Georg Letham (62 page)

Where did these memories get me? Nowhere! Keep going! The room I was on the point of entering was the same one in which that most unfortunate of all creatures, that most enchanting, dearest child, the little Portuguese girl, had lain, and now Walter's widow was sleeping here with her tiny infant brought too soon into this hard world.

Was the woman febrile? Was she on the road to recovery? Or to the grave? Through my doing? I did not venture forward. I waited.

Regrettably I was still not entirely my own master after my sleepless night. I was thinking about things that were long past and could not be changed, yet I needed to focus on what was all too glaringly present, what was taking from me the confidence I needed that morning more than ever.

Some of these inopportunely remembered details had to do with the little dog that stood at the door snarling and panting relentlessly and would not let me pass. I had had an encounter with him many weeks back. Walter had needed the animal for an experiment. March normally performed services of this kind but had been busy with other matters, and I had been obliged to go get the experimental animal out of his pen in the basement corridor, to put him on an old leash that was used only for this purpose and smelled of blood and chemicals, and take him to the laboratory. I still remember how he willingly followed me at first. But the closer we came to the laboratory and the muffled sounds of distress and pain emanating from it, the sounds of one of his fellows suffering on the operating table, the more reluctant he became. He dug in with all four feet, his fur bristling like quills (to use that painfully accurate expression), in his handsome golden brown eyes an
expression of panicky terror–an almost human terror. I felt I had never experienced anything of the kind. “Let's go,” I exhorted myself, “Move,” and yet I hesitated, not daring to cross the threshold. But what was the use? I had to do what was necessary. The animal had then suffered a great deal. There were no scars. Everything had healed. But he had not forgotten. Suffering had made him vicious. For he may have resisted us, Walter and me, who put him on the table, and Carolus, who did not take part actively but looked on, but he did not resist with teeth bared as he was doing now.

So did the creature's bitter suffering not elevate him? Or is betterment through suffering peculiar to man, who is more highly developed? I don't know. What awaited me now as I chased the animal away and entered the sickroom through the slightly open door gave me no evidence either way.

The woman lay in bed. The room, brightly illuminated by the morning sun, looked peaceful and very tidy. A small, old-fashioned zinc washbasin stood on a chair. Clean, damp diapers had been hung to dry in pairs over the backs of chairs and on lines. There was a smell of milk and chamomile tea. A makeshift vase, a water carafe, held some magnificent flowers, orchids, if I remember correctly. The woman was pale, but her eyes were clear. Still no fever. Her eyes as they looked at me were clear and malignant, filled with hate. The woman had spread her husband's old camel-hair blanket over the bed and pulled it up to her chin. The child lay sleeping, its mouth half open, in a basket to her left.

I was uncertain. Should I go first to the mother, despite her blazing eyes? Should I take care of the child first?

Happily, it was plain that Y.F. had been unable to lay a hand on the tiny creature, no matter how the experiment on the mother turned out.

Had I been my old self, I would have gone to the mother first. Perhaps, thanks to the power I had always had over people, I could have become master of the situation. But I turned and bent over the child, as an involuntary but for that very reason all the more furious flush (what a rare occurrence with me!) spread over my face, to the roots of my hair. I had already taken hold of the slight little body from underneath to lift the baby out of the cradle, had begun to take comfort in the moist warmth that a baby's body gives out, when the mother, however weak she may have been, abruptly sat up in bed, bent down for the baby with a sudden movement of her upper body, and violently knocked my hand away, hurling these words in my face:

“Keep your hands off my baby! I know everything!”

But this passionate outburst was all she could manage. She was unable to hold on to the baby. Her days and nights of terrible suffering had left her with only a fraction of her strength and she had to let go of the child. A good thing the young nurse who followed me in and had planted herself in front of me was able to tear her furious eyes away from my face in time to attend to the infant, which was beginning to mewl softly. She hastily took it from the mother and soothed it in her arms with one hymn after another (as though that was all she knew).

“Oh, just go, would you, please,” she hissed at me, interrupting her singing briefly. Her broad, flowing white hood rippling, she nodded angrily toward Walter's widow, who now tossed like a madwoman in her creaking, squeaking bed, threw the camel-hair blanket to the floor, groaned, tore her hair, and in her jarring voice cursed me and herself and her husband all in the same breath.

“I know everything?” I reflected. She and the nurse could have learned the truth only from March. But if only she had vented her rage
and despair on me, instead of on herself, I could have left the sickroom with a lighter heart, I must say.

I looked at her. Her lips were pale, contorted with feeling. Unconsciously she pressed her heavy breasts together with both hands. She mastered herself, evidently because of the child–turned her face away from me and toward the wall and got herself under control just as suddenly as she had been overcome by her fit of rage. Suffering had helped her grow as a person, at least.

I understood that I had brought about an irreparable change in this woman's existence. She had trusted in me; in her delusions about life, which she refused to recognize for what it inescapably is, she had grasped at
me
, a vision, a phantom. She had seen in me a misunderstood humanitarian, a benevolent and knowledgeable physician unjustly condemned and deported, had invoked the testimony of her late husband in my favor. Perhaps she had even seen in me her future sustainer, for she knew of a bequest that Walter had made to me. She may have been thinking of letters we had drafted together, she knew of our last conversations. And she thought that if there was anyone to whom she owed her life and that of her child, it was me.

The child was going to be baptized at noon that day, as I learned from Chaplain Amen, and she had wanted to christen it both “Walter” and “Georg” in the holy sacrament of Old Catholic baptism!

She
had
wanted to do that. No longer. For it was I, Georg Letham, who had tried to infect her with the same terrible disease that had killed her dear husband. Y.F. How can one explain this?

One cannot explain it.

One tiptoes away from the scene of one's crimes, eyes averted. Quietly closes the door behind one after gingerly letting the little dog in to
comfort the woman as best it can. The little dog barks joyfully and dances about the room. The nurse glowers, the child mewls, the dog barks–and does the poor woman laugh? How I wish she would. If only she is saved!

Perhaps Frau Walter, in her boundless desolation, had begun to love me, and this unnatural, ill-founded, pathological love had then turned into an equally unnatural and pathological hatred. But neither her hatred nor the animosity, now constantly on furious display, of the once faithful March could bedevil me more than my conscience did. Yes, Georg Letham the younger–with a conscience! And yet so it was! I wanted to maintain a humorous, ironic attitude as I bore everything that came along in this atrocious and farcical world. But who can make himself be calm, act superior and amused, when, through his own doing, a flourishing human life is about to be brought down?

Fortunately it turned out otherwise. In one case out of a hundred, a woman will withstand without ill effect an infection during delivery as grave as this one had been. And this was that one case!

I am unable to put into words the truly wild happiness I felt and my beatific sense of relief when the first week passed without fever and I saw that everything was going to be fine. No puerperal fever! And, what is more, the perilous four and a half days' last respite that most of the subjects of our experiments had had between being bitten by a Y.F.-infected
Stegomyia
mosquito and coming down with Y.F. passed in Frau Walter's case without the appearance of fever symptoms. So neither childbed fever nor Y.F.! What a stroke of luck, I say again. These were hard days for me. A great deal of work, as March no longer did
anything without a direct order from Carolus, and Carolus, temperamentally phlegmatic as always, let others make the decisions unless he absolutely had to. He practically had to be forced at gunpoint to sign his name to anything. But in a really urgent situation, a critical moment, he showed what he was made of, and the hellish climate had not sapped his strength of will. Even if his intentions and objectives were not always the same as mine, we got along, and I had a mainstay in him despite the great disparity in our natures.

March's antagonism may have affected me deeply, but it had no power to truly injure me once I had adapted to it. For the time being he was letting the matter rest with his first and most consequential rottenness, his disclosure to Frau Walter of my
Stegomyia
experiment on the evening of her husband's demise.

When he saw what he had caused, he backed off. He was not happy about it. Until that time he had presented a comparatively good appearance. But from then on he began to decline. He couldn't live with me and he couldn't live without me. It was like knives cutting him up inside. No one could have helped him. I least of all.

I had to be content with moving our experiments forward to some degree. The external difficulties mounted from day to day. But fate's interventions on my behalf–Frau Walter's continued good health and the unexpected success of what had been a desperately difficult delivery (I could not imagine what would have become of me if she or little Walter had died)–gave me new courage.

Walter's widow remained one of the chief difficulties. In her hatred for me, she went so far as to slander me with elaborate, ingenious accusations, like a lunatic with persecution mania. In addition to the serious but unprovable crimes of the attempted murder of her and her unborn
child, I was also alleged to have committed a theft. She maintained that when I had looked through her purse I had tucked away some of the loose banknotes, a not insignificant sum all told. Now in former times I had often been without resistance to the allure of money. But if there was any respect in which I had changed, it was this one. I had taken out the key and that was all. Was it March who wanted to pin on me this small but for that reason all the filthier crime? Our things had been searched while I was away from our basement room, and some banknotes had been found among my possessions. But it turned out that they had been enclosed with the letter I had received from my family when I had been severely ill with Y.F. March was my witness. It was he who had removed the money before giving me the pages of the letter. Through this clever shift, he had kept the money from being ripped to shreds, the fate met by the letter, whose contents and even whose author remained unknown, to my sorrow. March himself was forced to clear me. He did it grudgingly, but he did it. I was able to point out that Dr. Walter had on repeated occasions entrusted large sums of money to me (this was a violation of the regulation prohibiting the possession of money, but it had been relaxed in our case) and that I had never abused his trust. And what could I have done with the relatively insignificant amount in my situation, and what would I have done given the plans I had? But some of this stuck, and the sidelong looks from the hospital staff were not always easy to bear. Were they meant for the man who had perpetrated the attempted murder of Frau Walter, if passively standing by while the mosquito bit could be called that, or for the alleged petty thief?

The woman's hatred was evident not only in such grave charges but in little things too. I have not yet reported the fact that in addition to
wood and leather, clothes and linens soon begin to rot in this sultry climate, because they never dry out, literally falling to shreds in the hands of the washerwomen. Now Carolus (who was particularly open and generous as long as it was other people's property that was involved) had had a small bequest from Walter's estate in mind for me, namely, an assortment of his surgical gowns, his linens, his tropical suits, of which he had several dozen and which were made of a very robust material, silk, I believe, blended with linen, or a similar blend of fabrics. After the doctor's illness these articles had gone into the disinfection chambers to be sterilized in jets of pressurized steam at a hundred degrees centigrade, as a result of which they had lost none of their durability but a good deal of their beauty and glamour. If I would not be reaping the benefit of them, though I had been blowing my nose with nothing but filter paper for weeks, they could also be used as dishcloths. And this was the purpose for which Walter's widow had intended them. All the persuasion of the good Carolus was to no avail.

I had other things on my mind, and I had no trouble getting over the loss of these items, to which I had no claim.

Diapers could have been fashioned from these things too, of course. But no one thought of that. Instead the necessary articles, very expensive and of very poor quality, were purchased down in the city. Was the old stuff going to be dragged all over the world as a memento of Dr. Walter? I said nothing on this point.