Georg Letham (6 page)

He even warned me not to mention the possibility of divorce to my wife. But the idea must already have taken root without my realizing it, for I did it just the same. More tears from the old lady, more despondent scenes, and, most appalling of all, more ecstatic debauches with this woman who found the ultimate satisfaction only in doglike suffering and could never be kicked enough. And I? I was part of it.

We took a trip to the south and were no different when we came back. What did she care about my happiness? Did she ever understand me at all? That is, was such an abnormal individual as I ever able to really make myself understood to such an abnormal individual as she?

I was preoccupied with an attempt to isolate the two different poisons from the scarlet-fever streptococcus cultures. Now just
one
poisonous substance or toxin is already extraordinarily difficult to isolate perfectly in crystalline form. It has been done properly in relatively few cases. So imagine the difficulties of separating the toxins into one component ascribable to the known streptococci and another component ascribable to the unknown scarlet-fever pathogen. A project like this requires superhuman diligence, great sacrifices of time and money. I lacked time, especially. I wanted to live at the workbench, but my wife wanted something else. She would hear no talk of my money worries. She herself had more than enough money, after all. The marriage, as
fragile as it was, ate up a lot of time. The less I loved my wife, the more she craved my attention. And pinched pennies drastically. Who does not understand that? She loved me and feared me. A state of affairs intolerable in the long run.

I have never in my life been entirely free of stirrings of compassion. “Conscience doth make cowards of us all.” Hamlet, archetype of recent Europeans. True, I never had so much of a conscience that it exerted a compelling effect on my life. I always felt compassion in the wrong places, all the more when I resisted it. In my youth my father had wanted to tear this evil (and it is never anything but an evil) out by the roots. But who can get hold of the roots of a personal trait? I knew what I was doing when I put an animal, a living creature that feels pain and has a certain degree of consciousness, on the torture rack. Other people did not know. Other people did not require intoxication, mental anesthesia, forcible calming after their horrific bloody experiments, other people did not suffer from a constant craving for excitement. But why speak of animals when we are talking about a person so close to me that . . .

Just the facts. As the intolerability of the overall circumstances of my life emerged, becoming clearer every day (if it would not have taken us too far afield, I would have liked to give a full account of a day during this period, in all the hellish endlessness of its twenty-four hours)–when I had recognized the intolerability of my circumstances clearly enough, I made a final attempt to free myself from my spouse in an amicable manner. We had been married in church like everyone we knew. But the bond generally expected to hold a marriage together,
conjugal love, existed on her side only. I did not love her. To this day I really do not know whether I was still capable of this much-discussed feeling at all, indeed, whether I was
ever
capable of love. Who does know?

The cornerstone of marriage is supposed to be the partnership of the sexes, a partnership craved for the purpose of satisfying natural urges and entered into in the hope of mutual succor. So says the Church, citing the procreation of offspring as the primary purpose of marriage. I wanted a child very much. But at the same time I was afraid to have one. I feared the responsibility of bringing one more life into this most terrible of all worlds–and this was one reason for marrying my wife, for in view of her age alone it was extremely unlikely that she would be granted another child. She herself did not believe she would be. Nevertheless she was unswerving in her conviction that any marriage between Catholics was an indestructible, objectively existing bond that could not be broken even if love turned to hatred and revulsion.

She stood firm in her belief (it was possible for her to believe, only I had to be constantly doubting) that my fondness for her would return one day, because after all it had been there once, namely, when I had asked for her hand. One error compounded by another. Why should I explain to her my true motivations in marrying her? I had taken this desperate step only because I could not face living with myself on a permanent basis. For the same reason that so many individuals, and not the most worthless ones in many cases, resort to alcohol, morphine, or cocaine, or take pointless trips, amass idiotic collections. It was only to escape myself that I had courted her.

I had expected her to provide her share of the “mutual succor.”
That
I could tell her. But she did not wish “base motives” to shackle me to her.
Like so many rich people, she did not understand what money means to one who does not have it. She spoke to me as to a good but unreasonable child. She even went beyond the will that I have mentioned. On her own initiative, she began lengthy negotiations with an insurance agent. One evening she showed me the result. She had just paid the first premium on a mutual insurance contract: upon the demise of one party, the surviving party was to receive a large amount of money. I, if she died before me, and vice versa. What was she trying to do? Did she understand me after all? She was certainly rich enough already. What would she do with even more money after my death? But
I
needed money, she knew that. I would get it only after her death, but then without fail. Was she trying to test me? Had she caught the morbid desire for experiments from me, like an infection?

I could only shrug. But she misinterpreted that as proof that her love and her life were more valuable to me than any earthly possessions. And yet even a fraction of that insurance money would have let me leave the city, go to America, break with everything I had done until then, and begin something new and different. For what was my life now? Just whatever the current experiment was, a positive or negative result. And then? When that experiment was over, when it got a thumbs up or a thumbs down, a new hypothesis was next in line, to be confirmed or disconfirmed, the result in turn forming the basis for further work. As idiotic as it sounds, as much as this kind of work seems to resemble the monotonous play of infants, or something even sillier, that really is how it is. This is what countless people do all their lives. The only joy is a flutter of the nerves, a sensation, an artificially evoked and just as artificially gratified arousal. But the “craving for excitement” is never satisfied, only thwarted, and so it goes to the last breath. Let anyone who does not
believe this read, for example, the reports of the scholars, let him cast his eye upon the numerous scientific journals and weigh the immense, truly colossal
volume
of this work against its meager
content
; let him set the work and the energy expended on it against its useful effect, whether in respect of the advances in what is actually known about reality or in respect of the instrumental capabilities by which needy humanity has been enriched through this activity.

My wife was so little able to follow me here that she regarded me with compassionate eyes as though I were an incurable mental patient and often did not even take my words seriously. She was serious only about the sensual aspect of our relationship, and this angered me a great deal. Yet I was compliant, if I may use the word, despite my antipathy; I was her slave despite my alienation, dependent upon this woman who made me accede to her voluptuous compulsion to suffer, which afforded me a kind of satisfaction too. And all the while becoming I cannot begin to say
how
strong,
how much
more uncontrollable every day, the wish for freedom, for complete disentanglement from her! (From myself.) That was the ultimate sensation I sought.

Even my wife did not find complete serenity in her false bliss. How would that even have been possible?

She was declining visibly. She placed herself in the care of her son-inlaw, who administered an arsenic treatment to fire up her animal spirits, already inordinately overheated in my view, to a still greater pitch. She now often gave off a garlicky odor due to transpiration of arsenic through the skin, her eyes glowed still more brightly and ardently than before, sudden flush alternated with sudden pallor behind her enameled mask; one day she collapsed with symptoms resembling those of stroke. I hastened to her bed, shed tears, nursed her devotedly, and thought,
with a feeling of deliverance in my heart of hearts, that this was the end. I gave her an injection of morphine from a small Pravaz syringe. This did her good. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for her. Unfortunately we were all fooled, my father, her daughter, my son-in-law, and I. We had not recognized her superhuman toughness. She was one of those people who are still hiking long distances at eighty and outdoing the fifty-year-olds at ninety. She recovered. She became healthier than she had been before. She traveled with her daughter to a spa, and I entertained the absurd hope that some happenstance would save me from our reunion.

And yet I did not hate her.

My wife had been looking forward to a romantic spring and was very reproachful toward me for not going along on this trip. But how could I have gone? I longed for nothing so much as to be relieved of the burden of her presence for as long as possible.

But it was not a good time for me nevertheless. My creditors did not leave my heels, they constantly forced me to dodge them, to pretend to be someone else on the telephone, to rearrange my whole life, to do everything I could to fend off their all-too-legitimate demands. Some of them professed to be agreeable to a refund without interest, others to an out-of-court settlement, but I could not think about it. And yet I had no prospect of ever being entirely rid of them. Some of them were highly impertinent and threatened me with all sorts of things. But that got them nowhere.

I was no longer so welcome at the club. Ugly rumors about me were circulating. It was said that I was unreliable and greedy as a physician,
had tortured animals for no reason, had sprayed eau de cologne in their eyes, had secretly borrowed (stolen) dogs from my acquaintances, had destroyed their vocal cords before the experiments to stop them from howling, and so forth. It was said that I had squeezed the last remnants (!) of my wife's fortune out of her by abusing her sadistically, having first hypnotized her and deprived her of the faculty of volition. It was said that my scientific work was done by other, more talented persons in exchange for payment. It was said that I had subjected people as well as animals to pointless and excruciating experiments in my clinic and had extricated myself from criminal action brought by the surviving dependents of my victims only at great financial sacrifice (allegedly the cause of my money problems). I was never able to pin down the source of these defamatory rumors. It must have been someone close to me, in all likelihood my stepdaughter's husband. My letters to my wife were never taken seriously, that is to say, never properly answered. I wrote every day, yet received plaintive letters in which she reproached me for never thinking of her. What was I to do?

Wrenched from my usual occupation (I had had to stop my experiments because my funds were totally depleted, and just when I had nearly isolated Toxin Y, a whitish hygroscopic crystal), I wandered about the city in search of novelty. I had shaken off the sisters. The older one had abandoned me because of my lack of money. The younger one still liked me, but I had absolutely no use for her and brutally told her so to her face. She cried openly on the street, but then she got the point and retreated. I never heard from her again.

By chance I ran into an acquaintance, a former classmate. At one time he had been among the least talented people in the class, but he
had been the quickest to make a career for himself, was codirector of a chemical plant that produced medicines. Hair restorers, calcium supplements, rejuvenation tonics. He ran an experimental laboratory in a distant city. He made me an offer.

That evening I wrote to my wife again. I suggested to her that we put an amicable end to the marriage, inasmuch as it was wearing the two of us down both physically and mentally. Instead of replying, she came herself. She had received this letter “by accident,” she said, the earlier ones having been kept from her by her daughter. She was agitated, fearful. Clear signs of physical decline could no longer be ignored. Occasionally she clutched her heart with her heavily beringed, wizened hand (no one yet knows how to enamel hands). It flashed through my mind how happy both of us would be if she met with a painless death that day or next. Her varicose veins were giving her trouble. A small venous blood clot had once come loose and made its way from the lower leg to the brain. She doubted whether she would ever be quite well again. She was afraid to have an operation, perhaps because my example had proven to her that doctors are not infallible gods. Yes, nothing less than that. Through a curious association of ideas, there came into my mind the peculiar action that I had observed as the effect of Toxin Y, the toxic substance in crystalline form that I had obtained from scarlet-fever cultures: similar abnormal clotting phenomena, producing sudden death–a pulmonary embolism, a heart attack, a stroke–in experimental animals. It was a possibility. They had not suffered. I believe.

On some pretext, it was late afternoon, I disengaged myself from my wife, who was exhausted from her journey and from being overwrought. She tried to stop me. She wanted to tell me all about how her daughter
and her husband had threatened to have her declared legally incompetent and her property confiscated if she did not leave me. She tried to throw her pale arms around me. I escaped with some effort.