Hospital Of The Transfiguration by Stanislaw Lem

Author:Stanislaw Lem [Lem, Stanislaw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Marglewski’s Demonstration

In the hot days of July, the hospital finally caught up with the influx of wartime casualties. A balance between admissions and discharges was reached. At noon, the overhead sun truncating the stubby shadows of the trees in the yard, patients wandered in their underwear. A primitive shower was arranged for them in the evenings with a pump worked by Joseph, the big peasant nurse with an old face and a young body.

Stefan was sitting in the ambulatorium, where sparks of sunshine glimmered like filaments in a quartz lamp. He was writing up the admission of an ex-prisoner from a concentration camp. Some stroke of luck had opened doors for this man that usually swung in only one direction.

Marglewski came down the corridor and looked in. He seemed interested in the case. He whistled. “A beautiful cachexia,” and laid his hand on the head of the ragged little man, who looked like a pile of old linen in the room’s shining whiteness. The man sat immobile on a swivel stool. Two lopsided furrows cut across his cheeks from his eyes and disappeared into his beard.

“Debility? An idiot?” asked Marglewski, keeping his hand on the poor man’s head. Stefan stopped writing and looked up in surprise.

Bright tears rolled down the patient’s cold, purplish cheeks and into his beard.

“That’s right,” Stefan said, “an idiot.”

He stood up, pushed the papers into a corner of the desk, and went to see Sekułowski. He began awkwardly, saying that he had changed his mind on certain points and that it was high time to shed some of his intellectual baggage.

“Some concepts are obsolescent,” he said, trying to sweeten an avowal of cynicism. “I have just experienced a small catharsis.”

“Last year” Sekułowski said, “Woydziewicz gave me some cherry vodka that produced a genuine catharsis on a large scale. I suspect him of having thrown in some cocaine.” But when he saw Stefan’s expression, he said, “But go on, doctor. I’m listening. You are seeking and you have hit the target. Insane asylums have always distilled the spirit of the age. Deviation, abnormality, and weirdness are so widespread in normal society that it is hard to get a handle on them. Only here, concentrated as they are, do they reveal the true face of the times.”

“No, that’s not what I’m talking about,” said Stefan, suddenly feeling terribly lonely. He searched for words but could not find them. “No, in fact it’s nothing,” he said, backing up and leaving in a hurry, as if he feared the poet would detain him.

But Sekułowski was absorbed by a spider climbing the wall behind his bed. He swatted it with a book, and when it fell to the floor, he sat staring at the blot of fluttering, threadlike legs.

Returning along the corridor, Stefan ran into Marglewski, who invited him to his apartment. “I have a bottle of Extra Dry,” he said. “Why don’t you drop in, and we can get rinsed out.”

Stefan declined, but Marglewski took the rejection for mere politeness. “No, come on, don’t be silly.

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