Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

Marglewski spoke with a discreet, sardonic smile, constantly folding and unfolding his hands. He grew more animated as he got into his subject, rustling his papers, sprinkling his phrases with Latin, building enormous sentences without glancing at his notes. Stefan observed with interest the lovely line of the thighs of Nosilewska’s crossed legs. He lost track of Marglewski’s deductions, surrendering instead to the rising and falling cadences of his voice. Suddenly the lecturer stepped back from the podium.

“Now, colleagues, I shall demonstrate how what I have called the mourning for his disease can be manifested in a convalescent patient. If you please!” He turned sharply to the open side door. An old man in a cherry-colored hospital robe came in. The white gown of a nurse waiting in the corridor could be seen outside the door.

“Come in, please,” said Marglewski with a poor attempt at amiability. “What’s your name?”

“Wincenty Łuka.”

“How long have you been in the hospital?”

“A long time, a very long time. A year, maybe. At least a year.”

“What was the problem?”

“What problem?”

“What brought you to the hospital?” asked Marglewski, holding his impatience in check. Stefan felt bad watching the scene. It was plain that Marglewski cared nothing for the man. All he wanted was to get the statements he needed out of him.

“My son brought me.”

The old man suddenly looked confused and lowered his eyes. When he raised them again, they had changed. Marglewski licked his lips and craned forward avidly, his eyes fixed on the patient’s sallow face. At the same time he made a brief, significant gesture to the audience, like a conductor holding the rest of the orchestra while evoking a pure solo from a single instrument.

“My son brought me,” the old man said in a more assured voice, “because I was seeing things.”

“What things?”

The old man waved his hands. His Adam’s apple bobbed twice in his dry neck. He was obviously trying to speak. He raised his hands several times, but no words came, and he did not complete the gesture.

“Things,” he finally repeated helplessly. “Things.”

“Were they beautiful?”

“Beautiful.”

“Tell us what it was you saw. Angels? The Lord God? The Blessed Virgin?” Marglewski asked in a matter-of-fact tone.

“No, no,” the old man interrupted. He looked at his own pale hands and said, quietly and slowly, “I’m an uneducated man. I don’t know how to… It started one day when I went out to mow hay, over near Rusiak’s farm. That was where it happened. All the trees in the orchard, and the barn, sir, they changed somehow.”

“Be more precise. What happened?”

“Everything around Rusiak’s farmyard. It was the same, only different.”

Marglewski turned quickly to the audience. Rapidly and distinctly, like an actor delivering an aside, he said, “Here we have a schizophrenic suffering disintegration of personality functions—but completely cured.”

He intended to go on, but the old man interrupted: “I saw, I saw so much.”

He moaned. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He tried to smooth a recalcitrant curl back onto his head.

“Good, very good. We know that. But you don’t see things anymore, do you?”

The patient looked down.

“Well?”

“No, I don’t,” he admitted, and seemed to grow slightly smaller.

“Please observe!” Marglewski addressed the audience. He went up to the old man and spoke to him slowly and emphatically, enunciating carefully. “You will not see things anymore. You are cured. You will go home now, because you don’t need us. Nothing is bothering you. Do you understand? You will go home to your son, to your family.”

“I won’t see things?” the old man repeated, standing motionless.

“No. You are cured.”

The old man in the cherry robe looked distressed—so distressed that Marglewski beamed, taking a step backward so he would not block the audience’s view, pointing surreptitiously at the old man.

The patient walked heavily to the podium. He put his square hands, pale from his stay in the asylum, on the stand.

“Gentlemen,” he said in a thin, pained voice. “Why do you have to do this to me? I’ve already… you can put me anywhere, even give me those electric shocks, only please let me stay. We’re so poor on the farm, my son has four mouths to feed, what am I supposed to do? If I could work—but my hands and my feet won’t listen. I don’t have much time left, and I’ll eat anything you give me, only let me stay. Please let me stay.”

Marglewski’s face went through a gamut of emotions as the man spoke. Satisfaction gave way to surprise, then to anxiety, and finally to anger. He gestured to the male nurse, who entered quickly and took the old man by the elbow. At first the patient jerked away like a free man, but then he sagged and let himself be led away unresisting.

Silence filled the room. Marglewski, white as a sheet, pushed his glasses back onto his nose with both hands and returned to the podium with a raucous squeaking of his new shoes. He opened his mouth to speak when Kauters commented from a seat in the back, “Well, there was mourning all right, but not so much for his disease as for three square meals a day.”

“Please save your remarks for the end,” snapped Marglewski. “I haven’t finished. That patient, respected colleagues, has experienced ecstatic states and intense feelings which he is now unable to recount. Before the onset of disease, he was subnormal, almost a cretin. I cured him. But, as they say, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. What you saw just now was the cunning often exhibited by cretins. I have observed the symptoms of his mourning for his disease for some time now,”

He went on and on in the same vein. Finally he wiped his glasses with a trembling hand, ran his tongue over his lips, rocked back on his heels, and announced, “Well, that’s all. Thank you, colleagues.”

The ex-dean left immediately. Stefan looked at his watch, leaned toward Nosilewska, and invited her to his room. She was surprised—“Isn’t it too late?”—but consented in the end.

As they left, they passed the other doctors gathered outside the door. Marglewski was perorating, holding Rygier by the lapel. Kauters stood silently biting his nails.

Back in his room, Stefan seated Nosilewska alongside Staszek, uncorked a bottle of wine, laid some crackers on a plate, and looked for the orange vodka Aunt Skoczyńska had sent him. After one round, he suddenly remembered something he absolutely had to check on in the third ward, cleared his throat, excused himself, and left with the feeling of having done what he was supposed to do.

He wandered in the corridors, thought about going to see Sekułowski, until Joseph caught him standing at a window. “Doctor, oh, it’s a good thing you’re here. Paścikowiak—you know, in seventeen—is acting up.”

Joseph had his own terminology. If a patient was getting restless, he was “misbehaving.” “Acting up” meant something more serious.

Stefan went into the ward.

About a dozen patients watched with mild interest as a man in a bathrobe jumped up and down like a frog, emitting menacing screams that frightened no one, clenching his teeth and waving his arms and legs. Finally he fell onto a bed and began tearing at the sheets.

“Paścikowiak, what’s all this?” Stefan began jovially. “Such a peaceful, civilized man, and all of a sudden you start raising hell?”

The deranged man peered out from under his eyebrows. He was short and thin, with the fingers and skull of a hunchback, but without the hump. “Oh, you’re on duty today, doctor?” he murmured with embarrassment. “I thought it was Doctor Rygier. I’m sorry, I won’t do it again.”