Stanislaw Lem: Hospital of the Transfiguration

Kauters maintained his silence.

Pajączkowski, now calm, stood up again. His eyes were red. Stefan approached him. “Professor, we have to decide. Some of them must be hidden.”

“We must hide all the patients who are conscious,” said the director.

“Maybe a few of the more valuable ones could be…” Rygier hesitated.

“Perhaps we can let all the convalescents go?”

“They have no papers. They’d be picked up at the station.” “So which ones do we hide?” asked Staszek with nervous boldness.

“I’m telling you, the most valuable ones,” Rygier repeated.

“I cannot make decisions about value. Just as long as they don’t betray the others,” said Pajpak. “That’s all.”

“So we are supposed to make a selection?”

“Gentlemen, please go to the wards. Doctor Nosilewska, you will want to inform the nursing staff.”

Everyone headed for the door. Pajpak stood off to the side, leaning with both hands on the back of a chair. Stefan, the last to leave, heard him whispering.

“Excuse me?” he asked, assuming that Pajączkowski was speaking to him. But the old man did not even hear him.

“They’ll be so afraid,” he was whispering almost breathlessly.

No one slept that night. The selection yielded dubious results: about twenty patients, but no one could vouch for their nerves. The supposedly secret news somehow spread through the hospital. Young Joseph ran around in an open robe, not leaving Pajączkowski’s side.

In the women’s ward, a half-naked crowd danced in a blur of limbs amid a thin, relentless wailing. Stefan and Staszek nearly emptied the stock of drugs in the space of two hours, dispensing the carefully hoarded luminal and scopolamine right and left. To the amusement of Rygier, who was guzzling pure alcohol, Stefan took two swigs from the big bottle of bromine. Marglewski was seen heading for the gate lugging two suitcases and a knapsack crammed with his index cards on geniuses. Kauters disappeared into his apartment before midnight. Chaos mounted by the minute. Each ward howled in a different voice, creating a random, polyphonic scream. Stefan passed the dean’s room several times in hasty and needless trips up and down the stairs. A sliver of light showed under the door, but there was no sound from within.

It seemed impossible to find a place to hide patients on the hospital grounds. Then Pajączkowski presented the doctors with a fait accompli; he took eleven schizophrenics in remission and three manics into his apartment. He moved a wardrobe in front of the door to conceal them, but it had to be taken away temporarily when the healthiest-looking schizophrenic had a sudden attack. A big chunk of plaster was chipped off when the wardrobe was hurriedly replaced, and Pajączkowski covered the spot with a curtain. Stefan looked in several times. Under other circumstances he would have been amused at the sight of the old man, his mouth full of nails, teetering on a chair supported by Joseph, putting up a curtain rod with a neurological hammer. It was announced that only those with at least two rooms could hide patients. That meant Kauters and Rygier. The latter, now thoroughly drunk, agreed to take a few. Stefan went to the ward to bring out the boy sculptor. He opened the door on a storm of screaming people.

Long strips of bedding whirled around the few remaining light bulbs. Crowing, whistles, and a repetitive hoarse chant of “The Punic War in the Closet!” rose above the general roar. Stefan groped along the wall unnoticed. Twice he was kicked by Paścikowiak, who paced back and forth with long, vigorous strides, as if trying to break free of gravity.

Patients blind with madness spun in demonic pinwheels, threw themselves against walls, and crawled by twos and threes under beds from which their jerking legs stuck out. Stefan at last reached the boy’s room. Once he found him, he had to use his fists to try to clear a path to the door. The boy resisted and dragged Stefan into a comer. There he took a large canvas bundle from under a straw pallet. Only then did he let himself be led out.

When they reached the corridor, Stefan stopped for breath. He was missing several buttons and his nose was bleeding. The wailing behind the doors rose an octave. He handed the boy over to Joseph, who was helping to arrange a hiding place in Marglewski’s apartment, and went back downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs he noticed that he was holding something: the bundle the boy had given him. He tucked it under his arm, reached for a cigarette, and was frightened at how his hands shook as he struck a match.

After the third attack among his stowaways, Pajpak gave each of them a dose of luminal. Dawn was breaking as the last of thirty drugged patients were closed into an apartment.

Pajpak, who seemed to be everywhere at once, was personally destroying files, ignoring Stefan’s warnings. Wiping his hands after burning papers in a stove, he said, “I’ll take the responsibility for this.”

Nosilewska, pale but composed, shadowed the director. A fictional post, “chaplain,” was created for Father Niezgłoba, who stood in the darkest comer of the pharmacy praying in a piercing whisper.

As he ran aimlessly through the corridor, Stefan bumped into Sekułowski. “Doctor,” the poet cried, clutching Stefan’s smock, “perhaps I could—why don’t you lend me a doctor’s coat? After all, you know I’m familiar with psychiatry.”

He ran along with Stefan as if they were playing tag. Stefan stopped, gathered his wits, and thought it over. “Why not? It hardly matters at this point. We took care of the priest, so I guess we can do something for you. But…”

Sekułowski did not let him finish. They ran to the stairs, shouting back and forth. Pajpak stood on the landing giving the nurses final instructions.

“I say we should just poison them all!” cried Staszek, red as a beet.

“That’s not only nonsense, it’s criminal,” said Pajączkowski. Large drops of sweat ran down his forehead and glistened in his bushy gray eyebrows. “God might change everything at the last minute, and what then?”

“Ignore him,” said Rygier contemptuously from the shadows. A bottle peeped out of his pocket.

“You’re drunk!”

“Professor,” Stefan joined in, Sekułowski shoving him toward the old man, “there’s one more thing.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Pajpak, when he heard Stefan’s suggestion. “Why don’t you want to come to… to my apartment?” He wiped his forehead with a large handkerchief. “All right, of course. Right away. Doctor Nosilewska, you know how to arrange it.”

“I’ll falsify the records right away,” she said in her clear, pleasant voice. “Come with me.”

Sekułowski went with her.

“Now, one more thing,” said Pajpak. “Someone has to go to see Doctor Kauters. But I can’t go alone, it’s too awkward.”

He waited for Nosilewska to come back from the office. Sekułowski was bustling around the building in Stefan’s white coat, and had even appropriated a stethoscope to adorn his pocket. But when he came near enough to the door of the next building to hear the gathering howls, he retreated to the library.

Stefan felt weary. He looked around the corridor, waved his hand, peered through the window to see if it was morning yet, and walked to the pharmacy to take some more bromine. As he was putting the bottle back on the shelf, he heard someone come in.

It was Łądkowski, wearing a loose black suit.

The dean seemed unhappy to find Stefan there. He stood awkwardly in the doorway.

Stefan thought that perhaps Łądkowski was not feeling well. He was pale and seemed not to want to meet Stefan’s gaze. He hesitated as if about to leave, even putting his hand on the doorknob, but turned back and came close to Stefan. “Is there any cyanide here?” he asked.