Georg Letham (66 page)

His experiment having failed, he had lost interest in life and tried to exit. I gazed at him a moment with tear-dimmed eyes (as the phrase goes). Then I did what was necessary.

The pulse was thready, very rapid, between ninety and a hundred, but still perceptible, and it remained so. The face displayed that rapt, unnatural expression that is seen in the field often enough in cases of severe abdominal injury and that physicians call
facies abdominalis
, “abdominal face.” It was not his heart that was killing him, but his
abdomen. Irony is far from me now. The facts are what they are. I cut his clothes off his body with great caution. He did not have much on. He groaned heavily, seemed suddenly deeply unconscious. The entry and exit wounds caused by the small-caliber bullet were about the same size. The entry wound was contaminated with powder residue and shreds of clothing, the shot had apparently been fired at close range. So he had been serious.

Both I and the stunned Carolus, who had lately become almost as fond of the good lad as I was, were just as serious about trying to save him, whatever it took. Carolus, with his unduly high opinion of me as a surgeon (he did not know the circumstances of the difficult delivery), advised me to attempt a lifesaving operation at once. In all probability the intestinal walls had been pierced by the bullet; a blood vessel in the abdomen might also have been hit. I considered, and shook my head. There was no way I could risk an operation here. I had no competent assistants. I no longer had any. A difficult delivery might possibly be improvised by a daring physician with luck on his side; a technically complex operation like opening the abdominal cavity, never. I said so to the brigadier general.

He did not want to see it my way. Perhaps he was afraid it would come out that the convict entrusted to his custody had not been supervised, or not closely enough to prevent him from obtaining the deadly weapon. My fate hung in the balance too. Would I continue to be left unwatched now that there had been a killing (suicide is killing, too) using the gun? Had March and I deserved our “freedom” here?

But for me there was no conflict. The situation was clear. I drew the consequences and aseptically bandaged poor March, who was just then awakening with a groan, gave him one injection of camphor after
another, and asked Carolus to telephone the main hospital of the penal administration. A passably modern operating room and an X-ray department had been added there only a few years earlier. (This was after an inquiring, courageous, and high-minded journalist had exposed to a horrified public, in grisly but brilliant reportage, the dreadful conditions prevailing on the island in general and characterizing the medical care provided to the deportees in particular.)

Carolus was happy to have someone give orders and pedantically carried them out to the letter. All that remained was for me to administer an analgesic injection, as the unfortunate youth had regained consciousness. It might be the last favor I could do him in this life.

The effect seemed to be markedly slow in coming and weak when it came. Had the poor devil become habituated to morphine? A review of our stores of drugs confirmed this suspicion. Not just alcohol, but narcotics too! Here again young March was his father's son. He had long ago fled from his seemingly insoluble difficulties into morphine. And I had seen nothing! It had all escaped the attention of the observer, the friend. He had long since given up. But why play the sober, objective physician and primly draw the veil over his fate? Was
I
blameless? It affected me as I thought nothing could since the death of my beloved little Portuguese girl. I bent over him. I thought he was finally under the soporific influence of the morphine. But he was still lucid.

He knew what he was doing when he hooked his thin, feeble arm around my neck and drew my head down. I did not resist his lips. I will not conceal it. It was the first kiss I had given anyone since the death of my poor wife. But he–did he take this first kiss for what it was? I don't know. It seemed to be making him gag. He pressed his lips together tightly. Did I understand him correctly? Was it his body, or was it his
mind that made him seem to be spewing my kiss back out? Gummi Bear! Which is it now, you or me?

Had he spewed me out? And that most justly, in the words of Scripture. For this is just what will befall those who are not warm and not cold. But could I be any other way?

He bore his pain bravely and did not ask for another injection. His face sagged, and he began belching continuously. Not a good sign. It was a wonder that he was still alive and his heart was working. He refused the third injection I tried to give him. My medical objective was not only to provide an analgesic, but also to shut down the autonomous movements of the injured viscera and delay the spread of infectious microorganisms as long as possible.

To spare him any unnecessary jostling, we had made him a bed on the laboratory table as best we could. Now he held tightly to my hand. I thought of the time I had first held this almost abnormally soft, seemingly boneless hand in mine, that moment so long ago when I had awakened aboard the
Mimosa
, close to him, under his protection. All his sufferings and passions were there to be read in his handsome, clay-colored face. I thought of my prognosis when I had first encountered him. He has suffered, he is suffering, he will suffer. But how senselessly he was suffering! My wife had died quickly.

At last, after more than three hours, the car came for him. The trip over the marshy log road from the catchment hospital had not been as easy as I had assumed. But that was not the only problem. Another was fear of entering the pestilential Y.F. hospital and–what did the public-health department and the administration of the great catchment hospital, accommodating some hundreds of convicts, care about the life of any particular one, still less one who wanted, as this March
did, to leave this best of all possible worlds? I waved to him, I waved him good-bye.

As I saw him being carried out of the building by trained bearers on the stretcher that had been taken from the vehicle, I did not know if I should be happy to be spared the sight of his death. Should I hope for him to be saved by a miracle from heaven? (Are there miracles? Is there a heaven?) Should I grieve? No, I did not ask that. I cast myself down, racked by abnormal dry-eyed trembling, in my basement room, from now on and forever and eternally my room, which he would never again share. I did not weep. Nature did not want to give me that consolation, that relief. That valve does not open for me. I thought–just one thought.

I still had in my pocket the nickel case containing the syringe.

Never in all my life, even in the worst of times, not in the remand prison observation unit, not during the first nights on the
Mimosa
, had I felt the hunger, indeed the almost invincible lust for stupefaction that I felt now.

But in the other pocket of my white coat I was also still carrying the precisely made gun that Walter had owned. The magazine held six cartridges. One was missing, five were there.

I told myself: If you can't go on living, fine! Die! But don't drug yourself. Destroy yourself, but don't escape!

A person wants to live. Even if, like March, he takes his life, deep down he wants to live. Just in a different way. He tries to blackmail fate. He experiments with his last stake, and no matter how the experiment turns out,
he still perishes
. . . I didn't want to do it. My suffering and my death would have proven nothing. Changed nothing. I was not deceiving myself. This consolation too was beyond the reach of my father's son.

If anything kept me going during this period (I do not say difficult, I will not call it terrible, hellish, these words do not express it)–if something kept me going during the period after March was taken away, it was the demeanor of the brigadier general. He was accepting of me in a way I did not deserve. Indeed I myself had not allowed “humaneness,” as it is called, to influence my actions. In my hardness, which was not cruel but only logically consistent, as the business required, I had perhaps, who knows, gone too far with poor March. I had sought to pluck out the eye that offended me, in the words of Scripture. Could I moan? I was all the more surprised by the comportment of Carolus, this man who was bourgeois, narrow-minded, and pedantic in all his endeavors but who had become absorbed in our enterprise and for its sake eventually sacrificed what was most difficult for him to part with, his money. But of that more later.

During the first few days, he spared no effort in doing everything he could do from his remove to help March, who was in critical condition. He was persistent on the telephone just as Walter's wife had been. Two or three times every day, he did not rest until he had obtained precise information on the condition of the would-be suicide. Surgery had been ruled out. I do not know what state the unfortunate lad had wound up in, whether he was looking so grand or was so clearly at death's door that the gentlemen in the catchment hospital did not want to attempt an intervention. They must either have believed in miraculous spontaneous healing or have regarded him as a goner for whom nothing could be done, providing him with painkillers and otherwise leaving him alone.

Fate (call it God or the devil or nature–it comes to the same thing)
proved kind to me. Fate had dismissed the little Portuguese girl from this delightful earth she had barely trod. Fate had silenced the great Walter just as he was beginning his most brilliant work. (I had studied the notebooks he had left. In them he had sketched out scientific and medical ideas of incalculable value, whose realization had been kept waiting due to the pressure of family worries and was foreclosed by his early death.) But fate had saved the son of a bitch Suleiman on the ship, had given the dockworker who was a burden on the entire world the gift of convalescence from Y.F. here in the hospital, it had left Walter's widow and his posthumous son alive (his mother then had him christened Walter Posthumous). And now the mortally wounded March, so it seemed, was on the road to recovery! He had gotten lucky, had probably only nicked his spleen, and would soon mend.

I am unable to describe my feelings as I received the news, every day less pessimistic, from his sickbed. Finally he passed–what a prosaic conclusion to his act of passion!–his first normal bowel movement. The young man was thus out of danger. About two weeks later Carolus arranged for March himself to come to the hospital telephone. Carolus spoke to him. March's voice was apparently weak, and Carolus, whose hearing was not what it was, could not always understand him right away, and thus I heard his dreary but very soothing voice repeat those ritual words: “What? Eh? What?” But March was not only on the road to recovery, he had even regained his gallows humor, and though I could not hear what he was saying to Carolus, I saw a very reassuring smile on the old man's leathery features. Then Carolus noticed me listening in. He was annoyed. His face darkened. He waved at me–was he waving me over? No! He was waving me back to my work. He
exchanged a few more words with the convalescent, apparently ones of great importance. “What?!” he asked then, his voiced raised. “Why not? Are you serious?”

He came out of the booth and closed the door gently and carefully. He did not look at me and did not speak to me further. The next day I waited in vain for the telephone to ring. Carolus was not waiting for it. Slowly I understood what the final conversation had been about. Carolus had asked the recovered March whether he wanted to come back to us, whether he wanted to see me again. March must have answered “No” or “I don't know.” He did not want to come back.

I tried to bear it with humor. To take it philosophically. Perhaps humor is no different from philosophy and philosophy at bottom nothing but humor. But true philosophy and true humor are rare. Enough of that. Now I come to the change in Carolus's attitude that I hinted at earlier, the change that loosened his purse strings.

When, for the first time since I had known him, old Carolus spoke of contributing his considerable financial resources, it seemed he was doing all he could to stimulate what remained of my spirit.

At this point we had to continue our experiments on a larger scale. The Y.F. hospital, now beginning to fill up with patients who were not “true” Y.F. patients, was not the right place for this. Our experiments would have a disruptive effect on the normal operations of the hospital, and, conversely, normal operations in the hospital would take up the space needed for our experimental patients. This was crystal clear.

But why not say: “Enough experiments! Enough horrors! Enough deaths!”

Why not take poor March's lot as a warning from fate that it had been tested enough? Why not content ourselves with simply caring for those
human beings who had contracted Y.F. by the natural route? Pointless questions. We still knew far too little.

The chaplain had dropped out too; his professional activity had become extraordinarily intense. So our team was down to the two of us, Carolus and me. We complemented each other. We had each other's number. We put up with each other. We were in agreement as to our ultimate objective. Our answer to those questions was “Because,” or better yet we studiously did not pose them. We wanted to go on. From etiology to treatment, or, in lay terms, from knowledge to action. From the microscope to medicine.

We received word that the “American” commission, which actually included a highly gifted Japanese, had not been unsuccessful. Regardless of the substance of this success, our work would either refute or confirm the results of the American commission.