Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

Returning to his chair, Stefan noticed a row of tall jars on top of a cabinet. Murky purple and blue shapes floated in them.

“Ah, my display set,” said Kauters, pointing to them with a black cane. “This is a cephalothoracopagus, and a craniopagus parietalis, a beautiful example that, and a rare epigastrium. This last embryo is a perfect diprosopus; there’s a kind of leg growing out of the palate, slightly damaged during delivery, I’m afraid. There are a few others too, but not as interesting.”

He excused himself and opened the door. Mrs. Kauters came in carrying a black lacquered tray with a steaming poppy-colored china coffee service with silver rims. Stefan was astounded again.

Amelia Kauters had a large, soft mouth and austere eyes not unlike her husband’s. She smiled, showing convex, slightly dull teeth. You could not call her beautiful, but she was definitely striking. Her black hair was in heavy braids that swung when she moved. Aware that she had beautiful shoulders, she wore a sleeveless blouse with an amethyst triangle pin at the neck.

“How do you like our figurines?” the surgeon asked, offering Stefan a sugarbowl shaped like a Viking ship. “Well, people who have given up as much as we have are entitled to originality.”

“It’s a comfortably padded nest,” Amelia said, petting a fluffy cat that had climbed noiselessly into her lap. The full, languid lines of her thighs disappeared into the black folds of her dress.

Stefan was no longer stunned. He took it all in. The coffee was superb, the best-tasting he had had in years. Some of the furniture looked like what a Hollywood director might use for the “salon of a Hungarian prince”—if he knew nothing about Hungary. The doors of Kauters’s apartment were like a knife cutting off the ubiquitous hospital atmosphere of spotless white walls and shiny radiators.

Looking at the surgeon’s sallow face, his eyelids fluttering behind his glasses like impatient butterflies, Stefan decided that the room had to represent its owner’s mind. That’s what he was thinking when Sekułowski’s name came up.

“Sekułowski?” The surgeon shrugged. “You mean Sekuła.”

“He changed his name?”

“No, why should he? He took a pseudonym—what was that book called?” he asked, turning to his wife.

Amelia Kauters smiled. “ Reflections on Statebuilding . Haven’t you read it, doctor? No? Well, we don’t have a copy. There was such a furor. How can I describe it? Well, it was a sort of essay. Supposedly about everything, but mainly about communism. The left attacked him, which was good publicity. He got very popular.”

Stefan was examining his fingernails.

“But I don’t remember it myself,” Amelia Kauters suddenly said. “After all, I was just a child. I heard about it later. I like his poetry.”

She got up to show Stefan a book of poems. As she did so, she knocked over another book, thin, in a soft pale binding. Stefan bent over to pick it up, and as he did Kauters pointed at it. “Beautiful binding, isn’t it? Skin from the inside of a woman’s thigh.”

Stefan pulled his hand away, and the surgeon took the book from him.

“My husband has a funny sense of humor,” Amelia Kauters said. “But it’s so soft. Look. Touch it.” As she spoke in her low voice, she delicately raised her hand and touched the corners of her mouth and eyes with nimble, furtive movements.

Stefan mumbled something and went back to his chair, sweating.

He felt that this strange scene was a microcosm of the people locked up in the wards. Peculiarity flourished in human beings who were removed from the usual city soil, like mutated flowers grown in special greenhouses. Then he changed his mind. Perhaps Kauters had shunned the city and created this dusky, violet interior because he was different to begin with.

On his way out, Stefan noticed an aquarium full of reflected rainbows standing behind a small screen. A goldfish floated belly-up on the surface. The image stayed with him, and he felt as if he had just completed some taxing intellectual task. He did not feel like going straight to supper, but was afraid someone might notice his absence, so he forced himself. Nosilewska sat there as always, somnolent, polite, occasionally flashing that priceless smile. Staszek—the fool—devoured her with his eyes, thinking that no one noticed.

That night Stefan could not fall asleep and finally took luminal. He dreamed of Mrs. Kauters carrying a basket of headless fish. She kept trying to give it to him. He woke up with his heart pounding and could not get to sleep until morning.

Sekułowski, it turned out, was not at all offended. He told Staszek to ask Stefan to drop in sometime before noon. Stefan went right after breakfast. The writer was sitting at the window looking at a large photograph showing a ballroom full of amused, relaxed people.

“Look at these faces,” he said. “Typical Americans. Look how self-satisfied they are, their lives all worked out: lunch, dinner, bed, and subway. No time for metaphysics, for contemplating the brutality of Things. Truly, the Old World has a special destiny: we must choose between less or more noble varieties of suffering.”

Stefan talked about his visit to Kauters. He realized that by discussing a colleague with Sekułowski he was violating an unwritten law, but he had a justification: he and the poet were both above such conventions. But of course he did not mention what Kauters had said about Sekułowski.

“Don’t be upset,” the poet said affably. “What is hideousness, after all? In art something can be well or poorly done, no more. Van Gogh paints a couple of old chamberpots and you feel like falling to your knees in awe, while some amateur makes the most beautiful woman look trite. What does it all come down to, anyway? The flash of the world, Glory, catharsis, that’s all.”

But Stefan thought that living in that kind of museum was too strange.

“You don’t like it? You could be wrong. Would you close the window for me, please?” asked the poet.

He looked especially pale in the strong light. The breeze carried the fragrance of magnolia blossoms.

“Remember,” Sekułowski went on, “that everything contains everything else. The most distant star swims at the rim of a chalice. Today’s morning dew contains last night’s mist. Everything is woven into a universal interdependence. No one thing can elude the power of others. Least of all man, the thinking thing. Stones and faces echo in your dreams. The smell of flowers bends the pathways of our thoughts. So why not freely shape that which has an accidental form? Surrounding yourself with gold and ivory trinkets can be like charging a battery. A statue the size of your finger is the expression of the artist’s fantasy, distilled over the years. And those hundreds of hours are not futile—we can warm ourselves in front of a statue as though it were a fire.”

He stopped and added with a sigh, “Sometimes I am happy gazing at a stone… that’s not me, that’s Chang Kiu-Lin. A great poet.”

“How early?”

“Eighth century.”

“You said, ‘the thinking thing.’ You’re a materialist, aren’t you?” Stefan asked.

“A materialist? Oh yes, the magic wand of classification. I think that man and the world are made of the same substance, but I don’t know what that substance is—it is beyond the reach of words. But they are two arches that hold each other up. Neither can stand alone. I can tell you that the table over there will continue to exist after our death. But for whom? For the flies? It cannot be ‘our table,’ and there is no such thing as ‘being’ in general. The object immediately disintegrates. Without people, what is the table? A varnished board on four legs? A mass of mummified tree cells? A chemical conglomeration of celluloid chains? A whirlpool of electron clouds? No, it must always be something for somebody. That tree outside the window exists for me, and also for the microbes that feed on its sap. For me it is a fragment of forest, a branch against the sky. For them, a single leaf is a green ocean, and a branch an entire universe. Do we—the microbe and I—share a common tree? Not at all. So what makes our point of view any better than the microbe’s?”