Georg Letham (63 page)

But another point was more critical. I reported earlier that Walter had had to take out and sign a new policy with the insurance company's subagent under which any liability on the part of the company was excluded in one precisely circumscribed case, namely, that in which the holder of the policy, Walter, departed this life by suicide or by “self-inflicted
accident.” Here the subagent, whom the wife had set against the husband, was of course thinking of Walter's experiments on his own person.

Now Walter had clearly perished as a result of his heroic experiment (and his inner conflicts, to which no one of his sort is equal). Once this was established, the widow would not get a penny. The family of six children, four boys, two girls, was so poor that public assistance and the like would have been needed even to raise the money for the return trip. For how far would the widows' and orphans' benefit go? It would hardly even cover the most pressing debts! But if the death of that great hero without a weapon, Walter, was found to be “natural,” the widow would immediately come into possession of a relatively large sum of money, the interest on which would give her and her children the means for a modest but adequate life in simple circumstances, say, in a country town in England.

So now what? Carolus, who was entirely on the side of Walter's widow (if only out of fear that she might go to him with new demands for money in the event her claim fell through), locked himself in with Frau Alix for hours on end. The woman held her baby, which was thin but agreeable and cried only rarely, in her arms, nursed it, put on its diapers or took them off, or else she played with the little dog. She sniffed at her eau de cologne or shredded the lovely flowers she had received from the subagent. And she discussed with her husband's friend how her financial problems were going to be solved. My evidence, albeit only that of a criminal sentenced without possibility of appeal, was not unimportant. I had been the right hand of the deceased at the end, after all, and he had entrusted his last writings to me. I was ordered in, not offered a seat, and regarded in baleful silence, but
Carolus whispered to her and convinced her to reconcile with me. He himself did not have such a tragic view of the inappropriate experiment on her. In his opinion she ought to be able to get over it with a little effort. But she bared her pretty teeth instead of smiling. She pursued me remorselessly with a hatred that I believed I did not deserve in this form, any more than I deserved the hatred of my former friend, who was quietly doing me as much damage as he could. But the woman lived and gradually began to flourish again, became more beautiful than ever, while poor March in his self-destructive fervor gradually became “a shadow of his former self,” as the saying goes.

With his treachery, March had hurt me a great deal–our enterprise even more. We had to break off for the moment. How could I have been so wrong about him? I had taken him for a “man in full.” Or, if not that, then at least a “frog.” Never a “rat.” But he was both. I realized that my father's excellent teachings were wonderfully applicable after the fact, but of no use while life is actually being lived.

March had told the woman not only that I had exposed her to infection by a disease-bearing mosquito when she had been bending over her dying husband, but also, to twist the knife, that I had said she had false teeth. I had never made that allegation. The woman's teeth did not have the smooth bluish sheen of fired porcelain dentures. It had been simple medical conscientiousness when I had had him check her mouth for dental prosthetics, something I would have done for anyone, no matter who it was, before administering anesthesia. March understood that as well as I did. He was a person of extraordinary intelligence. Otherwise he could not have learned the skills necessary for
our work as quickly as he had. It was not until I no longer had him by me for anything and everything that I noticed how necessary he was to me and to our work.

I did not allow it to come to a confrontation. And this was the worst punishment. I was silent.

I did not want to punish him with silence. But I had no choice.

I cared about him, I cared like nobody's business, as people say. I was thankful to him for the many fine services of the heart that he had done me on the ship and here in the hospital. He was almost a substitute for all human company. He had become, and this is no figure of speech, like a brother to me.

I no longer hated my real brother, I understood him. My father had a lot of money, my brother needed it. Not for himself, for his family. Was the solution to the puzzle so difficult?

But I could have spent my entire life on a lonely island with no one but March for company and perhaps never have needed anyone else. And yet I was unable to pluck up my courage, collar him, and lay before him what was in my heart, my misgivings, my hopes, my sufferings, my joys.

We remained distant. Time went by. The woman had long since risen from her bed of pain, the child, delicate but healthy, was carried outside in a woven basket, which, tightly netted from top to bottom against mosquitoes, was set down in a shady spot in the rampantly flourishing, stupefyingly fragrant hospital garden.

For some days I had had my bed back. One night I returned to our basement room later than usual and found March sound asleep in his old place on the floor. My clothes and other personal items had been cleaned and straightened up, as though nothing had ever happened
between us. And one day the foolish youth–one never knew what he might do, yet he was only too understandable, in his way–surprised me by quietly smuggling into my things a half dozen monogrammed handkerchiefs that had been among Walter's possessions. He had wheedled these articles out of Walter's widow. She would not have given
me
so much as a rag. Toward March she was all sympathy, gratitude, comradeship, and friendliness. And yet neither he nor she was happy. She never stopped trying to turn the hospital director, the resident, the matron against me and imputing to me all sorts of crimes and warning everyone she talked to against the devil in human form, the wife murderer, the Mephistopheles brazenly wearing physician's garb that I was as far as she was concerned. She also threatened to do what she could to prevent any other human being from falling victim to my diabolical experiments.

By that time all her threats and fulminations were harmless to us. They were much more dangerous for her. For the poor dissatisfied woman was ruled day and night by hatred of me. It had become an idée fixe with her, overshadowing even her grief over her late husband and her worry about her five children, who had in the meantime been taken in by the family of one of her husband's comrades from the shore batteries.

She should long since have been capable of leaving our building (“our building,” I call this dreadful Y.F. hospital, as though it had actually become my home!), should have been made to go. Anything but that. She did not want to leave here, or leave me. What she wanted to do was sweep past me (an unbelievably chilly expression on her face), with her silk Spanish shawl wrapped about her and showing off her once again slender figure, she wanted to cast poisonous glances my way
and try to make me persona non grata with Carolus and the chaplain. But for Carolus I was a sine qua non.

As long as all this affected only me, an individual of no consequence, I did not regard it as anything serious. But now that sunshiny, sweltering weather had begun, the hospital was filling up with patients. She and her delicate infant no longer belonged in this dangerous place of contagious illness. Not only were there
Stegomyias
in test tubes here, but there were also free mosquitoes flitting about (not to mention a thousand different kinds of nocturnal creatures) and laying their eggs in any discarded jam jar that had a few drops of stagnant rainwater in it.

We all wanted Alix gone, March not excepted.

Her husband had died as a result of the experiments. An avoidable death, as I saw it, and was it grounds for continual bitterness against us? Yes, and against the dead man too. She hated me. But it was possible she hated him just as much–as though he had intentionally left her in the lurch!

Carolus became the savior of our plans. I had given him too little credit at the beginning, on the
Mimosa
. He was neither a lummox nor a dry-as-dust pedant, nor yet a mere ambitious grind. But why sing a hymn of praise to him, which would have to be quickly followed by the qualification that must apply to all of us frail mortals. The facts showed how fortunate it was that our little team boasted not only an extraordinarily noble and in my view perhaps even great man like Walter, but also someone like Carolus. He was very far from mediocre, though it had taken me some time to realize that.

He grasped the situation before I did. He reproached me, in the languid tone that would once have exasperated me, for my imprudent
experiment on Frau Walter, and he did this upon examining our experimental records, in which I had not yet entered the infection of the woman at Walter's deathbed. I had not been afraid to do the experiment (fortunately without repercussion), but I was afraid to record it. He, great statistician and by-the-book type that he was, could not tolerate this lacuna. We therefore worked together to draft a simple statement of the facts, and only as an aside did he take me to task to my face for having breached, on my own authority and very much to the detriment of all, the law of solidarity that we had unanimously and of our own free will imposed upon ourselves at the beginning of the enterprise.

I had to concede the point. Thereupon he merely shook his long, sallow, withered, hairless head, which I had once likened to a thin, jaundiced baby's bottom, and returned to business as usual.

We discussed how we could induce Frau Walter to leave the island. She had to go. Our experiments were imperiled as long as she was here, and the climate was certain to be her and her children's undoing in the long run. And it had been our late friend's last wish that she return to her family in England. Now there was still the
nervus rerum
of money, that is, the life insurance, and this was the salient point. Carolus conducted this part of the negotiations with Frau Walter and the chaplain and me as a group, or at least he planned it that way. It was not easy to overcome the woman's practically savage hatred for me. Nearly four weeks after the attempt on her life by mosquito, though no harm had been done, she could still hardly look at me. She chewed her lips, turned red and white in alternation. Once she stepped on her little dog, then took him onto her lap and stroked the flat, densely furred head of the worried, golden-eyed, dumb brute, who didn't know what
was happening to him. But we had to achieve some result with her, and since the new experiments had to begin soon or not at all, we had to achieve it quickly.

One might have assumed that the poor widow would have welcomed nothing so much as the prospect of getting away from this epidemic-ridden island, with which she could associate only the unhappiest memories. Not so. The fancy the unfortunate woman had taken to me, currently expressed only in hatred and suppressed outbursts of fury, drove her to put one obstacle after another in the way of our plan to send her and the children away from the island as quickly as possible.

We were at pains to explain how the insurance matter was to be settled. She leaned in, cupping her ear as though unable to make out what we were saying. As she did so she brushed my cheek with her slightly wavy, rustily lustrous hair, in which there were already a few quite pale, colorless strands. I reared back as though stung by a tarantula. Anyone else would have noticed this abrupt, unexpected, I might say explosive, flinch of mine, and, as hard of hearing as the woman pretended to be or actually was, her eyes were good, and she must have seen it. But she acted as though nothing had happened and continued with her objections, which were based on the idea that the tightfisted insurance company would not pay her anything but instead initiate a major court action; for this she would have to prepare, and to prepare she would have to stay. We disagreed and said why, and the discussion went on. A corner of her pink raw-silk housedress, which was tailored for pregnant women and now hung much too loosely on her once again slender figure, fell on my left ankle. I pulled my foot back but could not
prevent the wide, Japanese-styled sleeve of her dress from touching my hand as it hung by my side. “Why do you want to get rid of me?” she said, apparently referring to the business negotiations. “I'm not hurting anyone.” What clumsy maneuvering by a woman who could not have been much for tender caresses, a woman more masculine than maidenly!

Then she suddenly took a new tack. “Who's going to tend my darling's grave?” We said nothing. “What? Eh? What?” she screeched in her strident voice, looking at me with eyes blazing. I said nothing. Carolus was admirably calm, taking another stack of papers out of his briefcase, a barely perceptible smile on his thin lips in response to this inappropriate outburst. I got up and stood behind Frau Walter. Now there were neither meaningful looks nor the old “What? Eh?” and suddenly she heard every word. But to reveal to me what had been no secret for a long time, she rocked back and forth on her chair, showed off her still firm, lovely, heavy bosom, and tossed her head, perhaps in order to “accidentally” brush me with her hair again. Decent women are often the very ones who are coarse and tactless in their demonstrations of love. I saw the place on her neck where the insect had bitten her. She must have guessed my thoughts. She felt her neck with her narrow white hand, on which she was wearing her wedding ring and Walter's, but said nothing to me, simply stopped rocking.