Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

Stefan went for long walks in the fields near the woods. The telegraph poles hummed like drunken tuning forks.

When he tired, he would rest under a tree or sit on a bed of pine needles. One day, as he wandered, he found a place where three great beech trees grew above a bare patch of ground. They rose from a single stump and leaned gently away from one another. Nearby was an oak tree, not as tall, its branches forming horizontal, Japanese lines. It seemed to be standing on tiptoe, for the spring rains had washed the earth from between its roots. The forest ended a few hundred feet farther on. A row of beehives painted green and red like roadside shrines seemed to march up the hill. There was an echo; Stefan clapped his hands and the hot air answered several times. The buzzing of the bees underlined the silence. Now and then, a hive would sing more insistently. He walked on and was surprised to find that the buzzing of the beehives, far from fading, was growing louder. A deep humming filled the air.

When the gorge he was walking through rose to the level of the surrounding meadow, Stefan found himself near a square brick building that looked like a box on short concrete legs. Rows of wooden poles strung with wires led away from the building in three directions; the sound was coming from an open window. As he came closer, Stefan saw two men sitting on the grass in the shade below the window. He gave a start because at first he thought that one of them was his cousin Grzegorz, whom he had not seen since the funeral in Nieczawy. But then he realized that it was the stranger’s fair hair, the way he held his head, and his soldier’s uniform with the insignia ripped off that accounted for the resemblance. Stefan left the path and walked across the grass, gazing into the distance so as to look like an aimless wanderer. The others did not notice him until he was quite close. Then they looked up and Stefan met two pairs of eyes. He stopped. There was an uncomfortable silence. The man he had taken for Grzegorz sat still, his arms resting on his knees and his muddy boots crossed; a bronze triangle of naked chest was visible under his unbuttoned shirt, and his coppery hair covered his head like a helmet. He squinted as he turned his thin, hard face toward Stefan. The other man was older. Big but not fat, he had ash-colored skin. He wore a cap with the visor turned to the back, and he was missing an ear. In its place was a tiny, twisted flap of red flesh, sticking out like a flower petal.

“Is this a power station?” Stefan finally asked to end the silence. The only sound was the humming from the window. Then he noticed that a third person, a pale old man, was standing inside the window. His dark blue work-suit made him almost invisible against the dim interior. The young man glanced up at him and then back at Stefan. Without looking him in the eye, he said ominously, “You better stay away from here.”

“What?” Stefan said.

“I said you better stay away. Or there might be trouble.”

But the man missing an ear cut him off. “Hold it. Where are you from, sir?”

“The hospital. I’m a doctor. Why?”

“Aaah,” drawled the man without the ear, settling down with his elbow on the grass so he could talk more comfortably. “Do you take care of those—you know?” He pointed a finger to his temple and made a rotating gesture.

“Yes.”

The man without the ear laughed. “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“I’m not allowed to walk here?” Stefan asked.

“Sure. Why not?”

“I mean,” Stefan said, completely confused, “isn’t this a power station?”

“No,” said the old man in the window. Copper wires shined behind him. He leaned out the window to clean his pipe, and his forearms, covered with a tracing of veins, poked out beyond his short sleeves. “No, it’s only a sixty-kilowatt substation,” he said, concentrating on his pipe.

Stefan pretended that he knew what that meant and asked, “You supply current to the hospital, then?”

“Mmm,” answered the old man, sucking in his cheeks as he tried his pipe.

“Look, can I walk around here or not?” Stefan asked, not knowing why he needed reassurance.

“Why not?”

“Because he said…” and Stefan turned to the young man, who broke into a wide smile that showed his sharp teeth.

“So I did,” he said.

When Stefan did not leave, the man without the ear apparently decided to clear things up. “How was he supposed to know who you were, sir?” he said. “You made a mistake, kid. But if I may say so, sir, your face is pretty dark. That’s why.”

Seeing that Stefan still hadn’t got the point, he touched him amiably on the knee. “He thought you were from Bierzyniec. That you were one of the ones being shipped out all over the place.” He gestured as if he was draping something over his right shoulder and it finally dawned on Stefan: He thought I was a Jew. That had happened before.

The man without the ear was watching Stefan’s reaction closely, but Stefan said nothing. He only blushed slightly. The other man made conversation to cover the awkward silence.

“You work in the hospital, doctor?” he asked. “Well I work here. My name’s Woch. Operator. But not lately, because I’ve been sick. Too bad I didn’t know about you, doctor,” he added. “I would have asked for some advice.”

“Were you sick?” Stefan asked pleasantly. He stood there, for some reason unable to walk away. It was his misfortune never to know how to strike up a conversation with a stranger or how to end one.

“I was sick. The way it happened, first one eye pointed this way and the other one that way, then everything started to go around and around, and my sense of smell got so—ah!”

“And then?” Stefan felt foolish listening to the description.

“Nothing. It just went away by itself.”

“Not by itself,” the old man in the window said.

“All right, not by itself,” Woch loyally corrected himself. “I ate pea soup so thick you could stand the spoon in it, with sausage, marjoram, and a shot of whiskey, and it went away. My friend’s advice—the guy there.”

“Very good,” said Stefan, nodding to each of them and walking quickly away, because he was afraid that Woch would ask him what the illness had been.

He looked back when he got to the top of the first hill. The little red house stood there at the bottom of the gorge, seemingly uninhabited. The low humming from the open window, fading steadily, stayed with him most of the way back to the asylum, until it could no longer be distinguished from the buzzing of the insects above the warm grass.

This incident stuck in Stefan’s memory, as if it had some hidden meaning. So distinctly did he remember it that it divided the past into two parts and was his reference point for the chronology of hospital events. He told no one about it: that would have been pointless. Perhaps Sekułowski might have found some literary merit in Woch’s description of his illness, but that hardly mattered to Stefan. What did matter? He could not say.

After his morning rounds he would go for walks, carrying The History of Philosophy. But since he was making slow progress (unwilling to admit that ontological subtleties bored him, he blamed the hot weather), he began carrying another book: a thick edition of the Thousand and One Nights in a beautiful pale binding. It was from Kauters’s library. He would sit in that picturesque spot in the woods under the three tall beeches with their smooth, tight bark, imagining that a rubber tree must be similar. Feet propped on a log overgrown with blueberries, squinting at the flashes of sun that danced above the yellowed pages, he read the adventures of the peddlers, barbers, and wizards of Baghdad while The History of Philosophy lay beside him on a clump of dried moss. He no longer even bothered to open it, but carried it along like a guilty conscience.