Georg Letham (64 page)

The woman was intelligent and now understood the situation completely. She let everything pass and we were soon agreed. That is, she and Carolus were agreed. The chaplain's aid had been enlisted too; he was passive and forbearing as always and stayed neutral. But it was not easy for me to concur. They were quite right, the huge pile of insurance money had to be secured, and that could not happen by the direct
route. Her husband had too knowingly taken part in life-endangering experiments. His spirit of sacrifice might entitle him to a bronze memorial in front of the hospital or back home, he might be entitled to an entry in the encyclopedia, perhaps even the Nobel, but for all that his heirs were not entitled to the insurance money.

Cash was needed. What to do? The global insurance company that was worth millions had to be lied to and defrauded for the good of the financially weaker but morally stronger party.

The full insured amount had to be claimed through the subagent. The claim would run as follows. Dr. Walter had indeed been researching Y.F., as was his duty and official job. But he had never conducted life-endangering experiments on himself, and his highly regrettable death had been caused by an infection whose route was still unknown. An occupational hazard of which the insurance company had taken full cognizance, both in the first policy and in the addendum.

This Carolus, the chaplain, and (mainly) the resident, who had taken formal responsibility for the expert opinion and was putty in our hands, had to put in writing. They had to sign their names to it. In the likely event of a lawsuit, they would even have to swear to it. Ill-gotten gains. Do they profit nothing? Everyone was for it, everyone but me.

I
was going to declare our work null and void? Pretend to? A written, sworn declaration is not pretending. It had been the last wish of the deceased that the results of our work, which we had obtained not in an ivory tower but in epidemic-ridden sickrooms and laboratories, be deposited with a notary.

Thus I expressed my opinion candidly, and it was
No
. The widow turned to me, enveloped me, unseen by the others, in an imploring, beseeching, distraught look, in which all her fervent love and hate were
intermingled, and then she said to me with the sweetest, with the gentlest, the tenderest, the most girlish, the most caressing sound her raucous voice could produce: “I'll forgive you for that word!” Unexpectedly, abruptly, with touching awkwardness, she began to smile, whispered to me that I was a good doctor, perhaps
too
good, she was not ungrateful, she knew how much I had done! I flushed, but she displayed her full complement of beautiful teeth, and remarked, with a mischievous smile like a seventeen-year-old girl's, that she really didn't have false teeth. This? Now? Such coquettishness at a moment like this! And out of the mouth of the wife of someone like Walter! She exhibited her open mouth, the dazzling rows of teeth revealed by the two moist, pink lips, as though she were offering herself to me. I backed off, forced a polite grimace, murmured something about pressing work that couldn't wait, and withdrew in great distress.

It never makes me happy to be loved. But the other part of it, the great, overpowering feeling of loving, was not something I had a gift for, either. If I loved anything now, it was not human beings, at least none that were still attainable in my life, but something else. In its entirety it resided in my work.

Further very great effort was required in order to finally induce Frau Walter to leave the Y.F. hospital.

I will not go on about the pathetic woman's various attempts, either the ones that failed or the one that eventually succeeded, to come together with me in some fashion and “have it out” where there was nothing to have out. She loved. I did not. I saw in her simply a sick person whose illness expressed itself not in the body that had been
blessed with such tremendous robustness and splendid will to health, but in her mind. It was not within
my
power to cure her mind. I had no choice but to punish her with silence, because every word I said to her would have encouraged unrealizable hopes, to her certain undoing. The woman had other things to take care of. The future of her unprovided for children had to be more important to her than any phantasm that happened to appear to her. For it was only a phantasm.

Eventually we would all have the pleasure of seeing her leave the Y.F. hospital. The valediction took a week.

I spent most of my time hiding in the laboratory, and we put it about that entering the area was more dangerous than ever. In this way I protected myself from her last good-bye. Sometimes I thought back on the truly frightful physical and mental suffering she had gone through, I might almost say in my hands. But there was no trace of it left in her face, which, framed by the beautiful wavy, reddish brown hair, she occasionally, and most desperately on the last day, pressed against the glass door that connected the laboratory with the corridor. And her mind?

I pitied her from the bottom of my heart. Let no one doubt this brief statement.

At last she was sitting in the subagent's automobile, which the subagent had gallantly sent up the hill to the convent hospital. The young assistant nurse was going along to look after the infant during the coming days and help the widow with the eventual move. Everyone overlooked the quarantine. It had to be done.

The little dog too kept his rendezvous with disinfection. To his horror he was shaven smooth, brushed down with sublimate solution, and sprinkled with phenol, and now he was huddled in the automobile,
barely recognizable and hoarse from hours of barking. He was looking forward to better times.

I was not spared the task of putting my name to the aforementioned document concerning the cause of death in the case of the heavily insured medical officer Walter. I had to do it, against my better judgment, as Carolus did against his. It was with a peculiar feeling that I traced my signature, for the first time in a long while. I thought of the day when, my hand guided by my father's, I had first scrawled it in an exercise book using his otherwise jealously guarded gold fountain pen. Now, after the name Georg Letham, I wrote: Gr. 3. Convict, third grade. In my youth I had also written: Georg Letham, Third Grade. Gone. On! Thus do all things return in this short life. On all the more!

In C., as in his former posts, Walter had always enjoyed the greatest respect and love. The insurance company, which often had to rely on the goodwill of the administrative authorities, knew this and for-bore from making further difficulties for his heirs in a legal challenge. More detailed investigations were also dropped. And it was better that way. The resident's medical opinion was admitted, although it did not deserve to be. But we were all firmly resolved to make ten perjured statements in favor of the widow rather than deliver her almost destitute to a cruel fate.

After five years of unbroken service on C., the governor was no longer in the best of health.

A short vacation in Europe or some other Y.F.-free country was out of the question, for the simple reason that an absence for any length of time would have caused him to lose his immunity to Y.F., which he had survived shortly after his arrival here five years before. He was not staying here unwillingly and was socking away a lot of money and lived
like a prince. Where did that get him? His liver could not cope with C. any longer, and he had to leave.

Thus, as a convenient consequence of His Excellency's weakened health, a relatively large, comfortably appointed ship intended to accommodate the governor was also able to take Walter's widow and her children to Europe. It was already lying at anchor.

As we stood at our windows watching the great two-funnel steamer (not the little
Mimosa
) getting fired up and the government launch speed from shore and back again, the telephone, whose harsh jangle had so often startled our late friend from his work, rang once more. Carolus picked it up, listened briefly, then called me over and handed me the receiver with a strange smile, baring his long yellow fangs. I will say nothing about the substance of the conversation. It was the last adieu of the widow, who had been unable to bring herself to leave without saying something. She had tried and “succeeded at last.” The discussion did not drag on. It cannot have lasted more than two or three minutes, and I myself hardly got a word in edgewise.

More or less as a service in kind, Carolus, who had lately been treating me as someone in his league, had a favor to ask of me. But it was impossible.

I was grateful to him. I could only be, had to be grateful to him. And yet I could not comply with his request, his first and only one (which he had expressed on the
Mimosa
, to no effect then too). What he wanted was no more and no less than that I remember my duty as a son and brother and get in touch with my family at home. I could not. That life, I felt, was dead, I had it behind me. I could as little take it up again as nourish myself on shit. Not even for the sake of our enterprise. No. Other, greater men, heroic types who are able to rise above the fray,
they could have. Here I will cite only that brilliant discoverer of the syphilis spirochete, Schaudinn, who experimented on himself using human excrement. Humanity was already in his debt for a tremendous, epochal, seminal discovery, but he perished in the prime of life a few years ago as a result of this abominable experiment, “as the law he set himself commanded.”

I could not conquer myself that way. My father was the land of my birth. The land of my birth lay behind me. I had been deported. I had been deported inwardly. I wanted to regard my former “loving hearts” as dead. I wanted to be dead to them too. I wanted to wish for nothing from them and have nothing to fear from them. Is this understandable?

He did not understand it. I only shook my head in silence at his request, no matter how earnestly he put it in his awkward, grating way. I appreciated old Carolus's good advice.

That evening, after we had watched the government boat vanish among the craggy black islands in the wine-dark sea, trailing a golden banner of smoke, March, my former friend, approached me again for the first time. He did not have glad tidings for me. He was seeking consolation from me, and I–I tried to give it to him, determined as I was to wipe the slate clean of everything that had passed between us. He wanted to leave here. Our experiments were over at last, weren't they? He yearned for home! And for me! And number three on his list was the “loving hearts” he had left behind, his morphine- and cocaine-addicted father, who, as the son had learned from his mother's letters, had run afoul of the law for perpetrating the most devilishly clever frauds and scams, always at the expense of the poorest, out of whom he had wormed everything they had. Thus it might conceivably come to pass in this most farcical and most atrocious of all worlds that the
degenerate old druggist would turn up here among the deportees in a puce uniform, a black number on his chest, perhaps on the very day that his son, pardoned for his heroism, left this accursed deportation island.

I did what I could to calm him. I dodged the questions about the experiments and the ones about my feelings. But I strove to paint the prodigal father's conviction as unlikely, even though I thought it very possible. I preferred to believe that the morally debased old man belonged here much more than the son, whom I still did not want to see for what he was. I did not want to know what he was. I laid all the blame for the way things were on the clumsy or malicious hand of fate. And that very night I would see to my sorrow that I was still not equal to the world as it really was, what was it I said, to its mindless earnestness, “beyond improvement” in the best, the most hopeful, or in the worst sense. Was there no way to improve it, to change it? Did one have to regard it and oneself as the butts of a cruel, inhuman, cynical joke? Could I laugh, could I smile, if that was what everyone had to do?

That night I awoke suddenly. Even as I gave a start I knew that something much earlier had been the cause of this abrupt awakening. I turned the gradually fading dream over in my mind, listened to the rustling and nibbling of the rats that dashed about in great numbers among the many crates and kegs in the cellar and sometimes scurried under our bed, too. Our bed? I was now becoming wide awake and noticed that March's place on the basement floor at my feet was empty. I waited a moment, imagining that he was answering the call of nature, for we had come to an understanding between us that there would be
no relieving oneself in this bedroom. Sissy that he was, March had been in the habit of doing this from boyhood. It had required a fair amount of effort to break him of the practice of employing for this purpose a familiar article of indispensable utility to children and the infirm. But what was keeping him now? I became concerned, got up, and went looking for him. I hurried through the familiar corridors and up and down stairs. I knocked on the door of the room in question. Everywhere silent as the grave.

How odd! I had something like a feeling of home as I walked through the Y.F. hospital. I felt, as I looked for March, something of what I had felt as a child the times I had gone looking for my–my only too dearly beloved father in our big, often very bleak house.

To make sure I had looked everywhere, I rushed back through the labyrinthine architecture of the rambling building, which had been completely ruined by numerous additions over the many years of its existence, and ran finally toward the laboratory.

I ran, I walked, I slowed and stopped. I did not want to go on. I told myself that March and I must have missed each other and he was surely long since back in his bed. It was only out of a kind of dutiful opposition to my own inclinations that I conquered my misgivings and forced myself to go into the laboratory.