Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

Out of boredom more than interest, Stefan reached into the files. There were heaps of typescript in stiff covers. Marglewski kept talking, but disconnectedly, as if his mind was somewhere else. Sitting there hunched over, his nostrils flared as though he were sniffing for something, Marglewski looked like an old maid eager to confess the story of her one indiscretion.

He launched into a discourse so pompously laden with Latin that Stefan understood nothing. Marglewski’s thin, nervous hands stroked the cover of one of the boxes impatiently before finally opening it. Curious, Stefan glanced inside. He saw a long list like a table of contents, and skimmed down it: “Balzac—hypomanic psychopath, Baudelaire—hysteric, Chopin—neurasthenic, Dante—schizoid, Goethe—alcoholic, Hölderlin—schizophrenic…”

Marglewski unveiled his secret. He had embarked on a great investigation of geniuses, and had even intended to publish portions of it, but unfortunately the war intervened.

He began to lay out large sheets with drawings depicting genealogies. He got more excited as he spoke, and his cheeks grew flushed. As he passionately enumerated the perversions, suicide attempts, hoaxes, and psychoanalytic complexes of great men, it occurred to Stefan that Marglewski himself might well be suffering from an abnormality that afforded him a dubious kinship with his subjects, a kind of ticket to the family of geniuses. He had scrupulously collected descriptions of their every lapse, researching and cataloguing their failures, tragedies, misfortunes, and catastrophes. He swelled with joy at the discovery of the slightest hint of impropriety among anyone’s posthumous papers.

At one point, as Marglewski rummaged in a lower drawer for his latest treasure, Stefan interrupted him. “It seems to me,” he said, “that great works arise not out of madness, but in spite of it.”

He took one look at Marglewski and immediately regretted having spoken. The man looked up over the papers and glared at him. “In spite of?” he sneered. Suddenly he gathered up the scattered papers, jerked a tattered chart away from Stefan, and nervously stuffed it back into a folder.

“My dear colleague,” he said, interlacing his fingers, “you are still inexperienced. But this is no longer the age of the Renaissance man. For that matter, thoughtless actions could have fatal consequences even then. Of course you fail to understand this, but things that can be justified subjectively often look different in the light of the facts.”

“What are you talking about?” Stefan asked.

Marglewski did not look at him. He wrung his long, thin fingers and stared at them. Finally, he said, “You take walks a lot. But those power-station operators in Bierzyniec with that building of theirs can only get the hospital into trouble. It’s not only that they’re hiding weapons, but that young one, Pościk’s son, is nothing but a common bandit.”

“How do you know?” Stefan interrupted.

“Don’t ask.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t?” Marglewski peered through his glasses with an expression of pure hatred. “Haven’t you heard of the Polish underground? The government-in-exile in London?” he asked in a shrill whisper, his long fingers running lightly over his white smock. “The army left weapons in the forest in September. That Pościk was in charge of them. And when he was ordered to tell where they were, he refused! Said he was waiting for the Bolsheviks!”

“He said that? How do you know?” Stefan asked, dazed by the unexpected turn of the conversation and by the way Marglewski was trembling.

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything! It’s got nothing to do with me!” he said, still whispering. “Everyone knows about it—everyone except you!”

“I shouldn’t go there anymore, is that what you mean?” Stefan stood up. “It’s true I walked over there once, during a storm…”

“Say no more!” Marglewski cut him off, jumping to his feet. “Please forget this whole conversation! I thought it was my obligation to a colleague, that’s all. Do what you think best with what I’ve told you, but please, don’t say anything to anyone else!”

“Of course not,” said Stefan slowly. “If that’s what you want, I won’t tell anyone.”

“Let’s shake on that!”

Stefan held out his hand. He was shocked by what Marglewski had said, and even more by his undisguised panic. Could someone have put the man up to it? What about his anger? Could he have something to do with the underground? Some sort of—what did they call it?—connection?

Stefan left in confusion. It was so hot that he had to keep wiping the sweat off his forehead as he walked down the corridor. He heard a loud burst of laughter from the toilet. The door opened and Sekułowski appeared, wearing only pajama bottoms, shaking with laughter that had seized him like the hiccups. Drops of sweat hung on the fair hairs of his chest.

“Perhaps you could share the joke?” asked Stefan, squinting against the light that poured through the corridor’s glass roof and bounced off the walls, broken into rainbows.

Sekułowski leaned against the door, catching his breath.

“Doctor,” he hawked finally, “doctor, it’s just that…” He spoke in short bursts, gasping for breath. “It reminded me of our arguments, our learned… phenomena… the Upanishads, the stars, the soul, and when I saw that turd… I can’t!” He burst out laughing again. “Spirit? What is man? A turd! A turd!”

Gripped by his private delight, the poet walked away, still shaking with laughter. Stefan went to his room without a word.

His first inclination was to go to the substation and warn Woch. Stefan’s promise meant nothing if honoring it would expose the operator to danger, but he knew immediately that he would not go. Who would he warn Woch about? Marglewski? Ridiculous. Tell him that weapons were hidden in the woods? If it was true, Woch would know more about it than he would.

He spent several days concocting increasingly elaborate ways of warning Woch to be careful: an anonymous note, another nocturnal meeting, but none of it made sense. In the end he did nothing. He did not go back to the substation, feeling an obligation to Woch not to, but he did begin to wander in its vicinity again. On his way out early one morning, he saw Joseph on one of the highest hilltops. The nurse was sitting motionless on the grass, as if absorbed by the picturesque view, but nothing Stefan knew about him indicated any weakness for the beauties of nature. Stefan watched him covertly for a while and then, seeing nothing interesting, turned back. He was already close to the hospital when it occurred to him that Joseph might be Marglewski’s informant. After all, the man hung around with the peasants, and a village had no secrets. Besides, he worked on Marglewski’s ward, and the skeletal doctor might have taken him into his confidence in that acid way of his. But what could Joseph have to do with the London government? It made no sense; the details did not fit together into any sort of structure. Stefan again felt the urge to warn Woch. But every time he imagined an actual conversation with the operator, he lost his nerve.

In the meantime, something new was happening in the hospital. The apartment next to Stefan’s room, previously empty, was to receive a new occupant in the person of Professor Romuald Łądkowski, a former university dean. This scholar, known far beyond the borders of Poland for his research in electroencephalography, had headed his university’s psychiatric clinic for eight years before being ousted by the Germans. Now he was coming—unofficially—to the asylum as Pajączkowski’s guest. The director himself had driven to the station several times, serving as guard of honor for successive shipments of the professor’s baggage, Łądkowski was due in two days. Joseph flew up and down the stairs, gasping for breath, carrying a ladder, a rod, a worn carpet.