Stanislaw Lem: Hospital of the Transfiguration

The organ fell silent, and again it was necessary to shoulder the coffin that now rested on the catafalque before the altar, but this time Stefan did not even try to help. Everyone stood up and, clearing their throats, prepared for the way ahead. When the gently swaying coffin left the shadowed nave and reached the church steps, there was some jostling—the elongated, heavy box pitched forward threateningly, but a forest of upraised hands rebalanced it and it emerged into the afternoon sun with no more than a brisk bobbing, as if excited by the close call.

Just then a foolish and macabre thought ran through Stefan’s mind: it must indeed be Uncle Leszek in there, because he had always loved practical jokes, especially on solemn occasions. Stefan quickly squelched the idea, or rather recast it in terms of healthy reason: it was absurd, that wasn’t his uncle in the coffin but only the remains of his person, remains so embarrassing and troublesome that their removal from the domain of the living required the devising and staging of this whole interminable, intricate, and rather unconvincing ceremony.

He followed the coffin with the others, heading for the open cemetery gate. There were about twenty people in the procession; without the coffin they would have made a strange impression, because they wore clothes somewhere between dress appropriate for a long journey (almost all of them had traveled to Nieczawy from far away) and evening wear, predominately black. Most of the men wore Ugh riding boots and some of the women were in high laced shoes like boots, trimmed with fur. Someone Stefan could not recognize from behind was wearing an army coat with no insignia, as if the patches had been ripped off; that coat, which held Stefan’s eye for a long moment, was the only reminder of the September Campaign. No, he thought, not really—there was also the absence of people who would have been there under different circumstances, like Uncle Antoni and Cousin Piotr, both of whom were in German prison camps.

The singing—or rather wailing—of the village women was an endless repetition of “Give him eternal rest, O Lord, and everlasting light.” It bothered Stefan only for a moment, then he ceased to be aware of it. The strung-out procession bunched up at the cemetery gate, then followed the upraised coffin in a black line between the graves. Prayers began again over the open grave. Stefan found this a bit excessive, and thought that if he were a believer, he would wonder whether the being to whom they were addressed might not regard such endlessly renewed pleas as importunate.

Someone tugged at his sleeve before he could finish formulating this last thought. He turned and saw the wide, hawk-nosed face of Uncle Anzelm in his fur collar, who asked, again too loudly, “Have you had anything to eat today?” Without waiting for an answer, he quickly added, “Don’t worry, there’ll be bigos!” Anzelm slapped Stefan on the back, hunched his shoulders, and waded in among the relatives, who stood looking at the still-empty grave. He touched each of them with a finger, moving his lips as he did so. Stefan thought this quite curious until he realized that his uncle was simply counting the crowd. Then Anzelm whispered loudly to a village boy, who backed away from the black circle in rustic reverence, walked to the gate, and then broke into a run toward Ksawery’s house.

Having completed these host’s duties, Uncle Anzelm returned, whether by accident or design, to Stefan’s side and even found the time to point out how colorful the group around the grave was. Four stout boys then placed the coffin on cords and lowered it into the yawning hole, where it landed askew. One of the boys, holding onto the edge with dirty hands, climbed down and shoved it hard with his boot. Stefan was hurt by this rough treatment of an object that had so far been accorded uninterrupted respect. In this he found further confirmation of his thesis that the living, no matter how they tried to polish the rough edges of the passage out of life, could find no consistent and harmonious attitude to the dead.

The particular wartime aspect of the funeral was evident after the men with shovels, working with an almost feverish energy, closed the grave and formed the elongated mound of earth above it. Under normal circumstances, it would have been unthinkable for the mourners to leave the cemetery without strewing their relative’s grave with flowers, but flowers were out of the question in this first winter after the invasion. Even the greenhouses on the nearby Przetułowicz estate, where all the glass had been broken during the battle, left the Trzynieckis down, so only spruce boughs were laid on the grave. The prayers finished, their respects paid, the mourners turned from the green mound and made their way, one by one, down the snowy path to the muddy, puddle-strewn road back to the village.

When the priests, who were as cold as everyone else, removed their white surplices, things seemed more normal. Other changes, less explicit, came over the rest of the mourners. Their solemnity, a sort of slowing of movement and glance, fell away. A naive observer might have thought that they had been walking on tiptoe and had now got tired of it.

On the way back Stefan made sure to stay away from Aunt Aniela, not out of lack of affection or sympathy but because he was well aware of what a loving wife she had been to his uncle, and no matter how hard he tried, he would have been unable to utter a single phrase of condolence. In the meantime, panic spread over the mourners’ faces when they saw Uncle Ksawery take Aunt Melania Skoczyńska by the arm. Stefan was dumbfounded at the strange and rare sight. Ksawery hated Aunt Melania, had called her an old bottle of poison and said that the ground she walked on ought to be disinfected. Aunt Melania, an old spinster, had long devoted herself to stirring up family quarrels in which she could maintain a sweet neutrality while going from house to house spreading venomous remarks and rumors that fostered bitterness and did great damage, since the Trzynieckis were all stubborn once their emotions were aroused.

When he saw Stefan, Ksawery called from a distance, “Welcome, my brother in Aesculapius! Have you got your diploma yet?!”

Naturally Stefan had to stop to greet them, and after he quickly touched his maiden aunt’s frigid hand with his nose, the three walked together toward the house, now just visible through the trees. It was yellow as egg yolk, the very essence of a manor house, with classic columns and a large veranda overlooking the orchard. They stopped at the entrance to wait for the others. Uncle Ksawery revealed an unexpected flair for acting the host, expansively inviting everyone inside as though he feared they would drift off into the snowy, marshy countryside.

At the door, Stefan suffered a brief but intense torment, as an avalanche of greetings suspended during the funeral descended on him. During the kissing of hands and pecking of cheeks he had to be careful not to confuse the men with the women, which he may have done, he was not quite sure, Finally, amid the wiping of boots and waving sleeves of shed coats, he entered the drawing room. The sight of the enormous grandfather clock with its inlaid pendulum made him feel instantly at home, because whenever he visited Nieczawy he slept under the deer-head trophy on the wall opposite. In the comer stood the battered armchair in whose hairy depths he rested during the day and in which he was sometimes awakened at night by the loud striking of the clock, its unearthly face shining round and cold in the moonlight, glowing in stillness like the moon itself. But the traffic in the room prevented him from wallowing in childhood memories. The ladies sat in armchairs, the gentlemen stood enveloped in clouds of cigarette smoke. The conversation had barely begun when the double doors of the dining room opened to reveal Anzelm standing on the threshold. Frowning like a benevolent, somewhat absent-minded emperor, he invited everyone to table, A proper funeral dinner was out of the question, of course—the very term would have rung resoundingly false—and the weary, sorrowful relatives were instead invited to a modest snack.