Georg Letham (5 page)

I had cages of animals set up, initially in the basement rooms, then in other spots in my now-deserted private clinic. The clinic belonged to my wife. But, of course, she could know nothing. For her benefit I simulated a brisk business at the clinic, I sent myself fake doctor's fees, I had my mistress and her sister (they got along very well) telephone me when I wished to get away from my wife, pretending to be patients needing my assistance. And even if this deception and many similar ones were easy to practice upon my credulous wife, I was uneasy. A nervous disquiet, a presentiment of disaster, never left me. My irritability increased day by day, I never really slept, was never really awake, and more than once vented my rage upon my innocent wife.

But when she, enlightened by her daughter and perhaps by my father too (he had hated me since I once jokingly dubbed him a “loving heart”), saw “evil” in me, she did not oppose this evil. Faithful, more than faithful, to the words of Scripture (she was religious, and a thousand times
I envied her this mindless faith), she turned the other cheek when I struck her on the right. I can still see her rapidly aging face. Nature had botched the job, but an animated play of expressions had at one time lent it some life and appealing mobility nevertheless; out of vanity, she had had it elaborately enameled, hoping to still have an effect on me by some means at least. Now it was as smooth as the head of a statue made of butter that has been in the sun a while, a bleak, grotesque spectacle. On one occasion she was pressing her face close to me in her love madness. I tried to push her away, unsuccessfully. I repeated my attempt to fend her off, the ball of my left hand wedged into one of her eye sockets, from which copious tears were flowing. Through the wetness of her tears I suddenly felt something slightly bristly tickling the inside of my hand. Startled, I turned on the light (all of this was happening at night in our shared bedroom), and what did I have in my hand? False eyelashes, the latest product of the big-city beauticians' art, miniature brushes of curving little hairs cunningly designed to adhere supraorbitally. And this in a woman of over fifty, the mother of a grown daughter! Her wrinkled neck (the neck cannot be enameled and its furrows cannot be filled) was shiny, like creased, crumpled parchment, on the sides especially. There were reasons for this too. It was slight burn scarring. Once she had poured a load of strong perfume on her neck and then imprudently exposed herself to a sunlamp, which had practically seared the stuff into her skin.

If only she had stayed as she was! I might have been able to see the mother in her. But that was abhorrent to her.

She did not understand that she was played out as a woman, and that a ruined castle with electric lights and central heating is an absurdity. One evening, when I returned home after further large gambling losses,
she received me with distinct coolness. For me a moment of calm. I only wish it had gone on longer. But she pressed herself to me, her face pouty as ever (to the extent that her enameled mask was still capable of a pout). She wanted me to ask why she was angry. But I had many things on my mind that day, not just her. My experiments were refusing to yield a positive result. And also: my financial difficulties were mounting. But the longer I was silent, the more she was driven to speak; the cooler I was, the more vehement she became. As finally emerged, she had found out that I had completely neglected my practice, that the once clean rooms of our clinic were now polluted with animal material of an infectious nature. How had she happened on it? Only through her accursed love for me! I had dismissed my assistant in order to save money. She knew this and had thought to lighten my load with the help of a young doctor, a friend of her daughter, and the three of them had toured the premises, which she had a legal right to do as owner.

Her surprise was understandably great. She had never thought me capable of a lie. She loved me so much and knew me
so well
! And now? She became upset, she opened her mouth wide and showed her blindingly white, gold-rimmed false teeth, her sumptuous dressing gown hung open, she stamped on the floor, and one of the thin elastic stockings that she wore underneath the flesh-colored silk ones, stretched around the varicose veins, tore with a sizzling sound.

She was in the right, I was in the wrong. And yet she angered me, I had had enough of her, I vented my desperation upon her, the miscarriage of my experimental plans, my poisoned youth, all the disappointments of my life. I hurled myself upon her, I at last gave voice to the cruelest, most hurtful words, I balled my fists, I did to her both mentally and physically everything that one person can do to another without causing lasting damage–brutal, but within the law.

She doubled over in pain, her enameled mask twitched like a fish, but suddenly a sentimental, sensual smile came to her lips, she threw herself at my feet, and when I pushed her away, disliking such theatrical scenes, she crawled after me, she began to giggle coyly, and the more brutally I kicked her, the more blissful she became.

And the ghastliest thing of all was that her arousal was transmitted to me, that she overpowered me sexually. Ugly, aging, with gold-rimmed porcelain teeth, enameled face, wrinkled, perfume-scorched skin–what is the point of enumerating all her physical imperfections, down to the singed smell of her body–she was stronger than I. I, who had wanted finally to break with her, was possessed by her in the midst of my cruelties. Never before, neither with my beautiful young mistress nor with her still more beautiful virgin sister, had I felt what now thrilled me, what shook me to the marrow.

My father had taught me how to do away with a living creature and do it coldly. It came back to me now, the thing he had stirred up in me when I was young, perhaps thirteen. Pleasurable sensations, disgusting animals, and death had parts to play. This is not the time to go into it. But why was I thinking of him now, now of all times? Was I not “making love” to my wife? Or was it that I hated her, was I clinging, still, more than ever, to him? My wife–but why speak of it?

Her little dog was howling.

This little dog, as innocent as it was, became the source of new conflict. The howling of which I spoke just now must have been an expression of its terror of me. And the terror experienced by this thinking, feeling animal (albeit one with thoughts and feelings quite different from those of a person) was not entirely without foundation. For that little dog,
which had mysteriously vanished some weeks earlier, had been found unexpectedly by my wife and the young doctor in the basement rooms of the clinic, shut in an animal cage made of heavy iron wire. They had released it, and the caretaker at the clinic had enthusiastically lent a hand. It was just his job to lend a hand and he would have strapped the Pekingese to the dissection table with the same friendly smile. But how did it get there? Pekingese dogs–expensive purebreds are surely accustomed to a better life! I do not wish to make myself out to be better than I am. I had lured it there one day, and the only reason it had managed to cling to its miserable life in the dark cellar as long as it had was that dogs were poorly suited to my experiments of the time.

My stepdaughter was fond of the little beast. Why did she not keep an eye on it? She was happy to leave the inconvenience of its care and feeding to others such as her mother, who gladly sacrificed herself here too. What consternation when Lilly had suddenly disappeared. My slender, (natural) blonde stepdaughter's cute little mug puffy from crying, such a to-do, ad after ad inserted in the papers, the neighborhood scoured the minute anyone caught sight of a canine resembling the missing Lilly-poo crossing the street! And the solution to the puzzle known all the time! I will not drag it out. It was just a joke. I had to pay for it. For from that day on the cute young thing's hatred toward me became so fanatical that she was able to act intelligently, that is to say, quite intuitively and shrewdly and with feminine guile, and in the end it was due to my stepdaughter and her future husband, the young doctor, that the district attorney's office came after me immediately following my wife's demise. Admittedly that called for no special “feminine guile.” It was all just too obvious.

There was no outward change after this episode. Except that I got tired of both the M. sisters. Not the reverse, unfortunately. They did not wish to lose their income or my masculine affection, and they stayed on at the fancy hotel at my expense. The registered or courier-delivered letters containing unpaid bills came thick and fast, there was nowhere to hide from the two shrews. Finally they tried to cozen me with love and desperation. But I knew what this meant and withdrew in time into my immediate family. In time?

My wife, who had always been quite thrifty, now became mistrustful and something beyond miserly as the result of her daughter's constant malicious innuendos. She barely even shouldered her contractually stipulated fifty-percent share of the expenses of our luxurious three-servant household. She always miscalculated in her favor. Contributions from the privy purse could not be squeezed out of her by any technique. Yet she was munificent in outfitting her daughter, who had wasted no time getting engaged to the young doctor, in a style that was more than up to standard. It made her touchingly happy to put the couple in possession of a fine eight-room country house, with the most expensive furniture throughout. The young man, who got the well-appointed clinic in addition to the cute blonde and then the villa in the stylish garden suburb to boot, was to be envied.

He was successful. All my life I have respected success wherever I saw it. My liking for the young doctor, for this publicly recognized “loving heart,” was not reciprocated. When the four of us sat together, he and his wife, I and my wife, there was chilly silence after a few exchanges. He shrugged his shoulders at my experiments. I had not “cracked” the typhus pathogen, as he put it, or the scarlet-fever pathogen either.

My wife, with her doglike affection, tried to see me through everything that had been going wrong for me lately. But I never even managed to be frank with her. Everything about her love was a misunderstanding–and, as grotesque as it may sound, here too she always miscalculated in her favor.
She
loved openly and honestly, but I had to be dishonest all the time, because she forced me to be. And this soon sickened me. I am not a liar. I had my fill of it.

Lie after lie to do with the phone calls and with personal visits I had begun to receive from the impatient, extortionate moneylenders. But nothing about the failure of my experiments, which became all the more anguishing when I learned that my medical school classmate, the aforementioned Walter, had been dealing with the same topic as I and, at least in secondary experiments, had had far better luck. Was he beating me to it?

The urge toward stupefaction, toward intoxication in any form, grew day by day. My mental breakdown
must
have been noticeable, but nobody wanted to know anything about my true torments–neither my father, who had been making a pest of himself lately with his tedious visits, nor my wife, who was annoying me with her insipid, driveling, grandmotherly love.

Neither one of them could give me what I yearned for in the depths of my soul, but there was one medicine that they could have given me to ease my suffering: the original medicine, money.

My father condescended to give me a birthday present of a couple of thousand cash, a drop in the bucket. My wife was even more cunning (she thought): she showed me the duplicate of her will, which she had made on the eve of my stepdaughter's wedding and in which I was named sole heir. Her daughter was thus given a statutory portion,
and it was I upon whom she doted. More than ever. Well, I knew that. But our relationship was shaping up as more and more repugnant just the same.

I cannot even say whether it would have been more natural if we, that is, I, a man plagued by morbid urges and living without hope or belief, with no ground beneath my feet at all, and she, an aging, coquettish woman who felt alive only in suffering–I do not know, I say, whether there might have been another natural solution to these problems. Ultimately, perhaps, I might have found a way out if I had had a
friend
, another human soul who was intelligent yet had not succumbed to despair, who trusted me and was truly intimate with me, a man I could have looked up to–Walter, perhaps. But Walter, with all his brilliant accomplishments and outstanding qualities, was having his own difficulties at the Institute now and would be lucky even to finish his most recent work. Space at the Institute is always very limited, and, under orders from the Ministry, his seat, his workbench, were being assigned to a military physician, Major Carolus, a queer specimen about whom I will have much more to say.

I was working at the Institute again, or rather still, and my dear spouse ventured no further objection. I was permitted to go on working there (and work was the only solace I had left) not because of anything to do with myself or my own achievements but only because of my father's influence, which grew year by year, the clergy constantly by his side in a supporting role, as he by its. Not the first or the last anarchist and atheist to live in perfect harmony with the Church, at least outwardly.

How then could I expect him to stand by me inwardly, whole-heartedly, when I, with a presentiment of what was coming, for the first time
considered a divorce? I do not remember how this idea entered our formal and excessively polite conversation. But I had the feeling when I expressed it that this might be a way for me to save myself and my wife. Yet he stared at me, dumbfounded. He did not even hear me out–for him the matter was settled before it was discussed. Divorce, remarriage were impossible. Catholic marriage permits separation only; canonical law does not recognize divorce.