Hospital of the Transfiguration, Page 3

  Uncle Ksawery conferred in hurried whispers with the relatives in the gloomy drawing room, near the shiny glass of the oak bookcase, under the inlaid, lightly smoking oil lamp with the orange shade. He insisted that some stay the night, informed others about train schedules, and gave directions about who was to be wakened and when. Stefan had planned to start for home, but when he found that there was no train until three in the morning, he let himself be persuaded to stay the night. He would sleep in the drawing room opposite the clock, so he had to wait for the others to leave. It was nearly midnight when they did. Stefan washed quickly, undressed by the light of the flickering lamp, blew out the flame, and climbed between the cold sheets with an unpleasant shudder. He had felt sleepy before, but the feeling now left him as if plucked away by an invisible hand. For a long time he lay on his back trying to fall asleep, but the clock, invisible in the darkness, seemed to strike the quarters and hours with exaggerated emphasis.

  His thoughts, indefinite and vague, meandered through bits and pieces of the day’s experiences, but they tended inevitably in one direction. The whole family was made of fire and stone, passion and inflexibility. The Kielce Trzynieckis were famous for their greed, Uncle Anzelm for his rage, his great-aunt for some romantic madness lost in the mists of time. This force of destiny showed differently in different people. Stefan’s father was an inventor who did all other things strictly out of compulsion; he waved the world away as though it were a fly; sometimes he lost days, living Thursday twice and then realizing that Wednesday had been lost. This was not true absentmindedness, just excessive concentration on whatever idea was driving him at the moment. If he was not sleeping or ill, you could bet that he would be sitting in his tiny attic-workshop, among Bunsen burners, alcohol lamps, and glowing instruments, wreathed in the smell of acid and metal, measuring, polishing, welding. These actions that went into the process of inventing never ceased, though the planned inventions changed. His father went from one failure to the next with undiminished faith and a passion so powerful that strangers thought he was obtuse or oblivious. He had never treated Stefan like a child. He spoke to the small boy who appeared in his dimly lighted workshop the way he would have talked to an adult who was hard of hearing, the conversation full of interruptions and misunderstandings. Paying them no mind, moving from lathe to jig and back again, his mouth full of screws and his smock singed, he spoke to Stefan as if he were delivering a lecture, with pauses for particularly absorbed tinkering. What did he talk about? Stefan no longer really remembered, for he had been too young to grasp the meaning of those speeches, but he thought they went something like this: “What has happened and passed no longer exists, just as if it had never been. It’s like a cake you ate yesterday. Now there’s nothing left. That’s why you can make yourself a past you never had. If you just believe in it, it will be as if you really lived it.”

  Another time he said: “Did you want to be born? You didn’t, did you? Well, you couldn’t have wanted to, because you didn’t exist. I didn’t want you to be born, either. I mean, I wanted a son, but not you, because I didn’t know you, so I couldn’t want you. I wanted a son in general, but you’re the reality.”

  Stefan seldom spoke and never asked his father questions, except once, when he was fifteen. He asked his father what he would do once he had finally perfected his invention. His father’s face darkened, and after a long silence he replied that he would start inventing something else. “Why?” Stefan asked rashly. This question, like its predecessor, arose from a deeply repressed distaste, which had been crystalizing over the years, because his father’s peculiar career, as the boy knew only too well, was an object of widespread scorn—and the odium fell upon the son as well.

  Trzyniecki’s reply to his teenage son was this: “Stefan, you can’t ask things like that. Look, if you ask a dying man whether he wants to start life all over again, you can be sure he’ll say yes. And he won’t ask for reasons to live. It’s the same with my work.”

  This solemn and exhausting work earned no money, so the household was supported by Stefan’s mother, or more accurately, by her father. When Stefan learned that Trzyniecki was kept by his wife, he was so outraged that for some time he held his father in contempt. His father’s brothers had similar, though less adamant, feelings. But in time the contempt subsided. Anything that lasts too long becomes a matter of indifference. Mrs. Trzyniecki loved her husband, but sadly, everything he did was beyond her understanding. They skirmished, not really knowing why, across the border of two conflicting spheres, workshop and household. Not that his father deliberately turned more and more rooms into workshops. It just happened. Towers of wires and machinery spread over tables, wardrobes, and desks; Stefan’s mother trembled for her tablecloths, lace napkins, rhododendrons and cacti; his father did not like plants, secretly tore out their roots, and took a furtive joy when they withered. When cleaning house his mother might throw out a priceless wire or irreplaceable screw. Trzyniecki was off on a distant journey when he worked, and he really returned only during his frequent illnesses. And though Mrs. Trzyniecki felt his sufferings keenly, the fact was that she was most at peace when her husband lay moaning and helpless in bed, enveloped in hot water bottles. At least then she understood what he was talking about and what he was doing.

  As Stefan lay there listening to the tolling clock in the darkness above him, his thoughts returned to the day just past. Considered rationally, family ties—those interwoven interests and feelings, that community of births and deaths—seemed somehow sterile and tiresome. He felt a burning impulse to denounce it all, a delirious urge to shout the brutal truth in the faces of his family, to sweep away all the humdrum bustling. But when he searched for the words to address to the living, he remembered Uncle Leszek and froze, as if in terror. Stefan let his thoughts roam independently, as if he were a mere observer. A pleasant weariness came over him, a feeling that sleep was near, and just then he remembered the collective grave in the village cemetery. The vanquished fatherland had perished—a figure of speech. But that soldiers’ grave was no figure of speech, and what could he do but stand there in silence, a painful, bittersweet feeling of community greater than individual life and death beating in his heart? And Uncle Leszek nearby. Stefan saw his bare grave, uncovered with snow, as distinctly as if he were already dreaming. But he was not asleep. In his mind the fatherland merged with the family and, though they had been condemned by pure reason, both lived on in him, or perhaps he lived on in them. Well, he didn’t know anymore, and as he drifted off to sleep he pressed his hand to his heart, feeling that to free himself from them would be to die.

  STASZEK

  When Stefan opened his eyes, still bleary with sleep, he expected to see the oval mirror on gilt plaster lion’s paws that stood by his bed, the bay-front chest of drawers, and the green haze of asparagus out the window. He was surprised to find himself in a large, strange room filled with a clock’s sonorous chiming. He was lying very low, just above the floor, and dawn shined through a window frosted over with translucent ice. He could not understand why the old walls of the house next door seemed to be missing.

  Only when he sat up and stretched did he recall the previous day’s events. He got up quickly, shivering, slipped into the vestibule, and found his coat on the rack. He put it on over his shirt and headed for the bathroom. Candlelight, orange in contrast to the violet light of dawn filtering into the vestibule through the glass of the veranda, shined from behind the unlocked door. Someone was in the bathroom. Stefan recognized Uncle Ksawery’s voice and immediately felt an urge to eavesdrop. He justified his curiosity on psychological grounds: he believed that there was a single, ultimate truth about people that could be discovered by watching them when they were alone.

  He walked quietly to the bathroom and, without touching the door, peered inside through a crack as wide as his hand.

  Two candles burned on the glass shelf. Clouds of steam, yellow in the light, rose from the tub against the wall and enveloped t
he ghostly figure of his uncle who, dressed in home-spun pants and a Ukrainian-style shirt, was shaving, making strange grimaces into the dripping mirror, and declaiming emphatically, but with a caution demanded by the razor, an obscene limerick.

  Stefan, somewhat disenchanted, stood there wondering what to do when his uncle, as if he had felt his gaze (or perhaps he simply spotted him in the mirror), said in a totally different voice, without turning, “How are you, Stefan? It’s you, isn’t it? Come on in, you can wash. There’s enough hot water.”

  Stefan said good morning to his uncle and obediently entered the bathroom. He washed hurriedly, somewhat inhibited by the presence of Ksawery, who went on shaving, not paying any attention to him. There was silence for a moment, until his uncle said, “Stefan.”

  “Yes, Uncle?”

  “Do you know how it happened?”

  Stefan understood from his tone what Ksawery meant, but, reluctant to admit it, he asked, “With Uncle Leszek, you mean?”

  Ksawery, shaving his upper lip, did not answer. After a long silence, he spoke abruptly: “He came here on the second of August. He was going fishing for trout there below the mill. You know the place. Naturally he didn’t say a word. I knew him so well. We had duck for dinner, just like yesterday. But with apples, which I don’t have anymore. The soldiers took them all in September. And he didn’t want any duck. He always liked duck. That made me wonder. And he had that face. Except it’s hardest to notice in someone close to you. A man won’t admit to himself that…”

  “An aversion to meat, cachexia?” Stefan asked, realizing that he sounded ridiculous. His own knowledge somehow shamed him, even as it gave him a certain satisfaction. He stood up and dried himself quickly, not quite thoroughly, because he could sense what his uncle was going to say and he didn’t want to have to hear it naked. Because it made him feel defenseless? He didn’t try to decide. Ksawery was still looking in the mirror, his back to Stefan, and he went on without answering the question.

  “He didn’t want to be examined. And I was terrible. I made jokes, said I was studying ticklishness, that I wanted to see if his belly was bigger than mine, stuff like that. It was a tumor the size of a fist, so hard you couldn’t even move it, metastasized and everything, hell…”

  “Carcinoma scirrhosum,” Stefan said quietly, though he had no idea why. The Latin term for cancer was like an exorcism, a scientific spell that removed the uncertainty, the dread, the trembling, giving it the precision and tranquility of the inevitable.

  “A textbook case,” Uncle Ksawery mumbled as he shaved the same spot on his cheek over and over. Stefan stood motionless at the door, wrapped in the short bathrobe, his trousers in his hand. What else could he do? He listened.

  “Did you know he almost became a doctor? You didn’t? Well, he quit after the fourth year of medical school. He’d been an intern for a couple of years. We even started medical school at the same time, because I frittered away a couple of years after high school graduation. All because of a… well, never mind. Anyway, when he watched me examine him, he knew what it was. And I knew it was too late to operate, but when you’re a doctor the only other place you can send somebody is the undertaker’s. It’s never too late for that. What the hell, I thought, God knows what kind of pain he’s got. He agreed right off. I went to Hrubiński. A son of a bitch, but hands of gold. He agreed to operate but for dollars, because things were so uncertain and the złoty might go to hell. When he looked at the X rays he refused point-blank, but I begged him.”

  Ksawery turned to Stefan, looked at him as if he were holding back a laugh, and asked, “Have you ever got down on your knees to anybody, Stefan?” He quickly added, “I don’t mean in church.”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s what I did. Got down on my knees. You don’t believe it? Well I did, I’m telling you. Hrubiński operated on September twelfth. The German tanks were already in Topolów. The oats in the field were burning. The nurses had fled, so I was his assistant. The first time in years. He opened him up, sewed him up, and left. He was furious. I wasn’t surprised. But he cursed me. Everything was absurd that whole September, everywhere, and Poland, well…”

  Ksawery began sharpening his straight-razor on a belt, deliberately, slower and slower, and without stopping he said, “Right before the operation, after the scopolamine, Leszek said, ‘This is the end, isn’t it?’ So naturally I started talking the way you talk to a patient. But he meant Poland, he wasn’t talking about himself. I should go to his grave and tell him that Poland will rise again. A dreamer he was. But who knows how to die anyway? When he woke up after the operation, I was with him and he asked what time it was. Like an idiot I told him the truth. I should have set the clock ahead, because with his medical training he knew that a radical operation has to last an hour at the very least, and this was all over in fifteen minutes. So he knew…”

  “What happened then?” Stefan asked, not really wanting to know, just to fill a menacing silence.

  “Afterward I took him to Anzelm’s, that’s where he wanted to go. I didn’t see him for three months, not until December. But that’s something I never understood.” Uncle Ksawery, moving slowly, blindly, put the razor down and, standing next to Stefan, stared as if seeing something unusual at his feet. “He was in bed, he looked like a skeleton. He could barely swallow milk, his voice was frail, a blind man could see the state he was in, but he… how can I put it? He was completely confident. He explained away everything, and I mean everything. He rationalized. The operation had been a success, he was getting stronger every day, he was getting better, soon he would be up and around again. He had his hands and legs massaged. Every morning he told Aniela how he felt, and she wrote it down for the doctor so he could treat him properly. Meanwhile, the tumor was the size of a loaf of bread. But he told them to keep his belly bandaged so he couldn’t touch it, as if to protect the scar. The illness he didn’t talk about, except to say that it had been just a minor thing, or even that there was nothing wrong with him anymore.”

  “Do you think he was… abnormal?” Stefan asked in a whisper.

  “Normal! Abnormal! What does that have to do with it? He was a normal dying man! He couldn’t tear the cancer out of his body, so he tore it out of his memory. Maybe he was lying, maybe he really believed it, maybe he just wanted others to believe. How should I know which? He said that he was feeling better and better, and cried more and more often.”

  “He cried?” Stefan asked with childlike fear, remembering how strong Uncle Leszek looked on horseback, holding a double-barreled shotgun pointed at the ground.

  “Yes. And do you know why? They prescribed morphine suppositories for the pain, and he was putting them in himself. But when the nurse had to, he broke down. ‘I can’t do anything myself,’ he said, ‘except put that suppository in, and now they take that away.’ He couldn’t get up, but he said he didn’t want to. When they gave him milk, he’d say it wasn’t worth waking up for, that it would be different if it was broth, but when they gave him broth, he didn’t want that either. God, being with him then, talking to him! He’d hold his hands up, they looked like twigs, and he’d say, ‘Look, I’m putting on weight.’ He got incredibly suspicious. ‘What are you whispering about?’ ‘What did the doctor really say?’ Finally, Aunt Skoczyńska got the priest. He showed up with the oil for extreme unction and I thought, oh no, what now, but Leszek took it in perfect calm. Except that later the same night he started whispering. I thought he was talking in his sleep, so I didn’t answer. But he whispered louder: ‘Ksaw, do something.’ I went closer, and again: ‘Ksaw, do something.’ You’re a doctor, Stefan, aren’t you? So you know I had the morphine all ready, just in case he wanted… I had the right dose with me, you know, carried it in my shirt pocket all the time. That night, I thought he wanted me to… you understand. But when I looked into his eyes, I realized that he wanted to live. So I didn’t do anything, and he said it again: ‘Ksaw, do something.’ The same thing over and over, until dawn.
He didn’t say anything else, and then I had to leave. Well, yesterday Aniela told me that on the last night she went to take a nap and when she came back to see him, he was dead. But he was lying the wrong way.”

  “What do you mean, the wrong way?” Stefan whispered in uncomprehending dread.

  “The wrong way. With his feet at the head. Why? I have no idea. I guess he wanted to do something, something to stay alive.”

  Standing there in his wrinkled pants, his shirt open at the chest and traces of soap on his face, Uncle Ksawery slowly lowered his head. Then he looked at Stefan. His quick black eyes were sharp and hot.

  “I’m telling you this because you’re a doctor. It’s something you should know! I don’t know why, but I almost prayed. Unbelievable what a man can be driven to!”

  Water dripped off the mirror and onto the floor. They both jerked when the drawing-room clock struck, loud, majestic, and deliberate.

  Uncle Ksawery turned back to the basin and began splashing water on his face and neck, spitting loudly, snorting water out his nostrils. Stefan dressed hurriedly and somehow furtively, then slipped out of the bathroom without a word.

  In the dining room the table was already set. Blue icicles outside the window absorbed the day’s brightness and sent golden flashes through the panes and onto the glass of the grandfather clock, breaking into rainbows on the cut-glass carafe on the table. Uncle Anzelm, Trzyniecki from Kielce with his daughter, Great-aunt Skoczyńska, and Aunt Aniela came in one by one.

  There was a big pot of coffee on the table, a loaf of bread, pats of butter, honey. They ate in near-silence, everyone somehow subdued, looking at the sunny window and exchanging monosyllables. Stefan was careful to avoid getting the skin of the milk in his coffee. He hated that. Uncle Anzelm was thoughtful and gruff. Nothing really happened, but it took an effort to sit at the table. Stefan glanced once or twice at Uncle Ksawery, the last to appear, with no tie, his black jacket unbuttoned. Stefan felt that a secret covenant had been concluded between them, but his uncle ignored his meaningful glances, rolled pieces of bread into little balls and dropped them on the table. Then one of the village women who was helping out came in and announced loudly to the entire room, “A gentleman is here to see the younger Mr. Trzyniecki.”