Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

“So, you would like to work with us?” he asked Stefan, shaking his head.

“Yes, I would.”

“Well certainly, certainly.”

“Because the practice… it would be most useful,” Stefan murmured. He felt a strong aversion to old men, official meetings, and boring conversation, and here he had all three at once.

“Well, we will… yes… exactly…” Pajpak went on, shaking his head again.

Beside him sat a tall, thin doctor wearing a dustcoat stained with silver nitrate. Strikingly but not unpleasantly ugly, he had a harelip scar, a flat nose, wide lips, and a yellow smile. When he put his hands on the table, Stefan was amazed by their size and handsome shape. He considered two things important, the shape of the fingernails and the proportions of the hand’s width and length, and on both counts Doctor Marglewski revealed a good pedigree.

There was one woman at the table. Stefan had noticed her when he came in. When they shook hands, her hand was surprisingly cold, narrow, and muscular. The thought of being caressed by that hand was unpleasant and exciting at the same time.

Doctor Nosilewska (Miss? Mrs.?) had a pale face enveloped in a storm of chestnut hair that burned with gold and honey highlights. Below her lucid arched forehead her eyebrows tilted toward her temples like wings above sharp blue eyes that seemed almost electric. She was a perfect beauty, which meant that she was almost invisible—there was no birthmark or mole to capture the eye. Her tranquility was tinged with the maternal touch that marked Aphrodite’s features, but her smile was enlivened by the glints in her hair, her eyes, and a small depression in her left cheek—not a dimple, but a playful hint of one.

There was also a younger doctor with a pimply face, dark hair, and a hooked nose. Nobody spoke to him. His name was Kuśniewicz.

Stefan gathered from the conversation that the work was demanding but interesting, that psychiatry, however tedious, was the finest of callings, although given the choice, most of those present would have changed specialties. The patients were awful even when peaceful and quiet, and should all be given shock therapy whether they needed it or not. No one said anything about politics. It was like being on the ocean floor: all motion was indolent and subdued, and the most powerful of storms on the surface would be felt here only as a ripple, cause for a professional diagnosis.

The next day Stefan found out that he had not met all the doctors. He was accompanying Doctor Nosilewska on morning rounds (he had been assigned to the women’s ward), and as they walked along a gravel path spotted with water from the dripping trees, they met a tall man in a white coat. The encounter was brief enough, but it engraved the man in Stefan’s memory. He had ugly yellow features that seemed chiseled in ivory, eyes screened by dark glasses, a large pointed nose, and thin lips that were stretched across his teeth. He reminded Stefan of a reproduction he had once seen of the mummy of Ramses II: an asceticism independent of age, features somehow timeless. His wrinkles did not indicate the years he had lived, but seemed to belong to the sculpture of his face. The doctor, who was the best surgeon in the asylum, was rail-thin and flat-footed. His feet were wide apart as he slopped through the mud, and after a perfunctory bow to Nosilewska, he trotted up the outside spiral staircase of the red pavilion.

Nosilewska held in her white hand the key that opened the doors between wards. Almost all the buildings were connected by long glass-topped galleries so that doctors on their rounds would not be exposed to frost and rain. These galleries were reminiscent of greenhouse antechambers. But that impression vanished inside the wards. All the walls were pale blue. There were no spigots, drains, plugs, or door handles—just smooth walls to the ceiling. Patients in cherry robes and clacking clogs strolled up and down the cold, bright rooms between rows of neat beds made up in what seemed a military style. The windows were discreetly barred or covered with screens behind wide flower boxes.

Nosilewska walked through the wards locking doors behind her and opening new ones with fluid, automatic, almost somnolent movements. Stefan had a key too, now, but could not handle it so deftly.

Faces loomed around him: some pale and drawn, as if shrunken down to the skull, others puffy, swollen, unhealthily flushed. The men’s individuality was erased by their shaved heads. The bumps and oddities of their denuded skulls were so ugly that they overwhelmed the expressions on their faces. Protruding ears, extreme myopia, or a gaze fixed on a random object—these were the patients’ most obvious features, at least at first glance. A male nurse was pushing a patient along in the corridor, his movements not brutal so much as inappropriate for dealing with a human being. They softened for a moment as Stefan and Nosilewska passed. There was a gentle cry somewhere in the distance, as if someone was shouting out of conviction, rather than compulsion or illness, as if practicing.

Nosilewska herself seemed strange. Stefan had noticed it earlier that morning. At breakfast, he had tried to memorize her features out of aesthetic interest, so that he could summon them up later. He noticed then that her eyes seemed vacant, staring at nothing, as she bent her head like a swan’s over the rim of a steaming mug. He watched all her other unconscious signs of life: the delicate pulse at the base of her neck, the peaceful clouding of her eyes, the trembling of her lashes. When she slowly turned her blue, piercing gaze on him, he was almost frightened, and a moment later he quickly drew his leg back when their knees touched—the contact struck him as dangerous.

Nosilewska had a neat office in the women’s ward. Though it contained no personal objects, a femininity more subtle than any perfume hung in the air. They sat at a white metal desk and Nosilewska took a card index from a drawer. Like all female doctors, she could not use nail polish, but the short, round ornamental shaping of her fingertips was boyishly beautiful. High on the wall hung a small black Christ, suspended from two disproportionately massive hooks. That fascinated Stefan, but he had to pay attention: she was giving him a rundown of his duties. Her voice seemed close to breaking, as if she were about to speak in a high-pitched trill. Stefan had never written a case history of a psychiatric examination; in medical school he had copied, of course. When he found that he would not have to start one from scratch but would be adding to old notes, he appreciated Nosilewska’s helpful suggestions. She understood, as he did, that all the writing was infernally boring and futile, but that it had to be done out of respect for tradition.

“So that’s it.”

He thanked her and got ready to try it himself. Later he wondered whether that elegant woman in sheer white stockings and the tailored white coat with gray mother-of-pearl buttons realized what a set piece they were playing out. She rang for the nurse, a stocky, towheaded girl.

“Usually you walk around and ask the patients how they are, and what they think about their—well, symptoms, you know what I mean? But right now I’d like to give you a tour of part of my kingdom.”

It was indeed her kingdom. Though he was not claustrophobic, he was keenly and unpleasantly aware of all the doors that had been locked behind him with the magic key. Bars darkened the window even here in the office, and behind the medicine locker, in the corner, lay a wrinkled fabric: a strait-jacket. The patient who was brought in was grotesquely deformed by pajama bottoms too long and tight. She wore black slippers. Her face was expressionless, but seemed to conceal some surprise. With makeup, she might have passed for attractive. Her eyebrows had been artificially blackened, apparently with coal. They extended all the way to her temples. This might have accounted for the sense of strangeness, but Stefan was so surprised by what she said, he had difficulty looking at her. She was asked in a subdued, uninterested way whether there was anything new. She smiled promisingly and replied in a reedy, melodic voice, “I had a visitor.”