Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

He fell silent and took a deep breath.

“Every word I feel is the last. That I won’t be able to go on. Of course you don’t understand. You can’t. The fear—how can I explain it? Because words pour out of me like water coming under a door in a flood. I don’t know what’s behind the door. I don’t know if it’s the last wave. I can’t control the force of the flow. And you want me to take a stand. I can be free only through the people I write about, but that too is illusion.

“Who am I writing for? The days of the caveman are past. He ate the hot brains out of his friends’ skulls, and used his blood to draw works of art on the cave walls that have not been equaled since. The renaissance is gone, with its geniuses and heretics sizzling at the stake. The hordes who learned to ride the seas and winds have come and gone. Now we are in the era of dwarves quartered in barracks, music in tin cans, and helmets under which you cannot see the stars. Then, they say, equality and brotherhood will come. Why equality, why freedom, when lack of equality gives birth to visionary scenes and fires of despair, when danger can squeeze something out of man worth more than well-tended surfeit. I don’t want to give up these colossal differences, these tensions. If it was up to me, I would keep the palaces and the slums, and the fortresses!”

“Someone once told me,” Stefan said, “the story of a Russian prince of very tender spirit. He had a beautiful view from the window of his palace on a hill overlooking the village. But a few thatch-roofed cottages were in the way, so he ordered them burned down, and the charred rafters that remained provided just the touch he had been looking for.”

“Don’t blame me,” Sekułowski said. “Are we supposed to work for the masses? I’m not Mephisto, doctor, but I like to think things through. Philanthropy? Tutored virgins with dried-up hormones are condemned to do good works, and if you want to talk about the theory of revolution, beggars don’t have time for it. That is the vocation of well-fed rebels. It’s always bad for the people. Anyone who wants peace, quiet, and comfort will find it in the grave, but not in this life. But why be so abstract? I myself grew up in poverty, doctor, that you could not imagine. I had my first job when, I was three months old, you know? My mother lent me to a beggar woman who thought she could do better with a baby in her arms. When I was eight, I used to hang around in front of a nightclub, and when the elegant crowd came out, I would pick the most beautifully dressed couple and follow right behind them, spitting on their sealskins and beavers and muskrats, spitting as hard as I could on those perfumed furs and on those women until my mouth went dry. What I’ve got now, I fought for. People with real ability always make it.”

“And geniuses are supposed to regard everybody else as fertilizer?”

Stefan sometimes thought that way himself. He might have been talking to himself. He had forgotten that when the poet was irritated, he could be abusive.

“Ah, yes,” Sekułowski said, leaning back on his elbows and looking up at the flaring clouds with a contemptuous smile. “Would you rather be fertilizer for future generations? Lay your bones at the altar? Leave me alone, doctor. The one thing I can’t stand is boredom.”

Stefan’s feelings were hurt. “And what about the mass arrests in Warsaw and the deportations to Germany? Doesn’t that bother you? Are you going back there when you leave here?”

“Why should the arrests bother me any more than the Tartar invasions of the thirteenth century? Because of the accidental coincidence of time?”

“Don’t argue with history. History is always right. You can’t hide your head in the sand.”

“History will win. Survival of the fittest,” said the poet. “It’s true that even though I’m a world unto myself, I’m just a speck of dust in the avalanche of events. But nothing will ever force me to think like a speck of dust!”

“Do you know that the Germans are talking about liquidating the mentally ill?”

“They say there are about twenty million lunatics in the world. What they need is a slogan that can unite them—there’s going to be a holy war,” Sekułowski said, lying down on his back. The sun shined more brightly. Sensing that the poet was trying to escape, Stefan decided to pin him down. “I don’t understand you. The first time we talked you spoke of the art of dying.”

“I don’t see any contradiction,” Sekułowski said, his good mood obviously gone. “I don’t care about the state’s independence. The important thing is internal independence.”

“So you think the fate of other people…”

Sekułowski interrupted, his face trembling. “Pig,” he shouted. “Idiot!”

He suddenly ran off, loping down the hillside. Confused, the blood rushing to his face, Stefan ran after him. The poet pulled away and yelled, “Clown!”

By the time they got to the asylum, Sekułowski had calmed down. Looking at the wall, he remarked, “Doctor, you are ill-bred. I would even go so far as to say that you’re vulgar, since you try to offend me whenever we talk.”

Stefan was furious, but acted the doctor forgiving a patient’s outburst.

Three weeks later, Stefan was transferred to Kauters’s division. Before starting work he called on his new superior. The surgeon came to the door wearing a loose-fitting dark blue smoking jacket with silver stripes. As they walked down the long dark hallway to the apartment, Stefan explained his visit, but then he fell silent, stunned.

His first impression was of brown punctuated with black and throbbing violet. Something vaguely resembling a rosary of pale shells hung from the ceiling, and the floor was covered with a black and orange oriental carpet depicting gondolas, flames, or salamanders. The walls were covered with engravings, pictures in black frames, and a narrow glass cabinet on legs of buffalo horns, A crocodile’s snout with bared teeth hung on the wall above a Venus flytrap. A low octagonal glass table was inlaid with garish amber flowers. Bookcases on either side of the door were carelessly strewn with leather-bound books and moldy incunabula with yellowed pages. Enormous atlases and gray albums with blood-red and multicolored spines stuck out among the trinkets lining the edges of the shelves.

Kauters seated his guest, who could not take his eyes off the Japanese woodcuts, ancient Indian figurines, and gaudy porcelain baubles. The surgeon said he was glad Stefan had come and asked him to tell him something about himself. Stefan found it hard to answer such an insipid request with anything intelligent. Kauters asked if he planned to specialize.

Stefan half muttered something, enjoying the touch of the raw silk cover on the arm of the chair, a colossus upholstered in rich leather. Gradually he began to get his bearings: near the window was the working area of the room. Reproductions and plaster masks hung above the large desk. He recognized some of them. There was the iconography of the cretin: a flabby, snail-like body with no neck and a bug-eyed face, a worm-like tongue peeking out of the half-open mouth. Several of Leonardo’s hideous faces were framed in glass. One of them, with a chin protruding like the toe of an old shoe and with nests of wrinkles for eye sockets, seemed to stare at Stefan. There were distorted skulls and Goya’s monster with ears like folded bat wings and a clenched, twisted jaw. Between the windows hung a large alabaster mask from the church of Santa Maria Formosa: on the right side the face looked like a leering drunk, while the left half was a swollen mess with a bulging eye and a few shovel-shaped teeth.

Noting Stefan’s interest, Kauters began showing him around with evident satisfaction. He was a passionate collector. He had an oversized album of Meunier prints illustrating early devices for treating the deranged: great wooden drums, ingenious torturous leg-irons that were said to do wonders for the beclouded mind, and a pear-shaped iron gag secured by chains to prevent the patient from screaming.