Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

“You know, that boy…”

“The one with the angel?”

“Right. Be careful he doesn’t get hurt.”

Joseph was offended. He said he was careful of all the patients. Stefan took a fifty-złoty note out of his pocket. Joseph softened. He got the point. He was always careful, but now he would be extra-careful.

They were standing in the doorway. Patients wandered nearby, but they might as well have been unattended. As Joseph unobtrusively put the folded banknote away, a determination that surprised him came over Stefan, and in a voice not his own he asked, “Joseph, you wouldn’t happen to know what happened to the man the Germans arrested that night? You know who I mean.”

They looked at each other. Stefan’s heart pounded. Joseph seemed to be stalling. The flash of interest that had appeared in his eyes was submerged in a servile smile. “The guy missing an ear, who worked on the electricity? Woch? Did you know him, doctor?”

“I knew him,” Stefan said, feeling that he was putting himself in Joseph’s hands. The effort of carrying on the conversation made him feel faint.

An unctuous smile, more and more explicit, crept across Joseph’s stupid-cunning face. His eyes widened. “So you knew him, doctor? They say he wasn’t the one keeping that stuff in the hole. They say it was his godson, Antek. Well, who knows? But he was a fox, I’ll say that. A fox,” he repeated, as if he liked the sound of the word. “He drank with the Germans and made deals with them, until he wouldn’t give a normal person the time of day, he thought he was so important. He figured he had the German all wrapped up, but the German is a fox, too, and came at night and took him away like a chicken! Today a car came from Owsiany, and they had to make two trips, there was so much stuff. It was hidden under the coils, packed in crates like merchandise!”

“Did you see it?”

“Me? How would I see it? But other people did. They saw it, and they knew. But Woch didn’t realize. Everyone else could see it coming.”

“What did they do to him?”

“How should I know? You know the sand pit at Rudzień? Where the lake used to be? If you follow the road through the woods and then go to the right… They give you a shovel and tell you to dig a hole and stand over it. Then they get a peasant from the road to come and fill it in. They don’t like to dirty their hands.”

Even though he had supposed as much—even though he knew it could not have been any other way—Stefan felt such rage, such hatred for Joseph, that he had to close his eyes.

“What about the others?” he asked dully.

“The Pościks? Disappeared like a stone in a lake. Nobody knows anything. They must have escaped into the forest. They won’t be found in the swamps and caves. And all because they were stupid, they didn’t think ahead. They had something there—all that ammunition.” His voice dropped on the last words.

Stefan nodded, turned, and went to his room. With a steady hand he shook out a luminal tablet, thought about it, added another, washed them down with water, and dropped onto his bed with his clothes on.

Late that evening he was awakened by a pounding on the door. It was Joseph with a telegram from Aunt Skoczyńska: Stefan’s father was seriously ill and he should come home immediately.

He asked Staszek to take over for him on the ward and had no trouble getting several days’ leave from Pajączkowski.

“It’ll be all right,” the old man croaked as he stroked Stefan’s hand warmly. “And as long as you’re going anyway, try to find out what the Germans are up to.”

“Excuse me?”

“Take a look around, see what people are saying. There’s been a lot of bad news lately.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing, really.”

When he went to say good-bye to Sekułowski, Stefan found the poet composing, his hair standing on end as if electrified. His eyes jerked every so often in a strange inward gaze. His sonorous, metallic voice carried into the corridor, and Stefan stood in the door listening:

My heart is a planet of red termites

Fleeing in horror down a narrow path

My body—a plaything of sluts and Stylites—

Is murdering me. My expiring breath

O Night, tears away the veil at last

As that dusky girl with bloody thighs, Death,

Touches my face, a desolate nest…

Stefan went in and the poet stopped. A moment later, Stefan was telling him about the sculptor.

“Strangling Angel?” said Sekułowski. “That’s interesting, very interesting.” He filled a page with his careful, impassioned script. “Blessed are the meek, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” he read.

Then he looked at Stefan with twinkling eyes. “Because you’ve helped me a little, I want to show you something.”

He shuffled through the sheets of paper covering his bedspread. “I’ve been dreaming of writing the history of the world from the point of view of another planetary system. This is a sort of introduction.” He began reading from a piece of paper. “It is a festering uterus of suns: the universe. It teems with trillions of stellar eggs. Furious procreation bursting forth in grit and black dust, moving beat by beat, darkness by darkness.” He was improvising—there were only a few sentences on the paper.

“Where is this other system?” Stefan could not resist asking.

“Nowhere. That’s the whole joke.”

“And you believe that?”

Sekułowski held his breath. When his bright eyes looked up, he seemed inspired and beautiful.

“No,” he said. “I don’t believe it. I know it.”

Stefan’s journey was a nightmare. The filthy dark railroad car smelling of sour sweat was searched three times for lard or butter. There were police, and wild crowds attacked the doors and windows. He could not maintain his personal dignity in the incredible crush, since he was invisible in the darkness and silence was taken as a sign of surrender. Within an hour he was cursing like a sailor.

The city had changed. The streets had German names now, and jackbooted patrols tramped along the cobblestones. Airplanes with black crosses on the wings appeared above the houses from time to time: the sky was German.

The usual smell of boiled cabbage greeted him as he entered the building, and on the second floor the sweet-rotten smell from the furrier’s workshop triggered a complex of memories.

He found it hard to control his emotions when he saw the scratched brown door with the lion’s head carved in the transom.

The entrance was full of tinware, shelves, and odds and ends, and the cobwebbed frame of his father’s unfinished projects rose to the ceiling like macabre animal prototypes. His mother, as Aunt Skoczyńska immediately told him in a dramatic whisper, had moved to the village a month before, since there wasn’t enough money to keep the household going. His aunt embraced him in the open doorway and he fell into the naphthalene abundance of her bosom. She kissed him, cried a little, and pushed him into the dining room for bread with jam and tea.

As she brought out the labeled jars of homemade preserves, she talked about the high cost of fat and about a local lawyer. It was a long time before she finally mentioned his father. But then she launched with satisfaction into a detailed account of the events of the past few months. She painted a picture of a misunderstood, unlucky man of greatness, tormented by kidney and heart disease. She alone had supported the great inventor, distant relative though she was. “Your father,” she kept repeating, until Stefan began to suspect her of malice, as though she was accusing Stefan of coldness. But no—apparently she was simply expressing heartfelt sympathy. Years ago she had been beautiful. Stefan had even fallen in love with an old photograph of her that he had stolen from her room. But now accretions of flesh drowned what remained of her looks.