of gibberish. Whenever anyone approached, he raised his voice to a prayerful complaint and shivered. His blue eyes stared permanently at the iron bedframe. The other boy,
