Georg Letham (42 page)

But here there is no protection from the heat and the extravagant humidity. There is only escape from it, to a cooler, drier climate. To the highlands, the mountains. Or into alcohol or morphine.

But one had only to observe a man like Walter for an hour to realize that anything of the kind was profoundly abhorrent to him. If he escaped, it was to the bosom of the church at worst. Every Sunday, wearing his white tropical uniform that the hospital nurses had washed and ironed for him, he went to the Mass held in the chapel of the old hospital, to return an hour and a half later, his linen suit with all the starch taken out of it and his red, haggard face dripping sweat, but inwardly fortified. A pious man who had remained true to the religion of his youth and would remain so to the end.

To what extent this faith sustained him in his inner conflicts was beyond my ken. He discussed this with me as little as I told him of my unremitting suffering, my never-ending thoughts of the poor child. Not until just before his death did he share his problems with me.

With God he was always at peace. He was easy to help. He would have been easy to help, I mean.

He was invariably friendly to me. He called me Dr. Letham and shook my hand when we met in the morning. But otherwise not a word of an intimate, personal nature was exchanged. It was not that he was too proud. He was much too self-effacing to bother someone else with
his private affairs, even a lawbreaker such as myself, convicted for the murder of his wife without possibility of appeal. Nevertheless the rest of us were as well-informed as he was about his private affairs, in fact rather better in certain respects.

I said earlier that we learned more from the caterwauling of his wife, who often strained her voice to the limit because of her deafness, than might have suited the proud and reserved Walter. But things soon changed.

Our poor doctor was getting two or three calls a day from the start. The quiet of the workroom (normally interrupted by nothing worse than the sounds of the experimental animals) was broken by the ring of the telephone, which seemed particularly harsh in this context. Plenty of calls. But after a while his wife seemed to be answering his questions evasively. At first broadly and rhetorically, but then with only a stock “I don't know.” Whether the doctor was inquiring after the health of his oldest boy or about whether his second-oldest daughter's dreary pruritic skin rash had gone away or whether the household money had been adequate over the last decade (all public-health officers think in decades) or how things were going in the hardware business that supported the dear wife's family back home–he received the same deadly, vacuous answer every time:
I don't know
. Although it had nothing to do with me, it filled me with a kind of horror, and when I saw the happy husband and father hurry back from the telephone booth to his lab table, outwardly melting in sweat, inwardly not heartened, as he had been after Sunday Mass, but distressingly drained and troubled, I privately compared his state of fulfilled love with my own of ill-fated love. His wife, that dear woman, had not even been able to resist answering the doctor's good-bye with “I don't know.” He was agitated, in despair,
he might have wanted to curse, to slam the door of the booth, but that gentleman was in control of himself in all situations. He closed the door quietly, said nothing, set about his work with gentle hands, and, it will not be believed, he submitted to this game many times a day with the most good-humored expression in the world. Instead of having the number changed, which could easily have been done from the head office, he always yielded to the shrill ringing of the telephone. He did not believe it was right to let his wife think he was not there. He preferred to acquiesce to her diabolical attempts to manipulate him. He tried to understand her. Not vice versa.

Or did he even think she was right? It was her belief that, in the interests of the family, a family that was going to wrack and ruin, anything was permitted, even required, in the face of his stubbornness. That was just what she believed, and people with unshakable beliefs always have the advantage.

Why had Walter brought his family here? Was he any better–that is to say, was he behaving more rationally than Monica's mother? Was it not madness, the whole thing? Walter's wife was someone of pure, more than that, of practical, rationality. And she was someone with lively female wishes and desires.

If she was a normal woman, then she expected a normal man in Walter. Had she not made enough sacrifices, and had she not always been told that this was absolutely the last one she would have to make?

Thus he listened patiently to her infernal “I don't know” and then went back to his work with silent dedication, to find for the thousandth time that yellow fever was a terrible disease, but its nature and its mode of transmission still entirely unknown.

Sometimes the chaplain paid us a visit in the late afternoon, bringing the news from the city; he would invite us finally to play a card game, puff-puff, if I understood correctly. He was very concerned about our health and state of mind, we not so much about his. We would listen to his talk with seeming raptness, but soon one and then another would edge away and go back to work. What choice did he have? He would take his leave in his quiet, polite, impenetrable way, the way that elderly priests have about them. He did not disturb us, for, what with the fruitless yet very hard work in the oppressively hot, indescribably humid laboratory reeking with every horror there is, a brief interruption was always welcome.

Another visitor sought out the doctor during these days, behaving with rather less delicacy. This was an agent, who called himself a general agent but was really only a subagent, of the various shipping companies that would berth a foundering tub like the
Mimosa
in the city of C. every so often. He was also the representative of some large North American life insurance companies and had made a not inconsiderable fortune through all sorts of more or less legal deals (with the criminals here or against them, needless to say).

The subagent had come on a business mission. He would not be deterred from entering the laboratory. Everyone knew him, must surely know him! He was fearless because he already survived Y.F. during a great wave of the epidemic three years earlier compared to which the current one was a trifle, and since that time had not traveled. For if one leaves the soil of the Y.F. site, one's immunity disappears and the whole farce can start all over again. But the dandified gentleman, decked out in a diamond stickpin, gold cuff links, and similar gewgaws, was protected
from this danger. He was a knight in shining armor with a pith helmet, for he was exerting himself on behalf of a lady who had been slighted, threatened, who was in peril. And this lady was not a widow, her children were not orphans, it was Dr. Walter's wife herself who had sent him here, even if he denied it in his genteel way, as an emissary of reconciliation. With a palm branch in his beak, but a poisoned arrow concealed under his left wing, if I may put it that way. The palm branch was the greetings that the good man conveyed from the languishing wife and helpmeet. This was not a surprising piece of intelligence in view of the quarantine under which the husband had been kept for almost two months now and which would continue for an unforeseeable length of time. The business was soon settled, and Walter ushered the literally oily little gentleman out the door.

But, even behind the glass door of the laboratory, he shot his poisoned arrow. This was the insurance policy that the able subagent was formally canceling in the name of his company. Walter, prudent paterfamilias that he was, had taken out a policy providing his wife and children with fifty thousand American dollars in the event of his death, at particularly favorable, exceptionally low premium rates, as the subagent had ebulliently claimed.

So the current premium hasn't gone unpaid, has it? Of course not, acknowledged the subagent. All right, what then? We don't have a lot of time, said Walter with a trace of impatience. No wonder, when an experiment that was in progress had been temporarily halted and, if the moment was not seized, would have to be repeated the next day. The subagent bowed. He hadn't closed the lab door, he had a foot in it. He wasn't about to go, he was just getting started. The insurance company cannot assume this risk, he said as earnestly as a psalmist, gesturing
through the corridor window at the courtyard of the building, where at that very moment a Y.F. corpse wrapped in a white sheet was being carried to the basement autopsy rooms.

Walter understood. But he said, No, I don't understand, I thought it was the company's business to assume the usual risk of a physician in an epidemic area and the terms included that. Yes, but just the usual risk and no more, replied the subagent. If someone goes tumbling over Niagara Falls in a leather kayak, my insurance company might possibly, possibly assume that risk, but it has to know about it
beforehand
and will set the premium accordingly high. Anything else would be commercial suicide and could not be expected of any business. The fact that you would be willfully and deliberately exposing yourself to the most dangerous contagion for months on end was not known to the company when, through me, it signed this document, he said grandly, indicating the bumf he had under his smelly armpit. “Fine! I'll guide myself accordingly,” Walter replied, and bowed. The subagent finally had no choice but to leave. The guards in front of the hospital door greeted him with great respect and stood at attention, for he had spared no expense in order to be allowed into the quarantined research areas. He was a “pretty man,” a half-breed, and like many of his race afflicted with social ambitions. What did we care about his beauty, his race, his ambition, his business? Walter's face was very somber nonetheless. But he said nothing and went back to his work.

I empathized with our collaborator Walter all the more easily because my own experiences along the same lines with my wife were still fresh in my mind. For it was at that very time that I was preoccupied with an
absurd but nonetheless very intense interior monologue in part to do with my late wife and my old father, in part with the late little Portuguese girl. What would have become of these people if . . . Is there anyone unfamiliar with those annoying obsessions that will not loosen their grip on one's poor tormented heart and mind no matter what one does? So too are those cobweblike draperies known in the lands given to poesy as “gossamer” unwilling to let go of the hair of a person out walking, even in the strongest autumn storm, or of clothes whipped by autumn winds. They do not let go voluntarily. One has to use gentle force. But what kind of gentle force is there against terrible memories?

The good March's love and trust were only a mild consolation. If he had at least been able to do without any sort of requital, if he had left everything to me, if he had made things easy for himself instead of difficult–what might not have happened. As it was, however, all that happened was that I tried to bring it home to him for the thousandth time that I could not reciprocate his absurd feeling, now less than ever. And why, he asked naïvely. What response can you make to that? Only to stroke his hair and look away over his shoulder.

But for Walter, the love of his good wife, that exemplary normal woman and mother who wanted her husband to return to her and her children, was every bit as painful and crippling. Dispatching the pretty man, the subagent, was not her last attempt. She found a much more vulnerable spot than his material interests–total altruist that he was, other people were the only ones who ever got the benefit of his worldly goods. Money was just money for him. Of what percentage of the people of Europe, among whom money is absolutely worshipped as something holy in life, can that be said?

The telephone conversations were now becoming very brief. The lady
indicated that she did not want to detain her lord and master, she was much too lowly, too small, too insignificant, much too much a domestic drudge to disturb her husband at his important, public-spirited, promising, earthshaking work. As cheap as this irony was, it wounded the doctor, both hurting his pride and damaging his feelings toward his wife. Nevertheless, though at first glance he seemed softhearted and considerate, he was someone of indomitable character who knew just what he wanted to do and pushed it as far as it would go.

As far as it would go? Or only as far as he was permitted? The wife, availing herself of almost diabolical means, was beginning to distract her husband from his crackbrained, time-consuming, life-endangering experiments. On this day, for example, she demanded, quite coolly and even with a kind of gay composure, her passport. Her passport? She had never had one. There was only one passport, the one issued in the names of Dr. Walter, his wife, Alix Rosamunde Gabriele Therese, and their five children. Yes, that was the document the wife wanted. She no longer threatened divorce, or suicide, she indicated that she and her (her!) children felt they could not cope with the grueling climate, though it was quite good enough for convicts, that she wanted to move abroad, go to her mother and her brother, who were carrying on, after a fashion, the old hardware business that had belonged to her father, now three years dead. He, her husband, shouldn't worry, he'd be kept posted and would now be able to finish his humanitarian researches undisturbed.

As may be imagined, the good doctor, cut to the quick, did not have a snappy comeback. This tone, so calm, so composed, so acutely calculating, contrasted utterly with his wife's usual impetuous manner, which was the only one he was hardened to. For the plan did not come
from her own foolish brain but from the brain of the subagent, who knew more about human nature than the doctor had at first assumed. But the subagent was hardly mentioned, except when the wife casually let fall that the doctor need no longer be unduly concerned about his family's financial situation, the subagent had relieved her of the most pressing household worries, was taking care of everything for her and the children, for she herself was fully occupied with preparing for the move to London. And that was that. Bzzz–gone! The good Walter was so stunned that he fairly slumped (by the telephone) and then sat mutely in front of the microscope, his face grim. It was the microscope of recent manufacture, the one with twin eyepieces through which two people could observe and examine the same field of view at the same time. The brigadier general had brought it from Europe, and Walter had more than once used this splendid instrument to demonstrate to the good Carolus a beautiful (but uninteresting) bacillus specimen.