Georg Letham (48 page)

But all three men who had been inoculated, that is, bitten by mosquitoes impregnated with Y.F. blood, were so far as hale and hearty as minnows in a clear stream.

I may have trembled for my life. Certainly for our plan.

The eleventh day, my day, the one on which I would be bitten by a
Stegomyia
mosquito, was a Sunday. Carolus, Walter, and the chaplain were against performing an experiment on that day. And I, I went along with them. Why? Out of consideration for the religious twinges of my collaborators? By no means. To be frank: out of cowardice. Out of a wish to put off being bitten for one more day. I was afraid. I would be even today. At that time I already knew very well what the disease was. Although my life was wretched, I feared for it. I dreaded the waiting, particularly. Had I not waited long enough already? Those eleven days were not days of rejoicing. I shuddered at the thought of the retching, the vomiting, the terrible diarrhea. My sleep was disturbed. I was
deathly pale when, on Monday evening (the mosquitoes were most inclined to bite in the evening), my collaborators had me take off my white coat and told me to have a seat and keep still. This was not an unusual command; it was the normal procedure that I myself had directed for all those who had been inoculated previously. And what a huge difference between what one asks of someone else and what is done to oneself. The one is an experiment. The other is reality. Or does it come to the same thing? No matter. Thus it was that my upper right arm was covered with what is called gooseflesh. The little insect scurried back and forth on my skin. I trembled with cold. At the laboratory's temperature of more than thirty degrees centigrade, my teeth were chattering. Because of the gooseflesh or for some other reason, the insect would not bite. It sat there and did nothing to me. My collaborators asked me, Carolus very dryly, then March in the quavery voice that he always had at important moments, whether the mosquito had bitten. I could not lie. I shook my head and looked with anxious vigilance out the laboratory window over the archipelago, at the little island made of black rock, known all over the world, to which the worst criminals were deported and where, shut off from the living, condemned forever to silence, to the sight of the shadowless sea, and to the company of no one but themselves, they would limp along to the end of their lives, which were not lives. And yet I would have traded places with any of them! What was the use? There was no going back. Walter, who had watched everything in silence, removed the insect that was disinclined to bite and took another, the last of this series, out of the insectarium. The room was dim. He had not been quite steady on his feet lately. I suspected him of not being averse to a good swig of whiskey now and then. Whiskey? Walter?

And yet it was so. After his belated little honeymoon with his wife on the “lonely island” (it was a black rock with only three palms and otherwise as bare as a hand, but a flat isle, free of infection, somewhat marshy, yet covered with luxuriant vegetation), he had returned completely distraught. Though he had always been so scrupulously well-groomed, so impeccably neat, now he neglected himself. Much to my consternation. For it is a known fact that the first step on the way to moral dissipation in the tropics is the neglect of one's dress. Next come inadequate personal hygiene and poor table manners. The penultimate step is the use or abuse of alcohol and morphine, which are generally extraordinarily conducive to the morally destructive action of this deadly climate, going far beyond what these poisons do in temperate lands. Such a debauched gentleman is sent over the edge by entering into one of the temporary marriages with the native black women that are stigmatized by the English especially. In so doing, these men take their leave of the respectable world and fall to perdition among the blacks.

Even now I did not think that this complete gentleman and faultless spouse would be capable of such a step. But would I have believed even six weeks before that he could run around in a crushed, open lab coat, unshaven, his hair full of dandruff, with untended, black-edged fingernails, could wipe the sweat off his stricken face with a handkerchief that had already seen a great deal of use?

Was there no end to what all the waiting to hear from his “loving hearts” did to him? The fruitless hoping and pining had caused him to degenerate so far that now, in the late afternoon, under the influence of one or more whiskeys, he was no longer steady on his feet and was stumbling. Stumbling? Would he stumble? Fall, break the test tube
containing my mosquito? I was so addled by anxiety and dread that I imagined this with the fondest hope. But then he stayed on his feet, he pulled himself together.

He was surprised at himself. He did not recognize his condition. He thought it was an attack of malaria, whereas it was only the alcohol and the sorrow of his heart. Could I be feverish, he was thinking as he held the test tube to the window and shook it to rouse the quiescent insect in it a little. “I just took my temperature, and it was normal. Well, give me your arm, hold it like this, please.” Then he held the mouth of the test tube down on my forearm.

“No, not there, higher up,” I said. “We want all the experiments to be completely uniform.”

“As you wish,” he said, and cautiously slid the test tube up my arm to a point just below the shoulder.

What I went through in that moment is difficult to describe. Just a mosquito bite?

But the moment of hesitation, of uncertainty, was past. I too had gotten hold of myself. The fit of cowardice, the wave of dread, was over. No gooseflesh. I smiled. I yawned discreetly. I must have been a strange sight. My blood may not have been as sweet as sugar, but it was palatable, and the mosquito was unable to tear itself away from the feast that flowed beneath my skin.

Carolus logged the experiment, and I retired very early that evening.

How long Y.F. needed to incubate was still unknown. It might have been two, four, even six days. Even more. There are diseases, such as leprosy, whose incubation period, the interval between infection and the appearance of disease, is months or years long. During this time the infected individual goes about his work as usual, he lives as though he
were healthy. He acts like a healthy person, but is not one. Happy is he who knows nothing. I knew too much. That made my lot more difficult.

There were only two possibilities. Either our theory was correct, Axiom I was valid, and we, or at least one of us, must contract Y.F., provided we continued to abide rigorously by our methodology. Or everything was wrong, and in that case I saw before me nothing whatever to sustain my life. What more could I hope to do here? Vegetate in the deportee camp (which was unbelievably poorly run), among the dregs of humanity? But I would not even be able to vegetate
among
those dregs, I would be
beneath
them, inferior to them in every respect–would any man like me be able to tolerate that for more than a few days? I shuddered to recall my first days on the
Mimosa
. I have held my tongue about the details. And I will continue to do so.

By my side I had only a sentimental, maudlin man like March, who loved me and was my friend, but who could never satisfy me. With no real work, without freedom, in a dreadful climate–and without hope of hope? Even before my crime I had found life hardly bearable! And this! The only thing that had sustained me lately–now I understood clearly what had kept me from suicide after Monica's death–was my belief in our experiments.

As I went past Walter's room that evening, I saw on the table an open seltzer bottle and an empty glass. In a corner between his bed and the window, where the evening sun could not reach, was a half-empty bottle of Scotch whiskey. No one was watching it, and it would have been easily replaced by its owner. But I left it undisturbed. No inebriation! I wanted to be and remain lucid, enduring everything that came.

The work in the laboratory had dwindled to a minimum. Straightening up was really all there was to do. I washed out the medicine chest.
I sterilized the syringes, I cleaned the bottles, though this was actually March's job. But today it was good to pass the time while waiting for the “either/or.” I also found a package of solid morphine in the form of morphine hydrochloride crystals. This was more tempting than the whiskey. To avoid, to escape the pain of Y.F., the retching, the vomiting, the terrible headache! I felt a great temptation. I happened to notice a dead experimental animal, a rat, I believe, which must have given its life for experiments that required its blood. I left the morphine where it was and took the rat carcass downstairs to have it destroyed, as we did methodically with all animal carcasses once we had no further use for them.

The night after I had received my mosquito bite, I was again unable to sleep soundly. Although I sank into a profound slumber when my head hit the pillow, I started up, covered with cold sweat, even before March had really gone to bed. In the uncertain light I saw him fingering something bright and shiny. It was a rosary that the chaplain, he of the “Amen” tattoo on his throat, had given him. So March too had joined the devout. For me, for my salvation?

I did not want to accept his consolation. Nor was I capable of giving him any. I envied him his faith. How fortunate someone must be, in all his wretchedness, if he was still able to believe in God. Perhaps March was now thanking the Almighty for protecting him from being infected by the mosquito? No, probably not.

He had sacrificed himself for me, and of course he was lucky that heaven had not yet taken him up on his offer and given him Y.F. But now he looked after me, as a kind and foolish mother looks after her only
child. He expected everything of me. He yearned. A kiss, an awkward, loutish embrace with eyes closed, expressions of tenderness with which the unnatural love of homosexuals, not directed toward procreation, is satisfied often enough. I submitted to it uncomplainingly. But I never returned it. My face was cold. I did not want it. I was incapable of it.

Why deny it, I clung to him anyway. But only emotionally. Not physically.

He, and not Walter, who was my intellectual equal, was my friend. He had become my friend without my noticing.

I even thought now that if I had had someone like March by my side in recent years, things would not have gone with me as they had. But when he told me the same thing? When he expressed his affection in the silliest, but for that very reason the most touching way, “on the knees of his heart”? Had I not noticed the instinctive, fluttery movement to brush away the first mosquito that landed on my arm that evening? And had I not seen his face glowing with delight when Walter, carrying the second dangerous insect, had slipped on a carelessly discarded banana peel? March was normally tidy. Could I believe that he had deliberately left the banana peel there? It was just as plausibly an accident. I was the eternal unbeliever, despairing of everyone as a matter of logic, but I wanted to have proof of his love.
I wanted to believe
! Why
bother
? What was the point? A man with whom there was no way to talk about what we were doing, or about myself–what did he mean to me? But even this I wanted! Since that morning on the dock in sight of the steamer
Mimosa
as it lay offshore, I had felt the urge to confess. Just as he had. But only he had succeeded in easing his heart. Not I. How do people talk? How do people translate their innermost feelings into prattle and trivial endearments? This was beyond me. I asked him now to put
off going to sleep for a little while. I wanted to get up again, go to the convent garden. The night was starry and relatively cool. I asked him to come with me. I was depressed. I was miserable. I had a foreboding that the disease would take its gloves off with me. It was only a foreboding, for from the standpoint of the knowledgeable physician, it was grotesque to imagine that the first symptoms of Y.F. would already be appearing three or four hours after I had been infected by a bite from a mosquito. But does anyone always think logically and behave consistently? Thus I accepted March's help in getting dressed. He pulled on my socks, clasping my ankles as tenderly as my mother had once done in earliest childhood. I still remember feeling her breath on my bare ankles as it puffed out the then-fashionable close-fitting, embroidered veil she wore (she was about to go out), and her hair, somewhat loose underneath her velvet hat, tickling my naked skin. I was a thin, wiry, headstrong, very quiet youngster, two and a half or three years old at the time. Not wild about inordinate tendernesses, nor spoiled by them. My mother had had her children in rapid succession; for all her loving kindness, she was unable to devote herself entirely to any of us. My father's thriftiness and his high standards of luxury meant that it was not an easy household to run. My mother never relaxed. When the youngest child, my sister, was a year old, my mother died. She seemed to be in a hurry even then. She took to her bed, we went to her for five or ten minutes, and she was never seen again. I am not generally one to reminisce, the reader of these lines will perhaps have noticed that it is not in my nature to draw useless and bitter comparisons between the present and the past. This evening was otherwise.

Apart from our underclothing, both of us were wearing only our lab coats, which billowed in the evening breeze. We went softly through
the corridors, on our feet the woven straw sandals that are worn here. The Y.F. patients clamored, moaned, retched, and raved behind their doors. The half-grown youth who had provided us with his blood lay dying, or was already gone. We listened as we passed his door. The room was literally silent as the grave. And the door was locked. The foolish, curious, and, as must be admitted, extraordinarily fearless March could not refrain from laughingly rattling the door. He liked to laugh too much. He laughed at any opportunity. Nothing answered him. I pulled him away. A chlorine smell came from the room, much dissipated, but strong enough to irritate my always sensitive nasal mucosa and make me sneeze. The naïve March came out with a loud, laughing “Bless you!” on the hospital stairs, no doubt unaware that in the Middle Ages sneezing was thought to be the first symptom of the plague, and that for that reason the superstitious always responded with the pious exclamation “Bless you!” or “Gesundheit!”