When my pains intensified, one day Dizzy called for an ambulance. Apparently I had to go to hospital. It was a good time for an ambulance to come – August, the road was hard and dry, the weather was beautiful and – praise the planets – I had had my morning shower and my feet were nice and clean.
Now I was lying in the ward, strangely empty, with open windows, through which came aromas from the allotments – of ripe tomatoes, dry grasses, burning stalks. The Sun had entered Virgo, who was starting her autumn tidying and was already stocking up for the winter.
They came to see me, of course, but nothing makes me feel more uncomfortable than being visited in hospital. I really don’t know what to do with myself. Every conversation in this unpleasant place becomes unnatural and forced. I hope they didn’t think badly of me for telling them to go home.
Ali the dermatologist often came and sat on my bed. He’d drop in from the next ward, bringing me well-thumbed magazines. I told him about my bridge in Syria (I wonder if it’s still there?), and he told me about his work with itinerant tribes in the desert. For some time he had been a doctor for nomads, and had travelled with them, examining and treating them. Always on the move. He himself was a nomad. He had never stayed at any hospital for more than two years before something had suddenly started to make him itch and feel restless, so he’d try for another job in another place. The patients who had overcome all sorts of prejudices and finally come to trust him would be abandoned – one day a sign would appear on the door of his consulting room to say that Doctor Ali was no longer there. Naturally, his roving lifestyle and his ethnic origin doomed him to the interest of various special services – as a result his phone was always bugged. Or so at least he claimed.
‘Do you have any Ailments of your own?’ I once asked him.
Oh yes, he did. Every winter he suffered from depression, and the room at the workers’ hostel that the local authority had assigned him deepened his melancholy even more. He had one valuable object that he had acquired through years of work – it was a large lamp that emitted rays similar to sunlight, and was thus designed to raise the spirits. He often spent the evening exposing his face to this artificial Sun, while mentally wandering the deserts of Libya or Syria, or perhaps Iraq.
I wondered what his Horoscope was like. But I was too sick to do the calculations. This time I was in a bad way. I lay in a darkened room, suffering from a severe light allergy; my skin was red and blistered, stinging as if it were being slashed by tiny scalpels.
‘You must avoid Sunlight,’ he warned me. ‘I’ve never seen skin like yours before – you are crated for life underground.’
He laughed, because for him it was unimaginable – he was entirely geared towards the Sun, like a sunflower. Whereas I was like white chicory, a potato sprout – I should spend the rest of my life in the boiler room.
I admired him for the fact that – so he said – he only ever owned as many things as he could pack into two cases at the drop of a hat, in less than an hour. I resolved to learn this skill from him. I promised myself that as soon as I came out, I’d practise. A backpack and a laptop, that should suffice for any Person. Like this, wherever he ended up, Ali was at home.
This drifter physician reminded me that we should never make ourselves too comfortable in any particular place, in which case I had probably gone too far with my house. Doctor Ali gave me a jalabiya – a white ankle-length shirt, with long sleeves, that buttoned up to the neck. He said the white colour acts as a mirror, reflecting rays of light.
In the second half of August my condition grew so much worse that I was taken to Wrocław for tests, which didn’t really bother me. In a semi-conscious state for days on end, I anxiously fantasised about my sweet peas, worrying that I should be tending the sixth generation, or else the results of my research would cease to be valid and once again we would assume that we don’t inherit our life experience, that all the sciences in the world are a waste of time, and that we’re incapable of learning anything from history. I dreamed that I called Dizzy, but he didn’t answer the phone because my Little Girls had just given birth to children, and there were lots and lots of them on the floor in the hall and the kitchen. They were people, a completely new race of people brought forth by Animals. They were still blind – they hadn’t yet opened their eyes. And I dreamed I was looking for my Little Girls in the big city; in the dream I still had hope, but it was a stupid hope, so painful.
One day the Writer came to see me at the hospital in Wrocław to comfort me politely and to gently inform me that she was selling her house.
‘The place has changed,’ she said, offering me some mushroom pancakes from Agata.
She said she felt bad vibes there, she was afraid at night, and had lost her appetite.
‘It’s impossible to live in a place where things like that happen. Those dreadful murders have brought various minor deceptions and improprieties to light. It turns out I’ve been living among monsters,’ she said fretfully. ‘You are the only honest person in the whole place.’
‘You know what, I was planning to give up caring for the houses next winter anyway,’ I said, confused by the compliment.
‘A wise decision. You’d be better off in a warm country…’
‘Without the Sun,’ I added. ‘Do you know of any such place, apart from the bathroom?’
She ignored my question.
‘There’s already a “for sale” announcement in the paper for my house,’ she said, and paused for thought. ‘Anyway, it was too windy there. I couldn’t bear the constant howling of the wind. It’s impossible to concentrate with something rustling, whistling and murmuring in your ear all the time. Have you noticed how much noise the leaves make on the trees? Especially on the poplars – frankly it’s intolerable. They start in June and they go on shaking until November. It’s a nightmare.’
I had never thought about it.
‘They interrogated me, did you know?’ she said indignantly, suddenly changing the subject.
I wasn’t at all surprised, because they had interrogated everyone. This case was now their priority. What a ghastly word.
‘And? Were you any help to them?’
‘You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves… And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.’
There was some truth in what she said.
As she was saying goodbye, I rummaged in my things and handed her a deer hoof. As she took off the paper wrapping, her face twisted into a scowl of revulsion.
‘What on earth is this? For the love of God, Mrs Duszejko, what are you giving me?’
‘Please take it. It’s a bit like the Finger of God. It has entirely dehydrated, it doesn’t smell.’
‘What am I supposed to do with it?’ she asked in dismay.
‘Put it to good use.’
She wrapped the trotter up again, hesitated in the doorway, and was gone.
I spent ages pondering what the Grey Lady had said. And I think it tallies with one of my Theories – my belief that the human psyche evolved in order to defend us against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defence system – it makes sure we’ll never understand what’s going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.