Hospital of the Transfiguration Page 5

  The doctors’ dining room was on the top floor next to a large billiards room and a smaller room with what looked like card tables.

  The food wasn’t bad: ground meat and grits with bean salad, followed by crisp bliny. Jugs of coffee at the end.

  “War, my friend, à la guerre comme à la guerre’’ said Stefan’s neighbor to his left. Stefan observed the company. As usual when he saw new faces, they seemed undifferentiated, interchangeable, devoid of character.

  The man who had made the crack about war—Doctor Dygier or Rygier, he had introduced himself unclearly—was short, with a big nose, dark face, and a deep scar in his forehead. He wore a small pince-nez with a golden frame, which kept slipping. He adjusted it with an automatic gesture that began to get on Stefan’s nerves. They spoke in low murmurs about indifferent subjects: whether winter had ended, whether they would run out of coal, whether there would be a lot of work, how much they were being paid. Doctor Rygier (not Dygier) took tiny sips of coffee, chose the most well-done bliny, and spoke through his nose, saying little of interest. As they spoke, they both watched Professor Pajączkowski. The old man, who looked like a dove chick with his sparse, feathery beard through which the pink skin underneath was visible, was tiny, had wrinkled hands with a slight tremor, stuttered occasionally, slurped his coffee, and shook his head when he began to speak.

  “So, you would like to work with us?” he asked Stefan, shaking his head.

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Well certainly, certainly.”

  “Because the practice… it would be most useful,” Stefan murmured. He felt a strong aversion to old men, official meetings, and boring conversation, and here he had all three at once.

  “Well, we will… yes… exactly…” Pajpak went on, shaking his head again.

  Beside him sat a tall, thin doctor wearing a dustcoat stained with silver nitrate. Strikingly but not unpleasantly ugly, he had a harelip scar, a flat nose, wide lips, and a yellow smile. When he put his hands on the table, Stefan was amazed by their size and handsome shape. He considered two things important, the shape of the fingernails and the proportions of the hand’s width and length, and on both counts Doctor Marglewski revealed a good pedigree.

  There was one woman at the table. Stefan had noticed her when he came in. When they shook hands, her hand was surprisingly cold, narrow, and muscular. The thought of being caressed by that hand was unpleasant and exciting at the same time.

  Doctor Nosilewska (Miss? Mrs.?) had a pale face enveloped in a storm of chestnut hair that burned with gold and honey highlights. Below her lucid arched forehead her eyebrows tilted toward her temples like wings above sharp blue eyes that seemed almost electric. She was a perfect beauty, which meant that she was almost invisible—there was no birthmark or mole to capture the eye. Her tranquility was tinged with the maternal touch that marked Aphrodite’s features, but her smile was enlivened by the glints in her hair, her eyes, and a small depression in her left cheek—not a dimple, but a playful hint of one.

  There was also a younger doctor with a pimply face, dark hair, and a hooked nose. Nobody spoke to him. His name was Kuśniewicz.

  Stefan gathered from the conversation that the work was demanding but interesting, that psychiatry, however tedious, was the finest of callings, although given the choice, most of those present would have changed specialties. The patients were awful even when peaceful and quiet, and should all be given shock therapy whether they needed it or not. No one said anything about politics. It was like being on the ocean floor: all motion was indolent and subdued, and the most powerful of storms on the surface would be felt here only as a ripple, cause for a professional diagnosis.

  The next day Stefan found out that he had not met all the doctors. He was accompanying Doctor Nosilewska on morning rounds (he had been assigned to the women’s ward), and as they walked along a gravel path spotted with water from the dripping trees, they met a tall man in a white coat. The encounter was brief enough, but it engraved the man in Stefan’s memory. He had ugly yellow features that seemed chiseled in ivory, eyes screened by dark glasses, a large pointed nose, and thin lips that were stretched across his teeth. He reminded Stefan of a reproduction he had once seen of the mummy of Ramses II: an asceticism independent of age, features somehow timeless. His wrinkles did not indicate the years he had lived, but seemed to belong to the sculpture of his face. The doctor, who was the best surgeon in the asylum, was rail-thin and flat-footed. His feet were wide apart as he slopped through the mud, and after a perfunctory bow to Nosilewska, he trotted up the outside spiral staircase of the red pavilion.

  Nosilewska held in her white hand the key that opened the doors between wards. Almost all the buildings were connected by long glass-topped galleries so that doctors on their rounds would not be exposed to frost and rain. These galleries were reminiscent of greenhouse antechambers. But that impression vanished inside the wards. All the walls were pale blue. There were no spigots, drains, plugs, or door handles—just smooth walls to the ceiling. Patients in cherry robes and clacking clogs strolled up and down the cold, bright rooms between rows of neat beds made up in what seemed a military style. The windows were discreetly barred or covered with screens behind wide flower boxes.

  Nosilewska walked through the wards locking doors behind her and opening new ones with fluid, automatic, almost somnolent movements. Stefan had a key too, now, but could not handle it so deftly.

  Faces loomed around him: some pale and drawn, as if shrunken down to the skull, others puffy, swollen, unhealthily flushed. The men’s individuality was erased by their shaved heads. The bumps and oddities of their denuded skulls were so ugly that they overwhelmed the expressions on their faces. Protruding ears, extreme myopia, or a gaze fixed on a random object—these were the patients’ most obvious features, at least at first glance. A male nurse was pushing a patient along in the corridor, his movements not brutal so much as inappropriate for dealing with a human being. They softened for a moment as Stefan and Nosilewska passed. There was a gentle cry somewhere in the distance, as if someone was shouting out of conviction, rather than compulsion or illness, as if practicing.

  Nosilewska herself seemed strange. Stefan had noticed it earlier that morning. At breakfast, he had tried to memorize her features out of aesthetic interest, so that he could summon them up later. He noticed then that her eyes seemed vacant, staring at nothing, as she bent her head like a swan’s over the rim of a steaming mug. He watched all her other unconscious signs of life: the delicate pulse at the base of her neck, the peaceful clouding of her eyes, the trembling of her lashes. When she slowly turned her blue, piercing gaze on him, he was almost frightened, and a moment later he quickly drew his leg back when their knees touched—the contact struck him as dangerous.

  Nosilewska had a neat office in the women’s ward. Though it contained no personal objects, a femininity more subtle than any perfume hung in the air. They sat at a white metal desk and Nosilewska took a card index from a drawer. Like all female doctors, she could not use nail polish, but the short, round ornamental shaping of her fingertips was boyishly beautiful. High on the wall hung a small black Christ, suspended from two disproportionately massive hooks. That fascinated Stefan, but he had to pay attention: she was giving him a rundown of his duties. Her voice seemed close to breaking, as if she were about to speak in a high-pitched trill. Stefan had never written a case history of a psychiatric examination; in medical school he had copied, of course. When he found that he would not have to start one from scratch but would be adding to old notes, he appreciated Nosilewska’s helpful suggestions. She understood, as he did, that all the writing was infernally boring and futile, but that it had to be done out of respect for tradition.

  “So that’s it.”

  He thanked her and got ready to try it himself. Later he wondered whether that elegant woman in sheer white stockings and the tailored white coat with gray mother-of-pearl buttons realized what a set piece they were playing out. She rang for the
nurse, a stocky, towheaded girl.

  “Usually you walk around and ask the patients how they are, and what they think about their—well, symptoms, you know what I mean? But right now I’d like to give you a tour of part of my kingdom.”

  It was indeed her kingdom. Though he was not claustrophobic, he was keenly and unpleasantly aware of all the doors that had been locked behind him with the magic key. Bars darkened the window even here in the office, and behind the medicine locker, in the corner, lay a wrinkled fabric: a strait-jacket. The patient who was brought in was grotesquely deformed by pajama bottoms too long and tight. She wore black slippers. Her face was expressionless, but seemed to conceal some surprise. With makeup, she might have passed for attractive. Her eyebrows had been artificially blackened, apparently with coal. They extended all the way to her temples. This might have accounted for the sense of strangeness, but Stefan was so surprised by what she said, he had difficulty looking at her. She was asked in a subdued, uninterested way whether there was anything new. She smiled promisingly and replied in a reedy, melodic voice, “I had a visitor.”

  “Who was it, Suzanna?”

  “The Lord Jesus. He came at night.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. He crawled into my bed and…” And she described sexual intercourse in the most vulgar terms, looking curiously at Stefan, as if to say, “And what do you think of that?”

  Stefan froze and was so embarrassed that he didn’t know where to look. Nosilewska took out a small cigarette case, offered him one, took one for herself, and began asking the patient for details. Stefan’s hands shook so much as he tried to light her cigarette that he broke three matches. When Nosilewska asked him to check the patient’s reflexes, he did it awkwardly. Then the nurse, who had been standing by impassively, took the patient by the arm, lifted her out of her chair like a sack of laundry, and led her out.

  “Paranoia,” said Nosilewska. “She has frequent hallucinations. You don’t have to write it all down, of course, but a few words would be in order.”

  The next patient, a fat woman with reddish-gray hair, made countless fidgety gestures, as if trying to break free of the girl who held her from behind by the folds of her robe. She talked nonstop, a stream of nonsensically strung-together words that flowed on even when the doctor was asking her a question. Suddenly she jerked more violently, and despite himself Stefan flinched. Nosilewska ordered her taken away.

  The third patient was barely human. A thick, cloying stench preceded her. It would not have been easy to guess the sex of the tall, wretched creature. Bluish skin on a shriveled frame showed through the holes in her robe. Her face was large, bony, and blunt as a scarecrow’s. Nosilewska said something Stefan couldn’t catch, and the patient, who had been standing stiffly with her arms at her sides, began to speak.

  “Menin aeide thea…” She was reciting the Iliad, accenting the hexameters properly.

  After the nurse took the patient away, Nosilewska told Stefan, “She has a Ph.D. For a while she was catatonic. I wanted you to see her, because she’s pretty much a textbook case: perfectly preserved memory.”

  Stefan couldn’t help saying, “But the way she looked…”

  “It’s not our fault. I used to give her clean clothes, but a few hours later she’d look exactly the same. You can’t have a nurse standing over every coprophagic, especially these days. I’m going over to the pharmacy now, but you write out the case histories. Enter the dates and numbers in the book. Unfortunately, we have to take care of that administrative formality ourselves.”

  Stefan yearned to ask whether the sort of obscenity the first patient had used was common, but the question would have revealed his inexperience, so he held his tongue. Nosilewska left. He riffled through the papers. When he was finished, he had to force himself to get up and leave. Women were walking around. Some were giggling as they dressed up with scraps of paper, strips of rag, and string. In the comer was a bed with screens at the side and cords across the top. It was empty. As Stefan walked along the wall, instinctively trying to keep Ms back to the patients, he heard a scream of despair. He looked through a thick portal set into a small door. It was an isolation cell. The naked woman inside was throwing her body against the padded walls as if it were a sack. Her eyes met Stefan’s and she froze. For an instant she was a normal human being, ashamed of her terrible situation and her nakedness. Then she seemed to murmur something and came closer. When her face was up against the glass, her long gray hair falling across it, she opened her braised lips and licked the pane with her lacerated tongue, leaving streaks of pink-tinged saliva.

  Stefan fled, unable to control himself. He heard a scream. In a bathroom, a nurse was trying to force a howling and fiercely struggling patient into a tub. Her legs glowed bright red: the water was too hot. Stefan told the nurse to make it cooler. He knew he had been too polite, but he felt he could not reprimand her. It was too soon for that, he thought.

  A third room was filled with snoring, rattling, and wheezing. Women suffering from insulin shock lay in bed, covered with dark blankets. Here and there a pale blue eye followed Stefan with an insect’s vacant gaze. Someone’s fingers clutched his smock. Back in the corridor, he ran into Staszek.

  Stefan’s face must have looked different, because his friend slapped him on the shoulder and said, “So how was it? For God’s sake don’t take it all so seriously.” He noticed wet stains under Stefan’s arms.

  With relief Stefan told him about what the first patient said and how the others looked. It had been so horrible.

  “Don’t be childish,” Staszek said. “It’s only the symptoms of disease.”

  “I want to get out of here.”

  “The women are always worse. I was just talking to Pajpak, because I could see it coming.” Stefan noticed with satisfaction that Staszek was using his influence. “But Nosilewska really is all alone here, and she needs help. Stay with her a week to make it look good, and then we’ll get you transferred to Rygier. Or maybe—wait a minute, that’s an idea. You assisted Włostowski as an anesthesiologist, didn’t you?”

  In fact, Stefan had been good at anesthesia.

  “The thing is, Kauters has been complaining that he doesn’t have anybody.”

  “Who?”

  “Doctor Orybald Kauters,” Staszek intoned. “Interesting name, isn’t it? He looks Egyptian, but supposedly he’s descended from the Courlandian nobility. A neurosurgeon. And not bad.”

  “Yes, that would be better,” Stefan said. “At least I’d learn something. Because here…” he waved his hand.

  “I wanted to warn you earlier, but there was no time. The nurses are completely unqualified, so they are a little callous, a little brutal. In fact, they do some pretty rotten things.”

  Stefan interrupted to tell him about the nurse who almost scalded a patient.

  “Yes, that happens. You have to keep an eye on them, but basically—well, you know how people are. Behind one’s choice of a profession, there can be aberrant emotions…”

  “There’s an interesting question,” Stefan said. He was looking for an excuse not to go back to the ward and wanted to talk. They were standing under a corridor window. “A free choice of professions sounds like a good thing,” he said, “but really it’s only the law of random distribution in a large population that guarantees that all important social positions will be filled. Theoretically, it could happen that no one would want to work in the sewers, for example. Then what? Would they be drafted?”

  “It’s worked so far. The random distribution hasn’t failed. Actually, this is one of Pajpak’s favorite themes. I’ll have to tell him.” Staszek smiled, showing teeth yellowed by nicotine. “He says it’s a good thing people are so unintelligent. ‘Nothing but university professors—that would be a n-n-nightmare. Who would sweep the streets?’” Staszek intoned, imitating the old man’s voice.

  But Stefan was getting bored with this too.

  “Will you come back to the ward with me? I want to take
the case histories up to my room. I guess one should be able to write in the ward, but I can’t with that door behind me.”

  “What door?”

  “I keep feeling they’re standing behind me, looking through the keyhole.”

  “Hang a towel over the door,” Staszek said so matter-of-factly that Stefan felt reassured; Staszek must have gone through the same thing.

  “No, I’d rather do it this way.”

  They went back to the duty room, and to get there they had to pass through the three women’s rooms. A tall blonde with a ruined, terrified face called Stefan aside as if he was a stranger she was asking for help on the street instead of a doctor.

  “I see you’re new here,” she whispered, looking around nervously. “Can I talk to you for five minutes? Even two?” she begged. Stefan looked at Staszek, who stood smiling slightly, playing with a neurological rubber hammer.

  “Doctor, I’m completely normal!”

  Stefan knew that dissimulation was a classic symptom in some forms of madness, so he thought he knew how to handle her. “We’ll talk about it during rounds.”

  “We will? Really?” She seemed to cheer up. “I can see you understand me, doctor.”

  Then she leaned close and whispered, “Because there’s nothing but lunatics here. Nothing,” she added with emphasis.

  He wondered why she had been so secretive. Who else did she expect to find in an asylum? But as he walked with Staszek, it suddenly struck him: she meant everybody, including the doctors! Nosilewska too? He tried to ask Staszek, as delicately as possible, whether Nosilewska was perhaps a little strange, but his friend snorted.

  “Nosilewska?” Staszek launched into a heated defense: “Ridiculous! She comes from the best family.” He’s hopelessly in love with her, Stefan realized. Staszek suddenly looked different to him. He noticed the badly shaved spot on his bobbing Adam’s apple, his ugly teeth, an emerging pimple, the receding hairline where a few years ago there had been lush dark waves.