Georg Letham (52 page)

In a short while Carolus and Walter came in, their hands full of jars containing fresh young
Stegomyias
whirring about. At first I did not understand what they might want from me in this room, which really was not a pleasant or stimulating place to be anymore. Oh, nothing, just a drop of my precious, peerless essence. Blood, I mean.

They wasted little time making sure it was all right with me if they went on carrying out my working plan to the letter. They examined me no further, but simply set to work. First they had March let a good amount of light into the room, which until then had deliberately been kept dim. They needed light for their delicate work. I would have preferred darkness. I could not even tolerate the weak light that I saw with my eyes closed.

And did I at least close my eyes, as would have been the thing to do? Unfortunately not. Someone like G. L.
had
to see what was going on around him. I had to make use of that brief illuminated moment amid the incalculably wide, vast desert of my fever to take note of my situation and everything that was going on around me. It was just not in my nature to turn a blind eye. Thus I stared with frantic interest at the blackish, white-barred, six-legged, tiny-headed insect that Walter had placed on my bared upper arm and that was using its hair-fine proboscis to pick out a good place to bite and feed. It was running restlessly about
on my arm, held captive by the test tube as though in a cage, unable to fly away.

I saw the veins on Carolus's age-weary hand, underneath the skin with its satiny sheen, the old-man's skin that had been thinned by the years. I saw the long, badly warped, horny nails, with bluish dirt underneath them. Finally I flinched. During the past few days I had been almost unconscious. I was conscious
now
. I felt the bite of the tiny
Stegomyia
as though I had been stabbed.

A comparatively small pain added to all the great pain I was suffering. But I would very much have liked to avoid this one. I groaned loudly, thinking it would get through to Carolus and March and Walter that this bite had been enough and that I was asking to be left alone. March noticed. The others might have noticed too, but they paid no attention.

They conferred: Walter said he had sent two wires. The first to the Department of Health . . . As his voice dropped to an inaudible whisper, he quickly but gently moved the mosquito from my arm to a test tube, which was then placed in a wooden rack and labeled with grease pencil. Then came a second mosquito. The nurse, whom neither of the gentlemen had deigned to look at, left the room to eat her evening meal or have a little break.

I stayed. I stayed in bed. My sufferings went on. And why wouldn't they? March took the bilious mucus I gagged up from my swollen lips and gazed at me ingenuously, full of sympathy. When I was inspired to lurch upward, as anyone might to toss his schnapps, Walter forcefully pushed me back. Not out of concern for the salubrious “horizontal position,” but only so as not to disturb the biting and feeding insect. On his serious features, furrowed, lately somewhat puffy, decaying from
within, could now be seen a tense expression of ardent commitment to the experiment, of joy in his work. His hands no longer shook as they had on the first evening. No doubt he had sworn off drinking again. If only he would go away! Off with him! Leave me be! Dear God! To hell with everyone! Enough of the horror!
That
was the fervent prayer I choked out, that was what my heart and my insides yearned for. That I hated Carolus, to whom I had had an unspoken aversion even on the
Mimosa
, was understandable. But now I had a much greater hatred for Walter, who, when the second mosquito had bitten amply, licked his narrow, beard-fringed lips with the lewd pleasure of the experimenter.

There were perhaps five mosquitoes together in the jar. One or another of them might fly away as they were being taken out. For this reason the window had been shut tight. The heat and the stench of my humble self had become still more unbearable. But at least the experimenters and their precious, hard-to-replace little beasts were protected. So patience, I told myself. Pull yourself together, Georg Letham the younger, be a man, stick it out. Stick it out, get hold of yourself, one mosquito bite more or less won't kill you. Fine. I gritted my teeth and got hold of myself.

The shiny little test tube that Carolus held in his hand, pressing its open end against my upper arm, glittered cruelly under the electric lights. I lifted my eyes to the glinting test tube, its rounded end. I was anxious to see the last of the insects and waited with terrible impatience for them to bite or not bite. Finally it was over.

They goose-stepped off, Carolus, Walter, March. The nurse appeared, freshly washed and brushed, with a clean headdress over her hair, smelling of soap. She opened the window, turned off all the lights but one, a very dim one at the head of my bed, she plumped the pillows, she gave
me some ice chips, she cleaned my gutta-percha bib, she straightened the bedsheets at my feet, and she nodded mysteriously to March, who had just come in carrying a fat letter in my father's writing. She seemed rather serious, whereas the old boy was merry. I saw and did not see. Unexpectedly I slipped into a shallow sleep. I had been almost entirely without sleep for so many days and nights. Truly I had become as avid of sleep as only someone dogged by fever can be. When March first came in, before the mosquitoes had been placed on me, it must have been six o'clock. Now it might have been eight. I stretched thoroughly. I noticed that my breathing was becoming slower and that everything in me, from head to toe, was drifting off, dying down. It was a good, peaceful dying down, a gradual, completely inescapable, yet absolutely voluntary and lovely sinking. It was like what happens when you shut down the iris diaphragm of a microscope using the condenser knob. The light coming through the eyepiece gradually becomes weaker and weaker, but things emerge with a new sharpness, a serenity and an inevitability they did not have before. Now I heard myself sleeping deeply.

I was in my hometown. In my house. I was returning late after a walk to visit a patient, an older lady. I had had dinner in town and assumed that my wife, exhausted from her journey, would have long since gone to bed. In such cases I sometimes spent the night on a comfortable leather sofa-bed in my study, so as not to disturb her light sleep. I too was extraordinarily tired. The barometer was unusually low for this time of year, mid-August. The air abnormally pillowy, suffocatingly close. Humid, but with no tendency toward rain. Before going to bed, I took the little glass vial of Toxin Y out of my pocket and put it aside, on the
mirrored top of my cabinet. But I could not sleep. Suddenly I heard my wife walking back and forth in her room directly above my study. She was awake now, or had not yet gone to bed. She was talking in a loud voice. To herself? I had gone quietly into the bathroom. The footsteps in my wife's room had stopped. As had the sound of her voice. I was just about to settle down when she appeared on the landing, wrapped in a sumptuous salmon-colored nightgown heavily embroidered with glass beads, her fine jewelry still on her throat, on her ears, wrists, and fingers. In her eyes was an expression that in the most unfathomable fashion always both attracted and repelled me. A doglike tenderness, a lust to be beaten. I drew my shoulders together. I bowed my head. I let her know that all I wanted was to be left alone. Turning on the lights in the study, she noticed the glint of the glass vial that held the toxin. She thought it was medicine. Morphine. She asked me to give her an injection, from which she expected a favorable effect. I felt the deadly irony of fate so strongly that I could not help smiling too. This put her in a better mood immediately. Conquered once more by her voluptuous urges, she embraced me with her short, rosily powdered little arms, she dragged me upstairs to our bedroom. She drew the curtains and enfolded me. She sank down at my feet and I felt the wet warmth of her tears on my lower legs, which she was clasping firmly. I bent down to her, gripped by a feeling of sympathy normally foreign to me. She seized the opportunity, reached up next to me with her right arm and switched off the little lamp on the night table. As she made this movement, the catch of her expensive jeweled bracelet bit hard into my right upper arm and not only tore the sleeve of my shirt almost up to the shoulder, but also scratched my skin so deeply at one spot that I flinched with pain. A few drops of blood flowed from the little wound.
I merely smiled a superior smile, and it was she who was distressed, I who calmed her; I was already calm. I comforted her, and she, her eyes fastened on me imploringly, clung to me until weariness overcame her and she sank into a deep sleep. I did not bend. My little wound had stopped bleeding. A scratch, no more. Her valuable bracelet lay glittering on the Persian carpet, in the middle of an ornament representing a flower or a dragon. At this point the dream became unclear. I saw myself with her head in my lap for a long time, playing distractedly with her emerald bracelet.

I gave a start. “Please keep still,” Walter said.

He was still standing to my right, Carolus to my left. The light was still burning. There were no nurses to be seen. On the rack in front of me were exactly two test tubes containing mosquitoes whirring about. The third insect sat on my upper arm, hunching as they do, jiggling its last pair of legs, and was just then preparing to bite. I flinched. I did not want to go through with this. I had to.

When the insect had done its job, Walter carried it in its test tube to the wooden rack, and the fourth insect was placed on me. I groaned. Everything I have just described at length had happened in the space of a few seconds. Is time just a dream too?

March came in with another load of hungry mosquitoes. He took the engorged ones back to the laboratory. Walter seemed to continue with something he had been saying: “Secondly, I've wired my wife to tell her we're making progress now and ask for a little patience.” Carolus, to whom these words were addressed, made no reply. He only shook his sage head thoughtfully and then nodded. Yes or no? Best not to choose.

Carolus assisted as dexterously and handily as was possible for him.
His thoughts were not with me. I looked at him. Not vice versa. Lord only knows on what difficult chapter of medical statistics they lingered.

I was very distressed. I was not permitted to move and had to keep still even when I was vomiting. The transfusion of my blood to twenty-five or thirty thirsty mosquitoes took until almost midnight. This was part of our experimental program.

But there was no provision in our program for the kind of dream I have just recounted.

Walter had chosen the right moment to have the mosquitoes designated for new experiments feed on my blood: the morning after the scene I have described, my temperature had dropped considerably. I felt like a new man–bright yellow all over, but free of the dreadful pressure in my head, the vomiting, the epigastric pain, and all the rest of it.

I knew this was only a deceptive window. I knew these hours of relatively lucid awareness were numbered. Nevertheless something like hope awakened in me. I thought back on my life. I thought about little M., whom I had loved and whom I still loved. Why had it been she that I loved? Just because she was there. This is beyond reason.

This love had not changed me outwardly. Everything I went through had necessarily followed strict laws. And even if this late feeling had transformed the old Georg Letham the younger into an entirely different being, this “entirely different being” would have to go on living under the same name, with the same responsibilities, in the same world, and with the same past.

But what lay ahead was open. If my feeling for the little Portuguese
girl who had died so young was genuine, I might one day be able to leave this hospital room as one changed within. I began to hope. I began to rejoice. I delighted in the great gift of these hours of freedom from fever and pain. For the first time it dawned on me that I might be
more fortunate
by far in my suffering than most people were in their normal lives.

My Y.F. had meaning. For the first time since this terrible illness had begun afflicting and killing people, it had meaning. The experiment was a necessary one, whose result would be that things would change. It had great significance. Though I lay powerless in the grip of this awful disease, my mind and my will made me superior to it.

I told myself that if I pulled through the second, more terrible period–I could not imagine it and did not want to, was only too happy to savor these few good hours–but if I stood the test of the second period, better days would dawn for many people, and for me.

The people around me had happier faces too. Carolus reported to me what the matron had already suggested: if I recovered, we, March and I, would not go back to the camps. I and all those designated for lifelong exile who had been experimental subjects would be recommended for clemency by the governor, in return for having voluntarily permitted the use of their bodies. This improvement in our fortunes could only have been due to Walter.

The inoculations continued. My case had been the only one so far with an unambiguously positive outcome. But when I asked after March, who had not appeared at my sickbed for some time, Carolus's leathery features twisted into what he intended to be a zany grin. But he made no reply, as though he had an especially nice surprise for me, the leathery bald rogue!

The solution was not long in appearing. My brief period of illusory
well-being was already over when I heard the footsteps of nurses carrying a patient past my door on a stretcher. Was there a new case from the town? Hardly! It was March who had fallen ill. He was being accommodated in the adjoining room. His bed, against the left wall of his room, and my bed, against the right wall of mine, had only that wall between them.