Salki

by Wojciech Nowicki

  I was walking around the park that day, others were walking too, but it’s not the time to list them all; I was complaining about the cold and my lost piece of attire, I was looking at the same place the Sleńdziński family looked at over a hundred years earlier and, blinded, I couldn’t see anything. I had just come back from a place, not so far away, where fields, a few trees, and a bush are all that there is. That bush marks the spot where the house was, one of the houses that belonged to my clan. There is only one bush like that in the entire neighborhood. It was planted by some great-aunt of mine; I know her name was Malwina. I felt as if I’d lost my senses when I got out of the car in that place that was not mine, because it felt as if I was going to visit a gravesite; as if somewhere under a meter of snow I wanted to find preserved traces of gravestone. My father found that stone by the bush when we visited a few years earlier. I should be the one locked up in the Holy Ghost Hospital, not Wincenty.

  Delirium tremens not only brought the Vilnius native Sleńdziski to the Holy Ghost Hospital, but also many others, including Jan Bartoszka, “a vicar from Tyniec, marital status: bachelor.” It happened in 1875, on March 29th. “Admitted with symptoms of violent madness,” the book says in the doctor’s arabesque writing, “throws himself around, beats everyone, when in a straightjacket, he kicks himself in the head.” He must’ve been quite limber, or else kicked himself while seated. What’s more, “he threatens and curses those who claim he is crazy.” This vicar has so little description to his name, that our knowledge of him is reduced to those shakes, madness, to him soiling himself, his furious attacks and maladjustment. But I find something else fascinating about him. It’s not his stay at Holy Ghost and the doctor’s care, but what came before: his church career, solitary drinking (supposedly solitary, because if not, then with whom?), long winters, long summers—because there are no good seasons for a man who lives in suspended misery, almost alone, with a detestable old hag of a housekeeper by his side—and a lack of interest in the spiritual life. Or maybe I’m wrong, maybe it was different, maybe the vicar from Tyniec was a sociable person and basked himself, as if in sunlight, in the love of people, liked to have a drink with them and played some cards for little money, just to stay busy? I can’t decide, but it’s not important; there’s a gap that could fit an entire lifetime between his alleged beginning and the end at the hospital, where they put him in a straightjacket and pronounced him crazy, and where he started kicking himself in the head. After a month of therapy, the vicar from Tyniec “is calmer—slept through the night without opiates.” It is, however, only a temporary improvement because he remains restless, the drugs don’t help, he suffers, cries, soils himself at night, screams, and won’t let others sleep. Three months later he suffered from an “epileptic seizure,” and is “restless—bites, screams that wolves are biting him.” (It’s interesting, by the way, what excites the minds of modern alcoholics, what images are brought on by a night of torment in a police station drunk-tank or a hospital, because the drunk visions of wolves and shackled ankles that people feared in the nineteenth century aren’t relevant today). At the end of the year, without signs of any visible improvement to his condition, the vicar travels the same path that the ex-tutor and many after him took—the path to Kulparkowo. Because there were three paths I know of from the records: the first is when patients leave cured, or when someone bails them out once informed of their dire condition, and takes them away; either way, once they’re outside the confines of the hospital walls: “Welcome freedom!” The second, and apparently very common path, was a journey to Kulparkowo, the brand new Lviv clinic—a dead-end path, it seems. The third path was a coffin—if there was pneumothorax involved, or if treatment lasted for too long.

  I know how those who were released felt. It must’ve felt the same way as when I was walking back from Świeradów in the direction of Gierczyn to visit my uncle, the collector. And that’s all I remember from that visit—a house and outbuildings filled with everything you could possibly collect: farm equipment, clocks, horse buggies, feeding troughs, coffers full of books and papers of unknown origin and mainly in German, so, for me, not interesting; etchings, rustic and bourgeois furniture, banners, sculptures, paintings by local and foreign painters that were preserved quite well or completely moldy. He had everything, and this massive collection would leave me in awe because I didn’t yet know how a house could become buried under objects, how uncomfortable it can become, and I couldn’t understand my family’s complaints; that they would rather have room to park their cars in the barn instead of dealing with the objects amassed there, in that chaos comprehendible only to one person—my uncle. They wanted a bathroom, a garage, and a set of proper kitchen appliances. They would dream about spending holidays at Lake Balaton, or at least a nice Sunday road trip, but my uncle wanted to keep these things because that was how he would preserve his memory. He is convinced of that to this very day. My uncle presented me recently with a stack of nineteenth-century cooking magazines filled with etchings portraying mystical objects and tools long-forgotten and unused. The names of the presented dishes leave one in complete darkness as well; they read almost like a fairytale, a novella for young girls from a different century, where everything seems unreal. He attached a tiny old photo taken during the January Uprising, showing a group of dissenters with a caption the size of several scattered poppy seeds. He, an old man with a magnifying glass, part of a long family line of teachers, deciphered the description for me. He must’ve known I wouldn’t be patient, or capable of doing it myself. He deciphered it and typed it out on his typewriter. This is how you preserve memory. I contracted this passion from my uncle, although I don’t really know him at all.

  On that day I was walking toward his house through the forest, technically not a forest anymore but a huge pit of fallen trees—not a single one was standing after the strong winds a few weeks before, and that calamity was all people talked about. A massive logging operation had started and the hills buzzed with chainsaws; workers stood in the mud of the forest paths, and the ground was squashed by trucks. The hills were shiny, bald, and it felt like walking through Mordor, all black and repulsive. Instead of a humming silence there was the thumping of axes and roaring of chainsaws, large trucks on the sides of the road, filled with lifeless trees that had been felled overnight, or just few moments ago, and had stopped being a forest. I went down into the valley and there was nothing there, just green up the brim, a valley filled with sun and echoing with the Eurythmics song. When I think back on it now, it echoed for miles. But songs can last for that long only in my memory, and I know it’s my inner storyteller, suggesting a prettier version of that walk. The saws became quiet. I walked, and the crystal clear air carried “Sweet Dreams.” I entered the valley of light. This is how those who, after months of treatment, were proclaimed cured and saw the world again must’ve felt.

  The vicar from Tyniec was not the only priest recorded on the hospital cards. Another was Benedictine Krawczyk, a capuchin from Goszyce where Miłosz lived during the war; a capuchin suffering from violent madness (I should mention that I don’t always understand why it’s mild at times and why violent at others). He arrives at the hospital in January and is released after a short stay, but his condition doesn’t improve, so he comes back. “According to those closest to the patient, it was only recently—two weeks since his ordination, after his first primitia—that he became restless. Thinks he is Christ’s plenipotentiary for healing the sick—extremely energetic—keeps his own calendar, which stays five days behind. Speaks poorly of the convent, claims that the crazy people locked themselves in there and sent him, the sane one, to an institution.” The capuchin, whenever he feels better, walks from room to room. He reads out the patients’ names and tries to cure them by taking them for a stroll. Among those people, there probably is Mr. Drużak, suffering from a “profound religious reflection,” always smiling and rather happy; only sometimes, in fits of rage, he would threaten to burn down the whole city—wh
ich, coming from a chimney sweep sounds like a legitimate threat. And then there’s Mr. Nowak: one of the many suffering from delirium tremens, who the morning after he was admitted screamed that he was being “suffocated by a phantom.” This outburst won him an extra dose of opium, but it amounted to nothing since they kept administering opium and a straightjacket the entire time. His whole stay was just a string of bad luck. One day he even “beat up Katz,” but who Katz is, we don’t know. Finally, after four months of torment, his brother comes to take him away. But it doesn’t seem like he’s taking him to a better life. Among the others cured by walking with the nutcase priest is also Mr. Sendler, “a Russian government official” from Michałowice, also suffering from delirium tremens—cured, then readmitted, then cured once more; and Mr. Zaremba, “employee of Archduke Charles Louis in Galicia” suffering from “profound reflection with a notion of persecution”—depression with hints of paranoia—and Mr. Maurycy Spira, the only Israeli in the crowd, suffering from profound reflection, and a medical student from Pińczów living in Krakow. So I attempt to find Spira; there was a doctor named Maurycy Spira who served in the Polish Legions, but mine would probably be too old to be a match. There was also another one (or the same one) in Rzeszów, president of the Bar Kochba, a Jewish sports club established in 1910, and, as I learn, one of the first Jewish clubs in Poland. I’m curious if the student managed to escape the “profound reflection” of his adolescence in one piece. And so, many years later, I wish for him to get it together and become a decent man. I can’t do much more.

  I read about this fellowship of the totally and partially crazy for the nth time; they’re all dead, gone to the other side. I recreate, I try to figure what led them to Kulparkowo. Anyway, the very fact that Krakow’s crazies were sent there, outside of Lviv, proves what Krakow really was back then: a satellite, a province, a muddy town with suburbs full of suspicious inns; a town with brothels right by the town wall on narrow streets that smelled like an outhouse. And the new, huge hospital was built in Lviv, in the then still-empty borough where the loonies wouldn’t bother anyone. It just so happens that those who were sent from Holy Ghost to Kulparkowo were some of the first because the hospital was built in 1875, the same year in which the first hospital patient cards were dated. In those days, a midgety gnome by the name of Jan Matejko reigned over the souls of all those tribesmen in Krakow. (I need to write it down in order to believe it: these are the great people this city used to have, the giants it used to praise).

  It’s a sultry spring, it’s raining, candelabra-like little blossoms start to appear on the chestnut trees; it seems as if they, and not the lanterns, are shining. You can walk and breathe in all that has accumulated: the smell of the soil, of blooming, of urine. It’s spring, a season for walks around the town in which all those patient cards had been filled out; cards that I have to keep or pass on. It seems like the doctors sent their worst cases back home at the end of the year, as if they were handing out school reports. They took inventory and decided that the chimney sweep, suffering from “profound religious reflection,” was cured, and that the vicar from Tyniec was incurable. How did they ship them back? What were the winters like back then? Did they need to put those crazies in straightjackets (probably yes, often)? Numb them with opiates measured by the tablespoon and teaspoon (most likely)? What transportation did they use? Probably the train, since from 1861 there was a connection, courtesy of Archduke Charles Louis, between Krakow and Lviv. They probably had them travel in coach too, since better seating wasn’t yet popular. Around 1875 this railway company became very popular, carrying almost one million passengers a year—I read this somewhere, amazed, and I even tried to research how long a trip lasted back then, and how long it lasts now. I don’t have any data for 1875, but in 1914 a trip from Krakow to Lviv lasted five and a half hours; today it’s six hours and fifty-eight minutes at least, but there’s a border along the way and they need to change the train’s wheelset to fit the different track size—whereas back in the day it used to be a smooth ride. This railway boom might’ve saved the patients from the Holy Ghost Hospital from a ride in a horse-and-buggy ambulance. But I can only imagine this part because I feel sorry for them after all those years; for all those suffering from “profound reflection” and lying stretched out as if nailed to a cross, too calm and deprived of any thoughts, staring blankly at the floor, those who don’t talk for years until their family realizes something needs to be done. And I feel sorry for violent madmen, dreaming of shackles and wolves, screaming at night and soiling themselves, for all who must’ve grown boring to the staff of the Krakow hospital after months and years spent in a straightjacket; years of shock therapy, leeches, cold compresses, and opiates.

  It’s not that far of a stretch from the story of the train-car full of crazies being shipped from my town to Lviv, or Kulparkowo—formerly Goldberghof—to the stories and journeys taken a little farther; journeys I discovered in the notes recorded for the sake of others’ learning. Half a century before the specters of Holy Ghost Hospital, mad from drinking, from sadness, or from love, a man named Krystyn Lach-Szyrma embarked on a journey to England and Scotland, where he was supposed to study economics. He was a keen observer, and paid attention to detail while still seeing the bigger picture, and knew how to sketch realistic images. His England and Scotland: Recollections From the Journey of 1820–1824 is still interesting even today, at least in part. He observes Great Britain without spite; he’s not some Frenchman who can’t stand the food and doesn’t like anything. Lach-Szyrma tells it how it is, providing information about how the country is organized, about its laws, prices, roads, and about its sick, including its madmen.

  He was not the only one to do so. Mental hospitals were famous as examples of charitable initiatives worth bragging about, but also as human zoos, museums where, for the sake of knowledge, or pleasure, the better part of society observes the lesser one. Among these institutions, Bedlam undoubtedly held the highest ranking, the worst of the worst, a cesspit of madness, a dumpsite for those who hit rock bottom. I saw Bedlam before I even knew about its existence in the reprints of paintings by William Hogarth, a slightly cartoonish eighteenth-century artist who was very popular in his day. His contemporaries were particularly impressed by A Rake’s Progress—the story of Tom Rakewell, a young man who inherits a fortune only to blow it all immediately—a series presented in eight paintings. The fall in this story is inevitable. Upon his father’s death, Tom already begins to enjoy some of his inherited luxuries. He goes to London, drinks, gambles, and attends orgies in a brothel. He loses everything. Then he finds a rich old hag, whom he marries—and then he’s rich again, and loses everything once more. The last two paintings depict a debtors’ prison, in which Tom starts to go mad, and Bedlam, where he lies naked on the floor, among other madmen. He lies on the ground covered by a mere cloth patch that, due to the observed decorum, is snow-white—but this whiteness is discordant from a common sense perspective. He lies senseless, not recognizing the only person who loved him despite everything, named, ironically, Anna Trulove, who even in those dire circumstances came to help him. But he can’t be helped. Tom the profligate doesn’t recognize anyone. And, in the background, behind the darkness of this human vortex, curious ladies with handheld fans enjoy a leisurely stroll as they are sightseeing the reeking chamber of half-humans; ladies free and bright among the confused and dark minds. It is Bedlam, although a milder version, because otherwise it would count as pornography. I haven’t seen Bedlam itself, but I’ve seen Hogarth’s paintings in situ, in a kind of madhouse, but one designed to host objects of arts and crafts: Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, the most crowded museum I know. Also the most peculiar one, and as if the three connected tenement houses piled to the roof with hundreds of thousands of objects of all kinds weren’t enough, right outside its walls was a city sprawling out in its weird shape, within its islandish self. It’s enough to step outside in the square to meet judges in their robes, with their case fil
es, on their way to the park for a cup of soup from a Korean bar just around the corner.

  “On the 29th of November, 1823—a month which, with its overcast skies, brings the English most of their splenetic moods and makes one most suicidal . . .” That’s how Krystyn Lach-Szyrma begins. “I have visited Bedlam. Bedlam, as is known, is a madhouse in London.”

  What follows are the descriptions of the building and sculptures in the vestibule—because they do have symbolic meaning, after all, and so we need to pay attention—and later the author writes briefly about what is inside the madhouse. “For the most part, the madhouse is not entirely unlike the lucid world. The majority of its populace are those without thoughts and unable to act, only staring in a torpor at what passes in front of their eyes. The madhouse also contains the forgotten populace. It wakens pity, but is not interesting.”—and, as Lach-Szyrma believes, that is because, just like in the outside world, all attention is naturally turned to the “upper classes where the empire’s dignitaries, reformers, politicians, heroes, prophets, kings, and gods reside.” The author then ignores the maddened mob, and walks quickly through the halls, as if they were empty. He doesn’t notice those mad from drinking, the simple folks, victims of delirium tremens, those who wake in the morning screaming, the catatonics, or those suffering from profound reflection, or those religiously agitated and lying stretched out on the ground as if crucified, or the crazed priests climbing furnaces and throwing ripped-out bricks at everyone until the allied forces of a straightjacket, drugs, and bloodletting will exhaust them and make them—as one doctor from Krakow put it—refrain from “monkeying around.” But even in the case of those he described as fate’s chosen ones—all he ever does is helplessly shrug his shoulders: “It would be difficult to distinguish all the kinds of madmen enclosed there; I will make accounts of them as they appeared in front of me.”