Kubahskoi was a Polish student in his middle twenties. He spoke English with many curious turns of phrase, and expressed considerable pleasure at the prospect of sharing a room with Paul. His manner was courteous and refined; his references to himself were modest. Above middle height, he had a solid physique and a sensitive, slightly melancholy face. His forehead was high, his eyes unmistakably Slavonic and rather secretive; he had a heavy, drooping moustache. When dressed he looked like a German student from the pages of a nineteenth-century illustrated novel.
He installed himself with a rapidity which implied considerable experience, and indeed he had been an inmate of many sanatoria. He had fallen ill during the Occupation, whilst studying law at Warsaw University. A pneumothorax had been induced (which had been maintained ever since), but he had remained obstinately positive; apart from this he looked and felt relatively well, and he was not confined to bed.
Like many Slavs, he possessed an exceptional faculty for languages; he spoke four fluently and two others with proficiency. English he had started to study only a few months previously, and by speaking it with Paul he made rapid progress. He was equable in temperament and very studious; there were times, however, when he would be overcome by the wretchedness of his situation, and then for hours he would lie back with his head on the pillow, motionless and silent. Paul, seeing him thus, was always reminded of the pencil sketch made of Nietzsche on his death bed—the great brow, the heavy moustache, the staring, unseeing eyes.
Once each morning one or other of the assistant doctors would pass on a routine visit, usually demanding no more than: “Tout va bien?” Paul posed no questions. ‘Perhaps they are deciding to give me no treatment now that they see the improvement I am making through bed rest alone,’ he thought. Some days, indeed, it seemed to him that he was coughing less and that he felt better, though if he sought corroboration from the mirror above the wash-basin, he was rapidly disillusioned; at times he would be so irritated by the sight of the deep flush on each of his cheeks that he would slap at them violently with his hand, punishing their redness by turning them scarlet. For the rest, the graph of his temperature chart plotted an eccentric and irregular course, recoiling on some evenings, to bound more precipitously the next.
The British students continued to visit Paul, though less frequently than at first. But John Cotterell, with whom Paul shared a number of common interests, came once or twice each day, often passing a whole evening with him when Kubahskoi was playing bridge in the room of one of his fellow-countrymen.
From the various details which emerged during the conversation, Paul became familiar with the uncomplex background of John Cotterell’s life.
He was the son of the headmaster of a small private school, at which he had received his education and from which he had gained a scholarship to a public school, and subsequently to Oxford. During the war he had joined the Navy and had reached the rank of lieutenant-commander. One year after returning to the university he had fallen ill.
His illness had not evolved beyond its earliest phase; an initial pleurisy had long since cleared and his lungs were free of infection. He felt no misgivings, therefore, about the future. He was engaged to a girl whom he had met during his naval service, and of whom he kept several photos conspicuously displayed by the side of his bed.
Sometimes John questioned Paul about his own background. Paul always replied that there was nothing which merited relating. Apart from the fact that he was an orphan, everything had been ordinary, everything conventional. When John attempted to commiserate with him on the grounds that he had had no parents, Paul silenced him instantly; not having known his parents, he had not missed them. In truth, he said, he would not have wished his life to have been otherwise. No, he had not been deprived of family life; he had been brought up by an uncle, his father’s brother, and in the company of a number of young cousins. No, he had not been a good scholar at school, nor indeed had he been a scholar of any sort or description.
“And your war service?” inquired John Cotterell.
“As uneventful and undistinguished as the rest of my life,” said Paul with finality.
“A man without history; ergo you must be a very happy man,” said John Cotterell.
“Why not?” replied Paul, dismissing the matter.
Paul’s past, as he had declared, did not merit discussion. Nevertheless he never thought of it without disenchantment. And yet, as he would have freely acknowledged, by most standards it had been enviable: the usual middle-class pattern—day-school, boarding-school, public school. To the last he would not have gained admission but for the fact that it was second-rate and, specialising in the production of extroverted young toughs (mostly the sons of wealthy manufacturers from the Midlands), did not exact even minimal educational standards.
A disappointment to his uncle, who had never spared himself on his nephew’s behalf, he had idled away his time between leaving school and the beginning of the war. His decision to join the Army—for some years he had been a pacifist—coincided with the loss of his religious faith, the sustaining force throughout his childhood and adolescence.
At the end of the war, having lost touch with his uncle, he had entered Cambridge with an Army grant. It had been halfway through his second year that he had been found to be in an advanced state of consumption.
At the beginning of a stay in a sanatorium most patients exhibit one of two clearly defined reactions. The representatives of the first group sit in their beds in a state of sullen fury because no notice is apparently taken of them by the medical staff, and their reiterated question to anyone who will listen is invariably: “Well, why don’t they get on with it?” Those of the second group prefer to evade attention, and when occasion brings them into contact with their medical advisers, seek to avoid discussion of their symptoms or condition. Paul, after initial resistance, could now be said to belong to the latter.
And as the days passed and nothing happened, he gained a certain wary confidence. In particular he looked forward to the weekends, for he felt that at such times he must surely be immune from uncongenial summonses to the Service Médical and the initiation of treatment. In the same way he awaited impatiently the approach of Christmas, which he hoped would promote a state of interregnum in the sanatorium until the New Year.
Encouraged by the example of Kubahskoi’s exceptional application, Paul also started to work. In the evenings (like the week-ends, temporary periods of immunity), if no one visited him, he read.
Then one day the smiling Dr. Vernet came to Paul’s room and announced: “Monsieur, after Christmas your holiday will be over. We shall then start to torture you.”
“What do you intend to do to me?”
“That, monsieur, depends on the result of certain tests which we shall make. As your famous politicians say: ‘Wait and see.’”
And, smiling still more broadly, Dr. Vernet left the room.