Georg Letham (65 page)

It was horribly hot and I was dripping with sweat underneath my tattered pajamas.

At last I was at the laboratory, not at the entrance with the glass door, but at the other end, in front of a solid door, and to my happy surprise saw a chink of golden light. I told myself how foolish it would have been for me to have trusted my feeling and gone back to our bedroom.

I opened the door softly and to my great horror saw, in his familiar
red-and-white-striped pajamas–my dead friend Walter, bending over a little table by a corner window and doing something with mosquitoes in jars. “Walter!” I cried involuntarily. He straightened–and what I saw staring at me was not Walter's unforgettable, gaunt, serious face, but March's handsome mug. March was whey pale and no less aghast than I. One of Walter's colorful pairs of pajamas had come his way through Walter's widow and he was wearing them tonight for the first time. “March?!” I whispered in consternation. “What are you doing here?”

March stammered a few incomprehensible words, and, a hot flush spreading over his features, he made himself laugh, a laugh that was croaky, unnatural, and yet came from deep in his chest, a laugh that continued almost nonstop throughout the ensuing brief conversation. I had gone up to him quickly and I saw that he had two jars in front of him. The smaller, empty jar was labeled “m. (St.) g. II
Y.F
. 5 /9 11” in blue grease pencil. This meant second-generation mosquitoes (
Stegomyia
) fed on the ninth day with yellow-fever blood from a patient who had fallen ill after five days of incubation. In the other, larger jar, numerous mosquitoes startled by the light were flitting confusedly and occasionally clambering about on the walls; it was labeled simply “m. (St.) II III 0.” This was thus the large cache of insects, all in their second and third generations, that had so far not fed on human blood and were being kept in reserve for further experiments. It takes fifteen to twenty-three days for a larva to develop from egg to adult insect, and the mosquito is fecund two to three weeks after emerging from the pupa.

“What's going on? What is this? What are you doing here? Where are the mosquitoes?” I asked. March's foolish convulsive laughter prevented him from answering. His eyes flooded with tears and he hung
on to the laboratory table with both hands, so that the two jars knocked together and rattled violently. The smaller one had lost its gauze top. There was not a single mosquito in it. Or so it seemed at any rate. For after a long moment had gone by and I was still gazing at March in perplexity, unable to find any plausible explanation for all this, a young, unusually small mosquito emerged bashfully and perched on the rim of the jar, sitting hunched over as these insects do and jiggling its long hind legs, the white markings visible on its dark abdomen; in two seconds it had spread its elongate wings, and, the white lyre-shaped marking clearly visible against the lip of the jar under the light, pushed off. After a few zigzags it found its way to the ceiling and the lamp, where a fair number of its kind were already performing their familiar jerky dance. There was mosquito netting over the windows, so the dozen
Stegomyias
up there, knocking about in choppy corkscrews and steep parabolas, could only be the previous occupants of the jar.

Who had let them out? March. Why?

I had no time for calm consideration. Immediately my blood was stirred, as the saying goes, I felt my temper get the better of me, and, face terrible, fists clenched, I advanced toward him. He was laughing, white as a ghost. He backed off, still laughing idiotically, and whispered between fits of laughter: “Go on, hit me! Cut me down! Riddle me with bullets!” He reached into a pocket of his pajamas. “Stop that laughing,” I whispered. Extremely silly of me, for (as I realized at once) he was not laughing of his own free will at all, but out of compulsion. “Stop that foolish laughter now and help me catch them. Get a ladder!” Still laughing, he brought a ladder on his shoulders. The late doctor's nice pajamas were soaked with his sweat. “Hold the legs,” I said, “and when I get up
there, hand me the bottle and the cotton wool.” I gave him a piece of cotton wool and a bottle of chloroform, the same one he had used to anesthetize Walter's widow. “Spread the stuff one drop at a time, not too much, not too little,” I said, or rather I shouted. But this time he did not dare to retort, “Stop shouting!” His laughter was broken, it was threatening to become compulsive weeping. He was trembling all over. The swaying ladder, rotting and weakened like anything made of soft wood in the tropics, picked up the trembling, and I felt the vibration. That we did not need. I had in mind to stupefy the freed
Stegomyias
with the not overly concentrated chloroform-alcohol mixture, which was evaporating quickly in the heat, so that I could catch the highly infectious beasts dead or alive.

But that was easier said than done. The wad of cotton wool was too wet or too dry, I held it too high or not high enough, I could not jump while I was perched on the clumsy, unsound, half-rotten ladder, but the nimble creatures up there in their element could. Finally we had recaptured seven of the eleven fugitives. The others we had to leave for the time being. They swerved so cleverly as they flitted about on the ceiling that they got away from me despite all my tricks and stratagems. March and I were more dead than alive ourselves from the fumes of the chloroform mixture, from the effort, from fatigue, from the heat and the excitement. We checked the mosquito screens on the windows once more to make sure the dangerous creatures could not find their way outside, locked the doors carefully, and retired. Or at least we tried to. It was about two in the morning. I was as though drunk from the enormous amount of chloroform I had used. Incapable of thinking clearly or acting with any sort of decisiveness.

The true brother of a man like me is not the one nature gave him. March had come to mean more to me than my brother had. That night I realized this more clearly than ever. And yet I had no choice but to separate from March.

The question was, should I keep my reasons from him or explain them. Or rather my reason, the reason I could never trust him again after what had happened. People can live together without love, if necessary, but not without trust. He could get personal with me, abuse me, if that was the way it had to be; that was fine. It was understandable that he did not want to be merely a “means to an end” for me. I understood why he had lost faith in me over the experiment on Walter's wife that was of such fundamental importance to the progress of our research. It certainly had nothing to do with love for her. March's abnormal orientation meant that she had no power over him. No, it was only jealousy of me, and especially of the research that had gradually consumed me body and soul, that had made him stop being consumed by me body and soul. What did he care about all the world's women and widows? What did he care about the unborn child?

Ungovernable as he was, he wanted to possess
me
. He wanted, if a physical union was impossible, to play the most important, more than that, the only, role in my
emotional
life. He wanted to be on top–and be a man. To assert his dominance, he had installed himself in the bed on high and shown me my place in the pit of hell, cheek by jowl with the rat pack. I had gradually understood him and had forgiven him. Without a word. One need not speak. Without reproach. One need not square the accounts. But now I understood him even better, for on this last night he had made me see the unbridgeable chasm between
us. I could no longer ignore it. How little we know of what we do!
Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner
. Fine, with pleasure, March, dear boy, life companion, as long as it was only me. But if he turned against my work and tried to destroy it? Never. My final word? Without the slightest hesitation my final word.

The next morning I saw the signs of desolation in the face that had once been so pleasant, had become a fat and happy face here, but was now nothing but skin and cheekbones. Again he hung on me with his fine blue-gray dog's eyes, expecting some reproach, a fit of temper, some “human” emotion from me. It was hard for me to do what I had to do.

I went to see Carolus up in the room that he had been sharing with the young resident since Walter's death. Carolus was brushing his long yellow teeth. And the way he did it! He dipped an old, discolored, sparsely bristled toothbrush, repeatedly and without rinsing, into a glass with three fingers of mouthwash in it. Economy! Economy! He stinted, even here. And the drops ran down his nightshirt.

I interrupted him while he was thus unappetizingly employed, asked him to hurry, and went to wait outside the door.

March skulked by, head on breast, once, twice. Like an animal without the power of speech, he nudged me with his elbows. The way a dog bumps his master behind the knees to elicit from him a response of some kind, to ask for a walk, a treat, or simply, in his naïve brute way, to remind him of his, the dog's, existence. March, don't worry, I thought to myself, without acknowledging him, I won't hurt you. But, March, you know as well as I do that it's hopeless, we have to part, and you can't go into the laboratory anymore.

Carolus had the best relations with the acting governor and his staff. His influence and his general's rank could accomplish a great deal.
Through his mediation I wanted to make sure that the overly devoted, overly emotional March suffered no consequences, but instead received a comfortable post in the administration of C., which was within his capabilities thanks to his innate intelligence and his willingness to work. Then too there was the prospect of special amnesty, under Walter's plan, for those deportees who had volunteered for life-threatening experiments and had in fact become ill, as March had.

Carolus came out of his bedroom, washed and tidied up with as much attention to detail as he could manage, and we went to the laboratory. Much to his astonishment, I shut the door in March's face. March had been slinking gloomily behind us.

Carolus had an indestructible trust in me. And I, now I realized it, had the same in him.

Without mincing words I explained the situation to him, touching on the personal side of the matter as little as possible. Our first order of business was to get the missing mosquitoes out of the dark nooks and crannies where they had hidden, as these creatures do during the daytime. Little by little we collected quite a few.

Eventually we had even more than were missing. Mosquitoes were relatively uncommon on the rise where the Y.F. hospital was built, but some of these must have slipped in from outside. And how could we distinguish, while the creatures were still alive, those that had fed on human blood from those that had not? Unfortunately we had no choice but to put all of them together in the now inaccurately labeled jar and kill them all with chloroform.

Carolus had confided to me some days previously that the simple soldiers of the shore batteries had not been unmoved by the noble examples of Walter et al. We were going to have the opportunity to
work with these splendid young men. And now they were here, but the infected mosquitoes were not! What to do? We had to get fresh ones from the insectarium and, toiling side by side for many hours, get them to consummate the act of feeding on severely ill and dying Y.F. patients. And then wait. For ten to twelve days, optimally. What might not happen in that time?

My face was grim and I vouchsafed March not a word. My suggestion that a place be found for him in the office of the chief of public health for C. had met with the approval of Carolus, who was now beginning to rely on me unquestioningly for many things. But we know how slowly the wheels of bureaucracy grind. Thus it happened that March, unemployed, languished in quiet despair, and then, after dark, in loud despair, and finally, wordlessly but also unceasingly, tried to appeal to my sympathies.

I kept him hanging, until, on the eve of his new employment, I told him. Clearly, succinctly, and as gently as possible. He blanched and grabbed me by the neck in a frenzy. But then, in an abrupt transformation, the expression on his face changed, his menacing gestures turned into an awkward but for that very reason all the more touching caress; his trembling fingers had sought my chest. No more harsh words, he no longer appealed for my forgiveness; he merely asked me, in an artificially firm voice, whether I did not stand in awe before my godlike self.

Godlike? I was only doing what I had to do, and I did not respond to the mute and tender supplication in his eyes. I stroked his hair, which had begun to grow on his head like the downy plumage of a young bird. Perhaps he prayed to me, as people pray to God, unbidden by Him.

And if I did not want his doglike submissiveness, I did not want what
he did that night, either. He had sneaked into the laboratory, his paradise lost, for the last time, had mixed up a terrible intoxicant out of the pure alcohol on hand there in bottles (he was his father's son, as I was mine), and, toward morning, after God knows what kind of awful night (I had no inkling, I swear it! I was asleep!), had tried to shoot himself in the heart with Walter's army revolver, his hand made unsteady by alcohol and fear of death. But his hand must have dropped at the crucial moment. He hit himself. But he hit himself in the epigastric region, the area below the left costal arch, not in the heart.

I had never toyed with the young man who now, unconscious and white as a sheet, breathing shallowly from the upper chest like a woman, his abdominal muscles rigid, lay before me on the laboratory tiles. I had never toyed with him, I swear it by the holiest things there can be for a man like me, I swear it by my self, that I had never experimented on him. Rather he had experimented on me: he had tested
me
to see how much he was worth to me. Could he really have thought he could make my life and my work easier through his suicide? He had wanted to be my god, as I was his. But I was only a human being like too many others.