them with clever flirtation, but with only one girl he was hopeless. There comes a time when you have to forget the jokes and become serious, but Staszek just couldn’t do it. Everyone realized that dancing, flirting, and light banter were a sort of preparatory action, like a peacock reading its tail for the peahen. But that was as far as Staszek’s social talents went.
Stefan discovered this by tracing his friend’s amazing transformations: leaving a gathering where he had sparkled, he turned silent and morose. This was followed by long talks between the two of them, autumn walks in the park, evenings spent wrestling with philosophical conundrums: heated arguments, efforts to find “the ultimate truth” or “the meaning of life” and similar ontological deliberations. Neither of them was capable of such incisive reasoning on his own. They catalyzed, complemented each other. But not in personal matters. Staszek propounded a theory to explain his erotic defeats: he did not believe in love. He liked to read about love, but did not believe in its existence. “Look,” he said, “just read Abderhalden! If you inject a female monkey with prolactin and stick a puppy in the cage with her, she immediately starts caressing it and taking care of it. But two or three days later she’ll eat the beloved doggie. That’s mother love for you, the most sublime of all feelings—a few chemicals in the blood!”
Secretly Stefan felt superior to his classmate. Staszek had a round, plump moon-face, though his body was thin. He had a good-humored potato nose, the tip constantly plagued by a big pimple. He froze in winter because he considered going without long underwear a sign of manhood. And he spent three-quarters of every year hopelessly, obviously, and comically in love. They spoke a great deal about life in general, but very little about their own lives. Yet now, sitting on the damask seat-covers in Uncle Ksawery’s shadowy drawing room, it was hard to plunge straight into the refuge of philosophizing. When Staszek finished his story, there was an uncomfortable silence. In an effort to break it, he asked Stefan about his professional life.
“Me? Well, for the moment I’m not doing anything. Not working anywhere. And with the Germans now, the Occupation, I don’t know. I’m looking. I’ll have to find some position somewhere, but I haven’t really thought about it too specifically yet,” Stefan said, speaking more and more slowly as he went on. They both fell silent again. Stefan was disappointed at how little they had to say to each other, and desperately sought a subject. More to keep the conversation going than out of any real curiosity, he asked, “So how is it in the asylum? Do you like it there?”
“Ah, the asylum.”
Staszek perked up and seemed about to say something, when suddenly he stopped, his eyes wide, and his face lit up. “Stefan, listen! I just thought of it right now, but so what? Archimedes also, you know! Listen, why don’t you come to work at the asylum? Why not? It’s a good place, you’d get some specialization, you know the area here, it would be quiet, interesting work, and you’d have plenty of time to do research—I remember you always wanted to do research.”
“Me? The asylum?” Stefan asked in amazement. “Just like that? I only came here for the funeral, you know. But it really doesn’t matter to me…” He stopped, not sure whether the last words sounded wrong, but Staszek hadn’t noticed anything. They spent the next fifteen minutes going over the subject, discussing what it would be like if Stefan took the position, because there was indeed an opening for a doctor at the asylum. Staszek answered Stefan’s doubts one after the other: “So what if you didn’t specialize in psychiatry? Nobody’s born a specialist. Your colleagues would be first class, believe me! Well actually I guess doctors are like everybody else—some better, some worse. But they’re all interesting. And it’s such an easy place! It’s like being outside the Occupation, in fact it’s even like being outside the world!” Staszek got so excited that he turned the asylum into a kind of extraterrestrial observatory, a delicious solitude in which a man naturally endowed with a fine intellect could develop in peace. They talked and talked, Stefan totally unconvinced that anything would come of it but nonetheless encouraging his friend for fear of the vacuum that beckoned beyond the borders of this last topic.
There was a knock at the door. Uncle Anzelm and the aunts were leaving for the station. By rights, Stefan should have gone with them, but he managed to get out with a frantic kissing of hands and a barrage of bows. Aunt Aniela seemed to be in a good mood, which under different circumstances would have upset Stefan—he remembered what Ksawery had told him—but he was in too much of a hurry to get back to Staszek to be indignant. This renewed, albeit final contact with the family—Anzelm’s arrogance as he put his arms around Stefan for a kiss but only brushed his face with a stubbly cheek, the idiotic injunctions and advice of Aunt Melania—made Staszek’s proposition seem much more attractive. But when he returned to find his friend gazing at the old engravings on the drawing-room wall with affected nonchalance, he felt uncertain again. In the end, after carefully considering the pros and cons, he announced that he would go home to settle certain things (this was a fiction, there was nothing to settle, but it sounded plausible). Then—after a certain length of time (he emphasized this, so as not to look too much like a swine afterward)—he would come back to Bierzyniec.
At noon Stefan bid his uncle a polite but reserved farewell and left for the station. Staszek went with him; he could take the same train as far as Bierzyniec.
It was a warm spring-like day. The melting snow made gurgling streams that turned the road into a quagmire. Stefan and Staszek said little as they slogged along, partly because negotiating the puddles demanded attention, but also because there was nothing to say. They killed time at the station, smoking cigarettes the way they used to between lectures, the lighted ends cupped in their hands, until the train came. As the train pulled in, Staszek looked at it aghast and decided to go on foot. The ears were bursting with people. They were pressed against the windows, sitting on the roofs, hanging on to every rail, handle, and step. When the train stopped and was invaded by the mob of peasants and shoppers waiting to get on, it was an outright battle. Stefan vented an aggression he would not have expected of himself, pushing and shoving among the sheepskins as if his life depended on it. The train was already moving when he obtained a toehold on the edge of a wooden step. With both hands he grabbed the overcoats and furs of the people hanging from the door above him. But when he realized that he would not last more than a few minutes in that position, he jumped. The train was moving so fast that he nearly fell, but somehow he escaped with no more than a good spray of dirty snow and slush. When he turned from the tracks, flushed with effort and anger, he saw Staszek’s indulgent, amiable smile. This only fanned his anger, but his friend called from a distance, “Take it easy, Stefan. It’s fate, not me. Come on, we’ll walk to Bierzyniec together.”
Stefan stood there indecisive for a moment and was about to say something—not about the vague things he had to “settle,” but about clean clothes and soap. With an energy unusual for him, Staszek took him by the arm and told him that at the asylum he would find whatever he needed, and he did it so warmly that Stefan smiled, waved away his reservations, and slopped through the mud with his friend toward the three humps of the Bierzyniec Hills that loomed brightly on the horizon.
THE GENIUS
From Nieczawy to Bierzyniec it was twelve kilometers of winding, sodden clay road. When they reached the top of the highest hill, the road dropped into a deep channel that led through a narrower but equally marshy passage until a gentle rise with young forest on the southern slope suddenly appeared from behind a clump of trees. Massive buildings ringed by a brick wall loomed on the ridge. An asphalt road led up to the main gate. Out of breath after their brisk hike, they stopped a few hundred meters short of their goal. From this height Stefan had a view of a wide, gently rolling space with fog creeping in here and there in the setting sun. The melting snow reflected strange colors. A notched stone arch with an indistinct inscription, both its ends hidden in bushes, rose in front of the black gate. When they got closer, Stefan made out the words CHRISTO TRANSFIGURATO.
Hastily crunching through puddles still frozen in shady spots, they reached the gate. A fat, bearded porter let them in. Staszek went into feverish but subdued action. He ordered Stefan to wait in an empty room on the ground floor while he looked for the head doctor. Stefan paced the flagstone floor staring vacantly at the patterns of a fresco partly covered by plaster; there was a sort of pale gold halo and, just where the blue plaster began, a mouth opened as if to scream or sing. He turned around when he heard steps. Staszek, already wearing a long white smock with cuffs beginning to fray from too much laundering, had returned sooner than he expected. He looked taller and thinner in the smock, and his round face beamed with satisfaction.
“Perfect,” he said, taking Stefan by the arm. “I’ve already talked everything over with Pajpak. He’s our boss. His name is Pajaczkowski, but he stutters, so… but you must be hungry, admit it! Don’t worry, we’ll take care of
