Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

The room was filled with misty twilight. The wind rattled a branch against the windowpane. Stefan stopped in the corridor; Nosilewska was standing at the Jew’s bed, slowly pulling the blanket off his head. For a moment he tried to resist, tugging with his thick fingers. With an infinitely light and gentle hand, she stroked his stiff, bristly hair. Her face was turned to the window, and she seemed to be looking far off into the distance, but the irregular cracks of the outside wall were only four feet beyond the windowpane.

Stefan looked off to the side; in a patch of shadow he saw the other boy, who, having interrupted his endless journey, was pressed into the embrasure, staring at the woman’s silhouette outlined against the window. Stefan wanted to go in and ask for an explanation, but he withdrew and left as quietly as he had come.

It was May. The bas-relief crescent of woods that ringed the asylum glistened with generous green. New flowers blossomed every night, and leaves that had hung with folded wings opened to the air. No longer gentle silver columns, the birch trees were loud white flames. The heart-shaped leaves of the poplars drank in the sun’s warmth and absorbed its bright hues. Bare mounds of loam showed like honeycombs scattered on the joyous landscape.

Kauters ordered Stefan to examine an engineer named Rabiewski, who had been brought by car from the nearby town. The patient’s wife recounted the strange transformation of her husband in recent months. He had been a skilled worker, but after the Germans came and bombed the factory, he began supporting himself by teaching vocational courses. Easygoing and phlegmatic, he had been a passionate fisherman, book collector, and vegetarian. An honest man, he would not hurt a fly. Since the beginning of the year, he had been sleeping more and more. By now it had got so, he would doze off during dinner and wake up with a start like a beetle that had been poked. He became lazy and reluctant to go to his lectures, and at home he was a different man; he would fly into a rage for no reason at all and then quiet down equally suddenly. He would fall asleep for hours and wake up with a throbbing headache. He also began to tell strange jokes—he would burst out laughing at things no one else found funny.

The orderly, a strapping young man known as Young Joseph, to distinguish him from the orderly Joseph, had deft hands that could break the most despairing clinch; he led Rabiewski into the examining room. The patient was a fat, balding man with a wreath of gray hair. He wore a purple hospital robe as he limped to a chair and dropped into it so awkwardly that his teeth snapped together. He answered questions only after a long pause, or after they had been rephrased in the simplest possible terms. At one point he noticed the stethoscope lying on the desk and began to giggle.

Having scrupulously recorded the history of the illness, Stefan began to test the engineer’s reflexes. He had him lie down on the oilcloth-covered examining table. The day was bright with sunshine, and reflected prisms showered from all the chrome fittings in the room. While Stefan was tapping the patient’s tendons, Kauters appeared.

“Well, how does it look?” he asked, brisk and animated. He listened to Stefan’s exposition with satisfaction.

“Interesting,” the surgeon said. “For the moment let’s put: suspectio quoad tumorem . We’ll do a specular eye examination. And a tap. And then…”

He took the hammer and struck Rabiewski’s thin leg.

“Aha! What’s this? Please touch your right knee with your left heel. No, not like that. Show him,” he told Stefan, and walked over to the window. Stefan explained. Kauters came back with a leaf he had tom from a branch near the window, rubbing it between his fingers. Sniffing his slender, sinewy hand, he said with content, “Perfect. Ataxia too.”

“Cerebellar, doctor?”

“Perhaps not. Too early to tell. But there is a disturbance in thinking. Abulia. Now let’s see.” He tore a sheet of paper from his notebook and drew a circle on it. Then he showed it to Rabiewski. “What’s this?”

“It’s a part,” the engineer answered after long thought. His voice sounded pained.

“A part of what?”

“A spiral.”

“You see!”

Stefan reported the incident with the stethoscope.

Kauters rubbed his hands. “Perfect. Witzelsucht. A textbook case, don’t you think? I’m convinced it’s a small tumor in the frontal lobe. Time will tell. Please write everything down.”

The patient was lying on the table, his slightly goggled eyes staring at the ceiling. As he exhaled noisily, his lips parted to reveal long, yellow teeth.

That evening, Stefan came down with a headache and fever. He took two aspirin, and Staszek brought a bottle of vodka, which should have helped. But the weakness, chills, and fever lasted for four days. On the fifth day Stefan was finally able to get out of bed. After breakfast he went straight to Rabiewski’s room, curious to find out what was happening. The ordinary hospital bed had been replaced by a special one with nets at the sides and on top. The engineer lay as if caught in a web in the cage that they created, no more than a foot and a half high. His whole body seemed swollen. Kauters was leaning over looking at him attentively, moving his head out of the way when the prisoner tried to spit in his face. The thick lines around Rabiewski’s mouth were white with foam. The surgeon took off his glasses and Stefan had his first clear look at his eyes. They bulged, devoid of any sparkle, and were dark like the eyes of an insect seen through a magnifying glass.

“The tumor is growing,” Stefan said in a half-whisper. The surgeon paid no attention. He backed away again when the patient managed to turn his head and sprayed saliva. The patient grunted, tensing the muscles of his immobilized body.

“Pressure on the motor region,” Kauters murmured.

“Are you thinking of operating, doctor?”

“We’ll do a tap today.”

That evening, the brain that was lashing Rabiewski’s body seemed to reach a paroxysm of vexation. Knots of muscles cramped and rippled beneath his sweaty skin. The netting on the bed resonated like strings on a musical instrument. Stefan gave him two injections, which did not help much: the chloral narcosis stilled the fury only for a short while. When he came out of the anesthesia, the engineer reacted to the first light he had seen in many hours and mumbled hoarsely, “I know… it’s me… help.”

Stefan shivered. After the tapping of spinal fluid, there was an insignificant improvement. Kauters sat in the room for days on end, pretending that he had just come in to check when Stefan happened to appear. At first Stefan merely wondered why the surgeon was stalling. Then he grew depressed: the chances for a successful operation were decreasing every day.

The state of excitement passed. The engineer was able to sit in a chair. Pale and unshaven, he was the shadow of the burly man who had arrived three weeks earlier. His eyesight was gradually failing. Stefan no longer dared to ask about the date of the operation. Kauters was obviously upset, as if waiting for something to happen. Rabiewski had become his favorite patient, and the surgeon brought him lumps of sugar and sat watching him smack his lips and try to orient himself in relation to his own body, touching his thigh, his calf, his foot. His senses were slowly declining, and the world was fading for him. If you screamed into his ear, his twitching eyelids indicated that he could still hear.

On June 10, Kauters stuck his head out the door and called Stefan in from the corridor. The room was almost empty: no table or chairs. Rabiewski was back in his net, swollen, naked, and huge.