Hospital of the Transfiguration

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 Sekulowski?” 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, Holderlin—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, Poscik’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 Poscik 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 Sekulowski 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.

Sekulowski 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,