The Sanatorium at the Sign
of the Hourglass
I
IT WAS a long journey. Barely one or two passengers were travelling on that forgotten branch line, where the train ran only once a week. Never before had I seen those carriages of archaic style, withdrawn from the other lines long ago — as spacious as rooms, dark, and with many nooks. Those corridors, breaking off at different angles, those cold, empty and labyrinthine compartments — there was something strangely forlorn about them, something almost ghastly. I made my way from carriage to carriage in search of some snug corner. It was windy everywhere; freezing draughts threaded their way through those interiors, piercing the entire train from end to end. People were sitting here and there on the floor with their bundles, not daring to occupy the vacant, excessively high seats. Besides, those bulging oilcloth seats were as cold as ice, and sticky with age. No passengers boarded at the empty stations. Without a whistle, without a puff, the train continued slowly and, as it seemed, pensively on its way.
For a time, a man in a torn railwayman’s uniform accompanied me, silent, engrossed in his thoughts. He pressed a handkerchief to his swollen, aching face. Then he was lost somewhere — he got off unnoticed at some halt. Behind him he left his imprint in the straw strewn on the floor, and an outworn black valise that he had forgotten.
Wading in straw and litter, I went with tottering steps from compartment to compartment. The doors, open at both ends of every carriage, swung in the wind. Nowhere was there even a solitary passenger. At last I met a conductor wearing the black uniform of the railway service of that line. He was winding a thick scarf around his neck and packing away his bits and pieces, a torch and an official book. ‘We are pulling in, sir,’ he said, casting a look at me with eyes almost totally white. The train drew slowly to a standstill — without a puff, without a rattle, as if life had slowly escaped it along with its last exhalation of steam. We had stopped dead. Silence and emptiness — no station building. He pointed out to me, stepping down from the train, the direction in which the Sanatorium lay. I set off walking, my valise in my hand, along a narrow white highway, which led by and by into the dark copse of a park. I regarded the landscape with a certain curiosity. The path I was walking along rose up and led onto the crest of a gentle knoll, from which a vast horizon was encompassed. The day was thoroughly grey — dreary and without highlights. And perhaps under the influence of that heavy and colourless atmosphere, the entire great bowl of the horizon darkened, upon which an immense wooded landscape was arranged, like stage scenery, in ever more distant and grey strands and layers of forestation, flowing in streaks, in gentle slopes, here from the left side, there from the right. That whole dark, utterly solemn landscape appeared to flow almost indiscernibly into itself, to displace itself like a clouded and gathering sky full of unfathomable movement. The liquid belts and trails of those forests rustled, and seemed to be carried along by that sound, like a tide rising imperceptibly toward the land. The white road meandered like a melody, receding amid the dark dynamic of the wooded terrain, along a ridge of wide chords, struck with the force of huge musical massifs, which finally engulfed it. I snapped off a twig from a wayside tree. The green of its leaves was intensely dark, practically black. It was strangely saturated blackness, deep and generous, full of force and nourishment, like sleep. And all the greys of the landscape were derivatives of that one colour. At times, our own landscape assumes such a colour, on cloudy summer twilights awash with long rainstorms — that same deep and peaceful abnegation, the same resigned and final numbness, having no more need of the consolation of colours.
In the forest it was as dark as night, and I made my way gropingly on noiseless conifer needles. As the trees became sparser, the beams of a wooden bridge began to clatter under my feet. On its far side, amid the blackness of trees, the grey and many windowed walls of a hotel loomed, signposted as the Sanatorium. Its glazed double doors stood open. One stepped through them directly from the bridge — which had a shaky handrail of birch branches on either side. In the corridor, all was gloom and solemn silence. I tiptoed past door after door, reading their numbers with my fingertips in the darkness. At a corner, I finally happened upon a chambermaid. She was hurrying out of one of the rooms, breathless and flustered, as if tearing herself free from someone’s importunate hands. She could barely understand what I said to her. I had to repeat myself. She fidgeted helplessly.
Had my telegram been received? She spread her arms; her glance only wandered to the side. She was waiting for an opportunity to skip back to the half-open door, at which she was squinting.
‘I have come a long way,’ I said with some impatience. ‘I booked a room here by telegram. To whom do I report?’
She didn’t know. ‘Perhaps you would like to try the restaurant?’ she stammered. ‘Everyone is asleep now. I will announce you when the doctor wakes up.’
‘Asleep? But it is still daylight. Nightfall is a long way off...’
‘In this place, they always sleep, didn’t you know?’ She raised her inquisitive eyes to me. ‘And besides,’ she added coquettishly, ‘here, night never comes.’ She composed herself, no longer trying to escape. As she fidgeted, her hands plucked at the lace of her pinafore.
I left her. I went into the semi-dark restaurant. Here stood tables, and a huge buffet extended the length of one wall. I felt my appetite returning after a long time without eating. That aspect of plates abundantly crammed with pastries and cakes was a delight to me.
I put down my valise on one of the tables. They were all unoccupied. I clapped my hands — no response. My eyes were drawn to a neighbouring, larger and brighter room. This room was open through an expansive window or loggia onto a landscape I had already come to know, and which now, in its deep sadness and resignation, stood in the frame of the embrasure like a memento mori. The remains of a recent sitting still lay on the tablecloths, together with opened bottles and half-empty glasses. Even the tips had been left uncollected by the staff. I returned to the buffet, appraising the cakes and pies. They looked most appetising. Ought I to serve myself? I wondered, feeling a surge of the most singular ravenousness. One short-cake in particular, with apple jam, made my mouth water. I was on the point of levering one of those cakes with a silver spatula when I sensed the presence of someone behind me. The chambermaid had entered, wearing soft, silent slippers, and gently touched my back. ‘The doctor will see you now,’ she said as she scrutinised her fingernails.
She walked ahead of me, not once turning completely around, confident of the magnetism she exerted with the motion of her hips. She played with the intensity of that magnetism, adjusting the distance between our bodies as we passed by dozens of doors, each given a number. The corridor grew increasingly dark. Finally, in total darkness now, she leaned against me. ‘Here is the doctor’s door,’ she whispered. ‘Please go in.’
Doctor Gotard received me, standing in the centre of the room. He was a short man, broad in the shoulders, with a black beard.
‘We received your telegram only yesterday,’ he said. ‘We did send a carriage to the station, but you arrived on a different train. It’s not the best of connections, I’m afraid. So, how are you feeling?’
‘Is my father alive?’ I asked, looking anxiously into his smiling face.
‘Alive? Why, naturally,’ he said, steadily holding my eager look. ‘Within, of course,’ he added, his eyes narrowing, ‘the limits determined by the situation. You know as well as I do that from the point of view of your family home, from the perspective of your own country, your father has died. This cannot be completely undone. And that demise casts a certain shadow over his existence here.’
‘But Father himself does not know, does not suspect?’ I asked in a whisper.
He shook his head with deep earnestness. ‘You may rest assured,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘that our patients do not suspect. They cannot suspect...’ Demonstrating the mechanism on the tips of his fingers, poised in readiness for this, he continued: ‘The whole process rests on our having set back time. We fall behind time here by a certain interval, the extent of which no one really knows. It all boils down to simple Relativism. Here, your father’s death, the death that has caught up with him in your homeland, simply hasn’t run its course yet.’
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘Father is dying, or approaching death...’
‘You misunderstand me,’ he replied in a tone of tolerant impatience. ‘Here, we reactivate past time, with all of its possible outcomes — and even, therefore, the possibility of a recovery.’
Still looking at me, he smiled and stroked his beard.
‘But no doubt you would like to see your father now. We have reserved for you, in accordance with your instructions, the other bed in your father’s room. I will show you the way.’
As we stepped into the dark corridor, Doctor Gotard began to speak in a whisper. I noticed that, just like the chambermaid, he was wearing felt slippers.
‘We allow our patients long hours for sleeping. We are conserving their vital energies. Besides, there is nothing better for them to do here.’
He stopped in front of one of the doors, and put a finger to his lips. ‘Go in quietly, your father is asleep. You should go to bed too. That would be for the best for the time being. Farewell for now.’
‘Farewell,’ I whispered, feeling my beating heart rising to my throat. I pressed the door handle, and the door yielded of its own accord, opened half way like lips parting without resistance in sleep. I entered. The room was grey and bare, practically empty. On a plain wooden bed under a tiny skylight, my father lay asleep in a heap of bedclothes. His deep breathing discharged untold layers of snoring from the depths of his slumber. The whole room already seemed to be lined with those snores, from floor to ceiling, and still new snores were forthcoming. I looked with affection at Father’s emaciated, wasted face, now thoroughly absorbed in its stertorous labours — a face in a distant trance, which, having cast off its earthly covering, was making its confession on some far removed bank of its existence, in a solemn enumeration of its minutes.
There was no other bed. A piercing chill was sucked in at the window. The stove was unlit. They don’t seem to care very much about their patients here, I thought to myself — such a sick man at the mercy of draughts! And certainly nobody here ever does any cleaning. A thick layer of dust covered the floor; it had overgrown the night stand, and upon it, medicine bottles and a glass of coffee that had long ago gone cold. There are cakes piled high in the restaurant, I thought, and yet they give pure black coffee to their patients, rather than something nourishing! But in view of their good deeds in setting back time, naturally this was a small matter.
I undressed slowly, and slipped into Father’s bed. He did not awaken; but his snoring, apparently dammed up too high, fell an octave lower, relinquishing the grandiloquence of its declamation. It was now, as it were, private snoring, for his purposes alone. I tucked the eiderdown around Father, to protect him as far as possible from the draught blowing in at the window. I soon fell asleep beside him.
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