Polish “Beautiful Mind”? Read the excerpt from “Phantom doses”

Wojciech Chamier-Gliszczyński “Phantom doses”, WAB – fragment:

The early summer of 1956 brought us all sorts of weather anomalies. The mourning for Comrade Burt was over, and the air was relaxing. Huge masses of exotic air rolled overhead, bringing rapid changes in pressure, storms of unprecedented force, muggy afternoons, and even hotter nights. The nearby river poured out regularly on the surrounding fields, huge mosquitoes were brooding in the backwaters, wild animals confused their directions and went out onto the roads, deer and wild boars roamed the countryside, ignoring the wailing of terrified women, barking dogs and the cries of men armed with pitchforks. Some domestic animals, on the other hand, taking advantage of general confusion and panic, ran to run as if they suddenly felt the call of nature dormant in them, as if they had discovered that original sin that had condemned their ancestors to eternal slavery and indecent existence among people. only seemingly free food, for which many of them paid poor slave lives. The most faithful quadrupeds perished, domestic fowl and canaries escaped into the forest, regardless of the dangers lurking in the wild and unholy thickets; Cows fled from pastures in whole herds and, like tarpans, traveled tens of kilometers in one day, before anyone realized that the farm was short of dozens of head of cattle.

All these circumstances, as Grandfather Włóczka, our patient from the ward for the elderly, asserted of his immortality, heralded the inevitable collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the imminent end of communism.

One steamy afternoon in a similar atmosphere, I finally saw my doctor Ludwik Strauss, whom I had known only from photography. He was very shy and low-key, which was impossible to tell when looking at the highly successful portrait in the cover of a textbook for high school students of medical schools. Some of my friends did not hide their disappointment with the fact that the famous doctor turned out to be a conus (as they cruelly called him), but many of those who knew what they already had husbands and lived with them and young children in a boarding house for married couples, decorated in the west pavilion, it was telling me: “Girl, look better at his hands and the length of the middle finger, you will know if the man is really big where he needs to be!”.

Is it any wonder that most of my friends from the State School of Neuropsychiatric Nursing were really jealous of me, that it was I who became a doctor, that it was me that the famous doctor Strauss, the editor of “Psychiatric News” and a member of Polish Of the Psychiatric Society?

That magical afternoon, when I was returning from the kitchen in the one-story pavilion, decorated in the style of the 1930s, to the pavilion for men, where I used to help distribute drugs at this time, I heard his voice: “Sister! Sister!”. He ran from the end of the corridor to the vegetable shed.

– Sister! Little sister! Dr. Strauss shouted, and made sweeping arches with his strong arms, as if thanks to this, like a swimming champion, he could traverse the distance between us faster. “Please go to the vegetable shed quickly and bring me one of those cloth bags stacked behind the apple crates!”

And then he added that he absolutely needed it. Necessary due to the circumstances of a strange nature, the cruel end of which took place in the palace courtyard.

As we ran to the place together, we saw the sight of a courtyard lined with long pools of water separated only by narrow tufts of rickety grass. Among the children with speech impediments and some of the adult inmates of our facility, there was a strange atmosphere of relaxation, like after a violent storm. All eyes were turned to one side, towards the center of the courtyard, where lay the half-dead body of a pink flamingo, whose exotic masses of hot air had brought it to Trzebielin.

Dr. Strauss approached the dying bird cautiously on tiptoe, dispelling the curious glare. He motioned for me to come over. The animal was breathing heavily, and no sound was heard other than the steady whistle of agonizing breath coming from a cavernous throat. Children, who were restless and mobile on a daily basis, watched the torment of the heavenly creature with hypnotic curiosity. Włóczka’s grandfather, who survived all his children and was visited only by an elderly childless great-granddaughter, remained aloof in a group of our retirees and pensioners with reality disorders. Confused by his alleged immortality, he consoled himself that he would probably live to see the end of communism; the painful agony of the flamingo, however, filled him with deep regret over his own immortality, and when the pink angel breathed his last, Grandpa wept with excruciating tears. He was shaking all over, holding his gray head, and only thanks to the help of one of the inmates, who always treated him as if he were her unborn child, did he control himself enough to return to his room on his own.

Ludwik nodded at me with a knowing look. I helped him put the enormous body of the bird into a sackcloth bag for potatoes, and with the doctor walked towards the palace and on through the black-and-white terrazzo-tiled hall to his office, where an enameled treatment table gleamed in the sterile glow of fluorescent lamps. Dr. Strauss carefully laid the exotic animal on the cold counter and began to prepare for work. Seeing I had no idea what to do with myself, he gave me a blue smock and told me to put on smelly rubber gloves – I was to assist him.

He took off the shelf the bulky volume of The Art of Hunting Beast Binding from 1850 by Dr. Konrad Jelonek, an eminent physician and great hunting enthusiast, and when he found the appropriate page, he froze over it. It took a few moments before he got down to the actual act of creation in which I was to participate as his secret accomplice.

We both realized that under no circumstances should we tell anyone what terrible things we had done in the doctor’s offices. The act of creation had to be covered by the deepest mystery, a bloody preparation buried in the deepest layers of memory.

“It’s important that the audience doesn’t know how the trick is constructed,” he said, retrieving the dead entity from a sackcloth bag and setting it on the shimmering table. “Nobody should know how much work it took to create our creation,” he added, then explained that smart people used to say that you can easily find an explanation for every trick, but to believe that there is a simple solution behind every trick is untrue. It is an illusion of an intelligent man who desires simple and elegant solutions, while the secret of a good prestidigitator is precisely the disproportion between the illusionist’s hardship and the triviality of the trick. – For a true master, everything should be easy. For example, one should not read the notes and manuscripts of great writers, so as not to deprive themselves of the illusion that the shape of the book was planned from the beginning.

Before commencing the work, he stuffed the bullet wound with cotton wool and sewed the skin over it with a thin thread, because it is of paramount importance in the preparation of “angels” to remove the skin skillfully so as not to stain the feathers with blood. Then he thoroughly cleaned the bird’s throat and blocked it with a gauze pad. Through the nostrils, carefully blown, he threaded a thin string and tied the curved beak so that it remained closed. He placed the flamingo on its back, with his left hand he parted the feathers and with a sharp scalpel cut the skin of the breast and abdomen, starting from the middle of the torso up to the cloaca. He talked all the time about what he was going to do.

In this way, I became a participant in amazing events taking place in the sharp light of a mirror operating lamp. The doctor introduced me to the secret art, he discovered areas that I would not be able to explore on my own, the world covered with a curtain of pink feathers, just like later, when he was teaching our children (first the eldest daughter, then the rest) techniques of preserving insects or making preparations with frogs caught in the meadows of Trzebieliński.

– My companion would like to pay attention to the process of skin pulling – he said, sprinkling talcum powder on the cut wound – look: through the same hole the skin on the bird’s thigh is separated, down to the knee joint, and at this point the leg should be cut off …

From the limb freed in this cruel way, the skin is pulled down to where the magnificent feathers reach; the tibia is cleaned and left intact. The head, the doctor explained, should be skinned down to the base of the beak. He continued to present other areas of the naked body: wings and neck, then threading the head through the skin of the neck, then a sharp incision at the base of the skull, removal of the tongue and larynx, and finally the brain. The skull, after scraping the brain, was cleaned by the doctor with arsenic soap, and then he placed a wire loop in it, securing it firmly with gauze pads. The wire was thickly wrapped in a bandage and he modeled the shape of the neck and the rest of the body of a pink flamingo.

He watched me surreptitiously as I blush, awkwardly supporting the bird’s long neck like a huge phallus covered with delicate feathers.

‘Now we’re going to pull the skin over the skull…’ Strauss announced, first turning it inside out.

When this was complete, he proceeded to dissect the wings. He cut off the arm bone from the forearm bone, and then began to clean it of the muscles so that the wire could be easily inserted under the skin all the way to the wrist and tied to the forearm bone.

Then the proper work of the divine architect began. He replaced the dead muscles with cotton wool and gauze, he tied the wires supporting the wings firmly to the axial wire, and he did the same with the legs and the base of the tail. Finally, he placed gauze pads on all the wires and, like God the Father, modeled the final shape of the flamingo to seal the magic body back, closing it in its original form. Just a small cosmetic feather treatment and you could admire the bird in all its glory.

Wrapped in longitudinal strands of paper and bandages, the flamingo proudly waited for the moment when it could be presented to the whole world.

We worked day and night to raise a wonderful animal from the dead. Me and my Ludwik, together in the sterile light of a mirror lamp. We set the bird in the palace hall, on a stand made of thick glued plate, before some of the patients, nurses, orderlies and doctors were gathered, and when we finally unveiled the curtain made of a hospital screen, when we discovered this inconceivable miracle before the world … there was first murmurs of disbelief, then single, jumbled words of fear and delight, and at the end there were enthusiastic applause, shouts of joy, cheers and whistles. Patients in striped pajamas and bathrobes stared in amazement at the flamingo that stood alive before them, with its pink neck loftily stretched out; doctors in elegant woolen jackets and ties tied around the neck in a Windsor knot exchanged professional comments among themselves, nurses and orderlies nodded their heads with boundless approval; the children laughed and ran around, grabbing hands and drawing pirouettes just in front of the beak of the magnificent bird; Włóczka’s grandfather rejoiced at the imminent collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the imminent end of communism.