Georg Letham (54 page)

I did, in my way. He in his. He reported to the chaplain for confession and Communion, since he believed that the confession he had made and the Communion he had received in the hospital at the beginning of his illness (like all new patients) were insufficient.

That day he practically had to be taken by force out of my room. My energies were hardly worthy of the name, they were only sufficient for staying alive. I only wanted to sleep. I ate very little, afraid the terrible vomiting might return, and what that meant can be judged only by someone who has gagged and vomited himself nearly to death as I had. I could barely speak. “Barely” was the word for everything I did. I could barely even think.

March, a person of almost inexhaustible energies, did not understand this. Six or seven days after my defervescence, he was sitting by my bed as happy as a clam and feeding me in his awkward way. I bridled at his overbrisk ministration. But I didn't want to hurt him. Nevertheless it became too much for me. My stomach, whose lesioned
walls were only lightly healed, could not accommodate much food at one time, even if it was as delicious as the black cook in the hospital kitchen was able to make it for convalescent patients. But when the good March sat by me and rejoiced at every morsel I forced down, who would have had the heart to tell him: go away and quit tormenting me with your love! It makes me want to th . . .

So I submitted to him. Then I collapsed on the pillows. A gnawing pain began in my stomach and climbed up my throat to my mouth. I belched–always an ominous sign with me, who never belched when I was healthy–though I did my best to suppress it in order not to worry March. I made myself lie still and hold down everything that wanted to come up.

The good fellow was now standing at the window. He closed the blinds, but then held two slats apart for a last swooning look at the evening landscape. The hospital was on a hill. On clear days the view was enchanting, the islands, dark, craggy, but partly ringed by lush vegetation at the shore, could be seen gleaming in all the colors of the rainbow in the light of the setting sun, the sea reflecting its blazing brilliance and the copper and sapphire tints of the clouds. The massy, towering structures of the clouds were motionless. Also motionless were the rocky islands in the becalmed sea. Between the two was the suspended blaze of the gradually subsiding evening sun. It was a strange feeling to hear my friend's oohs and ahs at the sight of these empyrean natural wonders while the pain inside me was eating me up. He sat on my bed. Dusk was falling rapidly. He caressed me with his fine, stupid eyes and ran his fingers over his skull to see if he could feel his hair growing back, and asked me half seriously, half jokingly, if I thought there was anything there.

Anything there! Why not say what was really on his mind? His future and mine were a thousand times more important. He had learned, in fact earlier than I had (at that time I was suffering the initial attacks of fever), of Walter's humanitarian plan to officially recommend clemency for every convict who had volunteered for life-threatening experiments. Now it was of great concern to me (and not without reason) what this freedom would really mean. Was it only the freedom to move about freely on C. and in all probability perish here from the hardships of unemployment and poverty and the climate, especially if, as would be the case for the two of us, we could not count on support from munificent family members? Or was it the true freedom to be allowed to live again, as one wished to do?

As I said, my hearing had become extraordinarily keen as a result of my illness. Although I was in the grip of a new wave of fever, my ears could detect the slightest sound. I must also note that I was much more attentive now to the things around me. I was struck by much about people and things that I would never have thought worthy of notice before. Thus my eyes were opened to innumerable character traits in people, ones that were both ridiculous and affecting, repellent and poignant. I understood people better. I found their behavior natural and not always internally inconsistent.

I could never have engaged with March and Walter this way before. With my keen ears, I could hear something dejected, weighed down, in March's regular breathing. Possibly someone with gloomy thoughts allows a tiny bit of phlegm to rattle in his windpipe as he breathes, whereas a happy, carefree person will just hawk it up. The way he clears his throat, the way he hawks . . . March did not clear his throat, he rattled. His eyes hung on mine with an anxious expression. He must
have been worrying about the same thing as I was. He wanted to be considerate, he didn't want to agitate me, he had tact, and the ears of his soul had always been rather keen by nature, more so than mine, I fear. But what was the good of that if there was still no way for him to help me? So he may have suspected the state I was in, but, with horrible anxiety, I felt the nausea coming and I only wanted to spare him the sight of his friend being sick again. I was silent and put on an annoyed expression, I didn't want him around now. Not because I was not fond of him, no, precisely because I was. Was he so reluctant to understand that? Was it impossible for him?

Why was it that the nurse who was just coming in did understand it? In less than three seconds he had been hustled out the door, I was lying horizontal, the pillows were on the floor, the ice bag was on my stomach (where the detestable pain was appearing in all its fearsomeness), the gutta-percha bib was flapping around my neck. The light was turned out, perhaps so that I would not see what I vomited, the dreaded coffee substitute-like matter. And the orders: breathe deeply, breathe deeply, lie still, lie flat! No movement. Nothing. No
r
(read), no
f
(enough)! Breathe. Be silent.

Perhaps it was my last day. In any event it was a relapse and the more serious in that I had no reserves of strength. The nurse stroked my brow. There was nothing else she could do at the moment. Then she sat down in a corner, and I heard her rattling her rosary beads rhythmically as waves of gagging rose from my wasted but distended and drum-tight belly. I thought about my past and future life. I turned my spirit away from the pain and the retching. I did not pity myself. Instead, amid raging, heart-wrenching pain, I reviewed a broadly conceived agenda
for the shape of my future life, provided fate saved me now. Did I have hope? Only hope of hope! The relapses were too perilous. But I wasn't going to die just yet. The retching finally stopped.

They kept March away from me until I was completely out of danger. Walter and Carolus came often.

Walter intentionally kept March far away. By way of compensation he gave me as much as he could of his own scant free time. If only I had been able to repay his interest in some way!

My good days were beginning. His were over, for he was in frightful shape. He didn't know what was happening to him. And although the various attempts to induce infection with bites from mosquitoes had failed completely in his case, his appearance was not much better than mine. I am not just saying this in hindsight. Even then, three months after our experiments began, I saw in his features a dissolution, a shadow of something that had already passed the point of no return.

An observer as levelheaded and as determined to be precise as I was could see, every day, every morning when I greeted him and accompanied him to the laboratory (where I just watched, still much too weak to work), how he was wasting away.

What the grueling twelve-hour workdays, made that much deadlier by the fiendish climate, could not do, worrying about his family could. Since that fragmentary telegram, particularly excruciating in its mysteriousness, he had received no news. He waited. Nothing arrived other than scientific journals and medical books. He reproached himself the most bitterly not for having embarked on the experiments, but for
having failed to give up his life with his family at the outset and send them to relatives in London long ago, irrespective of what happened to him.

When the sea was rough, he had visions of his family blundering into a typhoon, of the kind not infrequent in the environs of the Pearl Gulf at this time of year, on their way here. When he was paid at the end of the month, he was unsure whether to send them the money or wait until he found out what they planned to do.

Carolus wrapped himself in the reserve of a high official. March stayed at a certain distance, consumed by furious jealousy of Walter, yet always full of respect for his rank and his gentlemanly qualities. March then vented his agitation on me, and had I not been so very fond of him in my way (while never entertaining any carnal feeling), I would have become impatient and told him to go hang. But my self-mastery was necessary as never before. Four weeks after the last relapse, I was still in a condition of extraordinary weakness. Or should it be called peace? In any event it was an inactive hiatus. I felt I would never again be able to summon the determined energy for work that had always been my companion.

During this hiatus an unexpected figure suddenly appeared, one whose impact would be momentous in more ways than one–the ardently longed-for, the loving and beloved wife, Frau Walter.

I have already said that her husband's efforts to infect himself with a mosquito bite had been without success thus far. As things stood, I had suffered a very severe, March a mild but typical case of Y.F.; Carolus had shown quite mild fever symptoms that might have had some other cause; the chaplain we had thus far regarded as a reserve and had not yet inoculated; von F. the pharmacist had been ruled out, he no longer
came, and that was nice of him. Walter remained the puzzle in our experiments, designated with question marks. He had been bitten five times by mosquitoes carrying
my
Y.F. blood, and even more times by other mosquitoes that had fed on the blood of patients who had been even sicker and had since died. All had been in vain. Let us say he was lucky. We did not envy him, and I thought highly of him and felt sorry for him.

Now it is known in bacteriology that experimental animals such as guinea pigs may be robustly resistant to a given infection, able to withstand it just as long as they are well fed and have normal blood volume. They remain frisky and healthy despite being infected. But if they are artificially run down, an infection that was harmless before is now immediately fatal. There are strains of bacteria whose effects are disastrous only in winter, not in summer, when the animals enjoy greater vitality.

This old rule, though not so clear and irrefutable in every case, would unfortunately be borne out in our Walter's. And I, who for the first time in my life was beginning to overcome my antipathy to the “loving hearts,” would see–but why jump ahead, let us again allow the facts of the experiment to speak for themselves.

I said earlier that Frau W. eventually appeared. The strident voice we knew from the telephone might have brought to mind a tall, thin woman with a military bearing. But, quite unexpectedly, the person who appeared, naïvely violating the restrictions against entering the hospital, was a petite little thing, graceful despite her advanced pregnancy, who, with her pretty, lively, pale oval face, much more resembled a girl in her late twenties than a woman in her forties who had given birth to five children and was expecting a sixth. A magnificently shaped
head, wonderful naturally curly auburn hair with a few brighter strands (bleached by the sun on C., or turned gray by worry?). A Spanish shawl with a long deep green fringe that she had thrown about her fit closely on her still tautly modeled bust, more loosely on her protuberant abdomen, perhaps to hide the disfigurement of pregnancy. Thus she entered the examination room, her high heels clicking on the tiles, and looked around her. Without taking off her light-colored gloves, she extended her hand to her husband, who was pale as a corpse and speechless with astonishment; she nodded somewhat loftily to the rest of us. Only on me did her gaze linger a moment. How had she come back? A small motor vessel that plied the coastal waters was blowing its whistle in the harbor even now, and an automobile sounded its horn in front of the building, though there was surely no reason to honk in the insignificant traffic of this desolate convent area on the hill. The car belonged to the insurance subagent of whom I have spoken. He was no doubt giving the lady a prearranged signal to hurry. Had she thought her husband could simply be led away, as though he were a dog being sent off to be boarded in a good home?

She pulled her husband into a corner near the telephone booth, on her full, tight cheeks a fleeting blush of the kind common in pregnant women. She took both his pale hands in her gloved ones as though to hold him fast and lowered her overly loud voice so that we did not have to be in on the conversation. Nor did we wish to be. They could have talked just as well or better in his room. But the wife seemed to be extremely tense and edgy, she did not want to waste a second. She talked madly at him. In the heat of the conversation she let go of his hands and waved hers about. The fringe of her shawl fluttered, and her massively protruding belly was suddenly revealed. Walter was
visibly shaken. His wife, back without his knowledge and against his oft-expressed wishes! And here! Inside the cordon! Invading the laboratory, in violation of the rule that affected every resident of the city up to the highest officials (even if most of them abided by it only because it was in their interest to do so)! But how could such arguments move a passionate, death-defying woman who shrank from nothing? And now more than ever. We could not understand her words. But we heard her occasionally let loose with a raucous laugh and then, remembering her breeding, vainly attempt to cover it up with a fit of coughing. This spoke clearly enough. Walter, deathly pale, lost his composure. This man whom I had never seen discomposed, whom I would never have thought capable of a failure of nerve, suddenly had tears on his face behind his spectacles!