Hospital of the Transfiguration

vain. The old man noisily gathered up the dirty dishes, carried them away, came back, and started speaking to Woch in indistinct syllables that Stefan could not follow. Woch sat there, bent forward, leaning his heavy chest against the edge of the table. The electricity hummed and the fresh cool of evening blew in through the open window. The young worker Stefan had seen twice before came in from the corridor. The army coat, turned inside out, covered his back; his copper hair stuck to his skull and streams of water ran down his face. A little puddle formed at his feet where he stood in the doorway. Though no one spoke, it was clear they were expecting him. They exchanged meaningful glances, the old man shuffled off to the comer, and Woch stood up briskly and walked over to Stefan. “I’ll show you out, doctor,” he said. “You can go now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Sekulowski. 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” Sekulowski 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 Sekulowski 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.”