Georg Letham (53 page)

I was heading for difficult days again. The good ones were past. My condition rapidly became very serious, even more agonizing than before. And then my new neighbor! The poor boy's muffled moaning and groaning might have made me despair. I would not have withstood all this had the new G. L. not been in possession of something unknown to the old G. L., the hope necessary for any new life. As long as my rapidly climbing fever left me conscious at all, I hoped for deliverance, and I hoped just as much for his, for the success of the experiment, for freedom.

But I must very soon have lost consciousness. The last thing I remember was a hollow, monotonous, but rhythmic knocking on the fairly substantial wall between us. There were only a few bricks separating us; on one side was his feverishly burning head, on the other my own, horizontal as much as possible, the better to cope with the dreadful gag reflexes. Anyone who saw us might have thought we were like the caged experimental animals in the basement that also tried to put their heads together during their time of suffering.

Sick as he was, March was trying to stay in communication with me by rapping, as prisoners commonly do on radiators or walls or toilet drainpipes. But whether he was sending me love letters in his Morse code, or complaining about the cruelty of the experiments, or making fun of it (he was capable of anything), or telegraphing me further
chapters of his life story, soon I heard nothing more. No more than a corpse hears the clumps of earth pelting down on the top of its casket, those handfuls thrown down in threes, one group of three by each of the “loving hearts.”

The nurses, who knew how to treat severe cases like mine, spared no effort. I was cared for as though I were His Excellency the Governor himself. The good nuns and the resident, who had somewhat less experience, did not stint on adrenaline to stop the hemorrhaging from the mouth, stomach, and gut, the ice bag did not leave my tormented brow, I was given mustard plasters for the small of my back and the lumbar area to ease the hellish pain (who invented pain–God, or the devil?), I was fed spoonfuls of milk, jelly, meat juice, fruit juice, nor was there any limit on expensive champagne (Walter paid for it!)–I found out for myself that champagne may be fine for the tongue of an epicure, but not for a tongue with no papillary layer. No doubt I ranted and thrashed about furiously every bit as much as most people who are seriously ill. When I suddenly returned to somewhat lucid consciousness one night, the nurse and the priest were next to me, and I found bits of plaster in my hair and in my wild beard. But I had no time to reflect at length, I had to vomit, and that is what I did. Nothing is sacred to someone suffering so much. Never mind the other eruptions.

I may have brought things up, but nothing could bring me down. I wanted to live more than ever. If someone who is seriously ill has anything on his mind, if his thoughts manage to focus on anything whatever, it is simple self-preservation. Survival at any cost!

No amount of suffering could make me, the person I now was, stop wanting to survive. I did not want to die. I did not want to go under. In my delirium, when the nurse had turned her back for a moment to
remove the bedpan, I pulled down my “chart,” as it is called, on which the course of my illness had been neatly graphed by the excellent Carolus. And despite my temperature of forty-one, I recognized the death omen, the blue and red lines for pulse and temperature going up and the black line for detoxication, urine output, going down. During the last twelve hours, I had produced not a drop of urine. That was the reliable symptom of a speedy exitus.

The nurse came back, her hands washed, the same gentle smile, the same expression of motherly reassurance on her face, and asked me to pass water. I was unable to produce a drop. Tears flowed, but not urine. What can the human will do? It cannot force nature to its knees.

She catheterized me. She did it without shyness and I permitted it without shame. I, who had never even shown myself unclothed to my wife!

One suffering so much is not a man. Yes, I say he is no longer a person in the usual sense.

The sufferer is no longer entirely of this world. He needs more love than a human being can otherwise expect. More than he deserves. Much more.

The nurse was only doing her job. Nothing bothered her, neither my terrible carrion smell nor anything else on earth. She was not experimenting. She was doing what was necessary. She brought relief. Unexpectedly she removed three hundred grams of bilious brownish green urine, and the way she held the jar up to the light told me that she herself, in her unshakable faith, regarded this relatively small amount as a good omen.

March's room was as quiet as the grave. Tears came to my eyes, I shivered, and I fell asleep.

An image of the sick March pursued me into my sleep. All the stories he had told me in earlier days, along with memories of young M. (who had his face in my dream), passed confusedly through my thoughts–nonsensically, but with such verisimilitude, such surreal brightness and clarity, that when I awoke with a somewhat lower fever my mind was thronged with them. And March was going to perish for my sake? Not seeing the poor fellow for the last few days had strengthened my devotion and gratitude. Suddenly I didn't know how I was going to live without him.

Even when I was ill I had always limited my utterances of pain and delight to those even the strongest will could not suppress, but I cried out softly, and for joy, when I suddenly heard the rhythmic knocking on the wall between our rooms. I have forgotten what message he was sending me. Probably it was not really Morse code, for his condition still did not permit the full use of his intellectual faculties. But he was alive! He was not out of danger, he was at the beginning of the second of the more serious stages of the disease, while I was at the end of it. But his case had been milder than mine, his temperature had stayed below thirty-eight, and the nurse hoped he would pull through.

Carolus and Walter came to see me. I expected reports of the experiments then in progress, but both maintained a dogged silence.

Walter looked enervated. But it was not the enervation of a man consumed by internal conflict, a man killing himself with narcotics. It was only the fatigue of a scientist at the top of his game.

Walter's silence about the experiments did not mean he mistrusted me. On the contrary, more than ever he saw in me someone not to be given up on, and despite his reserve, both inborn and acquired, he
confided in me much that concerned his personal situation. I have already reported what he had wired to his wife, who was supposed to be relaxing with the children on an epidemic-free island a few days away. He seemed to regret it. In a whisper, perhaps because he did not want a loud answer, he told me she had wired back, congratulating him, but saying that now he could let it go at last, he could not go on tempting Providence, challenging fate. She had mentioned the five children by name and then–two exclamation points. This was really just her ordinary way of speaking, despite the fact that each word of this gas (and the punctuation, too) cost a pretty penny and took up space that might have been used for more important news. For at the end of this expensive dispatch regrettably not written in telegram style, she said that she was unable to say more because she lacked the funds.

This in itself insignificant message had the toil-worn, anxious doctor-gentleman very much on pins and needles. How was the pregnancy going? How was his wife doing, how were things with his children? Not a syllable about any of that! He had forebodings of some disaster and would have averted it only too gladly. There was only one path for him to take–the one we had all chosen for him. But he feared for those to whom his heart cleaved. Why have one, I might have asked once. Now I held my tongue. I looked at the polished ring on his finger and said not a word.

Was it conceivable that he told me this and many other details about his marriage, whose principals may have loved each other but never understood each other, merely so that, if his experiment on himself went wrong,
I
would offer his family a protective wing? It was possible. He hesitated, looked around the room, picked up my chart, sent the nurse out. His words became fewer, and yet he did not want to leave
me. No doubt he realized that on my first day without fever I was still as weak as a kitten and that every word cost me a great deal of effort no matter how softly I whispered it. I struggled to keep my eyes open, and between his laconic words I listened for my friend's knocking and scratching.

Oddly enough, my hearing had become much sharper now. My ears were more sensitive than they had ever been. I had noticed this in other patients after they passed the crisis, though the phenomenon had been less marked than it was in my case.

Finally the old nurse must have given Dr. Walter a sign that I needed rest. No sooner had he gone than March started in behind the wall, monotonously giving the same signal until he too was quieted.

My sense of time was not yet functioning. I spent the days following the crisis in rapidly alternating periods of sleep and waking. I didn't know what day it was and often woke up in the morning thinking it was still the evening of the previous day.

I found myself in an indescribable state of physical weakness. My hand would fall as it brought the spoon to my mouth, I spilled any liquid I was given. But I wanted to be my old self as quickly as possible, get up, work, move around, and live.

I had become fond of life.

I was living, perhaps for the first time, without a feeling of guilt.

I had passed through a great deal. Whatever I had done, I had paid for it. I could face the future better now.

I had been burdened (unconsciously?) by a heavy feeling of guilt–I can say this now–from earliest childhood, long before I actually became guilty of anything. With his story of his expedition and the rats, my father had revealed to me the imperfection, the senselessness,
and the cruelty of the world and the human heart, not just once but a thousand times over. But, pious as he was, no, worse than that, pietistic, as life had made him, he had tried to teach me religion and patriotism–a belief in something of unattainable goodness, perfection, and power standing above us–as a corrective to what we know of the world. God in heaven, the fatherland on earth. I could not make this God of absolute goodness responsible for the obviously senseless suffering of the world down below. When I heard about some catastrophe, the sort that the newspapers are full of day after day, when my eyes were opened to these things too soon–who was I supposed to blame? If not myself? I could only blame myself and my kind. God was just. The human creature was guilty. Man was sinful and stupid from the beginning. He inherited the sins of his fathers together with their stupidity and bequeathed the lot to his children. All were guilty. God the Almighty was not.

I had this vague guilty feeling as far back as I can remember. I had it as a young man when I saw the suffering of vivisected animals. I had it at the bedside of my patients. I had it when, searching for a way out of my predicament, I took my wife's life into my own hands. As mortal terror might make someone shoot himself in the head, my guilty feeling made me feel guilty. Whether the jury acquitted me or not, it could not relieve me of my feeling of guilt. I was my own judge. The jury could dictate a punishment for me. That was part of the record, like the criminal charges. But
inner
vindication through
outer
suffering, this rehabilitation was not in its power to bring about.

Long before I understood I was guilty, I had felt that I was very much complicit in the grotesque ghastliness of the world. Everything I saw, at first with my father's eyes and then through my own observations, only
made this guilt heavier. Then, on the island of C., it swelled, this guilty feeling of original sin. Not immediately. Not all at once. The loss of the little Portuguese girl was just the beginning. My truly frightful sufferings as a Y.F. patient–you would have to have gone through something of the kind to have any sense of them–were only the second step. Not the last, not by far.

I do not say: my love for the Portuguese girl (a paternal, a physicianly love, a hopeless, a foolish, senseless one, but still mine, the only love I still had in me)–I do not say that my love for the unfortunate child changed me morally. I do not say I was cleansed by the atrocious physical suffering, the vomiting for all I was worth and the loss of the last of my wind, the living putrefaction and the carrion stench, the sorriest thing that ever happened to my miserable body. That would take a lot more, including a good deal that one might find surprising in an inner transformation.

Happiness was needed too–a feeling of recovery and joy in being alive, and a hope that nothing could destroy.

My recovery was very slow. March had a much easier time of it. I didn't begrudge him his good fortune. What I had gone through was something I wouldn't have wished on my worst enemy, never mind my only friend.

When I took my first steps in the sickroom, I shuffled like an eighty-year-old stroke victim. Any movement produced wild heart palpitations accompanied by shortness of breath, forcing me to stop and rest. March, inoculated by one of the mosquitoes with my Y.F. blood, had fallen ill after I had, but he was already back on his feet and steady on them, though his eyes were sunken in deep hollows and his hair had
fallen out in clumps. I suspected that this had very much wounded his male vanity. March, bald–the handsome blond youth with a dome, from above his weary eyes to the nape of his neck! As strange as it may sound, I felt drawn to March as he was, depleted by severe illness; I had more of a liking for him than ever. A liking? What am I saying? It was pure joy when he came into my room holding the nurse's hand (the nun towered over him by more than a head) and literally threw himself on my neck! His bald head, which looked like a billiard ball and felt like one, smooth and regular, bobbed on my throat, in which my pulse pounded madly at the least excitement, and his tears flowed under my hospital gown, down to my lower chest. What a reunion! I joked. We had both risen from the dead and could thank the heavens.