The Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass
I
THE JOURNEY went on and on. Barely one or two passengers were travelling on that forgotten branch line, where the train ran only once a week. Never had I seen carriages of such archaic style, spacious as rooms, dark and full of nooks, withdrawn from the other lines long ago. Those corridors deviating at different angles and those empty, labyrinthine and cold compartments had something oddly forlorn about them, something almost ghastly. I made my way from carriage to carriage in search of some snug corner. It was windy everywhere — cold draughts cut a path through those interiors, penetrating the whole train from end to end. People sat here and there on the floor with their bundles, not daring to occupy the vacant and excessively high seats. Those bulging cedar seats were as cold as ice anyway, and sticky with age. No passengers boarded at the empty stations. Without a whistle, without a puff, the train went slowly and, as it seemed, pensively on its way.
A man in a torn railwayman’s uniform accompanied me for a time, silent and engrossed in his thoughts. He pressed a handkerchief to his swollen, aching face. Then even he was lost somewhere — he got off unnoticed at some halt. He left behind him his imprint in the straw strewing the floor, and an outworn black valise which he forgot.
Wading in straw and litter I went from carriage to carriage with tottering steps. The doors of the compartments, open at both ends, swung in the draught. 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 totally white eyes. The train drew slowly to a halt, without a puff, without a rattle, as if its life had slowly escaped it along with its last exhalation of steam. We stopped dead. Silence and emptiness — no station building. As I stepped down he pointed out to me the direction in which the Sanatorium lay. With my valise in my hand I walked along a narrow white highway which led by and by into the dark thicket of a park. I regarded the landscape with curiosity. The path along which I was walking rose up and led out onto the crest of a gentle knoll, from where a huge horizon was encompassed. It was an utterly grey day, dreary and bereft of 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 strands and layers of forestation, ever more distant and grey, flowing with streaks and gentle slopes, here from the left side, there from the right. That entire dark and solemn landscape seemed to flow imperceptibly into itself, to move impulsively like a cloudy and gathering sky full of potential movement. The fluid belts and trails of the forests seemed to rustle, and to be carried along by that sound like a tide rising imperceptibly toward the land. The receeding white road meandered through the dark dynamic of the wooded terrain like a melody along a crest of wide chords, struck with the force of the huge musical massifs that finally engulfed it. I snapped off a twig from a wayside tree. The green of its leaves was utterly dark, practically black. It was a strangely saturated blackness, deep and generous, as full of force and nourishment as sleep. And all the greys of the landscape were derivatives of that one colour. Our own landscape occasionally assumes such a colour, on cloudy summer twilights saturated by long rainstorms, that same deep and peaceful abnegation, that same resigned and final numbness with no further need of the consolation of colours.
It was as dark as night in the forest. I went gropingly on silent conifer needles. The trees grew sparser, and under my feet the beams of a bridge began to clatter. On its far side, amid the blackness of trees, the grey and many windowed walls of a hotel loomed, with a sign which read: SANATORIUM. The bridge, enclosed on both sides by a shaky handrail of birch branches, came to an end at the very entrance, where glazed double doors stood open. Gloom and solemn silence pervaded the corridor. I went on tiptoe from door to door, reading their numbers with my fingertips in the darkness. At a corner I finally came across a chambermaid. She was hurrying out of one of the rooms, breathless and flustered as if tearing herself away 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 a chance to skip back to the half-open door, at which she was squinting.
‘I’ve come a long way,’ I said with some impatience. ‘I booked a room here by telegram. To whom should I report?’
She did not know. ‘Perhaps you’d like to try the restaurant,’ she stammered. ‘Everyone is asleep at the moment. I’ll announce you when the doctor gets up.’
‘Asleep? But it’s daytime, and a long time before nightfall...’
‘Haven’t you been informed?’ she raised her inquisitive eyes to me. ‘They are always asleep. And besides,’ she added coquettishly, ‘night-time never comes here.’ She composed herself, no longer trying to escape. Her fidgeting 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. It was a long time since I had last eaten, and so I had a keen appetite. I was gladdened by the sight of plates abundantly crammed with pastries and layer cakes.
I put 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. Through an expansive window or veranda this room opened onto a landscape I had already come to know, and which, in its sadness and resignation, stood in the frame of the embrasure like a mournful memento. In evidence on the tablecloths were the remains of recent meals, opened bottles and half-empty glasses. Even tips lay here and there, uncollected by the staff. I returned again to the buffet, appraising the cakes and pies. They looked most appetising. Should I serve myself, I wondered. I felt a surge of most singular ravenousness. One short-cake with apple jam particularly made my mouth water. I was just about to lever one of those cakes with a silver spatula when I sensed the presence of someone behind me. The chambermaid had entered in quiet slippers and gently touched my back. ‘The doctor would like to see you now,’ she said, contemplating her fingernails.
She walked ahead of me, never turning completely around, sure of the magnetism exerted by 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 with a number attached. The corridor grew increasingly dark. In total darknesses now, she leant against me for a moment. ‘This is the doctor’s door,’ she whispered. ‘Please go in.’
Doctor Gotard received me, standing in the middle of the room. He was a short man, broad in the shoulders, and he had a black beard.
‘We received your telegram only yesterday,’ he said. ‘We did send a carriage to the station, but you had already arrived on another train. It’s not the best of connections I’m afraid. So, how are you feeling?’
‘Is Father alive?’ I asked, looking anxiously at him as he went on smiling.
‘Naturally he is alive,’ he said, steadily holding my eager look. ‘Within, of course, the limits determined by the situation,’ he added, narrowing his eyes. ‘You know as well as I do that from the perspective of your family home, from the perspective of your own country, your father has died. This cannot be completely undone. 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…’
‘The whole technique depends,’ he continued, demonstrating its mechanism on his fingers, poised in readiness for this, ‘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, that death that has caught up with him in your homeland, has simply not yet run its course.’
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘Father is dying, or close to death...’
‘You misunderstand me,’ he replied in a tone of tolerant impatience. ‘Here, we reactivate past time, with all of its possibilities — and even, therefore, the possibility of a recovery.’
He looked at me, smiling and stroking his beard.
‘But no doubt you will want to see your father now. We have reserved the other bed in your father’s room for you, in accordance with your instructions. I’ll show you the way.’
As we stepped out into the dark corridor Doctor Gotard began to speak in a whisper. I noticed that he was wearing felt slippers, just like the chambermaid’s.
‘We allow our patients to lie long hours in their beds — we are conserving their vital energy. Besides, they have nothing better to do here.’
He stopped in front of a particular door and put a finger to his lips.
‘Go in quietly, your father is asleep. You should go to bed too. It’s all you can do for the time being. Goodbye for now.’
‘Goodbye,’ I whispered, feeling my beating heart rise rise 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 went inside. The room was grey and bare, practically empty. On a plain wooden bed under a tiny skylight my father lay in a heap of bedclothes and slept. His deep breathing unloaded entire strata of snoring from the depths of his slumber. The whole room was already lined from floor to ceiling with that snoring, and still new entries came. I gazed with affection on Father’s emaciated, wasted face, now totally absorbed in that labour of snoring, a face which, in a distant trance — having discarded its earthly covering — was making its confession somewhere on a far removed bank of its existence, in a solemn enumeration of its minutes.
There was no other bed. A piercing chill drew in from the window. The stove was unlit.
They don’t seem to care for their patients very well here, I thought to myself. Such a sick man at the mercy of draughts! And surely nobody ever does any cleaning. A thick layer of dust covered the floor and had overgrown the night stand and the medicine bottles upon it, and a glass of coffee that had long ago gone cold. Cakes are piled high in the restaurant, and yet they give pure black coffee to their patients, instead of something nourishing! But in consideration of their good deeds in setting back time, naturally this is a mere detail.
I undressed slowly and slipped into Father’s bed. He did not awaken. Only his snoring, apparently dammed up too high, now sank an octave deeper, relinquishing the grandiloquence of its declamation. It became, as it were, private snoring, for his purposes alone. I tucked the eiderdown around Father, protecting him as far as possible from the draught blowing in at the window. I soon fell asleep beside him.
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