Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

After a week, Stefan no longer found the ward so revolting. Poor women, he thought, but some of them, especially the maniacs, prided themselves on a familiarity with the saints that went beyond the intent of church dogma.

Pajączkowski’s nameday fell on Sunday. The boss appeared in a freshly pressed coat, his sparse beard carefully combed. He blinked placidly behind his glasses like an old bird, as a woman schizophrenic from the convalescent wing recited a poem in his honor. Then an alcoholic sang. Last but not least was a choir of psychopaths, but they ruined the festivities by grabbing the old man and tossing him up toward the ceiling, above a net of upraised hands. With some effort, the old man was rescued from the patients. The doctors then formed up into a procession as in a cloister—the abbot at the front, the brothers behind—and went into the men’s ward, where a hypochondriac who was sure he had cancer made a speech, interrupted by three paralytics who suddenly broke into song—“The poor man died in an army hospital”—and could not be convinced to stop. Later there was a modest meal in the attic of the doctors’ building, and Pajpak tried to conclude the evening with a patriotic speech. It did not come off. The little old man’s head started trembling, he cried into his glass, spilled cumin-flavored vodka all over the table, and finally, to everyone’s relief, sat down.

Webs of intrigue were spread through the hospital, discreetly awaiting any newcomer’s first misstep. Someone was trying to oust Pajączkowski, weaving rumors about an imminent change of directors, rejoicing in every conflict, but Stefan observed this landscape of dwarfed personalities like someone staring into an aquarium, interested but detached.

He was drawn to the company of Sekułowski. They always parted amiably, but it annoyed Stefan that the poet felt so at home in his world of phantoms. Sekułowski treated him as no more than a sparring partner, regarding his own mind as the measure of all things.

Reports of mass arrests in Warsaw came in. There were rumors of the hurried creation of ghettos. Filtered through the hospital walls, however, such stories sounded misty and implausible. Many veterans of the September campaign who had temporarily lost their mental bearings during the fighting were now leaving the asylum. This made things slightly roomier; in some of the wards patients had been sleeping two and three to a bed.

But problems with provisions—especially medicines—were growing. Pajpak considered the problem carefully and then issued the most far-reaching measures of economy. Scopolamine, morphine, barbiturates, and even bromine were placed under lock and key. Insulin, which had been used for shock therapy, was replaced by cardiazol, and what was left of that was doled out sparingly. Statistics were vague. No clear trend in the census of the community of the mad had yet emerged from the oscillating figures. Numbers in some classifications shrank, others stagnated or rose. It was a time of indecision.

April arrived. Days of bright rain and greenery were interrupted by snowy spells that seemed to have been borrowed from December. Stefan woke early one Sunday with an emphatic sun dyeing his dreams purple through his eyelids. He looked out the window. The view was like a great painter’s sketch with a broad brush, and new variations of the same sketch followed, each containing fresh color and detail. Fleece-like fog crept through the long valley between ridges like the backs of sleeping animals, and black brushstrokes of branches were covered in the swell. Dark irregular shapes showed through the fog here and there, as if the brush had slipped. Then a trace of gold filtered into the white from above, there was an unsettled moment when white spirals appeared and drifted out to become a cloud on the horizon that soon thinned and receded until day shined through as pure as a bare chestnut.

Stefan went out for a walk. He left the road. Every scrap of ground was covered with green: it seethed in the ditches and spurted from beneath stones; blossoms were bursting, covering the distant trees in delicate celadon clouds. Exposed to the warm breeze, he tramped up a hill and reached its ridge through last year’s dry, rustling grass. The fields lay below like slightly soiled stripes in a peasant costume. Water droplets, blue and white, shimmered on every stalk, each one holding fragments of the image of the world. The distant forest angled toward the horizon like an underwater silver sculpture. The tops of trees on the slope below stood out against the sky, brown constellations of sticky buds. He walked in their direction. A mass of bushes blocked his way, and as he detoured around it, he heard heavy breathing.

He drew close to an entangled thicket. Sekułowski was kneeling inside it. Stefan could barely hear his laugh, but it made his skin crawl.

“Come here, doctor,” the poet said without looking up.

Stefan pushed through the branches. In the middle was a circular clearing. Sekułowski was looking at a small mound of earth where thin files of ants moved around a reddish earthworm.

Stefan said nothing. Sekułowski looked him up and down, then stood up and commented, “This is only a model.”

He took Stefan by the arm and led him out of the thicket. The hospital was gray and small in the distance. The surgical wing shined like a child’s red block that had been dropped. Sekułowski sat in the grass and began to scribble rapidly in a notebook.

“Do you like to watch ants?” Stefan asked.

“I don’t like it, but sometimes I have to. Were it not for us, insects would be the most horrifying thing in nature. Because life is the opposite of mechanism, and mechanism the opposite of life. But insects are living mechanisms, a mockery, nature’s joke. Midges, caterpillars, beetles—we should tremble before them. Dread, the greatest dread.”

He bent his head and went on writing. Stefan looked over his shoulder and read out the last words: “…the world—battle between God and nothingness.”

He asked if it was going to be a poem.

“How should I know?”

“Who would know if not you?”

“And you want to be a psychiatrist?”

“Poetry takes a stand about two worlds: the one we can see and the one we have lived through,” Stefan began hesitantly. “Mickiewicz wrote, ‘Our nation, like lava…’”

“This is not a classroom,” Sekułowski interrupted in a murmur. “Mickiewicz could say what he wanted because he was a romantic, but our nation is like cow flop: dry on the outside and you know what on the inside. And not just ours, either. But please don’t talk to me about taking a stand, because it makes me sick.”

He surveyed the sunlit scene for a while.

“What is a poem, then?”

Sekułowski sighed.

“I see a poem as a multicolored strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments. I try to connect hands and horizons, glances and the objects imprisoned in them. That’s how it is in daylight. At night—because sometimes it happens at night—poems are like spiraling curves that grow to completeness by themselves. The hardest thing is to hold onto them through waking into consciousness.”

“That poem you recited the first time we met, was it day or night?”

“That was a day poem.”

Stefan tried to praise it, but was rebuffed sharply.

“Nonsense. You don’t understand at all. What do you know about poetry anyway? Writing is a damnable compulsion. Someone who can stand and watch the person he loves most die and, without wanting to, pick out everything worth describing to the last convulsion, that’s a real writer. A philistine would protest: how awful! But it’s not awful, it’s just suffering. It’s not a career, not something you pick like a desk job. The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don’t write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another. I have to create an artificial certainty. When those flakes of plaster fall away, I sense that deep down, behind the golden fragments, lies an unspeakable abyss. It’s there, for sure, but every attempt to reach it ends in failure. And my terror…”