Stefan half muttered something, enjoying the touch of the raw silk cover on the arm of the chair, a colossus upholstered in rich leather. Gradually he began to get his bearings: near the window was the working area of the room. Reproductions and plaster masks hung above the large desk. He recognized some of them. There was the iconography of the cretin: a flabby, snail-like body with no neck and a bug-eyed face, a worm-like tongue peeking out of the half-open mouth. Several of Leonardo’s hideous faces were framed in glass. One of them, with a chin protruding like the toe of an old shoe and with nests of wrinkles for eye sockets, seemed to stare at Stefan. There were distorted skulls and Goya’s monster with ears like folded bat wings and a clenched, twisted jaw. Between the windows hung a large alabaster mask from the church of Santa Maria Formosa: on the right side the face looked like a leering drunk, while the left half was a swollen mess with a bulging eye and a few shovel-shaped teeth.
Noting Stefan’s interest, Kauters began showing him around with evident satisfaction. He was a passionate collector. He had an oversized album of Meunier prints illustrating early devices for treating the deranged: great wooden drums, ingenious torturous leg-irons that were said to do wonders for the beclouded mind, and a pear-shaped iron gag secured by chains to prevent the patient from screaming.
Returning to his chair, Stefan noticed a row of tall jars on top of a cabinet. Murky purple and blue shapes floated in them.
“Ah, my display set,” said Kauters, pointing to them with a black cane. “This is a cephalothoracopagus, and a craniopagus parietalis, a beautiful example that, and a rare epigastrium. This last embryo is a perfect diprosopus; there’s a kind of leg growing out of the palate, slightly damaged during delivery, I’m afraid. There are a few others too, but not as interesting.”
He excused himself and opened the door. Mrs. Kauters came in carrying a black lacquered tray with a steaming poppy-colored china coffee service with silver rims. Stefan was astounded again.
Amelia Kauters had a large, soft mouth and austere eyes not unlike her husband’s. She smiled, showing convex, slightly dull teeth. You could not call her beautiful, but she was definitely striking. Her black hair was in heavy braids that swung when she moved. Aware that she had beautiful shoulders, she wore a sleeveless blouse with an amethyst triangle pin at the neck.
“How do you like our figurines?” the surgeon asked, offering Stefan a sugarbowl shaped like a Viking ship. “Well, people who have given up as much as we have are entitled to originality.”
“It’s a comfortably padded nest,” Amelia said, petting a fluffy cat that had climbed noiselessly into her lap. The full, languid lines of her thighs disappeared into the black folds of her dress.
Stefan was no longer stunned. He took it all in. The coffee was superb, the best-tasting he had had in years. Some of the furniture looked like what a Hollywood director might use for the “salon of a Hungarian prince”—if he knew nothing about Hungary. The doors of Kauters’s apartment were like a knife cutting off the ubiquitous hospital atmosphere of spotless white walls and shiny radiators.
Looking at the surgeon’s sallow face, his eyelids fluttering behind his glasses like impatient butterflies, Stefan decided that the room had to represent its owner’s mind. That’s what he was thinking when Sekułowski’s name came up.
“Sekułowski?” The surgeon shrugged. “You mean Sekuła.”
“He changed his name?”
“No, why should he? He took a pseudonym—what was that book called?” he asked, turning to his wife.
Amelia Kauters smiled. “Reflections on Statebuilding. Haven’t you read it, doctor? No? Well, we don’t have a copy. There was such a furor. How can I describe it? Well, it was a sort of essay. Supposedly about everything, but mainly about communism. The left attacked him, which was good publicity. He got very popular.”
Stefan was examining his fingernails.
“But I don’t remember it myself,” Amelia Kauters suddenly said. “After all, I was just a child. I heard about it later. I like his poetry.”
She got up to show Stefan a book of poems. As she did so, she knocked over another book, thin, in a soft pale binding. Stefan bent over to pick it up, and as he did Kauters pointed at it. “Beautiful binding, isn’t it? Skin from the inside of a woman’s thigh.”
Stefan pulled his hand away, and the surgeon took the book from him.
“My husband has a funny sense of humor,” Amelia Kauters said. “But it’s so soft. Look. Touch it.” As she spoke in her low voice, she delicately raised her hand and touched the corners of her mouth and eyes with nimble, furtive movements.
Stefan mumbled something and went back to his chair, sweating.
He felt that this strange scene was a microcosm of the people locked up in the wards. Peculiarity flourished in human beings who were removed from the usual city soil, like mutated flowers grown in special greenhouses. Then he changed his mind. Perhaps Kauters had shunned the city and created this dusky, violet interior because he was different to begin with.
On his way out, Stefan noticed an aquarium full of reflected rainbows standing behind a small screen. A goldfish floated belly-up on the surface. The image stayed with him, and he felt as if he had just completed some taxing intellectual task. He did not feel like going straight to supper, but was afraid someone might notice his absence, so he forced himself. Nosilewska sat there as always, somnolent, polite, occasionally flashing that priceless smile. Staszek—the fool—devoured her with his eyes, thinking that no one noticed.
That night Stefan could not fall asleep and finally took luminal. He dreamed of Mrs. Kauters carrying a basket of headless fish. She kept trying to give it to him. He woke up with his heart pounding and could not get to sleep until morning.
Sekułowski, it turned out, was not at all offended. He told Staszek to ask Stefan to drop in sometime before noon. Stefan went right after breakfast. The writer was sitting at the window looking at a large photograph showing a ballroom full of amused, relaxed people.
“Look at these faces,” he said. “Typical Americans. Look how self-satisfied they are, their lives all worked out: lunch, dinner, bed, and subway. No time for metaphysics, for contemplating the brutality of Things. Truly, the Old World has a special destiny: we must choose between less or more noble varieties of suffering.”
Stefan talked about his visit to Kauters. He realized that by discussing a colleague with Sekułowski he was violating an unwritten law, but he had a justification: he and the poet were both above such conventions. But of course he did not mention what Kauters had said about Sekułowski.
“Don’t be upset,” the poet said affably. “What is hideousness, after all? In art something can be well or poorly done, no more. Van Gogh paints a couple of old chamberpots and you feel like falling to your knees in awe, while some amateur makes the most beautiful woman look trite. What does it all come down to, anyway? The flash of the world, Glory, catharsis, that’s all.”
But Stefan thought that living in that kind of museum was too strange.
“You don’t like it? You could be wrong. Would you close the window for me, please?” asked the poet.
He looked especially pale in the strong light. The breeze carried the fragrance of magnolia blossoms.
“Remember,” Sekułowski went on, “that everything contains everything else. The most distant star swims at the rim of a chalice. Today’s morning dew contains last night’s mist. Everything is woven into a universal interdependence. No one thing can elude the power of others. Least of all man, the thinking thing. Stones and faces echo in your dreams. The smell of flowers bends the pathways of our thoughts. So why not freely shape that which has an accidental form? Surrounding yourself with gold and ivory trinkets can be like charging a battery. A statue the size of your finger is the expression of the artist’s fantasy, distilled over the years. And those hundreds of hours are not futile—we can warm ourselves in front of a statue as though it were a fire.”
He stopped and added wi
th a sigh, “Sometimes I am happy gazing at a stone… that’s not me, that’s Chang Kiu-Lin. A great poet.”
“How early?”
“Eighth century.”
“You said, ‘the thinking thing.’ You’re a materialist, aren’t you?” Stefan asked.
“A materialist? Oh yes, the magic wand of classification. I think that man and the world are made of the same substance, but I don’t know what that substance is—it is beyond the reach of words. But they are two arches that hold each other up. Neither can stand alone. I can tell you that the table over there will continue to exist after our death. But for whom? For the flies? It cannot be ‘our table,’ and there is no such thing as ‘being’ in general. The object immediately disintegrates. Without people, what is the table? A varnished board on four legs? A mass of mummified tree cells? A chemical conglomeration of celluloid chains? A whirlpool of electron clouds? No, it must always be something for somebody. That tree outside the window exists for me, and also for the microbes that feed on its sap. For me it is a fragment of forest, a branch against the sky. For them, a single leaf is a green ocean, and a branch an entire universe. Do we—the microbe and I—share a common tree? Not at all. So what makes our point of view any better than the microbe’s?”
“But we are not microbes,” said Stefan.
“Not yet, but we will be. We will become nitrogenous bacteria in the soil, we will enter the roots of trees, become part of an apple that someone will eat while philosophizing, just as we are philosophizing now, and while enjoying the sight of rosy clouds that contain the water of our former bodies. And so on, in an endless circle. The number of permutations is infinite.”
Satisfied, Sekułowski lit a cigarette.
“So you’re an atheist?” Stefan asked.
“Yes, but I do have a small chapel.”
“A chapel?”
“Have you read ‘A Litany to My Body’?”
Indeed, Stefan remembered that hymn to the lungs, liver, and kidneys. “An original essay.”
“No, it’s a poem. I keep my philosophical views and my creative work strictly separate, and I forbid anyone to judge me on what I have already written,” Sekułowski announced with sudden obstinacy. Dropping his cigarette on the floor, he went on, “But I do pray sometimes. My prayer used to be, ‘O God, Who art not.’ That once sounded all right. But lately it’s the Blind Powers.”
“What do you mean?”
“I pray to the Blind Powers. Because it is they who rule our bodies, the world, and even the words I am speaking right now. I know they don’t listen to prayers,” he said, smiling, “but it can’t hurt.”
It was almost eleven o’clock. Stefan had to start his rounds.
For several weeks Father Niezgłoba, a short, gaunt man with bluish veins along his arms had been in Room 8. He looked as if he had once been a laborer.
“How are you, Father?” Stefan asked softly as he came in.
The priest had been allowed to retain his cassock, which made an irregular dark blot against the white hospital walls. Stefan wanted to be delicate, because he knew that Marglewski, the thin doctor who was in charge of the ward, sometimes called the priest “the ambassador of the kingdom of heaven” and treated him to anecdotes from the lives of church dignitaries. The doctor had considerable knowledge of the subject.
“It’s torture, doctor.”
The priest’s voice was pleasant, though perhaps a bit too soft. He suffered from hallucinations of unchanging content: at a baptismal party, he heard a woman’s voice behind him. But when he turned, the voice seemed to come from a place his eye could not see.
“Is the Arabian princess still with you?”
“Yes.”
“You realize that it’s only a vision, Father, a hallucination?”
The priest shrugged. His eyes were heavy with sleeplessness, tiny lines covering his lids.
“This conversation with you, doctor, might be equally unreal. I hear that voice as clearly as I hear yours.”
“Well, don’t worry. It’ll pass. But no more alcohol ever again.”
“I would never have done that,” he said with remorse, looking down at the floor. “But my parishioners are such terrible sinners.” He sighed. “They were always offended, angry, and persistent, so I…”
Stefan checked the man’s reflexes mechanically, put the hammer back in his smock, and asked just before he left, “What do you do all day, Father? You must be climbing the walls. Do you want a book?’
“I have a book.”
And indeed he took out a dog-eared tome with a black cover.
“Really? What is it?”
“I’m praying.”
Stefan suddenly remembered the Blind Powers and stood in the door for a moment. Then, perhaps too abruptly, he left.
He no longer visited Nosilewska’s ward. He had lost interest in the fates of the individual patients, as he had in the gruesome pictures in Uncle Ksawery’s anatomical atlas, which had fascinated him as a child. He exchanged a few words with Pajpak now and then, and occasionally assisted him on morning rounds.
Working with Kauters, he became acquainted with a ward nurse named Gonzaga. Big-boned and fat, she looked threatening in her wide skirts. But the threat was only potential, for no one had ever seen her angry. She affected people as a scarecrow did sparrows. Her cheeks dropped in heavy folds to the blue line of her mouth. Her enormous hands always held the key in its leather ring, a clipboard of medical records, or a pack of compresses. She never dealt with trays of syringes: there were orderlies for that. Handy with instruments, quiet and solitary, she seemed to have no private life. Kauters appeared to respect her. Once Stefan saw the tall surgeon standing in front of her with both hands on his chest, his shoulders moving nervously, as if he were trying to justify himself, convince her of something, or ask a favor. Sister Gonzaga stood there large and immobile, unblinking, the light from the window falling across her face. The scene was so unusual that it stuck in Stefan’s mind. He never found out what it was about. Sister Gonzaga could be found in the corridor at any time of day or night, moving like the moon with even steps invisible under her skirt, her lace cap brightening the dim hallway.
Stefan spoke to her only when ordering procedures or medication for the patients. Once, when he had just come back from seeing Sekułowski and was looking for a bottle in the supply-room cabinet, Sister Gonzaga, who was jotting something down in a notebook, suddenly said, “Sekułowski is worse than a madman. He’s a comedian.”
Stefan turned around. “Were you speaking to me, Sister?”
“No. I was speaking in general,” she replied, and said no more.
Stefan did not recount the incident, but he did ask the poet whether he knew Sister Gonzaga. Sekułowski, however, took no interest in the auxiliary personnel, though he did have a succinct opinion of Kauters: “Have you noticed what a stage decorator’s mentality he has?”
“How do you mean?”
“Two-dimensional.”
In a far comer of the grounds stood the neglected, nearly forgotten ward for catatonics, overgrown with morning glories that had not yet sprouted leaves. Stefan seldom went there. At first he had yearned to clean out those Augean stables—a gloomy hall with an oppressive blue ceiling in which the patients stood, lay, or knelt in frozen positions. But his reforming impulse had faded quickly.
The catatonics lay on bedframes without mattresses. Their bodies, caked with dirt, were covered with sores caused by the wires and springs of the bedding. Piercing smells of ammonia and excrement filled the air. This lowest circle of hell, as Stefan called it, rarely saw a nurse. Some unknown force seemed to sustain the existence of these mindless people.
Two young boys attracted Stefan’s attention. A Jew from a small town, who had a round head capped with dry, red hair, sat endlessly in his cubicle, bent over on the bed, always naked, with a blanket pulled up over his head. All day long, tirelessly, he called out two words of gibberish. Whenever anyone approached, he raised his voice
to a prayerful complaint and shivered. His blue eyes stared permanently at the iron bedframe. The other boy, whose hair was the color of rye, walked up and down the passageway between the main hall and the Jew’s cubicle, from the bed in the comer to the wall and back again. In this eight-step Golgotha he always banged against the bed rail, but he was unaware of it. A discolored sore swelled above his hip. He held his hands crossed on his chest or over his face, but he never stopped walking. When someone came in, he would utter a childlike moan that sounded strange coming from a man. And he was becoming a man. Freed of the rule of the intellect, his body led an independent existence, and the arcs of muscle on his slender, statuesque torso shined under his open shirt. His face was as pale as the wall he bounced off, his blue eyes set in an alternating expression of curiosity and entreaty.
Once Stefan went to the catatonics’ ward at an unusual hour, after dinner, to check on a suspicion that an orderly named Ewa was doing something improper with the boys, who were always highly agitated after she had been there. The Jew would tremble so violently that the bedframe shook, and the thin boy raced down the narrow corridor, hitting his hip on the bed, bouncing off, and smacking into the wall.
The room was filled with misty twilight. The wind rattled a branch against the windowpane. Stefan stopped in the corridor; Nosilewska was standing at the Jew’s bed, slowly pulling the blanket off his head. For a moment he tried to resist, tugging with his thick fingers. With an infinitely light and gentle hand, she stroked his stiff, bristly hair. Her face was turned to the window, and she seemed to be looking far off into the distance, but the irregular cracks of the outside wall were only four feet beyond the windowpane.
Stefan looked off to the side; in a patch of shadow he saw the other boy, who, having interrupted his endless journey, was pressed into the embrasure, staring at the woman’s silhouette outlined against the window. Stefan wanted to go in and ask for an explanation, but he withdrew and left as quietly as he had come.
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