He was quiet again, breathing more deeply than before.
“That’s not what I really wanted to tell you. But my head won’t obey me anymore.”
“Father, can I get you anything? Are you taking any medicine?”
“They keep sticking me with needles,” his father said. “Don’t worry about it. You regret the life I led, don’t you? Tell me.”
“But Father.”
“It’s too late for lying now. You regretted the life I led, and you still do, I know that. There was never time. We were strangers. The thing is, I never wanted to give you up. Obviously, I didn’t love you, because that would have been… I don’t know. Stefan, are you doing all right?”
Now it was Stefan who could not find words.
“I’m not asking if you’re happy. You know if you’re happy only afterward, when it’s over. Man lives by change. Tell me, do you have a girl? Do you plan to get married?”
Something caught in Stefan’s throat. Here’s a man who’s dying, almost a stranger, and he’s thinking of me. Would I be able to do that? he wondered, but was unable to answer.
“Say something! You have a girl, then?”
Stefan shook his hanging head. His father’s eyes were blue, bloodshot, but most of all tired.
“Well. Advice doesn’t help. But let me tell you this. We Trzynieckis need women. That’s the way we are. We can’t handle things on our own. To live a clean life, a person has to be clean himself. You were always pigheaded—maybe I’m not saying it right, but you never knew how to forgive, and that’s everything. You don’t need to know anything else. I don’t know if you can learn now. But anyway, you don’t have to look for beauty or intelligence in a woman. Just tenderness. Feeling. The rest comes by itself. But without tenderness…”
He closed his eyes.
“Without tenderness it’s worth nothing. And tenderness is so easy.”
Then he added in his old, strong voice, “Forget all this if you want. Don’t listen to my advice. That’s wisdom too. But in that case don’t listen to anybody’s. Now what did I want to tell you? Oh yes, there are three envelopes in the desk.”
Stefan was stunned.
“And in the bottom drawer there’s a roll of paper with a ribbon around it. That’s the blueprint for my pneumomotor. The whole plan. Are you listening? Don’t forget. As soon as the Germans leave, take it to Frąckowiak. Someone has to make a model. He’ll know how.”
“But Dad,” said Stefan. “You’re talking like you’re making a will. You’re not feeling that bad, are you?”
“I’m not feeling that good either.” He did not want comforting. “That pneumomotor is worth a fortune. Believe me. I know what I’m talking about. So take it. It would be better if you took it right now.”
With his neck outstretched he whispered, “Aunt Mela is impossible. Absolutely impossible! I can’t trust her any farther than I can throw her. Take it now. I’ll give you the key.”
He almost fell out of bed reaching for his trousers, draped over the chair. In the pocket they found—under a dirty handkerchief, a roll of wire, and a pair of pliers—a bunch of keys. His father held them up to Stefan’s face and looked for a small Wertheim key. He handed it to Stefan, who took it and went to the desk. His father dozed off again.
He woke up when Stefan came back. “Well, did you get it?”
Then he looked at Stefan sharply, as if he had just remembered something. “I was not good to your mother,” he finally said. “She doesn’t even know that I’m… I didn’t want to tell her.”
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 of
fended 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.
“You give him a hundred,” he said to Stefan. Stefan paid, and the conductor opened a notebook, adding the banknote to a stack of others. He wet his finger, rubbed his pocket flap, and pulled out a key. They followed him as he crawled under the car to the other side of the train and led them to a tiny compartment. “Have a good trip,” said the conductor politely, stroking his mustache and saluting.
“Thanks very much,” said Stefan, but his traveling companion suddenly lost interest in him and turned to the window. The man’s face was not so much old as desolate, with dark skin and a thin, sunken mouth. When he took off his coat and hung it up, Stefan saw that he had large, heavy hands with fingers that looked as though they were used to gripping angular objects. His fingernails were thick and dark, like pieces of a nutshell. He pulled his cap down over his eyes and sat in the corner. The train began to move. Two more passengers could have fit into their compartment, which did not endear them to the people jammed in the corridor. Their faces were twisted into scowls. Against the glass stood an elegant man with a delicate, plump face that seemed eternally moist. He rattled the handle and knocked loudly several times. Finally he started to shout, and when his voice failed to carry through the glass, he took out a document with a German stamp and pressed it to the glass.
“Open up right now,” he roared.
For a while Stefan’s companion pretended not to hear anything, then he leaped to his feet and pounded back on the glass: “Shut up! This is a crew compartment, asshole!”
The elegant man mouthed something to save face and withdrew. The rest of the trip passed without incident. When they reached the hills approaching Bierzyniec, the stranger stood up and put on his coat. When its folds bumped the wooden partition, they made a hollow sound as if there was metal inside. The train came around the turn to the empty platform and the brakes shrieked. Stefan and the stranger jumped out as the locomotive rounded the bend, huffing to get up steam for the hill. They slipped through a gap in the iron barrier. A sentimental autumn landscape unfolded behind the station. Stefan blinked up at the sun.
The stranger walked along beside him. They went through the town and turned on to the road that ran through the gorge. The stranger seemed to hesitate for a moment.
“Are you going to the asylum?” Stefan asked, curious.
For a moment the stranger did not reply. Then he said, “No, I just want to get some fresh air.”
They walked on for a few hundred meters. At the head of the gorge, where the trees still blocked the view of the little brick building, something occurred to Stefan. “Excuse me,” he mumbled, stopping.
The stranger also stopped and looked at him.
“You wouldn’t by any chance be going to the substation? Don’t say anything, but, well—please don’t go there!”
The stranger watched him warily, neither joking nor disbelieving; the grimace of a half-smile was on his lips and his eyes were wide and unblinking. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t move either.
“There are Germans there,” Stefan said quickly, his voice hushed. “Don’t go there. They took Woch away. He was arrested. They probably…” He broke off.
“Who are you?” asked the stranger. His face had turned gray as a stone. He put his hand in his pocket, and the hint of a smile that remained on his face became an empty twist of his mouth.
“I’m a doctor at the asylum. I knew him.” He could not go on.
“There are German at the substation?” asked the stranger. He spoke like a man carrying a heavy weight. “Well, it’s none of my business,” he added slowly. He was clearly mulling something over. Then he gave a start and leaned so close that Stefan could feel his breath. “What about the others?”
“The Pościks?” Stefan caught on eagerly. “They got away. The Germans didn’t get them. They’re in the woods, with the partisans. That’s what I heard, anyway.”
The stranger looked around, grabbed Stefan’s hand and gave it a short painful squeeze, and walked straight ahead.
Before he reached the turn, he climbed the hill alongside the road and disappeared into the trees, Stefan took a deep breath and started up the hill toward the hospital. When he neared the stone arch, he turned his head and looked back, down into the woods, searching for his traveling companion. At first he was fooled by the tree trunks that showed among the bright yellow and reddish leaves. Then he spotted him. The stranger was far away, standing still, black against the background of the landscape. But only for an instant: he vanished among the trees.
Pajączkowski stood before the door of the men’s wing, a rare sight in the yard. Father Niezgłoba was with him. The priest had been feeling well for several weeks and could have returned to his pastoral duties, but his substitute from the diocese would be at his parish until the end of the year. Besides, he admitted that he had no desire to spend Christmas with his par
ishioners.
“It’s funny,” he said, “but they get angry if you don’t have a drink with every one of them. It’s the same thing at New Year’s, and Easter, with the blessed food, is the worst of all. I’m not supposed to drink now, but you think they care about my health? I’m in no hurry. It’s better if I stay here, professor,” he told Pajączkowski, “if you don’t throw me out.”
Pajączkowski had a weakness for the Church. It was only thanks to him that two Sisters of Charity notorious for their merciless treatment of patients had not been dismissed years ago when a ministerial commission came to investigate the death of a patient who had been scalded in the bathtub. Actually, they left a few weeks later, under his covert pressure. At least that was the story.
Now the priest was trying to talk Pajączkowski into letting him hold Mass next Sunday in the little chapel against the north wall of the yard. He had already checked to make sure there would be no problems with the local parish, and he had everything he needed, except for Pajączkowski’s permission. The director wanted to go ahead, but was afraid of what his colleagues might say. Everyone knew that Mass in an insane asylum was a circus. It was all right for the staff, but the priest thought that the healthier patients at least would be up to it as well.
Pajączkowski was sweating, but when he finally agreed, he calmed down at once. Then he remembered some pressing business and excused himself.
That was when Stefan arrived. “Well, Father, no more visits from the Princess?” he asked, looking around the unkempt garden. The leaves were falling from the trees on the ridge faster than from those on lower ground. At first Stefan did not realize that he had hurt the priest’s feelings.
“My mind, dear doctor, may be compared to a musical instrument with a few strings out of tune. The soul, that marvelous artist, was therefore unable to play the proper melody. But now, since you gentlemen have treated me, I am completely healthy. And grateful.”
Hospital of the Transfiguration Page 16