camel smoking jacket.
“Can his contemporaries ever judge a man of genius? Is the van Gogh story fated to be repeated forever?”
“How should I know? Come into the room; it’s so humid in here, you could suffocate.”
“I think that more than one lunatic is an undiscovered genius. Just missing a counterweight, as you put it. Like Morek, for instance.” Stefan told him about the idiot mathematician.
Sekulowski cut him off angrily: “Morek is as much a genius as your Pajaczkowski, but without such a good job.”
“Be that as it may, Pajaczkowski has a doctorate in psychiatry… his work on manic-depression,” said Stefan, upset.
“Sure. Most academics are exactly like that mathematician. Maybe they don’t drool, but they can’t see anything outside their own fields. I knew a lichenologist once. You might not know what that is,” he added unexpectedly.
“I do,” retorted Stefan, who in fact did not.
“A lichenologist is a specialist in mosses,” Sekulowski explained. “This tow-headed scarecrow knew enough Latin to classify, enough physiology to write articles, and enough politics to carry on a conversation with the janitor. But if the discussion turned to fungus, he was lost. This world is crawling with idiot mathematicians. If they cultivate their poor skills in a socially useful direction, they’re tolerated. Literature is full of writers who are read by washerwomen but worry over their style with an eye to a posthumous edition of their letters. And what about doctors?”
Stefan tried to steer clear of the sensitive issue of medical practice, hoping to draw some more interesting formulations out of Sekulowski, but all he got was an invitation to kiss his ass. He went upstairs angry. All he knows is how to insult me, he thought.
Stefan decided to eavesdrop at his own door. The corridor was dark and empty as he approached on tiptoe. Silence. A rustling—her dress? The sheets? Then a sound like the plunger being pulled from a syringe. A slap. Then total silence, broken by sobbing. Yes, somebody was definitely crying. Nosilewska? He could not imagine that. He tapped the door lightly, and when no one answered, he knocked once and entered.
All the lights were out except the small lamp on the nightstand, which filled the room with a pale-lemon glow that reflected off the mirror to the wall and the bed. The bottle of orange vodka was half-empty: a good sign. The bed looked like a tornado had hit it, but where was Nosilewska? Staszek was lying there alone, in his clothes, his face buried in the pillow. He was crying.
“Staszek, what happened? Where is she?” asked Stefan, rushing to the bed.
Staszek only groaned more loudly.
“Tell me. Come on, what happened?”
Staszek raised his wet, red, snotty face; the emblem of dispair.
“If you… If I can… If you have…”
“Come on, tell me,”
“I won’t. If you feel any friendship for me at all, you’ll never ask me about it.”
“But what happened?” Stefan demanded, curiosity overcoming discretion.
“I feel miserable,” moaned Staszek.
Then suddenly he shouted: “I won’t tell you! Don’t talk to me!” And he ran out, holding the pillow to his chest.
“Give me back my pillow, you maniac!” Stefan shouted after him, but Staszek’s footsteps were already thumping down the stairs.
Stefan sat in the armchair, looked around, even lifted the covers and smelled the sheets, but he found out nothing. He was so curious that he wanted to go see Nosilewska, but he restrained himself. Maybe Staszek would calm down by morning. Maybe she would give something away, he thought, but he knew there was little chance of that.
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
