Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

Of all the people who used to come to his father’s workshop when he was a child, it was the workers who interested him most—the machinists, locksmiths, and electricians who made various parts to order. He had been intimidated by them—they were so different from everyone he knew. They were always patient, listening to his father with silent attention, looking at the blueprints carefully, almost respectfully. But beneath the cautious politeness lay something closed and hard. Stefan noticed that although his father liked to go on at the dinner table about people he had met, he never mentioned the workers, as if they, in contrast to the lawyers, engineers, and merchants, had no personality. Stefan had the illusion then that their life—“real life,” as he called it—was shrouded in mystery. For some time he racked his brains over the puzzle of that “real life,” before finally concluding that the idea was foolish.

Now, lying awake in the darkness, the memory surfaced. There had been some sense in that boyish dreaming after all: there was a real life for people like Woch!

Where Uncle Ksawery propounded atheism, Anzelm held grudges, his father invented, and Stefan read philosophy and talked to Sekułowski, reading and talking for months on end to recognize “real life”—that life was out there maintaining their world, shouldering it like Atlas, as inconspicuous as the ground beneath their feet. But no, he was mythologizing, because something like a mutual exchange of services went on: Anzelm knew about architecture, Sekułowski wrote, he and Ksawery treated the sick. Stefan suddenly realized that nothing would really change if all of them disappeared. Whereas without Woch and others like him, the world could not go on.

He rolled over, and some obscure impulse made him turn on the nightstand lamp. It was nothing, of course, but the light struck him as a symbol, a sign that Woch was on the job. The yellow light filling the impersonal room was somehow soothing; it ensured freedom for all tasks and thought. As long as it shined, it was possible to fantasize about worlds beyond the existing one.

I ought to get some sleep, he thought. This is going nowhere. As he reached for the switch again, he noticed an open book on the table —Lord Jim, which he had been reading. He flicked the switch and darkness surrounded him again. In a quick leap of association, he wondered whether Woch would ever read that book, but the idea was so ludicrous that he smiled in the gloom. Woch would never pick up such a book; he had no need to sail the oceans with Lord Jim. He would look on Conrad with contempt for solving on paper problems that he himself solved in reality. Who could say what it cost him, how much suffering and care went into his vigil over electric current? The “real life” of guarding the lamplight did not seem to bother him. And it was better for Stefan not to reach out to him or to think about him too much, because it only made it hard to fall asleep.

Stefan’s thoughts drifted. In his mind he saw the little house struck by bolts of lightning in a raging storm. He saw Woch’s sad gray face, his thick fingers instantly quelling an overload, and then he saw nothing at all.

In the hot days of July, the hospital finally caught up with the influx of wartime casualties, A balance between admissions and discharges was reached. At noon, the overhead sun truncating the stubby shadows of the trees in the yard, patients wandered in their underwear. A primitive shower was arranged for them in the evenings with a pump worked by Joseph, the big peasant nurse with an old face and a young body.

Stefan was sitting in the ambulatorium, where sparks of sunshine glimmered like filaments in a quartz lamp. He was writing up the admission of an ex-prisoner from a concentration camp. Some stroke of luck had opened doors for this man that usually swung in only one direction.

Marglewski came down the corridor and looked in. He seemed interested in the case. He whistled. “A beautiful cachexia,” and laid his hand on the head of the ragged little man, who looked like a pile of old linen in the room’s shining whiteness. The man sat immobile on a swivel stool. Two lopsided furrows cut across his cheeks from his eyes and disappeared into his beard.

“Debility? An idiot?” asked Marglewski, keeping his hand on the poor man’s head. Stefan stopped writing and looked up in surprise.

Bright tears rolled down the patient’s cold, purplish cheeks and into his beard.

“That’s right,” Stefan said, “an idiot.”

He stood up, pushed the papers into a comer of the desk, and went to see Sekułowski. He began awkwardly, saying that he had changed his mind on certain points and that it was high time to shed some of his intellectual baggage.

“Some concepts are obsolescent,” he said, trying to sweeten an avowal of cynicism. “I have just experienced a small catharsis.”

“Last year” Sekułowski said, “Woydziewicz gave me some cherry vodka that produced a genuine catharsis on a large scale. I suspect him of having thrown in some cocaine.” But when he saw Stefan’s expression, he said, “But go on, doctor. I’m listening. You are seeking and you have hit the target. Insane asylums have always distilled the spirit of the age. Deviation, abnormality, and weirdness are so widespread in normal society that it is hard to get a handle on them. Only here, concentrated as they are, do they reveal the true face of the times.”

“No, that’s not what I’m talking about,” said Stefan, suddenly feeling terribly lonely. He searched for words but could not find them. “No, in fact it’s nothing,” he said, backing up and leaving in a hurry, as if he feared the poet would detain him.

But Sekułowski was absorbed by a spider climbing the wall behind his bed. He swatted it with a book, and when it fell to the floor, he sat staring at the blot of fluttering, threadlike legs.

Returning along the corridor, Stefan ran into Marglewski, who invited him to his apartment. “I have a bottle of Extra Dry,” he said. “Why don’t you drop in, and we can get rinsed out.”

Stefan declined, but Marglewski took the rejection for mere politeness. “No, come on, don’t be silly.”

Marglewski’s apartment was at the opposite end of the same corridor as Stefan’s. It had gleaming furniture: a glass-topped desk one side of which leaned on prism-shaped drawers, the other on bent steel tubing that matched the frames of the chairs. It reminded Stefan of a dentist’s waiting room. The pictures on the walls were framed in metal tubes. Pedantically arranged books, each with a white number on its spine, filled two walls. As Marglewski set the low table, Stefan mechanically pulled a book from the shelves and leafed through it. It was Pascal’s Provinciales. Only the first two pages had been cut. His host opened a drawer in a contemporary sideboard to reveal sandwiches on white plates. After his third drink Marglewski got talkative. Vodka exaggerated his already vigorous gestures. He wrung his hands like a washerwoman when he said he had stained his coat and would have to have it cleaned. He pointed out boxes labeled with index cards along the windowsill. Sheets of cardboard were held together with colored clips. Marglewski, it turned out, was engaged in scientific research. With a show of reluctance, he opened a folder bursting with papers analyzing the effect of Napoleon’s kidney stones on the outcome of the battle of Waterloo and the influence of hormones on the visions of the saints—here he drew a circle, meant to represent a halo, in the air above his head and laughed. He was sorry that Stefan was not a believer; what he needed was pure, naive people steeped in dogma.

“You spend all that time talking to Sekułowski?” he exclaimed. “Ask him why literature has its head in the clouds. Believe me, more than one great love has gone down the drain because the guy had to take a leak and, afraid to mention it to his dearly beloved, expressed a sudden longing for solitude and sprinted off into the bushes. I’ve seen it happen.”