Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

And he added, “But you, remember! Remember!”

As Stefan got ready to leave, his father asked, “Will you come back?”

“Of course, Dad. I’m not going away. I just have to go into town to take care of a few things. I’ll be back for dinner.”

His father fell back on the pillow.

Doctor Marcinkiewicz had an office of glass and white walls. There was a Solux lamp and three quartz ones, whose presence may have been connected with the resettlement of Jewish doctors in the ghetto. Every third word he said to Stefan was “Doctor,” but Stefan felt nevertheless that he was not being taken seriously. Their dislike was mutual. Marcinkiewicz gave Stefan an unadorned description of his father’s condition: really just a simple case of angina pectoris, except that the pain was weak and not radiating. The changes in coronary circulation, however, were bad news, as bad as could be. He unrolled an electrocardiogram on the polished desktop and began explaining it, but Stefan interrupted him angrily. Only later did he become polite and ask Marcinkiewicz to take good care of his father. Marcinkiewicz declined Stefan’s offer of payment, but so feebly that Stefan put some money on the desk anyway. By the time he left, it had disappeared into the drawer.

When he left the doctor’s office, Stefan went to several bookshops, looking for Gargantua and Pantagruel. It was an old favorite of his, and now that he had some money, he wanted to buy Boy’s translation. But he could not find it anywhere: times were hard for bookshops. He finally got lucky in a secondhand store. Through an old acquaintance he also picked up some textbooks that were sold only to Germans, and got a copy of the latest issue of a German scholarly journal for Pajpak. Since he now had a fairly heavy load, he decided to go home by tram. A grotesquely overcrowded tram stopped; people pressed against the sweaty windows like fish in an aquarium. He grabbed a rail outside the door with his free hand and jumped onto the step. But he felt someone grab his collar from behind and pull him down. He jumped onto the sidewalk to avoid falling, and found himself looking right into the face of a young, smooth-cheeked German who unceremoniously elbowed him out of the way. When Stefan tried to climb up after him, a second German, accompanying the first, pushed him aside even more violently.

“Mein Herr!” Stefan shouted, giving him a shove of his own in return. The second German kicked Stefan in the backside with his polished boot. The bell rang and the car moved off.

Stefan stood on the sidewalk. Several passersby had stopped. He felt terribly confused and walked away, pretending that something across the street had caught his eye. He would not wait for the next tram. The incident left him so depressed that he gave up on his idea of visiting an old friend from school. Instead he walked home through the dry, rustling leaves.

His father was sitting up in bed smacking his lips as he ate curls of scrambled egg from an aluminum pan. Stefan told him what had happened.

“Yes, that’s the way they are,” his father said. “Volk der Dichter. Well, too bad. You see what their young people are like. Until last September I used to correspond with Volliger—you remember, the firm that was interested in my automatic tie presser. Then they just stopped answering. It’s a good thing I didn’t send them the plans. They got vulgar and uncivilized. In the end we’re all getting vulgar and uncivilized.”

He suddenly leaned over and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Melania! Melaniaaa!”

Stefan was amazed, but there was a shuffling of feet and his aunt’s face appeared around the door.

“Give me a little more herring, but more onion this time. What about you, Stefan? Something to eat?”

“No.” He felt disenchanted. When he left Marcinkiewicz, he had been ready to see his father again, had felt more affectionate, but now the old man had ruined his appetite.

“Father, I really have to get back today.” He launched into a complex description of the hospital, making it clear that his responsibilities were enormous.

“Be careful, watch yourself,” said his father, looking around for a piece of herring that had slipped off his plate. He found it, ate it with a big mouthful of bread, and concluded: “Don’t get too wrapped up in things there. I don’t know what to think, after what happened in Koluchów.”

“What happened?” Stefan asked, recognizing the name.

“Haven’t you heard?” asked his father, wiping his plate with bread. “There’s an insane asylum there,” he said, glancing obliquely at his son to make sure he hadn’t offended him.

“Yes, it’s a small private hospital. So what happened?”

“The Germans took it over and turned it into a military hospital. All the lunatics—I mean patients—were deported. To the camps, they say.”

“What are you talking about?” exclaimed Stefan, incredulous. The latest German treatise on therapy for paranoia, printed since the outbreak of the war, was in his briefcase.

“I don’t know, but that’s what they say. Oh, Stefan, I forgot! I meant to tell you right away. Uncle Anzelm is angry at us.”

“So?” Stefan said. He didn’t care.

“He says you’ve been living right there in Ksawery’s backyard for the better part of a year, and you haven’t gone to visit him once.”

“Then Uncle Ksawery ought to be angry, not Anzelm.”

“You know how Anzelm is. Let’s not get him going. You could stop in there someday. Ksawery likes you, he really does.”

“Fine, Father. I will.”

By the time Stefan was ready to leave, his father’s mind was on his latest inventions: soy caviar and cutlets made from leaves.

“Chlorophyll is very healthy. Just think, some trees live for six hundred years. There’s no meat in them at all, but let me tell you, with my extract these cutlets are delicious. Too bad I ate the last ones yesterday. When that stupid Melania sent you the telegram.”

Stefan learned that the telegram had been prompted by a sudden deterioration of relations between his father and his aunt, who had decided to leave. But they made up before Stefan arrived.

“I’ll give you a jar of my caviar. You know how it’s made? First you boil the soy, then color it with carbon —carbo animalis, you know what I mean?—then salt and my extract.”

“The same extract as in the cutlets?” asked Stefan, his expression serious.

“Of course not! A different one—special—and you use olive oil for flavor. A Jew was going to get me a whole barrel, but they stuck him in a camp.”

Stefan kissed his father’s hand and was about to leave.

“Wait, wait, I haven’t told you about the cutlets.”

The old man is completely senile, thought Stefan, with some tenderness, but without a trace of the morning’s emotion.

Stefan went to the station to go back to the asylum. But it was impossible: the crowd and the turmoil were horrendous. People crawled like bugs through the cars, while a bearded giant barricaded in a toilet pulled bulging suitcases in one after another. People even clambered on the roof. Stefan was still not used to traveling that way. He tried in vain to get into the car by explaining that he had to get to Bierzyniec. He was told to run along behind the train. He was ready to give up and go home to his father’s when somebody tugged at his sleeve. A stranger in a stained cap and a coat sewn from a plaid blanket. “Are you going to Bierzyniec?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t have a platzkart?”

“No.”

“We can go together, but it’ll cost you.”

“Fair enough,” Stefan said. The stranger disappeared into the crowd and returned a moment later clutching a conductor by the elbow.