The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (60 page)

The Fliedners allowed her to assist at a major operation, a leg amputation set for August 1. The day before, she met the patient,
Herr Fuer, a carpenter with sugar in the blood. A nail puncture on his shin had festered into gangrene. He was forty-five, with thick blond hair that stuck out from his head like shocks of wheat, giving him a clownish demeanor at odds with his grave condition. “I am frightened, fräulein,” he kept saying. “I need to pray.” She prayed with him. She wrote two letters for him and sang hymns. He joined in, his voice quavering with anxiety. Pastor Fliedner stopped by to pray with him, too, though Fuer was a Catholic.
What higher purpose
, she wrote that night,
can there be than saving a life or a soul?

The next morning, she impatiently rolled bandages until summoned to the surgery. For the next five hours, she and Sister Sophie attended the surgeon in the small, brightly lit operating room. Using a circular saw, the doctor removed the leg as high as possible to forestall spread of the poison. The cutting was grisly but brief.

She hadn’t expected beauty—there was no other word for it—in such a dire circumstance. The reek of rotting flesh, the gore, even the patient’s suffering mattered less than the continual awe. Awe for the incision, the steel blade entering the flesh with an unparalleled and godly presumption of intimacy. Awe for the beautiful taking up of the blood vessels. She watched the arteries flex like molten canes still hot from the glass furnace. When they straightened, filling up with fresh bright blood, the surgeon tied them off with seven waxed threads. The room was a slaughterhouse, but she paid no notice. They packed the wound. The white gauze bloomed and bloomed, not sapping Fuer’s vitality but stanching the spillage as if with a crafty abstract rendering of bouquets.

In the afternoon and evening, Fuer suffered greatly. She prayed with him when he was conscious. What made the operation so arduous and prolonged, the doctor said that evening, was the insufficiency of healthy skin to fold over the wound. They dressed the stump a second time with collodium strips, but they proved too small to be protective. The surgeon removed them and she helped stitch up the wound with black silk, then put on a Maltese cross bandage.
Cold
water compresses every five minutes, one of us always with him. Flowerpots on the windowsill from Sister Ernestine
. She fell asleep with her pen in hand.

Friday, 2 August 1850

12–12:30 Took my place by Fuer, who was going on well. In the afternoon I read to the dying man and the disfigured man in the garret, who are not allowed to join the others
.

2
P.M
. Cupped Margareta
.

3–4
P.M
. Making up powders, decoctions, infusions, etc., under Sister Ernestine’s direction at the apothecary
.

6
P.M
. Men’s ward. The amputated man
.

7
P.M
. Pastor’s class with the seminarists. They practiced telling him the story of Isaac and Elisha and the angels, which they will relate to the children tomorrow. He teaches like Socrates. Questions and answers, never outright lecturing or correction
.

Early the next morning, while scrubbing glass vials at the apothecary, an extraordinary paradox about Abu Simbel occurred to her: at the heart of Ramses’s monumental splendor was complete anonymity. The pharaoh who ruled for sixty-six years would never be forgotten as long as his name, Ramses or, in Greek, Ozymandias, issued from the lips of the living, which his monument at Abu Simbel ensured. But he, too, like Osiris and the primeval traveler before him, the dying sun, had passed through the twelve rooms in the hours between sunset and dawn. He’d sailed the infernal river, past ogres and tormentors, ravenous snakes and crocodiles, while priests made sacrifices and recited spells from the “Book of Going Forth by Day.” At
the Hall of Two Truths in the seventh room, Osiris weighed his heart against the feather of truth while the monster Ammit—she loved that name, which meant “bone crusher”—waited to devour the failures. Presumably the golden scales had balanced, and he rejoined Ra in the Barque of Millions of Years, sailing toward the glorious dawn of eternal life. But
none
of it was possible without the multitude of nameless artisans—the jewelers, cooks, embalmers, priests, stonemasons, bricklayers, painters. Their names, Bunsen said, survived more quietly, not in the mouths of people like her and Gustave and Selina, but buried with them, inscribed on parchment and protected by the magical rope of the cartouche.

She’d written a
third
note at Philae, she suddenly recalled. Not a plea to die, but a bargain offered to God.
I am prepared to serve without reputation
.

For a dozen years she had clung to God’s words. But what were these words anyway? Inventions of the brain, proximate fruits of intention.
Wait
, the Voice had said. And she had always understood that meant to await further instructions. But what if the waiting were
part
of His bidding, imposed not to humble her but to effect a sustained alertness, a sharpened attention to whatever happened? The eye of the falcon, the sun god’s eye, watching over everything.

By now her note, retrieved by the wind, would be nourishing rice stalks or lotus leaves. The notion pleased her. Perhaps His long silence was like that, not an absence but a slow fruition, as of the pale yellow, plate-size lotus blossoms that swayed over the sodden expanses of Nile silt.

I know how sensitive you are to words from our time together at Koseir when you forbade me to speak the name of a certain part that I later told you against your will. But in addition to my epilepsy, I have contracted an unspeakable disease. I am loath to write this word, but I must; otherwise, nothing I say will make full sense
.

Pox
.

She found it puzzling that the deaconesses had sprung up in Germany and not in England, both being Protestant. In England, the rural poor and the new industrial class cried out for such an institution. If she studied the Kaiserswerth methods, she might transplant them and start her own institute at home. Women not married to God, but to society, in His name.

Have you heard the old joke: One man to another: What is the price of love? Second man: Ten francs or marriage
.

The true answer is pox
.

What is a man to do who harbors this disease? I shall be lucky if I do not go mad. The cures are problematic. Valerian root is inexpensive and often prescribed but does not work. Gum from the lignum vitae is expensive and unproven. I shall try the mercury cure (“A night in the arms of Venus leads to a lifetime on Mercury”), which is what my father would have prescribed. The treatment must be repeated periodically, as the disease is thought to remain in the body until death
.

I wanted to tell you this in Kenneh but lacked the courage. Even to speak of it is a great dishonor to you, for which I apologize
.

No, she’d never gone to Egypt. Never set foot in the sand or sat on the shore of the Red Sea. It was not she who wished to die at Philae and instead was rescued by a man who became a friend, unlikely as that was.

And so, Rossignol, I want to say that you are beautiful. I wish that I had told you this before, but you are. Your mind is likewise beautiful. I have never met your like. I would say you have the mind of a man, but that would not suffice, either
.

I know that marriage holds no appeal for you, but what else is there between a man and a woman that would not provoke the condemnation of society, that would not be considered an abomination
,
that would not cause us pain? I had hoped we could be lifelong friends, but alas, I am drawn to you in the way that men are drawn to women. I began to love you—it was so easy and natural. But how can we have a future with my illness?

Saturday, 3 August 1850

Walked the bad eyes and the rheumatism in the morning. Lunch with the infant schoolmistresses. Reading Bible with penitents at evening—a new group of ten women fresh from prison
.

In her heightened existence, responsible for prolonging lives, it seemed natural to entertain opposing feelings, to be what she would have once called confused, though now she did not feel confused. She felt capacious. On the one hand, she suffered the scarifying sorrow of loss, and on the other, she was proud, filled with an immaculate and pure joy. For this was love, or had been.

No more love, no more marriage
. When she had refused Richard, those words had been as much a judgment on herself as on him. She had pitied herself, as though her hands had been severed before she had touched a single thing on earth—not a leaf, not the honed blade of a knife, or the silky hand of an infant. Now she had. They had touched like God and Adam on her beloved Sistine Chapel. No longer a stranger to love, she had set it aside. Rushing between patients, measuring elixirs or sitting in a profound quiet with the dying deaconess, she felt joy and grief and had no need to distinguish between them. Like the good and evil in the temples at Abu Simbel, they flowed together. They were one.

• • •

The next Thursday morning, a week after the amputation, she was alarmed to find Fuer, who had been steadily improving, stuporous
and hemorrhaging from the nose. The doctor visited three times that day. She followed his instructions, placing a bladder with artificial ice on Fuer’s head, renewing it every two hours, applying cold-water compresses to the back of his neck and temples. His moistened hair looked like the feathers of a molting bird. She washed his hands and chest frequently and checked his pulse every half hour. By 10
A.M
. it had risen to 130. She and Sister Sophie put leeches on his temples as he drifted into and out of sensibility. She offered to stay the night with him, but Mother ordered her to her room.

She barely slept. Vigilance had rooted in her, her schedule shaped to his. She woke at 5
A.M
. and found him bleeding at the temples. She held dry compresses against his brow, pressing upward with her hands flat on the cloth. Fuer stared at her so resolutely that she knew he was trying to communicate. His eyes rolled back in his head.

She called for a priest to administer extreme unction. While the old cleric prayed with enough heart for the three of them, she held the patient’s hand. After that, the room quickened with activity. At nine, the doctor arrived, examined Fuer, and declared it was typhus. Mother appraised the scene to determine who should care for him in his final hours. She chose Flo.

By evening, his teeth and tongue were black, the rest of him gray. Every half hour, per the doctor’s orders, she put thirty drops of ether on his head to assuage the pain. His hair was straw now, trampled and lusterless. She continued to refresh the ice bladder every other hour, and hourly applied strong chamomile tea compresses to the stump, which was pink and healing nicely, like the one healthy tree left in a forest decimated by fire. Through his coma, she sensed his fear, which had been the worst aspect of his suffering all along.
Strong steel and acids every hour internally and as much water as he can drink, mixed with raspberry vinegar. All day I held dry cloths to the bleeding, pressing down with my hands. This it is to live
.

She slept on and off at his bedside and awoke disoriented at 8
A.M
., two hours later than usual. He was still alive. At nine the doctor came but
did not dress the stump. He listened to Fuer’s heart and chest without ever looking at her, not wishing, she sensed, to convey emotion. After he left the room, she sat holding Fuer’s damp, clay hand. He was breathing, just breathing; it was all he could manage. And then, in a few minutes, without any struggle, he died. Gone in an imperceptible instant. And
where
had he gone? Where did they go when they left the body?

The job was not finished. She fumigated the room with vitriolic acid and supervised the removal of the body to the chamber of the dead, where it was sprinkled with chloride of lime and no one was allowed to enter. That afternoon his sisters came to call on him. She had to turn them away weeping.

• • •

Selina came to the institute for an afternoon’s visit. She noted what a rough place it was, lacking in the usual amenities: no hot water for a bath and very often no cold water. Flo bathed, she explained, when she swam in the Rhine with the orphans. Selina was glad that Flo’s family had not accompanied her. They would have been alarmed and disapproved. And interfered, Flo added.

That evening, after Selina left, Mother Fliedner asked her to accompany Deaconess Amalia the next day. They would be selling lottery tickets at the village inn to raise funds.

“What is the prize?” Flo asked.

“Money, just some money,” answered Mrs. Fliedner. Flo had never heard of such an undertaking. She wondered if it was better to award a gift. Perhaps chocolates or some other delicacy?

Mother said they hadn’t time to shop for chocolates and the people of the village were content to win a small pouch. Flo thought it undignified, but agreed.

The next morning she set out with Sister Amalia. Stationing themselves at a rickety table in the porte cochere where the carriages collected and deposited guests, they sold a small roll of chances. At lunchtime they picnicked by the river on bread and cheese. Sister
Amalia returned to the hotel and retrieved the table and chairs. She asked Flo to help her set up outside a restaurant down the street.

“But we have sold all the tickets.”

“Yes,” the sister agreed. “Now we beg. People will throw in their change from dinner.”