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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
In September 1913, Mieczysław Wojnicz, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior? Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the nearby highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone – or something – seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target. A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.
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‘Olga Tokarczuk is inspired by maps and a perspective from above, which tends to make her microcosmos a mirror of macrocosmos. She constructs her novels in a tension between cultural opposites: nature versus culture, reason versus madness, male versus female, home versus alienation. Her magnum opus so far is the historical novel The Books of Jacob, portraying the eighteenth-century mystic and sect leader Jacob Frank. The work also gives us a remarkably rich panorama of an almost neglected chapter in European history.’
— 2018 Nobel Committee for Literature
‘A magnificent writer.’
— Svetlana Alexievich
‘A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.’
— Annie Proulx
‘One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.’
— The Economist
Praise for The Books of Jacob
‘[A] visionary novel…. Tokarczuk is wrestling with the biggest philosophical themes: the purpose of life on earth, the nature of religion, the possibility of redemption, the fraught and terrible history of eastern European Jewry. With its formidable insistence on rendering an alien world with as much detail as possible, the novel reminded me at times of Paradise Lost. The vividness with which it’s done is amazing. At a micro-level, she sees things with a poetic freshness…. The Books of Jacob, which is so demanding and yet has so much to say about the issues that rack our times, will be a landmark in the life of any reader with the appetite to tackle it.’
— Marcel Theroux, Guardian4
‘The Books of Jacob is a spellbinding epic, one of the great literary achievements of the decade: a poetically brimful recreation of the world of a Jewish false messiah in eighteenth-century Poland, but beyond as well to mystically drawn priests and errant aristocrats. Charged with a sensuous immediacy it’s the kind of hypnotic novel you not so much read as dwell in, and which then, magically, comes to dwell in you.’
— Simon Schama, Financial Times
‘Sophisticated and ribald and brimming with folk wit…. The comedy in this novel blends, as it does in life, with genuine tragedy.’
— Dwight Garner, New York Times
Praise for Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
‘Drive Your Plow is exhilarating in a way that feels fierce and private, almost inarticulable; it’s one of the most existentially refreshing novels I’ve read in a long time.’
— Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
‘Though the book functions perfectly as noir crime – moving towards a denouement that, for sleight of hand and shock, should draw admiration from the most seasoned Christie devotee – its chief preoccupation is with unanswerable questions of free will versus determinism, and with existential unease…. In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation, the prose is by turns witty and melancholy, and never slips out of that distinctive narrative voice…. [A]n astonishing amalgam of thriller, comedy and political treatise, written by a woman who combines an extraordinary intellect with an anarchic sensibility.’
— Sarah Perry, Guardian 5
Praise for Flights
‘Flights works like a dream does: with fragmentary trails that add up to a delightful reimagining of the novel itself.’
— Marlon James, author of Moon Witch, Spider King
‘Olga Tokarczuk is a household name in Poland and one of Europe’s major humanist writers, working here in the continental tradition of the “thinking” or essayistic novel. Flights has echoes of W. G. Sebald, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić, but Tokarczuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her own…. Flights is a passionate and enchantingly discursive plea for meaningful connectedness, for the acceptance of “fluidity, mobility, illusoriness”. After all, Tokarczuk reminds us, “Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.” Hotels on the continent would do well to have a copy of Flights on the bedside table. I can think of no better travel companion in these turbulent, fanatical times.’
— Kapka Kassabova, Guardian
‘It’s a busy, beautiful vexation, this novel, a quiver full of fables of pilgrims and pilgrimages, and the reasons – the hidden, the brave, the foolhardy – we venture forth into the world…. The book is transhistorical, transnational; it leaps back and forth through time, across fiction and fact. Interspersed with the narrator’s journey is a constellation of discrete stories that share rhyming motifs and certain turns of phrase…. In Jennifer Croft’s assured translation, each self-enclosed account is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language balletic, unforced.’
— Parul Sehgal, New York Times
‘The best novel I’ve read in years is Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (trans. Jennifer Croft).’
— Rabih Alameddine, author of An Unnecessary Woman6
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THE EMPUSIUM
A HEALTH RESORT HORROR STORY
OLGA TOKARCZUK
Translated by
ANTONIA LLOYD-JONES
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9‘Every day things happen in the world that can’t be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they’re mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.’
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, tr. Richard Zenith10
CONTENTS
CAST OF CHARACTERS
MIECZYSŁAW (MIECZYŚ) WOJNICZ
A student of hydroengineering and sewage systems, from Lwów
LONGIN LUKAS
A Catholic, traditionalist, gymnasium
teacher, from Königsberg
AUGUST AUGUST
A socialist, humanist, classical philologist and writer, from Vienna
WALTER FROMMER
A theosophist and privy counsellor, from Breslau
THILO VON HAHN
A student of the Beaux-Arts and connoisseur of the landscape, from Berlin
DOCTOR SEMPERWEISS
A psychoanalyzing doctor, from Waldenburg12
WILHELM (WILLI) OPITZ
Proprietor of the Guesthouse for Gentlemen in Görbersdorf, whose uncle served in the Swiss Guard
RAIMUND
Opitz’s young assistant
GYÖRGY
A philosopher, from Berlin
AND
Frau Weber and Frau Brecht
Gliceria
Herri met de Bles
Klara Opitz, wife of Wilhelm
Sydonia Patek
Frau Large Hat
Tomášek
Saint Emerentia
The Tuntschi
Charcoal burners
Nameless inhabitants of the walls, floors and ceilings1314
I.
THE GUESTHOUSE FOR GENTLEMEN
The view is obscured by clouds of steam from the locomotive that trail along the platform. To see everything we must look beneath them, let ourselves be momentarily blinded by the grey haze, until the vision that emerges after this trial run is sharp, incisive and all-seeing.
Then we shall catch sight of the platform flagstones, squares overgrown with the stalks of feeble little plants – a space trying at any cost to keep order and symmetry.
Soon after, a left shoe appears on them, brown, leather, not brand new, and is immediately joined by a second, right shoe; this one looks even shabbier – its toe is rather scuffed, and there are some lighter patches on the upper. For a moment the shoes stand still, indecisively, but then the left one advances. This movement briefly exposes a black cotton sock beneath a trouser leg. Black recurs in the tails of an unbuttoned wool coat; the day is warm. A small hand, pale and bloodless, holds a brown leather suitcase; the weight has caused the veins to tense, and now they indicate their source, somewhere deep inside the bowels of the sleeve. Under the coat we glimpse a flannel jacket of rather poor quality, slightly crumpled by the long journey and marked by tiny bright dots of some non-specific impurity – the world’s chaff. The white collar of a shirt is visible too, the button-on kind, evidently changed quite recently, because its whiteness is fresher than the white of the actual shirt and contrasts with the sallow tone of the traveller’s face. Pale eyes, eyebrows and eyelashes make this face look unhealthy. Against the deep red of the western sky the whole figure gives the unsettling impression of having arrived here, in these melancholy mountains, from the world beyond.16
The new arrival walks towards the main hall of the station, surprisingly large for this highland region, along with the other passengers, but unlike them walks unhurriedly, perhaps reluctantly, and is not greeted or met by anyone. Putting the suitcase down on the worn tiled floor, the traveller pulls on a pair of quilted gloves. One of them, on the right hand, is soon curled and put to the mouth to receive a volley of short, dry coughs.
The young person stoops and searches for a pocket handkerchief. The fingers alight on the spot where a passport is hidden beneath the fabric of the coat. If we focus our attention on it, we shall see the fanciful handwriting of a Galician official, who has carefully filled in the fields on the document as follows: Mieczysław Wojnicz, Catholic, student at Lwów Polytechnic, born 1889, eyes blue, height average, face round, hair fair.
The said Wojnicz is now heading for the main station hall in Dittersbach, a small town near Waldenburg. As he walks hesitantly across this tall, gloomy space, where an echo is sure to inhabit the top cornices, he can sense someone’s eyes scrutinizing him from behind the ticket windows in the waiting room. Wojnicz checks the time on a large clock – it is late, his was the last train from Breslau – then, after a moment’s dithering, goes out in front of the station building, where at once he is enfolded in the broad embrace of the ragged mountain horizon.
It is mid-September, but here, as the newcomer notices to his amazement, the summer is already long over and the first fallen leaves are lying on the ground. The past few days must have been rainy, because a light mist still fills most of the landscape, making an exception only for the dark lines of streams. Wojnicz’s lungs feel the high altitude, which is good for his enfeebled body. He stands on the station steps, suspiciously eyeing the thin leather 17soles of his shoes; he will have to think about winter boots. In Lwów the asters and zinnias are still flowering, and no one has thought about the autumn yet. But here the tall horizon makes it darker, and the colours seem more garish, almost vulgar. Just then he is overcome by a familiar sense of sadness, typical of those convinced of their own impending death. The world around him feels like stage scenery painted on a paper screen, as if he could stick a finger into this monumental landscape and drill a hole in it leading straight to nothingness. And as if nothingness will start pouring out of there in a flood, and will catch him up too, grab him by the throat. He has to shake his head to be rid of this image. It shatters into droplets and falls onto the leaves. Luckily an ungainly vehicle resembling a britzka comes rolling along the road towards him. In it sits a slim, freckled boy wearing a strange outfit, reminiscent of a military jacket of obscure provenance – not like a Prussian uniform, which would be understandable in this place – and a military forage cap, fancifully tilted on his head. Without a word he stops in front of Wojnicz and, muttering something, takes his luggage.
‘How are you, my good fellow?’ asks Wojnicz politely in schoolboy German, but he waits in vain for an answer; the boy pulls his cap low and impatiently points to a seat for him in the britzka.
And at once they move off. First through the town over cobblestones, then along a road that in the falling darkness takes them through forest, along a winding track between steep mountain slopes. They are accompanied by the constant murmur of a nearby stream and its smell, which unsettles Wojnicz badly: the odour of damp brush, rotting leaves, eternally wet stones and water. In an attempt to establish contact he asks the driver questions, how long will their journey be, for example, how did he 18recognize him at the station, what is his name, but the boy remains silent and does not even glance at him. A gas lantern placed on the boy’s right side partly illuminates his face, which in profile resembles the snout of a highland rodent, a marmot, and Wojnicz guesses he must be either deaf or insolent.
After about three quarters of an hour, they emerge from the shadow of the forest onto an unexpected plateau between the wooded mountains. The sky is fading, but that tall, imposing horizon, still visible, brings a lump to the throat of any new arrival from the lowlands.
‘Görbersdorf,’ says the driver suddenly, in an unexpectedly shrill, boyish tone.
But Wojnicz can see nothing beyond a dense wall of darkness that is heedlessly breaking free of the mountainsides in whole sheets. Once his eyes have grown used to it, a viaduct suddenly looms before them, under which they drive into a village; beyond it, the vast bulk of a red brick edifice comes into sight, followed by other, smaller buildings, a street, and even two gas lamps. The brick edifice proves colossal as it emerges from the darkness, and the motion of the vehicle picks out rows of illuminated windows. The light in them is dingy yellow. Wojnicz cannot tear his eyes from this sudden, triumphal vision, and he looks back at it for a long time, until it sinks into the darkness like a huge steamship.
Now the britzka turns into a narrow side road along the stream and crosses a small bridge, on which the wheels raise a noise like the sound of gunfire. At last it stops outside a sizeable wooden building with very strange architecture that brings to mind a matchstick house – there are so many verandas, balconies and terraces. A pleasant light glows in the windows. Under the first-floor windows there is a beautiful sign in Gothic script 19carved out of thick tin:
With relief, Wojnicz alights from the britzka and fills his lungs with a mighty gulp of this new air, which is said to cure the most critical cases. But perhaps he does it too soon, because at once such an acute coughing fit assails him that he must lean against the balustrade of the bridge. As he coughs, he feels a chill and the nasty, slippery texture of rotten wood, and the positive first impression evaporates. Unable to restrain the violent spasms of his diaphragm, he is seized by overwhelming fear – that he is about to choke, that this will be his final attack. He tries to ward off panic, just as Doctor Sokołowski has advised him, by thinking of a meadow full of flowers, of warm sunshine. He makes a great effort, though his eyes are watering and his face is flushed. He thinks he is about to cough up his soul.
But then he feels a grip on his shoulder, and a tall, well-built man with grey-speckled hair offers his hand. Through his tears, Wojnicz sees a pink, healthy face.
‘Come along, my fellow. Let’s pull ourselves together,’ says the man confidently, with a broad smile that makes the visitor – though worn out by all the coughing – feel like huddling up to him and letting himself be taken off to bed like a child. Oh yes, indeed. A child. To bed. In some confusion, he throws his arms around the man’s neck and lets himself be led through a hallway smelling of spruce smoke and up some stairs softly carpeted with a runner. All this prompts a remote association with wrestling, with a male sport in which hard bodies press against each other, rub and strike one another, though not to do each other harm, but quite the opposite, to show each other 20tenderness and affection under the guise of combat. He surrenders to the strong hands and allows himself to be guided to a room upstairs, to be seated on the bed and divested of his overcoat and sweater.
Wilhelm Opitz – for so the man introduces himself, pointing a finger at his chest – covers him with a woollen rug, and from hands that appear briefly in the doorway receives a mug of hot, tasty broth. While Wojnicz drinks it in small sips, Wilhelm Opitz raises his finger (Wojnicz is realizing what an essential part of Wilhelm that finger is) and says in soft, slightly comical German:
‘I wrote to Professor Sokołowski that you should take a break in Breslau. It is too long and tiring a journey. I said so.’
The broth floods Wojnicz’s body with warmth, and the poor boy is unaware of the moment when he falls asleep. We shall keep him company a while longer, listen to his calm breathing – we are pleased that his lungs have settled down.
Now our attention turns to a streak of light as thin as a blade that falls into the room from the corridor and stops on the porcelain chamber pot underneath the bed. We are drawn to the cracks between the floorboards – and there we disappear.
◆
At a quarter to seven, Wojnicz was awoken by the sound of a bugle, thanks to which it took him a while to work out where he was. The tune it was playing sounded off-key, which amused him and put him in a good mood. It seemed familiar, in the way that applies to things so simple as to be brilliant – as though they have existed forever, and always will. 21
Mieczysław Wojnicz was afflicted by various conditions best understood not by him but by his father, January Wojnicz, a retired civil servant and landowner. He managed these disorders with great competence, gravity and tact, treating the property entrusted to him in the figure of his son with great responsibility and – it was plain to see – love, albeit devoid of any sentimentality or any of the ‘female emotions’ that he so abhorred.
One of these afflictions, which had to some extent been shaped by the father, was the son’s exaggerated fear of being spied on. Young Wojnicz devoted much attention to the gaze of others, constantly checking to see if someone’s eyes were following him from around a corner, from an angle, through a window in which a curtain had twitched, or through a keyhole. The father’s caution and suspicion had given rise to the son’s obsession. He felt as if another person’s gaze were something sticky that adhered to him like the soft, hideous oral cavity of a leech. And so, in every room where he was to spend the night, he carefully examined the curtains, blocked the keyhole with a ball of paper, checked for holes in the wall and chinks between the floorboards, even peeked behind the pictures. After all, at guesthouses and hotels peeping was not entirely unlikely – one time, when he and his father had stopped at a hotel during one of their health-related visits to a specialist in Warsaw, the young Wojnicz had discovered a neat hole in the wall, clumsily disguised by the rich pattern of the wallpaper, so naturally he had glued it up with a lump of bread; next morning when he tried to investigate who might be watching the guests and from where, he discovered that the servants’ stairwell, used by hotel staff, was on the other side of the wall. Aha! So he wasn’t being paranoid. People do spy on each other. They love to watch another person while he is unaware of it. They 22love to judge and compare. Those who are observed in this way are defenceless – unwitting, helpless victims.
Once awake, Wojnicz immediately set about writing a message to his father to reassure him. It was a matter of a few simple words, yet he didn’t find it easy; his forearm felt numb and weak. So he focused all his attention on his hand, as it ran the pencil tip across a sheet of cream-coloured paper in a leather-bound notebook. We find this movement fascinating, we like it. It reminds us of the winding lines and spiral flourishes that earthworms bore underground, and that weevils carve into tree trunks. Wojnicz sat in bed, propped up on two mighty pillows. Before him lay a clever piece of furniture, something like a small table with no legs. Its underside consisted of a pillow stuffed with peas, allowing it to rest easily on the knees of the person writing.
First, two figures appeared, forming ‘13’, then a straight line and a cross, ‘IX’, and after it another four figures taking shape as ‘1913’. Then from the flourishes the name ‘Görbersdorf’ appeared, underlined several times. The umlaut was treated with special reverence. The pencil continued to move evenly and persistently across the paper, the graphite creaking as the paper sagged beneath the round shapes of the letters.
The room was modest, but comfortably furnished. Two windows looked onto the street and the stream in front of the house, but the view was obscured by some crocheted curtains. Under one of the windows stood a small round table and two upholstered chairs, comfortable but rather shabby – a cosy corner for reading, if one so wished. To the left of the door stood the bed, with a beautifully carved wooden headboard, and next to it a wardrobe. There was a small dressing table to the right of the door. The walls were covered with fabric paper in broad light-blue stripes, 23which made the room look taller and more spacious than it really was. On the wall hung prints from exotic parts: a down of hares and a pack of hyenas.
Writing in Polish, Wojnicz briefly described his impressions of the journey, converting one thousand nine hundred feet into metres (it came out at almost six hundred), and transferred these figures onto a rough map illustrating his journey from Lwów. His commentaries were mainly about the meals he had eaten on the way. Next to ‘Wrocław/Breslau’ he wrote: ‘Pumpkin soup, followed by purée with lardons, cabbage and a cutlet exactly like our pork chops. For dessert, a vanilla pudding with meringue and blackberry compote, very tasty.’ Underneath he added: ‘Price: 5 marks.’ He had promised his father he would send him a few words each day, preferably about his state of health, but he didn’t really know how he was feeling, so he chose instead to send menus or geographical information.
There was a soft knock at the door, and before he had time to say ‘Come in’, a leather boot had wedged its way into the gap between the frame and the door, gently opening it; next the black pleats of a skirt appeared, the lacy edge of an apron and a breakfast tray, which was soon standing on the little table. The boots, lace and apron vanished as quickly as they had appeared, and the bewildered Wojnicz merely managed to pull his rug over himself, stammer a greeting and say thank you. He was so hungry that he was interested only in the food.
He recorded it at once in his jotter: hard-boiled eggs, two, in lovely faience cups, covered with little hen-shaped hats, slices of smoked sheep cheese garnished with parsley, balls of the yellowest butter served on a horseradish leaf, a small bowl of fragrant lard with a little knife for spreading it, a radish cut into slices, a basket filled with 24bread rolls of various kinds, light and dark, morello cherry jam in a glass dish, a mug of thick cocoa and a small jug of coffee.
At the end of the next sentence, the notebook banged shut, and Wojnicz delighted in eating everything that was on the tray. Then, invigorated by the meal, he got up. With the rug around his shoulders, he tottered to his suitcase, extracted a neatly folded set of underclothes, and set about his ablutions. As he was drying his face on a towel imbued with the scent of pine that pervaded the guesthouse, a vivid image appeared before his eyes, of his family’s house in the country, and of underclothes drying in the attic in winter, when it was pouring outside and Gliceria took them up there in pails. He could clearly see the attic, always full of dust, and the view from its small windows known as bull’s eyes – the image of fields and a small park – and the acrid smell of rotting tomato stalks, sweetcorn and beans on poles. And by the laws of some inexplicable synaesthesia this image changed into a physical sensation: the coarseness of fabric, the stiffness of collars, the angularity of freshly pressed trousers and the pinch of a hard leather belt. And it was there, in the attic, as soon as he could, whenever he was alone and out of the reach of his father’s discipline, that he undressed entirely; he would wrap his naked body in a satin tablecloth edged with a soft fringe and, feeling how blissfully it brushed against his thighs and calves, he would think how wonderful it would be if people could go about in tablecloth tunics, like the ancient Greeks. But now, with the memory of that satin toga, he dressed and was pleased to feel strong and rested at last.
We are witnesses as the clothing appears in layers on his slender body, until finally his figure, entirely different from yesterday’s, coughing and ashen-faced, stands with 25a hand on the doorknob, eyes closed, imagining how it would appear to the eyes of someone who might now be observing it. It looks good – a slender young man with fair hair and subtle features in formal grey trousers and a brown woollen jacket. Moments later, he resolutely opens the door.
No, we do not regard it as an obsession, at most as innocent oversensitivity. People should get used to the fact that they are being watched.
◆
At about ten o’clock Wojnicz went downstairs, ahead of his appointment to be examined at the Kurhaus.
The whole house was in semi-darkness, because the windows were small and few, as was typical of highland architecture. Here there was an oval table covered with a thick, patterned cloth, a sofa and several chairs, while against the wall stood an upright piano, rarely used, judging by the isolated fingerprints on its glossy lid and the wad of yellowing musical scores. A small shelf hanging beside it was full of books about the region, the local ski trails and sights. In a huge, glazed sideboard a beautiful porcelain dinner service was on display, white with sentimental scenes of shepherds and sheep in cobalt blue.
‘Gemütlich,’ Wojnicz whispered to himself, pleased to have remembered a German word that he particularly liked. That word was missing from his language. Cosy? Nice?
The words of Doctor Sokołowski came back to him too, from the days when he had first treated Wojnicz and started to tackle his apathy – that life should be made appetizing. Yes, appetizing, that was a better word than gemütlich, thought Wojnicz, for it could refer not only to 26space, but to everything else as well – to someone’s voice, to a way of speaking, of sitting in an armchair, or tying a scarf around one’s neck, to the way cakes were arranged on a plate. He ran a finger over the olive-green velvet tablecloth, and it was some minutes before, to his horror, he noticed a thin man sitting in an armchair by the window. He had distinctive, bird-like features, and a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles on his prominent nose. He was wreathed in a cloud of cigarette smoke. In Wojnicz’s confusion, his hand bounced off the velvet as if scalded and vanished in the embrace of its partner. Equally disconcerted by this discovery of his solitude, the man stood and introduced himself quite officially, in German, with a strange Silesian accent: ‘Walter Frommer. From Breslau.’
Wojnicz slowly and clearly pronounced his own first name and surname, in the hope that the other would remember them: ‘Mi-etchy-swuff Voy-nitch.’ In their brief conversation, Frommer informed him that he was treated in Görbersdorf regularly, and had been there for the better part of three years. He returned to Breslau at intervals, but there his condition immediately worsened.
‘You see, the city of Breslau lies on water. In spring, swarms of mosquitos hover above the buildings, small but extremely venomous, and people suffer from rheumatism. In summer it’s impossible to sit out in the garden, so government officials are posted there for only a few years before they move on to better places. Breslau is a transitional city.’ A sorrowful note appeared in his voice, as though he sympathized with the city. ‘It’s because of the omnipresent water, it creeps in everywhere… I tolerate it poorly.’ He began to cough. ‘Oh, you see, at the very thought of it I cough.’
Wojnicz looked away towards the window, just as a jolly company walked past outside, bursting into occasional 27laughter. He thought the people were laughing in Polish, though he couldn’t quite explain this impression. From afar their words were inaudible.
‘Are you preparing for a transfer to the Kurhaus too?’ he asked Frommer.
He thought this question might raise a faint smile on the face of his interlocutor, but the man took it seriously.
‘God forbid,’ he said, bristling. ‘There are too many people there. You can’t see anything from there. You won’t find anything out. Life in a crowd is worse than prison.’
So by now Wojnicz had a fairly well-formed opinion on the topic of Walter Frommer – he was an oddball.
He was apparently equally bashful, because they stood facing each other in awkward silence, while each waited for the other to utter some conventional remark. They were saved from this deadlock by Wilhelm Opitz.
‘I hope I am not disturbing you in the heat of conversation,’ said the proprietor, and Wojnicz wondered briefly if he were mocking them, or if he were quite so unobservant. But Wilhelm took him by the arm with a strong grip and led him towards the exit.
‘Excuse me, but I must pass this young person into the attentive care of Doctor Semperweiss. Our guest arrived here in a pitiful state.’
Frommer muttered something indistinct, then went back to the window and sat down in exactly the same position as before, as if he had a permanent job there as a smoking piece of furniture.
‘Doctor Frommer is a little odd, but he’s a respectable person. Like everyone at my guesthouse,’ said Wilhelm in his dialect, the sound of which Wojnicz found more and more to his liking, once they were standing on the front steps. ‘Raimund will take you to Doctor Semperweiss. Watch out for him, he doesn’t like people from the East. 28He doesn’t like people in general. It’s a great loss that there’s no one here like Doctor Brehmer,’ he added pensively, at the little bridge.
Wojnicz watched as the mist formed strange streaks and floated upwards like smoke.
‘Perhaps you know Doctor Sokołowski?’ he asked.
Wilhelm’s face brightened and became animated.
‘Of course, I knew him as a child. He was friendly with my father, who worked for him. All of us here work for the Kurhaus. How is he keeping?’
Wojnicz did not know how to answer that. All he knew was that Sokołowski worked at a Warsaw clinic and gave occasional lectures in Lwów. His father had taken him for a consultation on one of Sokołowski’s visits to the city. It was thanks to him that Wojnicz had ended up here.
‘Is he still as slim?’ asked Willi.
Slim? No, he was not. Professor Sokołowski was a stout, stocky man. But Wojnicz did not have to answer this surprising question, because out of the trails of mist emerged yesterday’s teenage coachman, whom Willi greeted with a light cuff on the head, a gesture the boy seemed to take as entirely natural and friendly.
Wojnicz and Raimund walked along the stream towards the centre of the village, Raimund eagerly relating something, but in such a strange dialect that Wojnicz understood little. He observed with interest the fine houses along the road, and the labourers who were mending the electrical traction. Raimund asked Wojnicz if he knew what electricity was.
They bowed to two elderly women in wide skirts who were sitting on a bench outside one of the houses.
‘Frau Weber and Frau Brecht,’ said Raimund with an ironical smile, and this Wojnicz did understand.
Soon the boy proudly pointed at Doctor Brehmer’s 29sanatorium, the building that Wojnicz had glimpsed the night before, but now it seemed even more impressive, especially as the mist had almost vanished and somewhere high over the valley the September sun was shining lavishly.
Raimund led Wojnicz to a door in a wide corridor, then disappeared. Wojnicz was received by a nurse with red swellings beneath her eyes. A polite smile briefly shielded her large, yellow teeth, which matched the tarnished gold-plated watch on a chain pinned to her apron. Above the breast pocket, her name was embroidered: Sydonia Patek.
Wojnicz had to sit in the waiting room until the doctor came back from his rounds. His fingers reached for the illustrated periodicals provided for the patients, but his eyes found no reassurance in them: they could not focus on the Gothic script. But to his surprise, he found a news sheet in Polish, and his gaze immediately relaxed on seeing words in his mother tongue:
In Prussian Silesia, a quarter of a mile from the Czech border and eleven miles southwest of Breslau, in a long valley stretching from east to west between Riesengebirge and Adlergebirge, located in Waldenburg County on the Stein, we find the charming village of Görbersdorf, famous for decades as a mountain resort for those with chest complaints.
Görbersdorf is situated at 570 metres above sea level, in a zone known to medical science as ‘consumption free’. The mountains surrounding it reach 900 metres. They shield the village and its medical facilities from the winds; hence in Görbersdorf a stillness of the air prevails that is rare in any valley. 30
He did not read on, but folded the brochure in half and shoved it into his pocket. Now his attention was drawn by a glass-fronted display case, in which stood a human torso made of wood. With no head, arms or legs, but an open chest and belly, it showed the internal organs painted in different colours. Wojnicz went up to examine its lungs. They were smooth and clean, polished, shining with varnish. They looked like the fleshy petals of an enormous flower, or fungi growing on the bark of a tree. How perfectly they fitted the proportions of the chest, how well their shape harmonized with the rib cage. He took a close look at them, trying to peek under the pointed corners where they joined other, coiled organs in various colours. Perhaps he was hoping to find something that he had not seen before, solutions to the mystery of why he was sick and others were not. If so, he was disappointed.
As he returned to his seat, he was seized by a familiar anxiety, a tension that always stirred the same physical reaction – he broke into a sweat. He would have to undress and expose his body to the gaze of a stranger. And panic: how would he hide his shameful affliction from the doctor? What would he have to say to avoid all those issues that he found so sensitive? How was he to escape? He had practised it so many times before.
Doctor Semperweiss entered the waiting room at a rapid pace, the tails of his white gown flapping behind him. Without even glancing at Wojnicz, he gestured for him to rise. Almost at a trot, Wojnicz followed him into a large consulting room with an immense window, glazed cabinets, all sorts of medical equipment and some strange-looking armchairs. Somehow Wojnicz was not surprised to see a shotgun leaning against the doctor’s desk – a large one, not a hunting rifle but more like a Winchester, with a finely polished butt. Without turning 31around, the doctor told him to sit down, which made Wojnicz feel safely hidden behind the desk, as in a trench.
He handed the doctor a letter of referral from Professor Sokołowski, but Semperweiss, hardly casting an eye at it, was clearly more interested in the body sitting before him. The young man was discomfited by the way the doctor was looking at him, as if he could not see Mieczysław Wojnicz, a patient from faraway Lwów, but just his body, a mechanical object. First he unabashedly pulled back Wojnicz’s eyelid and inspected the colour of the mucous membranes and the eyeball. Then he ran his eyes from chin to temple, and finally told him to strip to the waist so that he could examine his chest. He began to press the patient’s nipples with a finger.
‘Slightly enlarged, as are the lymph nodes,’ he said. ‘Is that always the case for you?’
‘For several years,’ replied Wojnicz, intimidated.
Holding him by the chin, the doctor drew a finger over his feeble, patchy two-day stubble. He scrupulously palpated the lymph nodes, and then his bold fingers percussed the back, extracting a hollow sound, a rumble as if from underground. He did it very carefully, centimetre by centimetre, like a sapper in search of a hidden bomb. All this took half an hour, until finally the doctor sighed and told him to get dressed. Only now did he reach for the letter. Glancing over the metal frames of his glasses, he said: ‘Phthisis.’ It sounded as though he had whistled. ‘Tuberculosis, consumption, or as it is fashionable to say nowadays: Morbus Koch. You know all this, young man, don’t you?’
As Wojnicz did up his shirt buttons, he nodded in the affirmative.
‘Not very advanced, to be clear. Just a touch, a little grain of something. “Phthisis” means decay, did you know?’ He 32pronounced this word, Zerfall, with distinct enjoyment, rolling the ‘r’. ‘But here we can deal with decay.’
‘Yes, Doctor Brehmer’s method—’ Wojnicz began, but the doctor impatiently stood up and waved a raised hand.
‘Oh yes, Brehmer noticed that travelling to Italy with consumption makes no sense at all. Only the mountain air can really cure it. Like the air here. Have you seen?’ The doctor went to the window and stood there for a while, lost in thought. ‘We’re in a basin,’ he said, making exaggerated circles with his hand, as if wanting to drive home to his listener the nature of the phenomenon. ‘Beneath us there’s a large underground lake, thanks to which it’s warmer here than elsewhere. This air is rich in oxygen, but there’s no wind. Lung diseases and epidemics have never been known to the local population, would you believe it? Nobody here has ever had a lung complaint. On top of that, the altitude is within the essential range for treating lung diseases, because it does not unduly accelerate the work of the heart, which happens in places higher than nine hundred metres above sea level. Fir trees grow here, filling the air with ozone, and ozone plays a key role in renewing the blood and the entire organism. Merely breathing will stop the process of decay in your young lungs. Every breath is curative. Just imagine that with every breath you take, pure light flows into your lungs.’ The doctor was looking at Wojnicz through his spectacles, which enlarged his dark eyes in an unsettling way. ‘And we have other attractions too. You simply have to submit, to yield to the treatment regime. Feel as you would in the army.’
He nodded out of the window at the patients strolling in the park.
‘Those are your comrades-in-arms.’
Suddenly Wojnicz realized that he would never grow 33fond of this doctor. He remembered kind, gentle Doctor Sokołowski.
‘It’s all clear to me, Doctor,’ he replied, pulling down his shirt cuffs. ‘I’d just like to know if I have a chance.’
‘Of course you have a chance. Otherwise you wouldn’t have come here, young man. You wouldn’t have dared to come here without feeling that you had a chance. You’d have suffered quietly in the East. It’s flat there, isn’t it?’
Wojnicz learned many curious facts about the brilliant Doctor Brehmer. He had bought the village of Görbersdorf and the entire neighbourhood, including more than a hundred hectares of forest and land, to found this sanatorium. Long before, Brehmer had noticed that the results of autopsies and examinations of patients suffering from tuberculosis always showed a disproportion between the heart and the lungs – their lungs were relatively large and their hearts small, with thin, fragile walls. No one had paid particular attention to this coincidence before, and no one had come up with the idea of connecting it with the aetiology of tuberculosis. But it seemed obvious that a small, weak heart led to more sluggish blood circulation, and as a result to chronic ischemia of the lungs and pulmonary epithelium. The consequence of this was consumption. Brehmer had also studied the geographical distribution of the illness’s occurrence, and this had confirmed his belief regarding the aforementioned aetiology. From travellers’ accounts it emerged that there were places and regions where tuberculosis did not feature: the higher mountains in all climatic zones, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and the steppes of Kirghizia.
First, the special features of the alpine climate were decisive here. Lower atmospheric pressure meant that the organism reacted to it with increased cardiac activity, as a means of defending itself against a lack of oxygen – this 34led to faster metabolism and a higher body temperature. Lifestyle and diet were important too: plenty of food, especially fat, kumis with alcohol content, and hard physical labour.
An accelerated heart rate caused an increase in the size of the myocardium, and the organ developed strong musculature; in inhabitants of the aforementioned regions this often led to cardiac hypertrophy, and thus to the opposite of the phenomenon observed in tuberculosis sufferers.
‘My dear young man,’ said Doctor Semperweiss to conclude his lecture, ‘this is our entire prescription. In Central Europe, the consumption-free zone begins at an altitude of roughly four hundred and fifty metres. On top of that, there’s the consistent supervision of a physician who regulates the diet. And also exercise in the fresh air. Nature itself cures us.’
The doctor took out a sheet of paper and wrote down his recommendations point by point, while commenting on them in a rather bored tone: ‘For at least six weeks, ideally several months: Walks tailored to the patient, on routes of varying gradients, with benches to rest on at short intervals along the way to avoid tiring oneself. Moderate treatment with cold water. And that will help you. Moderation in medicaments. In case of a severe cough, I recommend restraining the cough as much as possible, and if it cannot be restrained, you should take tiny sips of cold water or soda water with hot milk. Should there be bleeding from the lungs, which God forbid, we apply small ice packs to the heart and lungs, and give morphine injections. For acute attacks, with breathlessness and swooning, first we provide a strong stimulant – champagne, for instance. Yes, do not be afraid of champagne, or of alcohol in general. But categorically only in 35small quantities – drunkenness is strictly forbidden! In case of fever, first one measures the temperature every two hours, for confirmation. Night sweats are effectively combatted by taking milk in the evening with two or three teaspoonfuls of brandy or liqueur. Sister Sydonia Patek will explain and show you everything.’
Throughout this speech he continued to note down his recommendations. Wojnicz was amazed that he was capable of doing these two things simultaneously.
‘You are living at Herr Opitz’s house, am I right? Every day you will come to the Kurhaus for treatment and rest cures, and as soon as a place is free at the sanatorium, I shall let you know. Everything is fluid here, fluid,’ he stressed. ‘For now, Herr Opitz’s guesthouse is just as good for your health as this place, or Doctor Römpler’s sanatorium, and the daily short walks will add colour to your cheeks.’
Semperweiss got up energetically and handed Wojnicz the sheet of recommendations. And it was all over – he had been admitted.
Now he was sitting in the waiting room while the ugly nurse prepared him a treatment diary and other necessary documents. He pulled the folded leaflet from his pocket and finished reading:
In general one should recognize that with regard to therapy, a sojourn in places including Merano in the Tyrol, Görbersdorf in Silesia, or Davos in Switzerland (modelled on Görbersdorf) is considered the most effective cure to date. Doctor Römpler’s sanatorium, founded in 1875, is situated virtually at the foot of the mountains and consists of a suitable number of buildings in the form of elegant villas. A water system 1140 metres in length brings 36crystal-clear spring water down from the mountain to the sanatorium, and thus the water gushes straight from porphyritic rocks to the tastefully furnished bathing rooms of the shower building.
The patients have no lack of occupations and entertainments. The cure itself, including meals etc, takes up a large part of the day, but the charming locality of Görbersdorf offers a wide variety of excursions. The aim of the cure is for the patient to endeavour to combat his own illness. By strengthening the organism, one increases its immunity. By this means, the development of the illness is first halted, then gradually the complaint recedes and good health returns. Through regular exercise, the affected lungs learn to perform correctly, and the fresh mountain air stimulates the functions of the heart. The results of a cure at Görbersdorf can be rated among the most favourable. Almost 75% of patients return to good health.
It would be marvellous to think that he belonged to that seventy-five percent.
II.
SCHWÄRMEREI
Wojnicz returned to the guesthouse with the small notebook in which from now on his treatment history was to be recorded, and considered what Doctor Semperweiss had told him. The most important feature of the cure was the regimen. One got up early, very early in the morning, took one’s temperature, and noted it down. Before breakfast, which was eaten between seven and eight, gymnastics were obligatory, then after breakfast a walk, and perhaps baths as well, according to Father Kneipp’s method, and other procedures. The walks were along a fixed route. There was a mid-morning snack at ten – always fresh bread and butter, with milk. Then a rest cure on one of the many terraces. Lunch between twelve thirty and one thirty (soup with meat, a substantial meat dish with vegetables, then dessert and compote; on Sundays, instead of compote, a cake or other sweet made with flour was served). After lunch, coffee was de rigueur, in the winter garden or in one of the pavilions. Then came another rest cure, followed by another walk, but the afternoon route had to be different from the morning one. Afternoon tea was at about four or four-thirty, and supper at seven – a hot dish of meat and potatoes, with a required glass of milk. At night the thermometer was used again, and a few sentences were added to the notebook to record one’s mental and physical state. Plenty of sleep. No excitement. Good, substantial food. Lots of meat, milk and sheep cheese. Wojnicz decided on lunches and breakfasts at the Kurhaus; he would eat supper at the Guesthouse for Gentlemen. So he was advised. Once he moved into the Kurhaus, he would take all of his meals there. The guests were summoned to them by the sound of a bugle. 38
He was bursting with exhilaration and good intentions, the kind of euphoria that heralds a fresh start, the moment when one cuts oneself off from the past and forgets about it. Now even the austere, ironical Doctor Semperweiss seemed to him a harbinger of change.
As he walked, he tried to memorize the relative locations of the various houses and guesthouses. He inspected the rather bizarre astronomical observatory, where apparently Doctor Brehmer had studied the effect of the cosmos and the weather on treating tuberculosis. Then he reached an imposing edifice called the Villa Rosa and turned back.
A full, golden September sun was shining. Mieczysław Wojnicz strode firmly in the middle of the large flat stones that paved the road.
The two elderly women were still sitting on the bench outside their house, silently shelling broad beans, snapping the dry pods open. Suddenly a bean sprang from one of their wrinkled hands and landed just ahead of Wojnicz’s shoe. He picked it up carefully in two fingers and was going to return it to its owners, but for some reason they abruptly rose from the bench, picked up their bowls and baskets, and vanished into the house, their glossy black skirts flashing in the sunlight. Oh well, never mind. Wojnicz wiped the brown bean against his sleeve; it looked perfect. He tossed it in the air and caught it. Not knowing what to do with it, he put it in his pocket.
He found the guesthouse door wide open, which surprised him, and then he noticed a little prayerbook on the ground in front of it, tossed into a puddle. The cream-coloured pages were already soaked with dirty water. He picked it up and went inside, full of sudden anxiety. 40
The sitting room downstairs was empty – the other residents must all have been at their treatments. He placed the mud-stained prayerbook on a small table and was about to head upstairs when his attention was drawn to the half-open door to the dining room, and beyond it a pair of boots – on the table, somehow familiar. Without thinking, as if hypnotized, he went up to the door and pushed it, to take a closer look inside.
The boots were at one end of a long bundle of imprecise shape, which turned out to be a human body. It was lying on the table at which the meals were eaten. It looked well wrapped in rolls of material – it seemed to be wearing a large number of skirts, shirts, bodices and capes. Wojnicz had never seen any woman so close and so still before; they always flitted past, in constant motion, so that it was impossible to focus attention on them and take in all the details. But here before him lay a woman’s body, without doubt a dead one. He looked at the black lace-up boots protruding from under the skirts and petticoats. The latter were trimmed with embroidery, but the lace was already rather faded, and its edges were frayed. The shoelaces had been tied with great care in a double bow; how strange that someone who had laced their boots so precisely that very morning was dead by the afternoon. The top skirt, made of slightly shiny material in thin black-and-grey stripes, was neatly arranged. Above was a close-fitting jacket made of dark, almost black cloth, done up with round buttons, like the ones Polish priests had on their cassocks. A rather crumpled white shirt was sticking out from underneath it; a button hung by a thread, and the collar was pulled up to the chin, but carelessly enough for Wojnicz to notice a dark blue and red mark on the neck, shocking against the white skin.
Finally he had to do it – look higher, at the face. To his 41horror he saw the eyes, only half-closed, with a fine strip of eyeball shining under the lashes. The twisted head was turned towards him, as if wanting to make a confession. On the narrow lips, already rather blue, he noticed the trace of a smile. It seemed totally out of place, as if ironical. The tips of the teeth, quite dry, were just showing under the upper lip. And he also saw that the face was coated in fine, fair fuzz, like down.
He stood petrified, barely breathing.
He had immediately recognized that this was the woman who had brought him his breakfast that morning. At the time, he had only noticed the boot that opened the door and some ample curves hugged by a bodice, nothing more. Only now, after death, could she be seen in her entirety.
‘She hanged herself,’ said Willi Opitz, standing in the doorway.
Wojnicz shuddered, horrified by the proprietor’s low, resonant voice. The tone in which Opitz delivered this announcement made it sound like the confirmation of an act of criminal negligence, an unacceptable event. But his voice was shaking.
‘Don’t upset yourself. The people from the mortuary will be here any moment, and they’ll take the body away. Raimund has run to fetch them.’
Wojnicz did not know what to say. His tongue was bone dry, and his throat felt tight.
‘When did it happen?’ he asked.
‘When? Just now, well, an hour ago. I went upstairs when she didn’t come down to collect the vegetables from the supplier. She was hanging there. I cut her down. Go to your room, boy. Ah, here they are from the mortuary.’
‘She brought my breakfast this morning,’ said Wojnicz, 42with audible emotion in his voice. ‘She was your servant, wasn’t she?’
‘Oh, no, no. That’s my wife.’
Opitz waved a hand, as if shooing away a wasp, and opened the door for the gloomy mortuary workers, who began to talk to him quietly in dialect. Wojnicz withdrew from the dining room. As he hurried up the stairs, he could hear their stifled voices, but he couldn’t understand what they were saying. The entire conversation sounded like the mutterings of people who do not need words to communicate.
◆
Wojnicz sat down in a russet armchair decorated with a crocheted headrest. He was badly shaken. It was strange, it had not occurred to him that nice Willi Opitz had a wife. He should have known that men usually have wives who, without always being visible, support the family business from the kitchen or the laundry. Preoccupied by his journey and his illness, he had not even noticed her. And now she was dead.
Suddenly he was flooded by a wave of memories, because somehow this dead woman reminded him of his nanny. She existed in his memory as a blurred figure, always veiled by something, out of focus, on the run, a long, thin streak. But he used to play with her, he used to see her hands, and the wrinkled skin on them. He would grip that skin between his thumb and forefinger, pretending to be a goose (they used to call it tweaking), and in doing so he would smooth out her hands until they became almost young. He used to fantasize that if he could work out how to smooth all of Gliceria (this bizarre name was very popular in those days among the peasants in the Lwów 43
