membrane in several places, once, twice, three times.
“Just as I thought,” he murmured. Above his mask, his glasses reflected a miniature image of the lamp. Until that moment, Stefan had been applying sterile pads to stanch the flow of blood into the wound. Now he leaned forward. Their gauze-capped heads touched.
Kauters hesitated. Holding his left hand at the edge of the incision, he touched the membrane delicately with his right. The brain underneath, pulsing gray and pink, showed more clearly. Kauters looked up as if he expected a sign from above. His large black eyes looked so vacant that Stefan was almost frightened. Kauters ran his rubber- covered finger twice around the exposed membrane in a circle.
“Scalpel!”
It was a small, special knife. At first the membrane would not yield, but suddenly it split like a blister and brain burst through from below. It throbbed, swelling red in the tear from which viscid threads of blood trickled.
“Knife!”
Now there was a new sound, a bass rumbling of the diathermal apparatus. Gonzaga unwound the gauze from the electric knife and placed it in Kauters’s hand. Both doctors leaned forward. The flow of blood was not significant; no major vessels had been severed. But the situation was murky. Slowly, millimeter by millimeter, Kauters widened the opening in the membrane. At last, everything was clear: the protruding, swollen part was the forward pole of the frontal lobe. When the surgeon poked at it with his finger, the yellow tumor appeared deep in the cleft between the two hemispheres. Getting to it would be difficult. He slid his index finger along the bulging folds of the cortex. He finally managed to reach the growth with the pincers. The tumor lay at the base of the skull, which for an instant showed pearly-blue like the inside of a seashell; then blood covered it. The tumor extended in both directions, compact at the bottom and plump at the top. It was covered with a brown paste.
“Scoop!”
Kauters began raking out blood-soaked scraps, threads, and strips. Then suddenly he jerked back. Stefan froze for an instant before he understood what had happened. A needle-thin stream of blood was shooting straight up from the bottom of the wound, from between the two hemispheres of the brain that the surgeon was holding apart with his fingers. An artery. Kauters blinked. Several drops had hit him in the eye.
“Damn it!” he said. “Gauze!”
Blood saturated the tampon, part of the tumor remained, and it was impossible to see anything. Kauters pulled his belly back from the table, looked up at the ceiling, and moved his finger around in the wound. This continued as the compresses soaked up blood, which seeped onto the pads put down at the beginning of the operation. New compresses were added because hands and instruments were getting slippery. Stefan stood looking at Kauters, helpless. His mask had slipped and was pressing against his nose, but he could not touch it.
The surgeon turned on the diathermal apparatus with the foot pedal and moved the knife closer.
Blood throbbed visibly in the mangled tissue of the tumor. Then the first faint blue smoke of scorched protein rose and Stefan smelled the characteristic stench through his gauze mask. The hemorrhage stopped. Only where tweezers had been left clamped in the wound did tiny red drops crawl like ants.
“Scoop!”
The operation continued. The surgeon ran the thermocoagulator over the tumor’s surface. When it had cooled and solidified, he spooned it out, going after the remains with a crooked finger. But the longer this went on, the worse things got. The tumor pushed the lobe upward and pressed into it. The surgeon worked more and more briskly. At one point, reaching deep into the wound, he shuddered: when he pulled his hand out, the glove was ripped. The yellow rubber peeled back from his finger, cut by a sharp edge of bone.
“Shit!” Kauters said in a dull voice. “Please get this off for me.”
“A new pair, doctor?” asked Gonzaga, instantly lifting a packet from the sterilizer with a fluid movement of her forceps.
“The hell with it!”
Kauters ground the strips of rubber into the floor. His anger gathered in the wrinkles around his eyes, and shiny bluish drops of sweat sparkled on his narrow brow. The muscles at his temples bulged: he was grinding his teeth. He moved his fingers more and more brutally in the wound, pulling out and tossing aside ragged scraps, necrotic tissue, and the burst remains of some vessel. The floor was spattered with bloody commas and question marks.
The clock read ten: the operation had lasted an hour so far.
“Take a look at his pupils.”
Stefan lifted the sheet, which was heavy and stiff with coagulation, soaked with red blotches. Rabiewski’s face was shiny, pale as paper, as Stefan lifted his eyelids with tweezers. The pupils were tiny. Suddenly the patient’s eyes danced wildly, as if someone was pulling them on a string.
“Well?” Kauters asked.
“Nystagmus,” said Stefan, stupefied.
“Yes, of course.”
Kauters’s voice sounded derisive. He was drawing a needle across the cortex. The brain was deeply open, and there was more and more necrotic mass, fusing with the spirals and convolutions. Stefan looked at the wound, which gaped like an open mouth. He could see the white tissue of nerves shining like a hulled walnut and the gray matter, which was actually brownish, with lighter, narrow smears. Drops of blood shined like rubies here and there.
Irritated, the surgeon drew a convolution sideways; it stretched like rubber. “Let’s finish up!” he barked.
That meant he was giving up. His fingers worked quickly now, deftly pushing as much as possible of the bulging hemisphere back into the cavity of the skull. Bleeding started again somewhere. Kauters touched the dark end of the electric knife to a vessel and stanched the hemorrhage. But suddenly he froze.
Stefan, who had been staring at the mummy-like figure on the table during this last procedure, understood. Rabiewski’s chest had stopped moving. Without worrying about infecting his hand, the surgeon grabbed the bottom of the sheet covering the patient’s chest and face, tugged it aside, listened for a moment, and walked silently from the table. He kicked his bloody rubber galoshes off against the wall. Gonzaga took the edge of the sheet and drew it sacramentally over the stricken face. Stefan went to the window to catch his breath. Gonzaga was collecting the instruments on metal trays behind him, water roared in the autoclave, and Joseph mopped blood from the floor. Stefan stood leaning on the window ledge. A great, silent darkness spread before him. At the junction of sky and earth, he thought, loomed something darker than the night. The warehouses of Bierzyniec shined like a diamond necklace against dark fur. The wind faded in the trees and the stars trembled. The last of the water gurgled in the drain.
WOCH THE SUBSTATION OPERATOR
June was edging toward a heat wave. The forests, malachite green and fawn, shaded the view of the hills. There were silver birches, sodden evenings, and crystal dawns. Birds chirped endlessly. One evening the first thunderstorm struck. The landscape gleamed in the flashes of lightning.
Stefan went for long walks in the fields near the woods. The telegraph poles hummed like drunken tuning forks.
When he tired, he would rest under a tree or sit on a bed of pine needles. One day, as he wandered, he found a place where three great beech trees grew above a bare patch of ground. They rose from a single stump and leaned gently away from one another. Nearby was an oak tree, not as tall, its branches forming horizontal, Japanese lines. It seemed to be standing on tiptoe, for the spring rains had washed the earth from between its roots. The forest ended a few hundred feet farther on. A row of beehives painted green and red like roadside shrines seemed to march up the hill. There was an echo; Stefan clapped his hands and the hot air answered several times. The buzzing of the bees underlined the silence. Now and then, a hive would sing more insistently. He walked on and was surprised to find that the buzzing of the beehives, far from fading, was growing louder. A deep humming filled the air.
When the gorge he was walking through rose to the level of the surrounding meadow, Stefan found himself
