Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

Woch paused and took a drag of his cigarette. He fell into a reverie.

“The union paid for the funeral, and they did right by his family too. That’s how it used to be. Later on, in the thirties, they started laying men off.”

He crushed out his cigarette with a look of disgust.

“I had a repair crew working under me. You sit around all night waiting. A bird lands on a line and gets fried, a branch falls and knocks something down, a kid shorts something out flying a kite. All that stuff is natural. But then in the thirties this new thing started. I’ll never forget the first one. Not as long as I live. Suicide. A kid tied a wire around a stone, held the other end of the wire in his hand, and threw the stone over the cables. He was burned completely black, his hand fell off, and the fat that melted off him was strewn all around. If I hadn’t known him—but I did. He worked in the railroad yards, but they laid him off because he wasn’t married. They laid the bachelors off first. The girls liked him, he was a nice kid. People hadn’t known that electrocution was a quick death, but now they found out. And it was easy too, especially since the French ran the cables next to footbridges. It was cheaper that way. Very economical, the French. All you needed was a stone, a wire, and an easy toss.”

Woch was holding onto the edge of the table, as if he wanted to lift it.

“After that, every time the telephone rang when I was on duty, my heart stopped. By the time the third goddamned one did it, the whole city knew. There was an employment office right near the power station. We’d go out there, and they were lined up like sheep—the unemployed. Somebody once shouted, ‘There go the pallbearers!’ Pieluch, my assistant, shouted back, ‘Jump in the goddamn river, and we won’t have to bother.’ When they heard that, that was it. It’s a good thing we had a good driver, because the stones were flying. That Pieluch and I had words after that. He was no operator, but he had a sick wife. I could have had a hundred better men instead of him, and that made me angry. ‘You were rotting away down there a week ago yourself,’ I told him, ‘and now that you’ve had a couple of days’ work you say the hell with the rest of them.’ He was hot-tempered. He came back at me. So I busted him in the mouth. Later he came in begging for his job because his wife was dying and he didn’t have any money, but what could I do? And his wife really did die on him. That fall. When he came back from the funeral, he stuck his head through the window—I was on duty—and said, very quietly, ‘Die a slow death!’ Less than a week later, we got another call to go out to the bridge for a suicide, and damned if it wasn’t him. Baked like a goose. You could’ve stuck your finger in his chest. It was roasted crisp.”

The old man put two tin bowls of thick soup on the table and sat on a box nearby, balancing a steaming pot on his knees. They ate slowly. Stefan burned his tongue on the first spoonful. He blew on the next one. When they finished, Woch brought the tin box of tobacco out again. They smoked. Stefan was hoping that the operator would keep on telling stories, but he didn’t seem to feel like it. He sat there gray, massive, and gloomy, breathing heavily, exhaling smoke, parrying Stefan’s questions with monosyllables. When Stefan found that Woch had worked at the power station in his home town for a few years, he remarked, “So it was thanks to you that I had lights at home.” He wanted to emphasize this as a bond that would always connect them.

Woch said nothing, as if he had not heard. The rain had almost stopped, just a few drops falling from the eaves outside the window. Stefan hesitated to leave; he did not want to part from Woch in the mood of distance that had arisen. The conversation had petered out, and Stefan, looking for a new theme, picked up Woch’s engraved nickel lighter from the table. “Andenken aus Dresden” was engraved on one side in Gothic script. He turned it over and read, “Für gute Arbeit.”

“A beautiful lighter,” he said. “Did you work in Germany too?”

“No,” said Woch, staring straight ahead, his eyes blank. “The boss gave it to me.”

“German?” Stefan asked, a bit unpleasantly.

“German,” Woch confirmed, looking closely at Stefan.

“For good work,” Stefan said with a barely perceptible sneer, though he was well aware that this was not going to improve the mood.

“That’s right, for good work,” Woch replied emphatically, almost belligerently. Stefan had lost any sense of how to approach Woch. He stood up and, feigning nonchalance, strolled around the room, walking close to the equipment, willing to expose himself to a harsh rebuke about safety, anything to break the hostile silence. But in vain. The old man noisily gathered up the dirty dishes, carried them away, came back, and started speaking to Woch in indistinct syllables that Stefan could not follow. Woch sat there, bent forward, leaning his heavy chest against the edge of the table. The electricity hummed and the fresh cool of evening blew in through the open window. The young worker Stefan had seen twice before came in from the corridor. The army coat, turned inside out, covered his back; his copper hair stuck to his skull and streams of water ran down his face. A little puddle formed at his feet where he stood in the doorway. Though no one spoke, it was clear they were expecting him. They exchanged meaningful glances, the old man shuffled off to the comer, and Woch stood up briskly and walked over to Stefan. “I’ll show you out, doctor,” he said. “You can go now.”

It was so blunt, so completely devoid of politeness, that all Stefan’s efforts to appear to leave of his own volition collapsed. Hurt, angry, he let himself be led outside. Woch pointed toward the hospital. Stefan blurted, “Mr. Woch, you know why I came, I…”

It was so dark that they could not see each other’s faces. “Don’t worry,” Woch said quietly, “I couldn’t let you get soaked. It was only natural. Otherwise, there’s really nothing much to see here. Unless… You understand.” He put his hand lightly on Stefan’s shoulder, not as a gesture of confidence, but simply to make sure where he was in the darkness between them.

Stefan, who did not understand, said, “Yes, yes. Well, thanks, and good night.” He felt a brief squeeze of the other man’s hand, turned; and walked straight ahead.

He trudged up the dirt path. Gusts of wind bore scattered raindrops. He felt flushed after his adventure—a few hours that loomed larger than his months at the hospital. His anger at Woch had dissolved when they parted in the darkness, and now he only regretted that he had been so stupid, but what else could he have done but ask naive questions? He felt like a child trying to decipher the mysterious actions of adults. Just when he thought he had been initiated into the first mystery, they had thrown him out. For a moment he longed to go back and watch the three of them through the window. Of course he would not have dared, but the thought testified to his state of mind. He told himself that nothing unusual would be going on at the substation, that the others would be asleep and Woch would be sitting in the bright light among the equipment, getting up to look at the gauges now and then, entering some note on graph paper, and sitting down again. It was futile and uninteresting. But why did his thoughts keep returning to that silent, monotonous work? He suddenly found himself at the dark main gate, fumbling with his key in the wet lock. Blindly he followed the path that was a shade lighter than the surrounding dark grass and made his way to his room. He undressed without turning on the light and jumped under the covers. When he touched the cold sheets, he felt that it would not be easy to fall asleep. He was right.