How could I, Georg Letham, a physician, a man of scientific training, of certain philosophical aspirations, let myself be so far carried away as to commit an offense of the gravest sort, the murder of my wife? And to commit this crime chiefly for financial reasons? Or so it would appear to the outsider. For money was in fact the one thing I could never get from that woman, who was doglike in her attachment to me. Am I reviling her with this word “doglike”? No. I am only attempting to explain, and so far I have not succeeded. There is a gaping internal contradiction here, and yet that is how it was.
There was astonishment in legal circles and among the general public, as represented by opinions in the metropolitan press, that during my trial, when it was a matter of life and death to me, I yawned. It was the third day of the trial, the heat was oppressive, the oral arguments were telling me nothing new, and yet–how could a person accused of such a crime be so blatantly uninterested in the outcome of his trial? But this contradiction is only apparent, unlike the many true contradictions in my character. It may have interested others what became of me. But it could not interest me what others thought of my crime or by what “punishment,” under what section of the law, they exacted redress for the purpose of “retribution and deterrence.” I could not have gone through all I had gone through and still acknowledged the logical connection between crime and punishment. What law would apply to me? Common law and traditional law do not do me justice. And natural law? Too often I had seen the innocent suffer, while the guilty–vile and despicable creatures–attained happiness. They could sentence me. But they could not force me to recognize this sentence, execution or exile to C., where yellow fever and other tropical scourges were at that moment raging, as punishment.
Or were these arguments supposed to be enlightening me about my antisocial nature, about my “morbid character,” about my unfitness to live as a respectable citizen in a well-ordered state? My own experience of this “well-ordered state,” as whose moral exponent the court presented itself, had shown me that it was anything but a healthy, moral organism of orderly character.
But I had done the deed. Indeed I had, and nothing else mattered. And if a human being has on his conscience a crime so irrefutable that it can never be denied or glossed over or excused–if I had actually been driven to extinguish a human life, what is the good of talk, of lengthy oratory and presentations of evidence? The one who committed the crime cannot save himself now. But then he never could, not even before his crime. Even if he had foreseen everything, would not the internal forces that drove him still have been stronger than the counsel of reason?
His outward fate may be decided now. There is hardly anything left to hope for. If my skin is thick, I will survive a good deal. If I am sensitive, I will perish. What is, is. Everything has happened. Everything is over.
In my youth, after my father had carried out his educational experiments on me, I worshipped objective knowledge in the form of natural science and subjective enjoyment of life in the form of money. Money was more than a superficial pleasure–it seemed to me the only and therefore the best substitute for God in our otherwise faithless time. Money is the ground beneath one’s feet. He who has money at least has something. He is standing on the securest foundation there is in the contemporary world order.
To know and to possess as much as possible–such a simple recipe, and yet so difficult to follow! How devotedly I toiled, in my heart always disinterested, cold, and isolated, in the service of these two gods, spending my nights in experimental bacteriological facilities and pathology laboratories or at the gaming table–and in both my endeavors I had luck. With the help of my winnings, I carried out the most extravagant experiments (chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys are incredibly expensive). I sought distraction in work when I was tired of gambling, and sought distraction in gambling when I no longer had the drive and concentration necessary for intellectual work. At the green baccarat table, I had new ideas for scientific experiments. My fortunes were happy, but I was seldom happy myself.
I lost my mother early. My siblings, one brother, one sister, were strangers to me. My father played a central but calamitous role in my life; we could not be friends.
Though I had long since become weary of my way of life, I refused a chair at a small university. I had no interest in teaching. I did publish the results of my bacteriological experiments, which threw light on an interesting rare disease, rat-bite fever, but for the time being I was not pursuing them. I had won a fairly large amount at gambling. I locked my door and traveled. I met my future wife. She was very well-to-do, unbeautiful, no longer young. Thoughts of financial gain were far from my mind at first. There was nothing about community of property in our marriage contract, which we drafted one heavenly morning beneath palms and fruit-laden orange trees. And there was (and still is) a daughter from my wife’s first marriage; she was her legal heir and would soon be of marriageable age. Looking out over the azure sea, we discussed our future ménage. Far too many rooms, but only the one (shared) bedroom. A luxurious household, whose upkeep would come from my wife’s interest earnings and my income as a physician, contributed on an equal basis.
I had completely forgotten that I was not only a researcher but also a credentialed, qualified physician. And I was a good diagnostician, even if I knew human diseases and physical abnormalities more from the lecture hall, from the dissection table, and from the microscope than from bedside clinical observation. Modern scientific analytical methods–X-ray examination, chemical analysis, biological-function testing–are so well developed now that these accurate tests are an ample substitute for bedside experience.
I also had adequate manual skills from my experiments. Vivisection experiments, experiments on living material, cannot be performed without a certain degree of surgical skill. The laws of asepsis, the secret of all surgical practice, are also applicable here.
More than anything else, I had a certain interest in surgery and gynecology, an interest that deepened when I spent some months working as a volunteer at a large clinic following my return. Thus I considered moving and eventually did move from theoretical science to practical surgery and gynecology.
I married and became a practicing physician. My wife was soon devoting all her energy and irrepressible vitality to making things easier for me. I opened a private clinic on a lovely quiet street in the city. Medical colleagues who had previously sought my advice as a pathologist sent me patients, and everything seemed to be going well. Illnesses interested me, the ill did not. This is the case and is necessarily the case with ninety percent of all surgeons. Of my own free will I had promised my wife (she was softhearted, much too much so) that I would end my experiments with animals and never again set foot in a casino. I led a well-ordered life.
What was it at bottom that I wished to do “of my own free will”? To become a human being, as millions are. Then came the war. I was inducted, but was not deployed as a field surgeon. Instead I was granted the special favor, so it was thought, of being assigned to a bacteriological laboratory. A mobile task force, sent to trouble spots when needed. It was a time not only of senseless waste of life–millions dead–but also of terrible epidemics. All manner of bacteria were being unleashed, and these were necessarily more dangerous when people were starving, careworn, weakened, and half dead from loss of blood than they would have been in peacetime. Under the wretched hygienic conditions prevailing among the people of Europe in the final years of the war, Spanish grippe took forms that recalled the plagues of the Middle Ages. People dropped like flies.
I was not lazy. I worked day and night. I did my utmost. I had superiors and subordinates. I had regulations to follow and orders to carry out. Serum supply, epidemic control, practical research. It made a difference. I expressed no views about the whys and wherefores of the war and the strategic operations. Nor was anything said to me about them.
My wife wrote to me every day. I wrote back when I could. I was surrounded by people, but did not speak of personal matters for weeks on end. I was respected. I won no friends, but I did win commendations and decorations. After my crime many years later, I was sentenced not to the guillotine but only to exile, and I have these tokens of appreciation for my patriotic effort to thank for that. For the person who had had a hand in epidemic control during that critical period had rendered outstanding service to his country.
But about what that time destroyed in me–I will say nothing. How it brought to fruition what my father had begun–I will not describe it. He–my father–and my country too, in fact all the countries of the world, are hardly blameless for the development of my character. But is there any way to tell that to the judges, the jury? Better to cover mouth with hand and yawn discreetly.
Yes, my father had a determining influence on my youth. My life was the continuation of that of my parents by other means. My parents were in conflict with each other, and so I was in conflict with myself. My mother died comparatively young. From her I reaped the benefit only of a good physical looking after and the usual maternal warmth–she taught me how to talk. My father taught me how to think. Whatever I am as a thinking person, for better or worse, I owe to him. It took me a long time to escape from this childish thralldom. My wife, too, kept me in thrall–a thralldom of kindness, if I may put it that way.
I married her so that I would not be alone. The idea was that she would be around, give me the illusion of companionship, but not control me. Unfortunately she had other ideas about our relationship. She was ugly, as I said, a light brunette who wrongly thought herself blonde, narrow shoulders, broad hips, a clay-colored face as flat as a sheet of paper, with a snub nose, large nostrils into whose hairy interior it was possible to see. The usual depilatories were no help, only aggravated this ugly feature. Her teeth were few and unlovely, and so she did not like to show them when speaking or laughing. Later they were replaced with splendid dentures. For she was not without vanity and did more to conceal her ugliness than many women of acknowledged beauty do to maintain it. Her eyes were light brown to light gray–a rare tint, although it harmonized with her also light, fairly luxuriant eyebrows. From the beginning her ugliness had not repelled me but, in combination with her good social standing, her positive attitude toward life, and her unassuming nature, had actually attracted me, since I knew that this was not a lady who would ever lead me astray with her beauty and sensual appeal. Those gifts by which women generally influence men like me could in her case never have driven me to such an act as I have committed. But there are other complications, other conflicts.
My father had dominated me because he impressed me by his very existence. He would have existed without me, but not the reverse. He dominated me all the more strongly because of his formidable ability to take hold of people, to handle them. Taking hold implies letting go, and handling is never far from manhandling. He was older than I was. This was not yet a reason to look up to him. But he was also stronger and more beautiful (beauty, even in the oddest forms and guises, has always had an almost magical effect on me). But most of all he dominated me–banal, but true–because I loved him. He was aware of all this. For he was clever with people, perhaps because he was psychologically independent of anyone and everyone during the greater part of his life. Later, when he needed me, when, with graying but always dyed hair, with bitter creases appearing in his small, sharp-featured face, with deepening and ever more depressing perceptions of life, he was rapidly growing solitary, suddenly he was stranger to me than any stranger.
He was feared at work, and he was influential, more influential than the minister. He was polite, rich and tightfisted, pious and an anarchist, a misanthrope since his unsuccessful expedition, and always and in all things basically insincere–perhaps even against his will at times. He had wearied of lying, dissembling, playacting. They were no longer worth his while. He had attained everything they could attain for him. But he had to go on as he was. I no longer asked his advice, I had only myself to thank for my scientific career. The two of us reluctantly sorted out financial matters directly; in my youth, when they were important to me, they had been settled through his attorney and my legal guardian. The estate inherited from my mother was soon no longer worth talking about anyway.
In the postwar years he repeatedly came to me and guardedly stated his interest–but he never gained any insight into what was of critical concern to me. He suddenly took it into his head to drop his artificial mask of youth, which he had cherished for too long. Once I spent some time away, vacationing with my wife in a southern port. When I came back, he had snow-white hair. But, strange to say, his white, slightly curly, still thick hair looked like a wig in a theatrical hairdresser’s window. Yes, it was like the journeyman’s piece of a hairdresser’s assistant, resting on a milliner’s block. I smiled and held my tongue. I looked at him as though he were a wax doll in a carnival museum and gravely wished him all the best on his most recent promotion, which made him directly subordinate to the minister. He had risen that high already. The ministers changed and he remained.
He had awakened my compulsion to heedlessly, ruthlessly, look to the heart, had shown me as a defenseless child how to get to the bottom of things and ideas, how to control people and circumstances. He had told me of his experiences on his unsuccessful voyage to the North Pole. Not to amuse me. The impact he had on me was like that of a torpedo on a ship in passage. Over time I got to the heart of him too, of course, for finally what made him tick was no simpler and no more complex than what makes most people tick. He no longer needed to tell me anything. I looked at him steadily. I spoke of the events of the day as described in the most recent newspapers, we did not argue, we were in agreement about everything, asked nothing of each other, exemplary father, exemplary son, we both smiled, we shook each other’s hands, offered each other a glass of wine or the like; I inquired, feigning an interest I did not have, as to the health of my siblings, he responded to my questions with a wave of his hand–they’re immaterial to me too–but then he became more serious and asked how I had invested my money. As though he were unaware that everything belonged to my wife and nothing to me. But I ignored that, only smiled and said: “Wisely, of course!” Nothing more. And yet this point concerned me a great deal. My father and I were strangers to each other. More than that: he bored me. I understood him and he bored me. What did he have to say to me? I knew his ballad of the rats.
He bored me to tears with his love especially. Just the same as my wife. No, different in one way. Loving and not being loved did her heart good. Most women never entirely cast off masochism. If not in every respect the ideal man as imagined by a woman of her age, to her I was certainly like a child particularly cherished by its mother because of the pain and perils of bringing it into the world. If only she had kept her demonstrations of affection to herself! All too often she behaved toward me like a brooding hen, all warmth and filthy plumage, or like an imbecilic, sanctimonious, provincial wet nurse, or something. Unfortunately my father had picked up this manner from her, and it was often enough to drive a person to distraction. Had she given me hard cash (or a gun) instead of all the endearments and demonstrations of love, everything would have turned out differently. But no doubt her feelings were too soft for that. Both of them had considerable fortunes. But she kept hers from me, perhaps as a last way of binding me to her if it came to that. I could have understood that, certainly. But why shower a defenseless person–one internally at odds with himself–with demonstrations of a feeling that he will not and cannot reciprocate!
I was less a stranger to my wife than I was to my father. When she derived pleasure from suffering, I learned to find pleasure in making her suffer. We complemented each other splendidly. I experimented with great care to see how far I could go without losing her love. I went as far as I could imagine. Almost all the way–the thread still held, though stretched to the breaking point. But it snapped under the ultimate test. I had credited a human being with superhuman capacities for the “pleasures and sorrows of love,” and I had to pay the price. For human nature is fragile, and the average character never transcends it. So I had bet too much, and the bet was too risky. It was a calculated risk, but I had miscalculated.
But was I sorry on that account? No. Even the death penalty held no terrors for me. I am thinking of the time of the trial. Any earthly court was too weak, too absurd, too petty to punish me. God or Satan himself would have had to reveal himself to me. I yawned. I would have repeated my infernal experiment under different test conditions if it had been in my power, but I still would have done away with that love-addicted old woman, that bottle blonde with shining, light gray eyes in her flat, enameled face and blue varicose veins on her legs, and if possible my good old hoary-headed father too. There are such people.
There is someone else I must mention, someone who may have been the most important person for me–perhaps. Who knows? Walter, a contemporary of mine in medical school. Once during a lecture we had a singular experience, whose details I thought I had forgotten. But while I was in custody, in the interval between crime and verdict–during those difficult hours of solitude when I was left to my own devices, brooding and analyzing in the extraordinary anguish to which isolation will drive anyone, particularly if he has led an intellectually vigorous life until then–this episode, insignificant in itself, came back to me.
It happened during a long lecture on the optical properties of the human eye. As the old physiology professor was speaking, a small door opened to one side of the large blackboard. Through this door the lecture hall communicated with the rest of the physiology department.
At first we paid no attention. We were focused on the difficult calculations and formulas that the professor was writing with squeaking chalk on the blackboard, now dazzlingly illuminated by the midday sun.
I can still see my comrade’s hand, shapely, slender, yet masculine in its strength and sinewiness, copying down the formulas in a somewhat disorderly notebook; while the dark gray, shining eyes with their expression of total, I might even call it joyful, intelligence were fixed on the blackboard, the hand transcribed the figures almost autonomously, the lines wandering up and down.
There was a sudden stir. The students near the lectern began to laugh, to stamp, to get up out of their seats. Something not even knee-high, shaggy, outlandish, reddish white, was wriggling and squirming among them. What was it? A dirty-white poodle with a bushy, frantically waving tail, its head covered with blood down to the bare light brown nose, a large, square wound on one side of its head, its tongue, bruised at the edges, hanging out, its eyes rolling, was weaving silently past the feet of the horrified–no, not horrified!–only astonished professor. Gnawed-through narrow leather straps dragged from the handsome pasterns of the thin legs. No barking or whining was heard. Only raspy breathing.
My father had inured me, I will tell the tale later in great detail, to the ghastliness of life as it really is. Otherwise I would never have chosen to study medicine, I would have resisted the temptation to learn the secrets of physical life. Would have had to resist! So I thought I was impervious to even the most dreadful sights. I wanted to be. That was how I wanted to be. I actually seemed to be. I had dissected cadavers with total composure like every other first-semester medico, even smoking a cigarette as I worked. I had also been present at vivisection experiments, which are performed for third-semester students for purely pedagogical purposes. In the interest of scientific inquiry for the betterment of mankind, I had always been mentally prepared for this dark side of life and had endured it, if not easily. But I was unprepared now and was horrified when the animal scrambled higher and higher up the steps of the amphitheater, its tail swishing, and looked up at us with terrified madness in its eye. Now the beast breathed deeply and noisily through its tow-colored, somewhat bloody nostrils, to let out its anguish finally in a howl. My neighbor quickly got to his feet. The animal was running up in a quick zigzag, possibly toward a door to the outside that had been left open in the summer heat, and was already up to our bench at the very top of the amphitheater. From this distance the wound on its skull was clearly visible. The skin had been neatly removed, the milk white cerebral membrane was incised in the shape of a rhombus, and two very small, silvery instruments, I no longer remember exactly what kind, perhaps hypodermic syringe tips, still hung in the open wound, which was pulsating plainly.
The tumult around us was very loud. But it was merry. The students took the thing as a lark and the professor followed suit. He erased the figures on the board with a large sponge as though trying to wipe away this little episode of the puppy dog on the run from the embrace of science. The students, men and women, surrounded him; he fended them off, sweating and gesticulating. I especially remember the laughing face and fine teeth of a female student who wore her blonde hair in the madonna style of the time. Hitching up her long skirt, she skipped lightly after the animal. She followed it up to where the two of us were, cajoling it as young girls do their lapdogs when they have escaped the leash and trying to coax it back with blandishments such as “precious,” “sweetie,” “baby,” “you bad boy,” and so on and so forth. The upper part of its body was pressed against our feet, its wounded head turned toward the pretty young woman. It was ghastly the way the howl died in the unfortunate animal’s throat at the sound of this deep, cooing, coaxing human voice, the way it suddenly deceived itself, eternally trusting in its god, man.
But it did not return to its tormentors. My friend crushed what was left of the animal’s cranium from behind with the silver handle of his walking stick. He had raised his left hand, had aimed, had struck. A thud–and that was that. The animal went over without a sound and was no more.
The student stood up, descended to the lectern holding the walking stick by its other end, washed the bloody handle there, dried it on the towel next to the blackboard. And returned to his seat. The most peculiar thing was that no one, neither the professor nor the female student, found anything remarkable in what he did. The professor rang for the lab attendant to remove the carcass, the female student, after fruitlessly fluttering her blue eyes in the direction of my neighbor, sat back down in her front-row seat, which, thanks to her punctuality, she had occupied from the first lecture on, my neighbor turned back to his disorderly notebook, instantly a jumble of writing, and that was the end of it. I found out later that the experimenter who was working with the dog had been called to the telephone. Then the lab attendant had slipped out of the hot experiment area for a cigarette, and the unusually strong, intelligent, unanesthetized animal had freed itself–no one knew how–and in its misery had trotted toward the lecture hall, for which it was not yet entirely ready. It should not have been brought out until some weeks later, when the paralytic effects of the partial lobotomy had developed properly.
In the strangest way, for which there are no words, I felt attracted toward this student Walter. As the patient beyond saving is to the doctor, perhaps. But what does one have to do with the other? Nothing. Beyond saving . . . doctor. God couldn’t make sense of it.
Walter passed his exams at about the same time as I did. He was hearty, strong, the picture of blooming health. Originally he had been bound for the service; his father was a high-ranking military officer. But he had preferred the university. And he had taken up experimental pathology and bacteriology–the same fields as mine. He was left-handed, and, like many left-handed people, unusually clumsy. Everything went wrong for him sometimes. But he persevered.
I made many attempts to get closer to him. They never succeeded. He was a constitutionally cheerful, athletic person. He seemed to me to be tough inside and out, in a way that was not without humor–to be a “man without nerves.” He appeared to be fairly free of excessive humane sentiments or compassion. Rightly interpreted, his coup de grâce had been administered not out of compassion for the animal’s suffering, but because, once it had broken loose and come into contact with the students, infectious matter must in all likelihood have entered the artificial opening in its cranium; he, Walter, had therefore been forced to regard the dog as doomed and in any event useless for the purposes of the experiment.
I avoided the beautiful student, who was often around us later and who in all innocence exhibited a provocative nature. I paid no further attention to her. My wife was physically and mentally her exact opposite, if there are different types among females.
I saw Walter often. The very look of him was a source of joy. I found his captivating, boyish laugh contagious. I liked to laugh, I even imitated other people’s laughs. But he always avoided personal conversation. I apparently did not interest him–and in this he was unlike many women, upon whom I made an impression without wishing to, who became a burden on me in one way or another, and who usually took me much more seriously than I did them.
One might have thought that an experience such as this, the poodle fleeing in the middle of a scientific experiment, would have made me give up medical school in general and animal experiments in particular. What could have been more natural? I had an innate sense of the aesthetically interesting. As an art historian or the like, I would always have been able to hold my own. But I was driven to experiments (perhaps as a consequence of childhood experiences that I have yet to recount). I wanted to pit myself against a Walter, against this classical type of the excessively practical man who, for example, could see the animal in question as simply a piece of material, the way a carpenter does a piece of dense, nicely dry, knot-free wood.
But so long as it was animals that were the subjects of my experiments, all was well. The civilized world gladly shuts its eyes to this practice, as it does to war and so on. It was not until a human being met her maker that society got up in arms and had nasty things to say about my character. The fact is that if one day I decided to send my wife to her grave, and made this decision as coolly as I might have selected a laboratory animal for an experiment, that does not mean I undertook these two actions with total composure, with a completely clear conscience. There was thus consistency in that I never made these decisions without scruples.
But this scrupulousness was not a religious fear of sin. I did not believe in God. I was unable to countenance a world that included supernatural explanation. I would have liked to. It was not possible.
We are too young for godless anarchism. Thousands of generations before us have lived under the shadow of faith and, if they really had to suffer, at least suffered believing in a higher order and suffered for its sake. Perhaps a future generation will be equal to a life without faith. Will be able to look life in the eye, to see it for what it is. Will not lurch one way, then another, in benighted uncertainty. But I was not so fortunate. I was benighted from childhood on. Only from the outside did my career seem to run in a purposeful straight line–in reality it did not. Would I have lived only in and by experiments otherwise? When not performing an experiment, I felt no pleasure, indeed no connection with life at all. But in the experiment? Did I obtain satisfaction here at least? I must answer no.
The experimenter is like God, but on a small scale. He is as immeasurably small as God is great.
So it was with the animals. So it was with my wife. The animals were mine to do with as I pleased. I had paid cash for them, on one occasion four hundred rhesus monkeys for a transmission experiment that required that species. No one could stop me from doing what I did–there are so few moral impediments to the investigator anywhere in today’s world.
The animal has no inkling of its fate. The investigator does, of course, the experimenter knows what is coming. He alone knows what must come. He has long since weighed his basic interest in the matter against the animal’s interest in being alive and staying healthy and untormented, and found the weight of the suffering creature to be wanting. Perhaps he deigns to take the condemned animal, a dog, say, out of its cage himself. It barks merrily, lifts its head high, looks around with curiosity. It tries to run, stiff from lying down so long. It is cheerful. It needs him, too. Did I make the world the way it is? It sniffs the air with its moist, dark nostrils and supposes that the man in the white lab coat is going to lead it outside on the grimy cord about its neck, or to a feeding dish. The man now lifts the animal up by the scruff of the neck and lays it out. On the table. On the plank, which has been well sluiced down. He grasps the rib cage. He feels the little creature’s heart thumping excitedly against its ribs. A monkey is another matter. A monkey is a caricature of a man. Or is a man a caricature of a monkey? But in the way they react to great pain, man and monkey are much alike. An older, well-nourished rhesus monkey–especially the male, whose system is more finely tuned than the female’s . . . I will not go on with this here. Perhaps later I will get around to describing what happens in a scientific experiment in which hundreds and thousands of animals are sacrificed one after another ad majorem hominis gloriam. Many experiments have had a positive outcome; thousands of times as many have yielded nothing positive whatever. And for the subjects of the experiments, the animals destined to suffer, the service they were objectively rendering for science was a matter of indifference.
Perhaps we mean no more and no less to the higher power above us (I cannot believe in it and yet it is in my thoughts sometimes) than our cats and dogs, rats, guinea pigs, monkeys, horses–even bedbugs and lice do to us. I have experimented on bedbugs and lice, too. Science has long known that body lice transmit a very dangerous infectious disease, which, during wartime especially, has caused tremendous loss of life, namely, epidemic typhus, typhus exanthematicus. I believed I had found the pathogen of this disease in a certain bacillus. (Unfortunately this was not an error.) In 1917 I carried out experiments with body lice in the military epidemiology laboratory at the Russian-Polish front. This insect is so minute that the technical difficulties will be appreciated. What is the task? One must infect the insect with typhous blood, so that it becomes infectious. Is this clear? It is not easy. Nevertheless I was able to give the animal a stab with an exquisitely fine needle. But another researcher, a Pole, was even more resourceful. He was able to employ a very beautiful method to fill the gut of the millimeter-small insect with infectious material from behind. This procedure is not child’s play either, of course. It needs to be mastered in the same way as other bacteriological research methods. The result in any case is that a body louse fed with a certain pathogen becomes ill and dies. If its mortal remains are now smeared onto the skin of an ape and the ape licks the spot, it too becomes ill and dies quickly. And so it goes, first here, then there, from warm-blooded creature to cold-blooded creature. Lice, monkeys, lice, monkeys. It sounds grotesque, comical, but it is not.
At least momentarily, a positive result from a scientific experiment affords the investigator terrific satisfaction. I use the word “terrific” advisedly.
All the nightly vigils, all the diligent, exhaustive study, all the gnawing doubts and anxieties, all the time and expense, everything the investigator loses by giving up a social life, giving up reading, going to the theater and to concerts, above all by giving up a truly vigorous, conscious family life–it is all (for the moment) richly repaid by the feeling of knowledge gained, of having solved a puzzle, of having increased man’s power over things.
The renowned French physiologist Claude Bernard once called the scientific laboratory the “battlefield” of the experimenter. Certainly blood is shed. But there is a victory, too. And when he describes the task of the experimenter as to prévoir et diriger les phénomènes, who will dare to disparage the scientific investigator as a “cold mechanic of medicine”? No, he is much more like an experimenter-demigod probing the depths of the cosmos. And if he really is what he should be as an experimenter, he rises above the vulgar interests of men. He becomes a tragic figure. Or–and here the conflict begins–is he only a tragicomic figure? Was his “scientific result,” which in the best case is hauled for decades or a century through medical journals and scientific periodicals and books under his byline, really worth the trouble? Was it in many instances not even worth the electrical current that flowed through the lamps in his laboratory while he worked? Does it give meaning to meaninglessness? Does it take the horrifying out of the horror? Does it help? Can it be gratifying? Does the investigator’s interest not turn immediately to other problems, precisely like the hand of a cold mechanic? Is his thirst for happiness and inner peace ever appeased? Did the suffering of the sacrificed animals bring the investigator great things? If so, did it bring the nation great things too? Humanity? Did it transform the terrible disorder of nature into order and meaningful structure?
After the war I returned to my wife and immediately reopened the private surgical and gynecological clinic. But human disease could not hold me now. In my earlier zeal, I had made do with trained nurses. Now I brought in an assistant physician.
Success or failure, recovery with adverse effect or without it: I had seen the cheapness of an individual life too close at hand in combat and in military epidemic hospitals. Previously I had sacrificed animal lives on a vast scale in order to find something that might be of use in restoring even one human being to health. Now it was the opposite. Animal experiments became the main point.
With great caution, so as not to arouse the suspicions of my wife, I resumed my bacteriological experiments alongside my work as a physician, and as ill luck would have it, two of my patients at the time perished within a short period “following successful surgery.” There are such strings of bad luck everywhere, in accordance with the law of large numbers, but here there was a connection, as follows. I was concerned at that time with the etiology of scarlet fever. Notoriously, the bacterial cause of this exanthem (like that of numerous other infectious diseases, I mention only lethargic encephalitis and yellow fever among many) is still wrapped in complete mystery. Every known method has been tried without success despite the greatest experimental ingenuity and the keenest determination. No one on earth has seen the “virus” of scarlatina, scarlet fever, in the flesh! And yet it exists. It must be possible to find it. But how?
Now the matter of scarlet fever is particularly curious. Other pathogenic microorganisms are found as fellow travelers of this disease, identified streptococci readily seen on suitable specimens under the microscope; spherical bacteria arranged in chains can be cultured without difficulty on synthetic growth media. They cause ulcerations, they excrete extremely virulent toxins, they produce, when injected or circulating “naturally” in the bloodstream of the scarlet-fever victim, dangerous effects, beginning with high fever and ending in death.
The following line of thinking seemed plausible to me. The true pathogen of scarlet fever and yellow fever and so forth must, as has been gathered, be so small that it can traverse even the tiniest pores of the clay filter through which the bacillus cultures have been drawn. But the streptococci involved in scarlet fever, while not as big as potatoes, are of measurable size, even measurable volume and weight–and they never pass through such a small-pored filter, they remain in the old culture fluid, while the scarlet-fever toxin and pathogen slip through.
Would it then be conceivable that the unknown scarlet-fever pathogens are tiny freeloaders or parasites living on the much larger bodies of the streptococci, and that they are both being separated by the filter? Some such thing is imaginable, maybe even worth an experiment. Good! I devoted myself to this question, setting up experiments that would answer it one way or the other.
In my office I discharged my tasks as one discharges a duty. I neglected none of the imperatives of antisepsis when I performed the two operations mentioned above. And yet! And yet!
The first was an appendectomy in the “cold” or nonacute stage, generally an entirely safe intervention. Nevertheless a septic fever resembling streptococcal fever had already developed on the evening following the operation. What was inexplicable to my assistant was the appearance of virulent streptococci in the blood of the patient. I will keep it short. We lost the patient. Had I unwittingly transmitted dangerous microorganisms? My wife tried to console me. She took an interest in my successes and failures as a physician. I could not be silent, the thing touched her. I forced myself to stay away from the laboratory for a few weeks. Everything went splendidly in the interval. Even technically difficult operations were successful, and my patients marveled at my “gentle, blessed touch”!
But the day came when it was necessary to transfer the costly and painstakingly prepared scarlet-fever streptococcus cultures to fresh medium. Otherwise these organisms, which were living in the old culture fluid and continuously excreting toxins in the incubator, maintained at a uniform thirty-seven degrees, would eventually have poisoned, sterilized, exterminated themselves. They had to be settled on virgin soil. This job too I performed with extreme care. I used rubber gloves to handle the glass rods tipped with flame-sterilized platinum loops when I transferred tiny drops of the old culture into vessels containing fresh nutrient. My clandestine visit to the laboratory might have taken six or eight minutes at most. The cab was waiting by the side entrance of the Pathology Institute with its meter running, which is why I am able to estimate the time.
Moreover I was firmly resolved not to perform any operations during the next few days. I had, of course, washed my hands, my body, with the greatest possible fastidiousness following this visit to the laboratory, had even had my hair cut. Out of pure self-interest alone, I had done everything I could in order not to be infectious. As ill luck would have it, I must now repeat those ominous words, my wife welcomed me home with the news that there had been a call about a friend of my brother and sister, a woman. There was severe pelvic bleeding. My name came to mind for many reasons.
This was the second calamity. This time I could not be said to have done anything unwittingly. I would have liked to say no. But my wife pressed me; my siblings, who otherwise lived their own lives just as they let me live mine, besieged me with entreaties, particularly my sister. I wanted to have my assistant do the operation. Objections all around. He had so little experience, he was heavy-handed, etc., and most of all: no one wanted an outsider to know too much about the operation. I gave in and performed it. Again a minor, ten-minute procedure, assisted only by the clinical nurse, as, in view of its nature, we wished to prevent the assistant from finding out about it. For the law is not for such things. I knew the patient, a pretty, Rubenesque, golden blonde individual. She was a widow, prominent in society–she wished to avoid a scandal, had to avoid one. I did not understand it entirely, but I complied with her fervent request. Misplaced compassion! The man involved did not show himself.
This time I was not as calm as I had been after the appendectomy. I went out again to the clinic late in the evening or at night.
My wife was waiting down at the gate in her car. She had on her lap a small, long-haired, wheat-colored dog, a kind of Pekingese, the pet of her daughter, who was traveling. As I stood beside the bed of my patient, still asleep after the anesthesia, I looked down at the street. My wife seemed to be getting along well with the little dog. Her long, beautiful fingers played in the silkily gleaming, slightly wavy coat of the large-eyed little creature, sprightly unlike most of its breed. Suddenly it barked and snapped at my wife’s gloved fingers, which she had held out to it. It was summer, the car was open, the trees in front of the clinic swayed in the breeze. A fine day, very fine. Meanwhile the nurse had taken the patient’s temperature. It was 37.1. This is actually a fairly normal temperature, but I could not shake an uneasy feeling. And at the same time a sensation, an intuition (how shall I put it?) that only an experimenter will recognize. Could there be something amiss? Something that was not as it should be? Not from the experimental subject’s standpoint, perhaps–but surely everything was fine . . . I will not go on with this. I will merely state the patient’s course. The patient contracted an exanthem resembling scarlet fever. But the blood was persistently free of streptococci. Had I transferred not the streptococcus but the invisible scarlet-fever virus this time? My theory–was it correct? Had the unknown virus still clung loyally to the streptococcus cultures?
Difficult to describe my state of mind during the period that followed. The animal experiments secretly resumed at full tilt, the microscopy and culturing throughout the day whenever I was not by the bed of the poor delirious patient, and at night, since I was unable to sleep and could not bear the presence of my all-too-tender wife, the visits to gambling clubs, where I was now dogged by misfortune, by bad luck.
In addition the acquaintance made of a beautiful, very young, light blonde gambler, with whom I took up intending at first only to satisfy a momentary craving and whom I then installed in a first-class hotel and attempted to surround with great luxury.
Finally the death of my patient, the “almost” airtight result of my final experiments, the tearfulness of my wife, who did not understand my elevated mood despite these events. Suddenly the reversal. I noticed a suspicious redness on my underarm. Had I myself been infected in my experiments? I almost confided in my wife. For until then I had remained silent. But everything passed off well. I remained healthy. A big question mark still hung over the experiments, but on the other hand I was fortunate elsewhere. The young person loved me. She proved this by demanding a lot from me: money, time, love.
I did what I could. I was short of time most of all. Love can sometimes be a substitute for money. Money can sometimes substitute for love. There is no substitute for time.
As a result of my large expenditures on my work and on M. (the girl) as well as my gambling losses, I now ran into certain financial difficulties, which were not particularly pressing at first. The household cost money too, my income was not significant, my savings practically zero. But I was able to borrow money, the gentlemen at the gambling club knew quite a number of fairly respectable moneylenders, and for a time I paid my short-term debts to one lender with loans I obtained from a second or third.
If I had at least had some peace! I needed every minute of my time. I pressed my wife to do some traveling. She resisted. Her tenderness began to take on a more desperate character from one day to the next; only seldom did her naturally happy, sunny nature come through. My stepdaughter insinuated herself into the foreground after a period of haughtily avoiding us. She would not leave her mother and persistently tried to alienate my wife from me. But that aging, love-addicted woman only became more attached to me, gazed at me with her shining, light gray eyes, did her best to be near me all day long.
In the course of my scientific investigations I had neglected my practice almost entirely. I had forgotten important appointments–had, to give only one example of this kind, scheduled an elderly patient for surgery but was not at the clinic by his side when the time came. How difficult it was for me to persuade him later that I had his best interests at heart, that intensive radium treatment would stand him in much better stead than a surgical procedure. He believed it all in the end and died peacefully in his bed, instead of on the operating table. But who knows, perhaps my “gentle, blessed touch” could have gained him a few more years of life after all. And this same old man had a liking for me. He remembered me in his will, if not with a proper bequest, then at least with encomia, and lauded in particular my “loving heart.” Well, peace to his ashes. In my “loving heart” there was little peace. And no love.
My waiting room became emptier and emptier every day, the telephone calls were increasingly ones of a personal nature, that is to say, they were from my expensive golden blonde mistress and her sister, to whom I was lately held by “bonds of love,” and further I was being hounded by creditors, who had abruptly begun to be troublesome. It was a natural idea to attempt to stop the gaps in my budget with winnings from gambling, given that luck had favored me early on. But regrettably this was not the case now. Perhaps I was too worn out when I came to the club, for at that time my experiments were of the greatest importance to me, requiring the closest attention and the greatest care. Nothing is more humiliating for an experimenter than to present his results to his audience of physicians, to lay himself open to the criticism of shrewd, skeptical reviewers, and then see his results unable to withstand the sharpest scrutiny. It was imperative to avoid this. Unfortunately things were very far from what they should have been.
I had cages of animals set up, initially in the basement rooms, then in other spots in my now-deserted private clinic. The clinic belonged to my wife. But, of course, she could know nothing. For her benefit I simulated a brisk business at the clinic, I sent myself fake doctor’s fees, I had my mistress and her sister (they got along very well) telephone me when I wished to get away from my wife, pretending to be patients needing my assistance. And even if this deception and many similar ones were easy to practice upon my credulous wife, I was uneasy. A nervous disquiet, a presentiment of disaster, never left me. My irritability increased day by day, I never really slept, was never really awake, and more than once vented my rage upon my innocent wife.
But when she, enlightened by her daughter and perhaps by my father too (he had hated me since I once jokingly dubbed him a “loving heart”), saw “evil” in me, she did not oppose this evil. Faithful, more than faithful, to the words of Scripture (she was religious, and a thousand times I envied her this mindless faith), she turned the other cheek when I struck her on the right. I can still see her rapidly aging face. Nature had botched the job, but an animated play of expressions had at one time lent it some life and appealing mobility nevertheless; out of vanity, she had had it elaborately enameled, hoping to still have an effect on me by some means at least. Now it was as smooth as the head of a statue made of butter that has been in the sun a while, a bleak, grotesque spectacle. On one occasion she was pressing her face close to me in her love madness. I tried to push her away, unsuccessfully. I repeated my attempt to fend her off, the ball of my left hand wedged into one of her eye sockets, from which copious tears were flowing. Through the wetness of her tears I suddenly felt something slightly bristly tickling the inside of my hand. Startled, I turned on the light (all of this was happening at night in our shared bedroom), and what did I have in my hand? False eyelashes, the latest product of the big-city beauticians’ art, miniature brushes of curving little hairs cunningly designed to adhere supraorbitally. And this in a woman of over fifty, the mother of a grown daughter! Her wrinkled neck (the neck cannot be enameled and its furrows cannot be filled) was shiny, like creased, crumpled parchment, on the sides especially. There were reasons for this too. It was slight burn scarring. Once she had poured a load of strong perfume on her neck and then imprudently exposed herself to a sunlamp, which had practically seared the stuff into her skin.
If only she had stayed as she was! I might have been able to see the mother in her. But that was abhorrent to her.
She did not understand that she was played out as a woman, and that a ruined castle with electric lights and central heating is an absurdity. One evening, when I returned home after further large gambling losses, she received me with distinct coolness. For me a moment of calm. I only wish it had gone on longer. But she pressed herself to me, her face pouty as ever (to the extent that her enameled mask was still capable of a pout). She wanted me to ask why she was angry. But I had many things on my mind that day, not just her. My experiments were refusing to yield a positive result. And also: my financial difficulties were mounting. But the longer I was silent, the more she was driven to speak; the cooler I was, the more vehement she became. As finally emerged, she had found out that I had completely neglected my practice, that the once clean rooms of our clinic were now polluted with animal material of an infectious nature. How had she happened on it? Only through her accursed love for me! I had dismissed my assistant in order to save money. She knew this and had thought to lighten my load with the help of a young doctor, a friend of her daughter, and the three of them had toured the premises, which she had a legal right to do as owner.
Her surprise was understandably great. She had never thought me capable of a lie. She loved me so much and knew me so well! And now? She became upset, she opened her mouth wide and showed her blindingly white, gold-rimmed false teeth, her sumptuous dressing gown hung open, she stamped on the floor, and one of the thin elastic stockings that she wore underneath the flesh-colored silk ones, stretched around the varicose veins, tore with a sizzling sound.
She was in the right, I was in the wrong. And yet she angered me, I had had enough of her, I vented my desperation upon her, the miscarriage of my experimental plans, my poisoned youth, all the disappointments of my life. I hurled myself upon her, I at last gave voice to the cruelest, most hurtful words, I balled my fists, I did to her both mentally and physically everything that one person can do to another without causing lasting damage–brutal, but within the law.
She doubled over in pain, her enameled mask twitched like a fish, but suddenly a sentimental, sensual smile came to her lips, she threw herself at my feet, and when I pushed her away, disliking such theatrical scenes, she crawled after me, she began to giggle coyly, and the more brutally I kicked her, the more blissful she became.
And the ghastliest thing of all was that her arousal was transmitted to me, that she overpowered me sexually. Ugly, aging, with gold-rimmed porcelain teeth, enameled face, wrinkled, perfume-scorched skin–what is the point of enumerating all her physical imperfections, down to the singed smell of her body–she was stronger than I. I, who had wanted finally to break with her, was possessed by her in the midst of my cruelties. Never before, neither with my beautiful young mistress nor with her still more beautiful virgin sister, had I felt what now thrilled me, what shook me to the marrow.
My father had taught me how to do away with a living creature and do it coldly. It came back to me now, the thing he had stirred up in me when I was young, perhaps thirteen. Pleasurable sensations, disgusting animals, and death had parts to play. This is not the time to go into it. But why was I thinking of him now, now of all times? Was I not “making love” to my wife? Or was it that I hated her, was I clinging, still, more than ever, to him? My wife–but why speak of it?
Her little dog was howling.
This little dog, as innocent as it was, became the source of new conflict. The howling of which I spoke just now must have been an expression of its terror of me. And the terror experienced by this thinking, feeling animal (albeit one with thoughts and feelings quite different from those of a person) was not entirely without foundation. For that little dog, which had mysteriously vanished some weeks earlier, had been found unexpectedly by my wife and the young doctor in the basement rooms of the clinic, shut in an animal cage made of heavy iron wire. They had released it, and the caretaker at the clinic had enthusiastically lent a hand. It was just his job to lend a hand and he would have strapped the Pekingese to the dissection table with the same friendly smile. But how did it get there? Pekingese dogs–expensive purebreds are surely accustomed to a better life! I do not wish to make myself out to be better than I am. I had lured it there one day, and the only reason it had managed to cling to its miserable life in the dark cellar as long as it had was that dogs were poorly suited to my experiments of the time.
My stepdaughter was fond of the little beast. Why did she not keep an eye on it? She was happy to leave the inconvenience of its care and feeding to others such as her mother, who gladly sacrificed herself here too. What consternation when Lilly had suddenly disappeared. My slender, (natural) blonde stepdaughter’s cute little mug puffy from crying, such a to-do, ad after ad inserted in the papers, the neighborhood scoured the minute anyone caught sight of a canine resembling the missing Lilly-poo crossing the street! And the solution to the puzzle known all the time! I will not drag it out. It was just a joke. I had to pay for it. For from that day on the cute young thing’s hatred toward me became so fanatical that she was able to act intelligently, that is to say, quite intuitively and shrewdly and with feminine guile, and in the end it was due to my stepdaughter and her future husband, the young doctor, that the district attorney’s office came after me immediately following my wife’s demise. Admittedly that called for no special “feminine guile.” It was all just too obvious.
There was no outward change after this episode. Except that I got tired of both the M. sisters. Not the reverse, unfortunately. They did not wish to lose their income or my masculine affection, and they stayed on at the fancy hotel at my expense. The registered or courier-delivered letters containing unpaid bills came thick and fast, there was nowhere to hide from the two shrews. Finally they tried to cozen me with love and desperation. But I knew what this meant and withdrew in time into my immediate family. In time?
My wife, who had always been quite thrifty, now became mistrustful and something beyond miserly as the result of her daughter’s constant malicious innuendos. She barely even shouldered her contractually stipulated fifty-percent share of the expenses of our luxurious three-servant household. She always miscalculated in her favor. Contributions from the privy purse could not be squeezed out of her by any technique. Yet she was munificent in outfitting her daughter, who had wasted no time getting engaged to the young doctor, in a style that was more than up to standard. It made her touchingly happy to put the couple in possession of a fine eight-room country house, with the most expensive furniture throughout. The young man, who got the well-appointed clinic in addition to the cute blonde and then the villa in the stylish garden suburb to boot, was to be envied.
He was successful. All my life I have respected success wherever I saw it. My liking for the young doctor, for this publicly recognized “loving heart,” was not reciprocated. When the four of us sat together, he and his wife, I and my wife, there was chilly silence after a few exchanges. He shrugged his shoulders at my experiments. I had not “cracked” the typhus pathogen, as he put it, or the scarlet-fever pathogen either.
My wife, with her doglike affection, tried to see me through everything that had been going wrong for me lately. But I never even managed to be frank with her. Everything about her love was a misunderstanding–and, as grotesque as it may sound, here too she always miscalculated in her favor. She loved openly and honestly, but I had to be dishonest all the time, because she forced me to be. And this soon sickened me. I am not a liar. I had my fill of it.
Lie after lie to do with the phone calls and with personal visits I had begun to receive from the impatient, extortionate moneylenders. But nothing about the failure of my experiments, which became all the more anguishing when I learned that my medical school classmate, the aforementioned Walter, had been dealing with the same topic as I and, at least in secondary experiments, had had far better luck. Was he beating me to it?
The urge toward stupefaction, toward intoxication in any form, grew day by day. My mental breakdown must have been noticeable, but nobody wanted to know anything about my true torments–neither my father, who had been making a pest of himself lately with his tedious visits, nor my wife, who was annoying me with her insipid, driveling, grandmotherly love.
Neither one of them could give me what I yearned for in the depths of my soul, but there was one medicine that they could have given me to ease my suffering: the original medicine, money.
My father condescended to give me a birthday present of a couple of thousand cash, a drop in the bucket. My wife was even more cunning (she thought): she showed me the duplicate of her will, which she had made on the eve of my stepdaughter’s wedding and in which I was named sole heir. Her daughter was thus given a statutory portion, and it was I upon whom she doted. More than ever. Well, I knew that. But our relationship was shaping up as more and more repugnant just the same.
I cannot even say whether it would have been more natural if we, that is, I, a man plagued by morbid urges and living without hope or belief, with no ground beneath my feet at all, and she, an aging, coquettish woman who felt alive only in suffering–I do not know, I say, whether there might have been another natural solution to these problems. Ultimately, perhaps, I might have found a way out if I had had a friend, another human soul who was intelligent yet had not succumbed to despair, who trusted me and was truly intimate with me, a man I could have looked up to–Walter, perhaps. But Walter, with all his brilliant accomplishments and outstanding qualities, was having his own difficulties at the Institute now and would be lucky even to finish his most recent work. Space at the Institute is always very limited, and, under orders from the Ministry, his seat, his workbench, were being assigned to a military physician, Major Carolus, a queer specimen about whom I will have much more to say.
I was working at the Institute again, or rather still, and my dear spouse ventured no further objection. I was permitted to go on working there (and work was the only solace I had left) not because of anything to do with myself or my own achievements but only because of my father’s influence, which grew year by year, the clergy constantly by his side in a supporting role, as he by its. Not the first or the last anarchist and atheist to live in perfect harmony with the Church, at least outwardly.
How then could I expect him to stand by me inwardly, whole-heartedly, when I, with a presentiment of what was coming, for the first time considered a divorce? I do not remember how this idea entered our formal and excessively polite conversation. But I had the feeling when I expressed it that this might be a way for me to save myself and my wife. Yet he stared at me, dumbfounded. He did not even hear me out–for him the matter was settled before it was discussed. Divorce, remarriage were impossible. Catholic marriage permits separation only; canonical law does not recognize divorce.
He even warned me not to mention the possibility of divorce to my wife. But the idea must already have taken root without my realizing it, for I did it just the same. More tears from the old lady, more despondent scenes, and, most appalling of all, more ecstatic debauches with this woman who found the ultimate satisfaction only in doglike suffering and could never be kicked enough. And I? I was part of it.
We took a trip to the south and were no different when we came back. What did she care about my happiness? Did she ever understand me at all? That is, was such an abnormal individual as I ever able to really make myself understood to such an abnormal individual as she?
I was preoccupied with an attempt to isolate the two different poisons from the scarlet-fever streptococcus cultures. Now just one poisonous substance or toxin is already extraordinarily difficult to isolate perfectly in crystalline form. It has been done properly in relatively few cases. So imagine the difficulties of separating the toxins into one component ascribable to the known streptococci and another component ascribable to the unknown scarlet-fever pathogen. A project like this requires superhuman diligence, great sacrifices of time and money. I lacked time, especially. I wanted to live at the workbench, but my wife wanted something else. She would hear no talk of my money worries. She herself had more than enough money, after all. The marriage, as fragile as it was, ate up a lot of time. The less I loved my wife, the more she craved my attention. And pinched pennies drastically. Who does not understand that? She loved me and feared me. A state of affairs intolerable in the long run.
I have never in my life been entirely free of stirrings of compassion. “Conscience doth make cowards of us all.” Hamlet, archetype of recent Europeans. True, I never had so much of a conscience that it exerted a compelling effect on my life. I always felt compassion in the wrong places, all the more when I resisted it. In my youth my father had wanted to tear this evil (and it is never anything but an evil) out by the roots. But who can get hold of the roots of a personal trait? I knew what I was doing when I put an animal, a living creature that feels pain and has a certain degree of consciousness, on the torture rack. Other people did not know. Other people did not require intoxication, mental anesthesia, forcible calming after their horrific bloody experiments, other people did not suffer from a constant craving for excitement. But why speak of animals when we are talking about a person so close to me that . . .
Just the facts. As the intolerability of the overall circumstances of my life emerged, becoming clearer every day (if it would not have taken us too far afield, I would have liked to give a full account of a day during this period, in all the hellish endlessness of its twenty-four hours)–when I had recognized the intolerability of my circumstances clearly enough, I made a final attempt to free myself from my spouse in an amicable manner. We had been married in church like everyone we knew. But the bond generally expected to hold a marriage together, conjugal love, existed on her side only. I did not love her. To this day I really do not know whether I was still capable of this much-discussed feeling at all, indeed, whether I was ever capable of love. Who does know?
The cornerstone of marriage is supposed to be the partnership of the sexes, a partnership craved for the purpose of satisfying natural urges and entered into in the hope of mutual succor. So says the Church, citing the procreation of offspring as the primary purpose of marriage. I wanted a child very much. But at the same time I was afraid to have one. I feared the responsibility of bringing one more life into this most terrible of all worlds–and this was one reason for marrying my wife, for in view of her age alone it was extremely unlikely that she would be granted another child. She herself did not believe she would be. Nevertheless she was unswerving in her conviction that any marriage between Catholics was an indestructible, objectively existing bond that could not be broken even if love turned to hatred and revulsion.
She stood firm in her belief (it was possible for her to believe, only I had to be constantly doubting) that my fondness for her would return one day, because after all it had been there once, namely, when I had asked for her hand. One error compounded by another. Why should I explain to her my true motivations in marrying her? I had taken this desperate step only because I could not face living with myself on a permanent basis. For the same reason that so many individuals, and not the most worthless ones in many cases, resort to alcohol, morphine, or cocaine, or take pointless trips, amass idiotic collections. It was only to escape myself that I had courted her.
I had expected her to provide her share of the “mutual succor.” That I could tell her. But she did not wish “base motives” to shackle me to her. Like so many rich people, she did not understand what money means to one who does not have it. She spoke to me as to a good but unreasonable child. She even went beyond the will that I have mentioned. On her own initiative, she began lengthy negotiations with an insurance agent. One evening she showed me the result. She had just paid the first premium on a mutual insurance contract: upon the demise of one party, the surviving party was to receive a large amount of money. I, if she died before me, and vice versa. What was she trying to do? Did she understand me after all? She was certainly rich enough already. What would she do with even more money after my death? But I needed money, she knew that. I would get it only after her death, but then without fail. Was she trying to test me? Had she caught the morbid desire for experiments from me, like an infection?
I could only shrug. But she misinterpreted that as proof that her love and her life were more valuable to me than any earthly possessions. And yet even a fraction of that insurance money would have let me leave the city, go to America, break with everything I had done until then, and begin something new and different. For what was my life now? Just whatever the current experiment was, a positive or negative result. And then? When that experiment was over, when it got a thumbs up or a thumbs down, a new hypothesis was next in line, to be confirmed or disconfirmed, the result in turn forming the basis for further work. As idiotic as it sounds, as much as this kind of work seems to resemble the monotonous play of infants, or something even sillier, that really is how it is. This is what countless people do all their lives. The only joy is a flutter of the nerves, a sensation, an artificially evoked and just as artificially gratified arousal. But the “craving for excitement” is never satisfied, only thwarted, and so it goes to the last breath. Let anyone who does not believe this read, for example, the reports of the scholars, let him cast his eye upon the numerous scientific journals and weigh the immense, truly colossal volume of this work against its meager content; let him set the work and the energy expended on it against its useful effect, whether in respect of the advances in what is actually known about reality or in respect of the instrumental capabilities by which needy humanity has been enriched through this activity.
My wife was so little able to follow me here that she regarded me with compassionate eyes as though I were an incurable mental patient and often did not even take my words seriously. She was serious only about the sensual aspect of our relationship, and this angered me a great deal. Yet I was compliant, if I may use the word, despite my antipathy; I was her slave despite my alienation, dependent upon this woman who made me accede to her voluptuous compulsion to suffer, which afforded me a kind of satisfaction too. And all the while becoming I cannot begin to say how strong, how much more uncontrollable every day, the wish for freedom, for complete disentanglement from her! (From myself.) That was the ultimate sensation I sought.
Even my wife did not find complete serenity in her false bliss. How would that even have been possible?
She was declining visibly. She placed herself in the care of her son-inlaw, who administered an arsenic treatment to fire up her animal spirits, already inordinately overheated in my view, to a still greater pitch. She now often gave off a garlicky odor due to transpiration of arsenic through the skin, her eyes glowed still more brightly and ardently than before, sudden flush alternated with sudden pallor behind her enameled mask; one day she collapsed with symptoms resembling those of stroke. I hastened to her bed, shed tears, nursed her devotedly, and thought, with a feeling of deliverance in my heart of hearts, that this was the end. I gave her an injection of morphine from a small Pravaz syringe. This did her good. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for her. Unfortunately we were all fooled, my father, her daughter, my son-in-law, and I. We had not recognized her superhuman toughness. She was one of those people who are still hiking long distances at eighty and outdoing the fifty-year-olds at ninety. She recovered. She became healthier than she had been before. She traveled with her daughter to a spa, and I entertained the absurd hope that some happenstance would save me from our reunion.
And yet I did not hate her.
My wife had been looking forward to a romantic spring and was very reproachful toward me for not going along on this trip. But how could I have gone? I longed for nothing so much as to be relieved of the burden of her presence for as long as possible.
But it was not a good time for me nevertheless. My creditors did not leave my heels, they constantly forced me to dodge them, to pretend to be someone else on the telephone, to rearrange my whole life, to do everything I could to fend off their all-too-legitimate demands. Some of them professed to be agreeable to a refund without interest, others to an out-of-court settlement, but I could not think about it. And yet I had no prospect of ever being entirely rid of them. Some of them were highly impertinent and threatened me with all sorts of things. But that got them nowhere.
I was no longer so welcome at the club. Ugly rumors about me were circulating. It was said that I was unreliable and greedy as a physician, had tortured animals for no reason, had sprayed eau de cologne in their eyes, had secretly borrowed (stolen) dogs from my acquaintances, had destroyed their vocal cords before the experiments to stop them from howling, and so forth. It was said that I had squeezed the last remnants (!) of my wife’s fortune out of her by abusing her sadistically, having first hypnotized her and deprived her of the faculty of volition. It was said that my scientific work was done by other, more talented persons in exchange for payment. It was said that I had subjected people as well as animals to pointless and excruciating experiments in my clinic and had extricated myself from criminal action brought by the surviving dependents of my victims only at great financial sacrifice (allegedly the cause of my money problems). I was never able to pin down the source of these defamatory rumors. It must have been someone close to me, in all likelihood my stepdaughter’s husband. My letters to my wife were never taken seriously, that is to say, never properly answered. I wrote every day, yet received plaintive letters in which she reproached me for never thinking of her. What was I to do?
Wrenched from my usual occupation (I had had to stop my experiments because my funds were totally depleted, and just when I had nearly isolated Toxin Y, a whitish hygroscopic crystal), I wandered about the city in search of novelty. I had shaken off the sisters. The older one had abandoned me because of my lack of money. The younger one still liked me, but I had absolutely no use for her and brutally told her so to her face. She cried openly on the street, but then she got the point and retreated. I never heard from her again.
By chance I ran into an acquaintance, a former classmate. At one time he had been among the least talented people in the class, but he had been the quickest to make a career for himself, was codirector of a chemical plant that produced medicines. Hair restorers, calcium supplements, rejuvenation tonics. He ran an experimental laboratory in a distant city. He made me an offer.
That evening I wrote to my wife again. I suggested to her that we put an amicable end to the marriage, inasmuch as it was wearing the two of us down both physically and mentally. Instead of replying, she came herself. She had received this letter “by accident,” she said, the earlier ones having been kept from her by her daughter. She was agitated, fearful. Clear signs of physical decline could no longer be ignored. Occasionally she clutched her heart with her heavily beringed, wizened hand (no one yet knows how to enamel hands). It flashed through my mind how happy both of us would be if she met with a painless death that day or next. Her varicose veins were giving her trouble. A small venous blood clot had once come loose and made its way from the lower leg to the brain. She doubted whether she would ever be quite well again. She was afraid to have an operation, perhaps because my example had proven to her that doctors are not infallible gods. Yes, nothing less than that. Through a curious association of ideas, there came into my mind the peculiar action that I had observed as the effect of Toxin Y, the toxic substance in crystalline form that I had obtained from scarlet-fever cultures: similar abnormal clotting phenomena, producing sudden death–a pulmonary embolism, a heart attack, a stroke–in experimental animals. It was a possibility. They had not suffered. I believe.
On some pretext, it was late afternoon, I disengaged myself from my wife, who was exhausted from her journey and from being overwrought. She tried to stop me. She wanted to tell me all about how her daughter and her husband had threatened to have her declared legally incompetent and her property confiscated if she did not leave me. She tried to throw her pale arms around me. I escaped with some effort.
The domestics had not been paid and the landlord had not received the rent. I had to get away from these disagreeable confrontations with my wife. My clinic was almost entirely empty. I had no patients and the son-in-law who had been sharing the costs had made excuses and put his patients in another private clinic. For an instant I considered seeking out my father. His signature on a check was worth just as much as that of a physician on my wife’s death certificate putting me in possession of the money. But I did not dare to go see my father.
I betook myself to the laboratory. Some letters of a professional nature lay on my desk. I took from the locked cabinet a small test tube containing about four centigrams of Toxin Y. Whether I had already conceived a definite plan of my crime or was only testing myself, asking, “What if . . .”–this I am no longer able to say today, any more than I can say what drew me to the vicinity of the house in which I was born and spent my youth with my parents and siblings, the “Rat Palace” as it was called, a rambling and rodent-plagued old villa on a river. To toughen me, my father once made me spend three nights in a room with rats (which he hated). The house had now been free of rats for a long time. It had been broken up into apartments for laborers and office workers. Rats hardly cared to live there anymore. Instead there were a great many children, the place was teeming with them. Bratty, undernourished, but full of glee and noise. I envied them their youth.
The garden no longer existed. On the same plot of ground rose a tenement, its walls covered with damp spots. I was flooded with memories of my childhood as I passed by. Bitternesses, inconclusive broodings. Feelings of hatred toward my father, feelings of envy toward my brother and sister. Pity for my wife and for myself.
I returned late. I had had dinner in town and assumed that my wife, exhausted from her journey, would have long since gone to bed. In such cases I sometimes spent the night on a comfortable leather sofa-bed in my study, so as not to disturb her light sleep. I too was extraordinarily tired. The barometer was unusually low for this time of year, mid-August, the air suffocatingly close. Humid, but with no tendency toward rain. Before going to bed, I took the little glass vial containing the toxin out of my pocket and put it aside, on the mirrored top of a cabinet. But I could not sleep. Suddenly I heard my wife walking back and forth in her room directly above my study. She was awake now, or had not yet gone to bed. She was talking in a loud voice. To herself?
No sleep. I had gone quietly into the bathroom, where there were always pajamas in a closet. But the closet was locked, and I had given the key to my wife. So I did not undress. The footsteps in my wife’s room had stopped now, as had the sound of her voice. I was just about to settle down when she appeared on the landing, wrapped in a sumptuous salmon-colored nightgown heavily embroidered with glass beads. In her eyes was an expression that in the most unfathomable fashion always both attracted and repelled me, a doglike tenderness, a lust to be beaten. I drew my shoulders together, I bowed my head. Rage against this woman, who could still smile, even now, welled up in me. I let her know that all I wanted was to be left alone. She turned on the lights in the study and saw the glint of the glass vial that held the toxin. She thought it was morphine. First she started reproaching me for a thousand petty things, then she cried, and without so much as a pause, smiling foolishly, she asked me to give her the same injection that I had given her before her trip.
I felt the deadly irony of fate so strongly that I could not help smiling too. Or was I just imitating her awkward, glassy grimace? No matter, it put her in a better mood immediately. She embraced me with her short, rosily powdered little arms. Conquered once more by her voluptuous urges, she dragged me upstairs to our bedroom, drew the curtains, and enfolded me. I pushed her away firmly, and that was the beginning. She wanted what she had always gotten. I could not fight her off. The more terrible the things I did, the more obstinately happy she looked! I was in a state of dreadful agitation. In her masochistic rapture, would she forget what she had asked me for? The injection? I wanted her to, and I didn’t want her to. Never had one part of me been so much at war with another. For, as of a short time ago, a violent solution was no longer so urgently needed. I could accept the position in the distant city and begin a new, respectable life without her.
The telephone rang. I thought–why now?–of my father. It rang again. In a particularly shrill, maddening manner, it seemed to me. But neither I nor my wife went to the phone. The ringing must have soon stopped.
Immediately following my wife’s death, which I ascertained conclusively, I opened the two windows and woke the housemaid. I told her to telephone a physician who lived nearby: my wife had taken ill, she was having fainting symptoms. The girl, in short cotton pajamas, her black hair disheveled, half asleep, her face pale and pasty, carried out my instructions. The physician apparently did not come to the phone immediately. Then he had every word repeated three or four times, the girl had to spell everything out. Had he become hard of hearing overnight? Finally I lost patience and took the receiver myself. Did I have so little control of myself? Apparently so. The physician immediately understood what I had to say extremely well. I don’t know why, but this entirely insignificant circumstance, that the telephone connection between us two physicians now functioned perfectly, gave me a feeling of happiness, put me in a kind of high spirits.
The physician recalled my name immediately as that of his colleague. But he seemed to have little desire to come now, at night, asked if I would not see to the patient again myself, take her pulse, check her breathing. The maid was looking strangely at the bed and the figure lying motionless on it. I gave no sign of noticing. I pretended to perform the examination as advised by the physician, then pulled the coverlet up over my wife’s open mouth and continued my conversation with him. He said with satisfaction that this was the normal course (of what?), that he would counsel me as a colleague, that I should quickly administer an injection of caffeine and let him know what happened. Of course he would be available if it was absolutely necessary (he carefully stressed the word “absolutely”). I gave my assent, hung up, turned out all the lights but one, and sent the maid out of the room with a feeling of relief. I walked through the adjoining rooms four or five times, sat down for a moment in the armchair, then tiptoed into my wife’s bathroom and dressing room and put the poison there for the time being. Then I called the physician again and informed him that my wife’s pulse had stopped while I was giving her the injection. The physician did not respond immediately. Then he took a deep breath–or he yawned–and finally, in a changed voice, meant to sound moved, asked me to try an injection of camphor, so that everything conceivable would have been done. Directly into the heart?! Of course he meant the cardiac musculature. I said nothing. Then he asked whether I still insisted on an immediate visit. He himself had given up administering camphor injections to the dying, he said. They never saved anyone. Again I found no suitable response. Otherwise, he continued, he would appear the next morning at seven thirty in order to comply with the legal formalities and fill out the death certificate. I surely had blank forms in the house. And he did not need to tell me that he had the deepest sympathy for me in my loss. I thanked him briefly and hung up.
The telephone then rang once more. I answered it. No one there. Wrong number? Ten minutes later the same thing. Yet a third time–now I felt I ought to call the operator and complain. I waited. My heart pounded. But there was silence. Good.
I believed I had taken care of the aftermath of my actions in the most straightforward manner. I would have told my father everything only too gladly. But the absurdity of this notion became clear to me at once and I laughed out loud.
I was happy. But not at ease. In the bedroom I turned on the light once more and got a clean hand towel from my wife’s small bathroom, which was charmingly done in almond green and pale pink. I spread it out over the still uncovered upper part of my dead wife’s face. Then I turned back the coverlet and spread the towel over her throat and chest as well. The window was still open; the hot, moist breeze caught in the dry, bright linen, lifting it where it swelled over the curves of the chest. Rhythmic rising and falling. But I knew what was what. I turned out the light. The wood in a built-in wardrobe suddenly contracted with a sharp crack.
I returned to the bed once again. The towel felt warmish and soft as silk. I touched the sides of the neck underneath. Warmth and silky softness here too. But there was no trace of a pulse at the carotid artery. The blood vessels were all clearly palpable, like thick knitting needles. Evidently there were masses of coagulated blood here as in the other blood vessels. Thus the old miracle test would fail. Come who might to the bed of the deceased, the coagulated blood would never liquefy.
Toxin Y, whose composition was known to no one but me, could not have been identified by a forensic chemist. Besides, it would have broken down into entirely innocuous constituents within the body in less than four hours, as I knew from animal experiments. Solid proof of organic toxins is in any case one of the most problematic chapters of forensic chemistry, though science has made great strides in this area in the past thirty years. It has been possible to determine toxicity limits by experimenting on living organisms, human or animal. But only when known toxins are involved. Mine was unknown. Once four hours had elapsed, there could be no result incriminating me, no matter what methods were used to examine the blood. And who would come here in the next four hours?
I locked the door and put the key on the small corner table in the hall. From the hall I went back into the bathroom, reluctantly and with great unease; the adorable pale pink and almond green walls, the white tile, the effete mirrors, the gleaming nickel-plated taps nauseated me. Hurrying to be finished there, I hastily dumped the vial of Toxin Y into the toilet bowl and switched off the light.
I seemed to have a hunger. I had, much more even than that afternoon, a need to see someone and to talk. I left the building. I went out onto the street. In front of the building, I met a young couple who lived on our (my) floor. I said hello first. They gave me a friendly glance in the strong glow of the street lamps and both returned my greeting politely. Evidently they were on their way home from a party. I walked to a post office that was open at night in order to wire my stepdaughter, who I assumed was still at the spa with her husband. I handed in the message marked urgent but then noticed that I had no cash on me. In view of the content of the message, the clerk was kind enough to send the telegram for me on credit. I wanted to leave my watch with him as a deposit, but he refused this with a smile. Perhaps, too, my father’s name was not unknown to him.
It occurred to me that I might tell my father what had happened before doing anything else, or rather it did not “occur” to me, I was simply unable to resist the mad urge. I had to do it. I called a cab and went to his house. His servant of many years opened the door. He reluctantly agreed to wake the old man. I followed him into my father’s bedroom.
Once again I heard him, as I had in my childhood, grinding his teeth fiercely in his sleep. The room, crowded with elegant furniture and antiquities, was dark and gloomy. He had become a collector in his latter days.
I had difficulty waking him. He fell asleep with difficulty, he awoke with difficulty. He threw himself furiously about, croaked and beat with both fists on the blue silk quilt. At last he opened his eyes. Why did he resist awakening so much? He stared at the light of the lamp I had turned on, like a hen at the butcher knife. From below came the honking of the cabdriver, whom I had asked to wait without paying him. I stared too, gazing at my father, at this white-haired, blue-eyed old man. He was the one I hated, not my wife. I asked my father for money. A lot of money. He should have asked why, but he did not give me that. He did not ask, Why do you come in the middle of the night, wake me up, and demand money? He bit his lip, turned his face to the wall, and did not reply. The servant, who had retreated as far as the door, was silent too. He yawned discreetly. My father yawned openly.
At last he was sufficiently lucid. He turned to me, eyeing me as though I were an adolescent son asking him for money to meet paltry obligations. With his scrawny hand he fumbled on the night table, where loose change lay next to an old pocket watch. Finally I lost patience. I ordered the servant to run down and pay the cabdriver, thus leaving me alone with my father. I sat on the edge of his bed. My father ran his fingers through his snow-white, still thick hair, then wrapped his long, gaunt body more tightly in the bedclothes, rolled over again, a little closer to the wall, as though avoiding contact with my coat. And yet he knew nothing! Had he always been so observant, such a good judge of character? I took a carafe of water from the night table, poured out a glass. I put it in front of me without drinking from it. My father looked surprised, but still said nothing. Was he half asleep even now? How was it that an old man slept as soundly as a child? But he had to wake up eventually. I gave him the full glass. I made him drink it, and only now did he come to full awareness and take fright.
I will never forget what happened then.
But just the fact of it. My motive, what drove me to do it, that had become inexplicable to me even five minutes later, and five minutes earlier I had had no premonition.
It arrived like a shot from a pistol, or, to use a more topical expression, from a Pravaz syringe, or like a torpedo from a submarine, or like a poison gas bomb out of a clear sky. I torpedoed the old man with a brief report of the incident. This “torpedo,” the response to another that had been launched fifteen years earlier, had an incredible effect. As an experimental dog, unprepared by anesthesia, howls when its peritoneum is opened with a neat incision, so my father began to howl. Only not so loudly. But so horribly that I immediately held his lips shut. At first he bit into the ball of my thumb, but then he understood the necessity of his silence and frantically held my hand more tightly against his flaccid lips and his silky, warm mustache.
And if what I had done made no sense, what he did was no better. Without giving me any counsel (at that point there were still many expedients that might have saved me), he sprang shakily out of bed, dressed in frenzied haste, rushed behind my back (I stood trembling at the window, looking out) to the door, then through the hall and down the stairs. It all happened in no time. Despite his age, he moved so fast that he was able to overtake the cabdriver. For the latter, drowsy as drivers often are at such a late hour, had trundled off at a crawl after carefully counting the fare he had taken from the old servant and placed in the breast pocket of his leather jacket. My father leaped into the old crate, and away they went. I did not hear what he shouted to the cabdriver, I only saw him wave to the old servant, who had run after him and was still standing there despondently; then he had the cab roar off at high speed.
I will now be extremely brief, despite the fact that what follows, what I wish to get out of the way in this section, the eleventh, is the bread and butter of that literary genre considered the most enthralling in our era, namely, the detective novel. What concerns me here is facts, such as those of the original “torpedo” episode, which dates back at least fifteen years now and in which my father plays a starring role, and then facts that did not come to light until after my sentencing, and also those later facts surrounding the figure of that friend (as I have actually only been able to call him since he ceased to be one) of my youth, Walter.
First, however, comes my return home (I went on foot, made detours, and it took me almost an hour), my surprise upon finding two burly uniformed policemen waiting for me on the dark landing. They brutally but adroitly seized me the moment I came through the entryway and turned on the stair light. And as, between them, I climbed our staircase with its clean, soft, dark blue velour carpet, half unconscious yet still composed, heart pounding madly, with teeth clenched and thus silent, their hands on my shoulders, I heard from above, through the open door of my apartment, the choked cries, the howling sobs of my stepdaughter, alternating with the soothing, solemnly drawling, oleaginous voice of my son-in-law, whose bromides, whose sonorous gentleness, kindness and manly compassion aroused in me the desire to throw up.
But, speaking of such things, I was now thrown upon the mercies of official justice. From that point on, I was never free again.
If only my father had listened sensibly that night, instead of cravenly running off! In comical disarray, the ends of his tie hanging down around his scrawny old man’s neck, one of his suspenders dragging on the ground from under his coat, so that he tripped over it, he had valiantly fled from me, his son, because I had made him an unwelcome confession, one for which the grand old connoisseur of human nature had not been prepared. Yes, if only my father had consummated his life as an anarchist by showing at that moment that he was still equal to existence as it was, is, and will remain, yes, truly, if, in the expected war of all against one, he had bravely fought on the side of his best student, on the side of his sole blood relative, namely, my humble self, if he had at least tried to understand me at the point when I was involved with experiments quite different from his own, then everything would have turned out differently.
Far weaker, more morally mediocre, more banal spirits, such as my brother, whom he had always ridiculed by comparing him with me, have done far better. But now is not the time for that, when I am marching upstairs between the two police officers to be confronted with my son-in-law and my stepdaughter–and my victim. Poor old lady, who might have done me the favor of voluntarily departing this life if there had been some particular pleasure in it for her and some particular advantage for me! She loved me, after all. She was just made that way. The good dowager, over fifty, had endured all sorts of experiments (her loveless first marriage, for example) and had needed all that in order to arrive at a proper understanding of herself. Death at the moment of the greatest pain and pleasure was doubtless in her mind–here we had always understood one another. But her relatives had no grasp of the thing whatever, any more than did, later on, the superficial official justice that was not even at the level of a serving girl, and least of all popular morality as represented by the press. To the papers it was just a vulgar slaying, a kind of insurance murder by poison, I was a Landru with Toxin Y, and they simply let the facts speak for themselves (and against me) as brutally and nakedly as possible.
But how was this disaster possible? It all happened as quickly as a test-tube reaction.
Nothing could have been simpler. My wife, the only person who knew me, at least to some degree, the only person who saw me as I really was, at least from a certain angle, and who in only that way had any use for me, had for a long time not concealed from her relatives her dim perceptions, her fears, and her psychological insights. It was she herself who had had the idea that she should be protected from me, that she should be placed in isolation, even declared legally incompetent. Sensibly or foolishly, she had wanted to be saved from herself. It was she herself who had instructed that my correspondence be read when the circumstances were important, but that it not be shown to her. Her doglike dependence on me and her fear for her own life, these had battled within her–she had conducted experiments no less than I. Alongside these experiments were the usual diversions, amusements such as befitted her age, her finances, and her social position, all falling under the rubric of bridge, of course not an adequate means of fulfillment. One day she had given in to her destructive or self-destructive urges, had come to me. That had been in the afternoon. In the evening, when I entered the apartment and camped downstairs in the study, she had called her daughter and her son-in-law and in presentiment of her fate had summoned the two of them. The strange telephone calls, all three of them (or were there only two?), were from these relatives, though they came too late in any case.
And I, as confident as a sleepwalker, had behaved more idiotically than any idiot! Think of it! I leave the scene of the crime without having scrupulously destroyed the most important piece of evidence. I fail to mention the fact of my wife’s death to the servants, to the neighbors encountered in the street that night. And that’s not all! I make the most unnecessary disclosure imaginable to my father, an entirely irrelevant person in this regard, and produce in him an equally idiotic reaction, namely, his flight to City X on the next Nordbahn train. The next day he fails to appear at work (for the first and last time in his life!). The noose tightens around my neck still more–through my own doing and his. If he had at least given me the money, if not a hundred thousand, then at least enough for me to get a cab and drive back, I would have been at the scene of the crime an hour earlier, would have destroyed the vial in time. Only the first four hours were critical. After that nothing could have been proven. I would have had to hold out with my wife for those four hours.
No, if the old man was at fault, it lay deeper, it went back a long time. What had happened now was incidental. Why accuse him–I could have hired a cab even with no money in my pocket and paid the driver when I got home. I always had enough money around for that. I had just had a fit of blindness and stupidity. For what else can you call it when a thinking person, one with such a high opinion of himself that he believes he is capable of discovering the invisible scarlet-fever virus, when such a person advertises the visible proof, the palpable evidence of his criminal act, even though what he wants to do, what he has to do, is conceal it. I had run to the old man to confess to him, thereby helping him atone for his old sins. And on top of that the experimental error mentioned above, one of the grossest type. What had happened to the vial containing Toxin Y? Instead of destroying it (washing it out under the tap, scratching off the label, tossing the empty vial out onto the street, along with the syringe)–instead of doing that, I throw the glass container, stoppered, containing a quite considerable residue of Toxin Y, into the toilet bowl in my wife’s small, almond green private lavatory. And do I at least pull the chain, to wash the thing into the sewer main? By no means. And the syringe? No, this too I fail to destroy. It remains in the bedroom, lying on a glass tabletop. I was so used to having it around, that precisely made, delicate little instrument!
So I considerately put weapons into my enemies’ hands. My wife’s sudden death, my unwillingness to prevail upon the neighborhood physician however reluctant he was to come at night, my refusal to attempt the recommended camphor or caffeine injection (we had camphor and caffeine in the house because my wife had become a hypochondriac after her illness and knew about their effects), the syringe with the slightly bloody needle on the night table next to the lamp, above all the little vial that now lay on the mirrored tabletop, conscientiously placed in evidence and open to official scrutiny, its label already half dry!–And the handwriting, becoming clearer every moment as the label dried, was mine and no one else’s.–What remained of the whitish crystalline powder could be identified from my experimental animals as extremely toxic, as a first-quality coagulant poison; my wife’s blood could and would be analyzed; everything pointed in one direction, and any amateur would be able to provide rigorous proof of the crime. That is, prove what had occurred. But to prove why it had occurred? That was the task of the court. But only the person who had understood all this could sit in judgment. Ultimately only I could judge this murder.
The case was so hopelessly clear that lying was obviously not a practical response. Given that the crime was one that needed to be understood in psychological terms, it may seem that a more promising approach might have been to present oneself to the judges trying the case as an entirely bestial, pathological personality who had acted in a fit of unbridled rage and who therefore–and this is what rules out this at-first-blush viable approach–belonged, not on the scaffold, nor in prison or the penal colony for life, but permanently under lock and key. Many people would undoubtedly find the prospect of lifelong confinement in an asylum a better fate than execution or deportation. But I did not.
I lived through several weeks in the psychiatric observation unit of the remand prison infirmary. With the help of my lawyer, my father had seen to it that I be subjected to a court-ordered mental examination. I endured one grilling after another by doctors and intelligence tests that lasted for hours and made me appear an idiot; I attempted, while in constant visible, audible, and tangible proximity to raving, raging, shrieking, howling, babbling, self-lacerating, excrement-eating persons, in the presence of the authentically mentally ill, of persons with incurable intellectual and emotional disorders, I attempted, summoning all my strength and all my resources, to feign illness. But I did not keep it up long enough–and I will say: though their very lives may depend on it, ninety out of a hundred men are not capable of feigning severe mental illness, beyond a certain point, without falling prey to it.
For me the universe has never been built on entirely sound foundations. I have already said that in my youth I became, under the influence of my father, an anarchist, an atheist, and a negativist to the point of being a cynic. In addition to this the internal pressure (call it conscience or whatever you want, you will never grasp it), in addition lack of sleep, in addition the continuous observation, the formulaic questions, driven into an unstable person’s soul as though with a sharp chisel, of the court psychiatrist, “court” being the operative word, in addition the bad food, the squalor, the latter all the worse the more one gives in to one’s own destructive urges and wrecks everything there is to be wrecked in one’s cell. (Who is not tempted now and again to smash everything in sight to bits?)
No one who has not experienced it could imagine the boundless exhaustion and enervation produced by being constantly face-to-face with oneself, the nights, the dreams, and nothing but a hostile atmosphere on every side–yes, Georg Letham the younger, did you expect a seaside holiday?
No matter, the day comes when your resistance breaks and you capitulate. Like a true madman I yearned to speak rationally, eat normally again, and it was high time. I was skeletally emaciated, and any force of mind I may have had was gone. My bones were poking through my skin, causing sores on the thin, dry, withered skin at the small of my back and beneath my shoulder blades.
Most terrible of all was that, one night, toward daybreak, I realized I had no hope of hope anymore. And that I had had no “hope of hope” since that rainy night. It was toward morning, at an hour when the truly criminally insane and the malingerers alike, through either natural tiredness or the effect of soporifics (usually scopolamine in powerful doses), grew quiet and slept. I was the only one for whom the effect of the soporific never lasted until breakfast (or what went by that name–a bowl of soup and a piece of bread, no spoon, no sharp-edged utensils). I was never able to sleep through until six. Ideas and words became a confusion then, thinking a sluggish muddle, difficult to describe.
That night I lay on my stomach to protect the skin on my back. It may be that the circulation in this unnatural position put particular strain on the cardiac muscle, burdened the pulmonary artery–I don’t know why, but I had to get out, I couldn’t stand myself any longer. I reported my “recovery” to the alarmed senior attendant, finding the words with difficulty, I wanted to have the doctor, the examining magistrate, my father, my attorney, you name it, I don’t know who all, summoned in the middle of the night, but the management had its immutable rules, I was told to be patient. I was a confessed criminal, and alone.
But I didn’t settle down, I couldn’t. Bottled up within me were all sorts of things that are hard to put into words, I was driven to give vent to my hopelessness, impotently now, yes, I was a thousand times more impotent now than I had ever been! I shouted till I was hoarse and physically could not shout, only croak; only the truly raving mad had the hang of yelling all night without hoarseness. I, who had just confessed to having feigned madness, destroyed everything I could get my hands on. That was not much. Only my blankets, woolen, not too thin, had to go. I bit into them, tore off shreds with my teeth, at that time still in fine fettle, the primitive needs of the body made themselves felt–and I–I don’t want to say it, any more than I have been able so far to describe specifically, in detail, the moment of my crime, I will only suggest that that morning I committed all the bestial depravities that I had heard described in paralytics as part of the lecture course on mental illnesses that I had taken as a young student. In others–and now I was seeing them, I was experiencing them in myself! My revulsion, in what lucid faculties I had left, against this animalistic raving, can scarcely be expressed, be communicated, in simple language. For one who has experienced this, the prospect of a quick punishment cutting things short, such as execution, will no longer seem so awful.
That terrible night and the next morning were a further step in the toughening process that my father had begun more than twenty years before. And it was me giving myself the lesson! To the staff–as in all such institutions, the staff was vastly overworked and jaded, had become cynical and dehumanized (and very likely had to be)–to them my case was clear. I had after all previously reported that I was of sound mind! I was no longer of interest.
Worn down and broken down (like so many before me), I had given up my hunger strike. I was therefore taken off the list of those who had to be fed through a rubber stomach tube. I had talked reasonably, and I no longer had to be given a shot of scopolamine in the evening. If I raged now, it was for my own pleasure. I attracted not a smidgen more interest than a dog in my laboratory attracts when it spins in circles behind the iron bars of its cage, howls frenziedly, and (after the experiment is over) tears the dressing off its wound. Thus do all things return in this short life! What would not return given an eternity!
I had had my father notified. He had been the one to suggest to me–not personally, through my defense counsel–that I be portrayed as mentally ill. In the interim he had requested retirement. The request was still pending, but he was supposed to be indispensable, irreplaceable. Now he had withdrawn from the world (though he was still continuously, without respite, pestered by newspapers greedy for novelty and sensation). Perhaps, in his rooms stuffed with art treasures and precious natural history specimens, he spent nights as sleepless and anguished as my own. All that is as may be, it may be that, his health weakened, a broken old man, he no longer felt strong enough to see me. He did not come.
My elder brother did come (evidently my father had only now given him permission, for what could have stood in the way of his visiting me long before?). He was frightened out of his wits when he saw me the morning after my “recovery,” almost completely naked, smeared with my own excrement, starved to the bone. He had me moved to another cell. He was extraordinarily energetic (energy, the only thing he inherited from our father–and yet it was not the same implacable force of will) in arranging to be left with me day and night until I had regained a semblance of human appearance and understanding.
We had never been close before. He was a normal sort, the kind that come a dime a dozen, but here he mattered more to me than all of human society.
For the first time in years, I spent hours in conversation–no, they were something other than “conversations,” they were meetings of minds, communions of souls, using the medium of words and simple human contact. If it can be said that I was in any way up to life again after that, I owe it to him. Let it be said to his credit, to the credit of mankind generally.
But I was far from being the person I had been before my crime.
I returned to prison from the observation unit.
During this entire period, that is, after I returned to prison and before my trial, I labored under a mental and spiritual paralysis. Past kept to a minimum, future to nothing, the main thing was the present, the moment. Possibly the life I was now compelled to lead was what caused this paralysis. Only things I could perceive directly concerned me–what I heard from adjoining cells, what filled the hours of the day for me and the others, what kind of food I was given, how I passed the nights, what visits I was permitted to receive, what my brother brought me, etc., etc.
One day my brother gave me some flowers, highly cultivated sweet peas, if I remember correctly. Formerly any kind of aesthetic beauty had enchanted me, I was a slave to the beautiful, the perfect, the unspoiled, as though under a spell–which may not be believable in view of my marriage and my profession, but so it was. Now, although the pale red flowers with their silken or creamy sheen aroused my interest, it was in quite a different way. I began to lay them out flat, to mount them using the pins from the tissue-paper wrapping, then to carefully dissect them, anatomize them, employing, for lack of a knife, the long nail of my right little finger, for which purpose I had given it an edge and a point as sharp as possible by honing it on the wall during my conversation with my brother, as he looked on in astonishment.
The anatomy of the sweet-pea blossom and stalk, the remarkable arrangement of the plant’s vessels (like an animal, a plant has vessels), with this I was able to occupy myself for hours. My attorney, who took turns with my brother in visiting me during these strange days, was farsighted, wore a monocle. I appropriated it and had in my possession a magnifying glass that was not half bad. Thus I spent an evening that was less dull and a night more tranquil than usual. This is just one example of the benefit my brother conferred upon me with his visits.
It was thus my brother, not my father, who succeeded in gradually ridding me of this derangement of sorts. It may be that immediately following my crime I needed a numbness of this kind in order to go on living at all.
But even now, in this less critical period, the idea of taking my life would not have appeared exactly absurd to me, and I believe there can be few lawbreakers who would recoil categorically from such a thought. More than one murderer or burglar or sex criminal would voluntarily put a painless end to his life if it were made sufficiently easy for him to do so. If gas valves were left within reach in the cells, so-called justice would be spared a good deal of effort, effort that is often very unproductive. But there can be no hope of such a happy solution immediately following the sudden change of feeling at the peak moment of the act itself. Later comes that stage focused on the present moment–that horribly passive, neutered, emasculated existence in the cell, which I now had behind me. And then at last comes the period of reawakening, of putting on the new man. And this “new man” now understands the awful turn that fate has taken and would be only too glad to exempt himself from its inescapable dictates.
This is of interest from the standpoint of so-called justice. During the trial, all the delinquent moments in a life will dramatically unfold once again. The crime will be committed again in the mind’s eye. It will not be buried, even if justice finds itself played for a fool when the prisoner hangs himself before he can be tried! The crime will be resurrected, by the perpetrator’s confession, his identification of himself, even his lack of contrition. And then, only then, as consolation for everyone else, comes the expiation, the neutralization of the crime, the “practical repentance” that is thought to be the proper punishment of the broken sinner.
My brother (I cannot repeat it often enough, so that the illusions I had about him will be understood), it was my brother who brought me back to life. And, why should I deny it, he did me good. Too much good. I awaited his arrival with longing, I liked to hear his voice. It was late summer, still very warm, especially in the narrow cell, a small window its only link to the outside world. He was perspiring, the philtrum in his upper lip, in the shadow of his somewhat stubby nose, filling up with crystalline beads of sweat that he wiped away with a self-conscious smile, stretching his broad shoulders and breathing deeply. On his brow, which was not exactly lofty, grew a great many tiny golden blond hairs (I had never noticed them before, and yet he had certainly had this peculiarity from childhood), coming to a little point at the bottom, a fairly dense down that, especially in a raking light, glinted metallically like mature crops in the distance. His teeth, which he revealed when he laughed (he still laughed, though now only rarely when he was with me!), were strong, with little gaps between them, yellowish white, short; the healthy bright red gums were broad. He wore his dark blond hair combed up en brosse.
But he already had lines on his forehead, quite deep ones, just below the downy little blond hairs. They were not worry lines, though. He said they came from spending every free moment outside with his wife and kids, preferably in the blazing sun. Knitting his eyebrows there had made the wrinkles carve themselves deeply between his eyes above the bridge of his nose, much too deeply for his age. I saw them when we sat together reading, bent over a book or a newspaper. Both of us silent and full of cares.
Was it any wonder? He must have known what it was to worry about putting food on the table, and not just by hearsay, given his low earnings and his rapidly growing family. My brother had as little money as I did. The fourth child was on the way. My father only laughed. No one would get any money from him before his death, he said. That way he could make his children do what he wanted.
My brother was often gloomy. The worry that his wife might work herself into such a state over my trial that she “deteriorated,” that is, lost the child through miscarriage, preoccupied him more than he let on.
One day I had been discussing my case with my attorney for more than an hour. My attorney too lived in a present-tense delirium, if I may put it that way: neither past nor future events interested him except insofar as they bore on the present situation, on the pending trial in my case, and thus also on his reputation as a “legendary” criminal defender.
Thus he simply accepted the facts as the basis for his work, which very much facilitated our relations. He asked neither too much nor too little. He did not probe, nor provoke me. He was uninterested in my crime, did not pry into its psychological motives, but spoke only of the impression that the facts must make on the court and the jury–in a word, he was more a journalist concerned with current events than a philosopher concerned with the eternal, more a dispassionate natural scientist studying a pathological character than an interpreter and arbiter of a legal principle that had been violated. Unlike everyone else, he viewed my situation as by no means hopeless.
My brother often pestered me with stupid questions: For God’s sake, how could you . . . someone like you! etc. All that was missing was for him to discover in me, as my feebleminded senile patient once had, a “loving heart.” Thus he was mistaken about me. But was I, neither feebleminded nor senile as I was, not equally mistaken about him?
Only the attorney was unsurprised by anyone or anything. Since the thing had happened, it had had to happen. Facts = law, reality = necessity. As he saw it, my wife’s death could be presented to the jury, men of modest intellect, as due to gross negligence on my part. In an unaccountable oversight, I had–on this basis he constructed his system, his plan–administered a second injection to my wife instead of the desired analgesic; in the dark, the excitement, I had made a mistake. Hence my panicky behavior afterward. As he would have it, I had always been a poor physician and had neglected my practice for good reason–the less I did as a physician, the more I was a benefactor of mankind. I had just made a tragic “mistake.”
He thought anything was possible. I thought that only what had actually occurred was possible. The facts had to have a meaning, if only a terrible one. Whatever had produced the consequences that had in turn become efficient causes. But he was counting on my instinct of self-preservation. Inserting his (my) monocle thoughtfully, he told me he had never been wrong. In order to save myself, I would play before the court the remorseful offender breaking down on the stand, the clumsy doctor whose dear wife had suffered from his blunder.
A man whose neck was on the line would take the initiative and do everything humanly possible to avoid the death sentence, would he not? What could be more natural? I owe the reader an explanation, but now I want to discuss some other debts–claims by my old creditors for comparatively large sums, but also comparatively small bills for the rent of our apartment, my poor wife’s burial, the plot in the churchyard, other routine amounts for servants’ wages, for electricity, telephone service, etc.
My father no longer wanted to be my father. Son-in-law and daughter-in-law did not come through with a penny. They could not be forced to.
The office of my Herr Attorney for the Defense received monthly bills from the Pathology Institute for the upkeep of experimental animals. One evening, when the attorney had gone and my brother appeared (thanks to my name and my former social position, I had far more extensive visitation rights than most), I offered the good man my experimental animals–guinea pigs, puppy dogs, and some few goats and monkeys–as a small private menagerie for his boys. How his face lit up at my thoughtful gesture! Never before had I accorded my nephews the slightest thing in the way of a gift. But then he had concerns about the danger of infection and the maintenance costs. We gave the animals to the city zoo. He seemed happy to have snatched them from a death by vivisection. He had a good nature. How he could laugh now, sharing the optimism of the attorney, even here–even with me there! It was infectious and he made me happy for a moment. I imitated his laughter–and that made him laugh even more. That evening (autumn was already approaching) I did not dissect his flowers. Later the night was peaceful and my sleep deep.
“Defend yourself, dear doctor, I don’t understand you!” the attorney often said to me when, during the periods of questioning by the examining magistrate, which could go on for hours, he had seen me sitting almost silent, seemingly apathetic, profoundly uninvolved, smoking one cigarette after another and rubbing the dry palms of my hands together. The rubbing produced a strange singed odor, particularly in dry weather. I breathed in this odor, bringing my palms toward my face mechanically. I was barely listening to the aggressive insinuations of the examining magistrate. Perhaps I was reminded of the odor my wife had had about her, which had also struck me as “singed.”
The examining magistrates now suspected that I had not committed my crime intentionally–but the court psychiatrists had not found in my mental state the necessary evidence of certifiable insanity as defined by law.
Yet my father still, more than ever now, spared no effort in trying to have me committed as a mental patient. But my memories of the psychiatric observation unit were so terrible that I opposed this with all my strength. Better decapitated than decerebrated! Better dead than mad! My brother and my attorney backed me up. My brother’s reasoning was based on his naïve belief in miracles; the attorney trusted that any circumstantial evidence would have sufficient shortcomings, and he was constantly warning me just not to say too much. What an unnecessary thing to ask! I had learned restraint. I was doggedly silent during the questioning periods, even though it is generally among the very worst mental torments to be harassed for hours on end by questions rephrased again and again. The judges, police inspectors, and so forth, traded off, I thought. They even set the chaplain at my throat, repeatedly. Events long past, such as the unsuccessful operations, were brought up and sifted through. They were described imprecisely and inaccurately, yet there was no way to object.
A half an hour of it is all right, you close your ears, you busy yourself with something, with voluptuously lingering over a cigarette, say, or with looking at your surroundings, the inkstands, blotters, faces, the sky that can be glimpsed through the poorly cleaned windowpanes. But then it becomes more and more difficult. Not that it would have driven me to a confession as the attorney feared. Not at that time. But the prisoner yearns for peace. Peace, quiet! A lie, some incomplete, equivocal utterance, would stop those probing questions repeated over and over and over once and for all. Or the truth would. The temptation to speak becomes stronger and stronger. Just so he stops! You bite down with your upper incisors as hard as you can against the lower–a not entirely natural defensive reaction, for, as anyone can verify for himself, maxilla and mandible normally meet in such a way that the lower row of teeth makes contact behind the upper, about three-quarters of a centimeter back, that is, not incisal edge against edge. Who cares? Why does it matter? But this is the kind of thing you work out, dream up, while the inquisitorial examining magistrate’s drill buzzes into your brain, to no effect but still excruciatingly.
The observations you can make while getting the third degree in your chair are limited–silly ones of no scientific value. Eventually it became my only goal, in compensation for my loss of freedom, to make it through the many examinations without confessing, and without lying, either. For any lie would have turned into a confession. I have always had a sense of logic and coherence and I would not have been able to sustain an internally flawed structure. The facts were so very solid. Even though it was my crime!
The great difference in age between my wife and me, the marriage that had been contracted largely for financial reasons, the will benefiting myself, the insurance enriching the surviving spouse, with me needing those riches so very much and my wife almost not at all, my alleged propensity toward acts of cruelty, the outbursts of violent, ruthless temperament, and above all the direct evidence of my crime, Toxin Y, which on the fateful day I had taken from the locked reagent cabinet in the laboratory. I could have brought it to my apartment only by deliberate plan. My wife’s sudden death showing signs of intravascular coagulation, the strokelike collapse. My father’s sudden flight, etc., etc.
The gears meshed tooth for tooth, in fact they meshed too well.
I did not speak. They made me stand now. But I looked at the gentlemen and was silent. The gentlemen looked at me and were doubtful. At the end of the presentation of evidence, the examining magistrates and later the jury too had their doubts about the “truth,” because it seemed just too simple! So this is how it was. Serious, but not hopeless.
I might still have been able to save myself after all, it is at least possible, if only I had been able to enlist people’s sympathy. But I was not. I breathed a sigh of relief every time I was back in my cell after the interrogations. They were terrible, especially when I was dragged out of bed and marched off for questioning.
Over the long term it was not entirely easy for me to carry on extended conversations with my brother about things of less direct concern to him or to me than my crime and its consequences. But even where my crime was concerned I had nothing enlightening to tell him, although he was waiting for something and would have been overjoyed if I had told him, lied to him, that I was innocent, that it was all just a misunderstanding or heaven knows what. I couldn’t! I couldn’t!
He came to see me shortly before my trial. He brought me some clean laundry and put the dirty laundry in a briefcase. At the end of his long visit, during which I had said nothing serious or to the point for many hours, I went to signal the turnkey to let him out as he stood at the door (I have already said that visitation was very humanely administered in my case, in marked contrast to the period following the verdict). I saw that his hands, clasped over the shabby briefcase stuffed with clothes, were perspiring heavily and trembling violently. He had lowered his eyelids, his mouth was half open. The light from the bare electric bulb on the ceiling of the cell glinted on his thick, dark blond, clean brush cut, the style favored by so many good petty officials.
He wanted to tell me something, perhaps give me a word of advice, or perhaps he wanted to slip me a sacramental charm for my trial–to this day I do not know. He had always been very devout–like my father–and yet devout in a way quite unlike the nasty old man. It was only now, when I was in my fortieth, he in his forty-third year, that we had gotten to know one another. But he said nothing more, and I too was silent. When the guard’s footsteps were audible in the flagstoned corridor (it had never been so late before), I told him he would hear something good from me yet. His eyes lit up, he spread his arms, the briefcase fell to the floor with a smack. But he did not embrace me, nor did we say anything more. But it seemed that he left me consoled.
Was it not a topsy-turvy world in which, on the eve of a man’s trial, one in which his life is at stake, he consoles his older brother, instead of conversely? Though the “consolation” I offered consisted in something entirely material. The original medicine for “loving hearts”–money. It was the first time I had ever given someone a present of any magnitude, and the first time I had had anything to do with a person without making him the subject of an experiment. For my financial status had changed entirely as the result of my wife’s death. To be sure, I had not become her heir. Whether I was condemned or was acquitted (but how could I be acquitted?), in no event would the tiniest fraction of her assets come into my possession. But the insurance was a different matter. I asked my attorney, and he agreed. The insurance policy dealt with the claims of the survivor, but nowhere in its many paragraphs were there any particulars about the circumstances under which one spouse became the survivor. The company could sue, of course. But my claim was incontrovertible. I had not taken out the policy. So there could not be anything “immoral” about the policy, whether I was a criminal now or not. I, or, in case I was convicted, my designated assignee, would have to come into effective possession of that very large sum. On the evening before the first day of the trial, I drafted a will, worded to be simultaneously a deed of gift. In it I named my brother and his children as my heirs. I could assume now that they would receive this inheritance after my “demise” under any circumstances. Even if I was sentenced to deportation or a relatively lengthy prison term, they would immediately come into possession of the money.
On the night before the trial, I slept like a log.
The proceedings went as I had expected. For the murder of my wife, committed by poisoning, I was sentenced to hard labor for life in C. All the facts of my life were regarded as incriminating, with the exception of my zealous service on the military hygiene task force during the war. To this latter fact I owe the decision not to impose the death penalty. I will not recount here all the phases of the trial, which was, I might note, at no point dramatic, at best theatrical sometimes. What would be the point of bringing my stepdaughter from the wings to pointedly ask of the assembled court, “How can I live without my mama?” or my son-in-law to ball his neatly gloved fists and threaten to spring at me, at the man, that is, whose crime had brought him a fortune of millions? What would be accomplished by repeating my concierge’s statements about my private life, or the account of a full-bearded, stammering, dark-spectacled department head from the Pathology Institute speaking evasively about my scientific work and, when pressed by the prosecuting attorney, ascribing to me (a) amateurish abilities and knowledge; (b) erratic interest in my scientific experiments–excessive enthusiasm alternating with laziness; and (c) a dark, withdrawn cast of mind in our personal dealings, something I had never thought I had? What would that prove?
It was certainly of greater consequence that my father, at that time long retired from the civil service and in every respect his own master, scorned to meet me face-to-face in the courtroom or testify for or against me. He gave evidence by proxy only, asserting his right to refuse to answer questions as a witness (did he have that right?).
But what was most painful for me was the fact that I did not see my brother, either among the witnesses or among the spectators. He had hardly figured in my past, but his role in my present was immense. I could not understand why he had not appeared.
I asked my attorney, who was astonished at my “impatience.” Perhaps I was less “criminal,” a person of lesser caliber, than he had assumed. He thought I must surely have had other worries.
Anyway he soon lost interest in me after the verdict. Though he did initiate the obligatory formal appeals procedure, clearly nothing could be expected from this step. He now came to the prison only rarely. All my visits were much more stringently monitored now, I wore the prescribed costume, I was subject to prison discipline, made my circuit of the yard, hands folded behind my back, on Sunday I heard (or did not hear) Mass, and time passed. The number of letters I could send was regulated, as was my activity, my cell had to be kept far tidier–but my psychological paralysis still had not entirely resolved. This circumstance was preventing me from regaining clear, responsible consciousness.
When I came from the mental ward to the prison, I was like someone entering a monastery after a terrible catastrophe. I wanted peace and quiet above all (or the death of the spirit); freedom was secondary. The import of a “sentence” had not yet dawned on me.
But the tedium gradually became very oppressive. I applied to the prison administration for work as a clerk. My request went completely unacknowledged. Perhaps I had not submitted it to the right office. The chaplain had the most influence on the premises, but I had never dignified his driveling missionary efforts with a response. Was I to bare my heart and my innermost motivations to him, when I had not bared them to my father, my brother, my attorney? But perhaps I had underestimated how helpful and also how dangerous he could be. It was on him that the type and quantity of reading material allowed to fall into my hands, classified by “level,” depended. Any institution allows for small but over time very significant acts of preferential and discriminatory treatment. There will be loopholes in “house rules” seemingly covering every detail: unpleasant severities for this person, compensatory, palliative benefits for that one.
An intellectually responsible person bears up under solitary confinement, isolation, being alone with himself, quite differently from an intellectually lazy one. But–this was my good fortune–at that time I was not remotely among the intellectually living. Only very slowly did my past, from childhood on, begin to come to life in me. I had become a gloomy monk without a monastery and without belief. It took a long time for me to recall, bit by bit, my younger self, my childhood, the crucial experiences of my youth, my father, the house that had been my home.
I had often been sleepless before my crime. Also when I was in the observation ward among the mentally ill. But after that, even during the trial, I became hypersomniac, always tired, apathetic–heavy limbs, dull thoughts, no will, no pain–in a word, paralyzed. Hence, too, my yawning during the final statements. It honestly was not bravado, not a cynical gesture.
The date of our upcoming little cruise was uncertain. We communicated with one another as prisoners do everywhere. It was important to many to maintain contact with the outside world so that they could put their private affairs in order before they were deported to C., receive gift parcels, amass as much money as possible, and, as its possession was indispensable but forbidden, find ways to smuggle it onto the ship and to C.
There were frequent rumors about our departure date, circulated by knocking on the walls. Everyone prepared feverishly, but for administrative reasons nothing happened.
Now, when we were all under the authority of a state institution, we saw the injustice of every action taken by it, its mindless belief that it always did the right thing, its sluggish pace in getting anything done, its dreary self-importance, the sloppiness of its bureaucracy. Yet it was still a model facility, and commissions from foreign countries visited the building and observed the inmates, took notes, tried to learn things. To us such a visit was always a sort of change and thus always a pleasure.
We all yearned for pleasure, even if it was just malicious pleasure. I felt strangely gratified, if I can put it that way, when I realized that I had acquired a strong sense of schadenfreude. It was clear that misery loved company in my case just because at bottom I couldn’t care less about the suffering of others and was if anything elated by it. It comforted me! I would never have believed it of myself before, but there it was. Perhaps my total isolation had had its effect.
I speak of total isolation, but I mean only being separated from my father and especially from my brother, my last and most unfortunate love. Most people start there, but that is where I ended, or thought I had ended. My brother’s withdrawal, his lapse into silence. If only I had heard from him, even the tiniest sign of life! I knew that the prisoners around me received letters, ones that were permitted and ones that had been smuggled in. Now and then I heard my neighbors being taken to the visiting rooms for fifteen-minute visiting periods, particularly when a trial date had been set. I was never summoned.
Never? No, I exaggerate. My attorney looked in on me one more time, that was all.
On one occasion one of my neighbors returned sobbing to his cell. I heard him throw himself onto the floor, howling dismally. This was not permitted. He had to get up at once. The turnkey on his rounds showed military strictness in making sure the prisoners lay down neither on the floor nor on the bed that was supposed to be folded up into the wall during the day. But this man must have received bad news from home. Had his child, his sweetheart, his best friend kicked the bucket? I don’t know. I knocked, I signaled to beat the band, but he did not answer. There was no distracting him from his animal howling and rolling about on the floor. It put me in good spirits.
So there were still people who were more miserable than I. People who were not as hardened as my father’s son. Abruptly I thought of my brother. What could be the reason for his terrible silence? I evolved a lot of fanciful theories and yet never felt I had gotten to the bottom of it. Probably I understood him as poorly as he did me. Or was he dead? Dead? Of him I used the word “die,” of the others “kick the bucket.” But the chaplain would not have withheld this news, though it would have been artfully put as always. Coming from him it would certainly have taken the form of a “lesson” for me!
I was sleeping less at night than had been usual for me. The fellow in the next cell moaned piteously and his bed creaked miserably. I heard everything clearly in the deathlike silence of the great building. Rats, those dear rodents, rustled and scurried as they had once in my parents’ house. And on my dear father’s ship, which I often thought of, stuck in the arctic ice during his voyage. I saw my father standing on deck, cradling two rats in his arms, his sons, my brother and me. I awoke in fright and lay there for a long time. At last I fell asleep again. I dreamed of an almond green, already somewhat wilted sweet pea, a flower similar to the one I had dissected and magnified using my attorney’s monocle. The parts that had been cut to pieces reassembled themselves, sepals, nectaries, cellulose fibers, sap vessels, and respiratory organs, the male and female reproductive parts of the plant, and they turned into a living flower. It rose stiffly, oozing sap, from a piece of white blotting paper covered with black mirror writing, as though it were growing out of the ground. Unfortunately my wife appeared in the same dream.
Her image came into my mind for the first time since her death. I saw her, her face withered, wrapped in a crinkled, light pink crepe gown, looking out a window of my apartment. The window was framed by cream-colored, embroidered drapes. My wife was laughing with one half of her face, crying with the other, one corner of her large mouth turned up, the other drawn down as though squeezed inside. She was grinning, filled with pain and voluptuous feelings at once, as so often in life. Her teeth were falling out, she tried in vain to keep them in, push them back, with her long tongue. Then she sadly regarded the ruins of former magnificence, she spoke, I nodded and did not understand her, she suddenly stepped back behind the curtains, spread them across her strong dark breast, which was markedly chilly, deathly cold to the touch. But now I was behind her, more or less at her feet. I came up to her knees. The varicose veins in her calves had shrunken so much that the heavy golden brown silk stockings bagged. Someone had to feel sorry for this creature, and yet I could not arrive at any remorse. My crime had therefore been necessary, had come from the heart. I thought of my father, as of a judge. But even then I was not sorry. What can you do! What must be must be.
An imprisoned criminal is a wretched thing. The crime that he attempted, using every means at his disposal, has failed. Yes, I had gotten rid of my wife, and that was worth something. But I was beginning to understand that my freedom from her had come at no small cost. I had carried my plan through to her detriment, no doubt, but not to my benefit. Before that decisive moment, my life had been a very dubious business. Now it might become a very miserable one. In fact it certainly would and I needed all the willpower I had to keep from breaking down, as I had that night in the mental ward when the ghastly conduct of those around me had disturbed me so much that I had pronounced myself sane. I was now beginning to doubt my sanity with some frequency. I was as insensible as a stone, I devoured whatever was put in front of me, I relieved myself in a tub holding a few liters because our institution, wildly praised by the experts as it had been, did not even possess the convenience of a W.C. In sane times I had always set great store by personal hygiene. Quite apart from bourgeois decorum, a bacteriologist, a physician, cannot survive without the most meticulous personal hygiene. How low I had fallen! I was shaved once a week, got a haircut once a month. There was scant soap, a towel had to last longer than I preferred. I therefore took care not to get it dirty, that is, not to use it. And likewise with everything else! I began to suffer from dental calculus. One day a crumbly, foul-smelling crust fell from my teeth, calculus that had accreted due to poor nourishment. I felt with my tongue along the inside of my teeth. There seemed to be a decayed spot on the lower right premolar.
The prison doctor–not one of the worst, by the way, even if I received the same indifferent treatment that everyone else did–found no caries, though I tossed and turned almost all night with gnawing toothache. He had me brought in again the next day–and found nothing. The same story the day after that. Finally the overworked man, who was as pasty as his patients, directed the mirror to the place I described and found a decayed spot. I expected that he would treat the tooth, or rather the root. But without a word he showed me his primitive equipment, two pairs of forceps from the previous century. He gestured, again without explanation, toward the long line of emaciated, coughing, hollow-eyed prisoners with intestinal and skin disorders who all had to be dealt with in the next half hour. For this exemplary institution for the warehousing of human vermin had no paid full-time physician, but–aside from numerous higher officials inspecting and supervising–only this one frazzled, weary medical day laborer, who treated prisoners only as an extra job and received a pathetic starvation wage from the government.
He had me wait outside and when consulting hours were over again offered to pull the tooth. I recoiled. Was I so cowardly that I feared the pain of a tooth extraction without cocaine? Was I so vain that I did not want to have a gap in my otherwise beautiful, closely spaced teeth? Formerly I had visited my dentist every three months, I had tended my teeth with the greatest care. I shook my head and left the doctor’s office, a small, artificially lit, suffocatingly smelly room full of the effluvia of scruffy, ill-washed men.
Three adjoining cell-like rooms were set up as sick bays. Only the most serious patients, the hopeless ones, were sent to the prison hospital.
That day I finally received another visit from my attorney, in response to my repeated requests. He was in a hurry, did not take off his overcoat, confused my affairs with those of another of his clients, excused himself with the explanation that he was swamped with work but gave me to understand in passing that he had been unable to collect his fee; my father had refused to pay for anything unless he could be held liable for it. The old man may have rhetorically commiserated with me, but at the same time he had announced his decision to apply to the Ministry of the Interior for a legal name change. I was much too dulled, much too wrapped up in my own suffering, to be affected by this dramatic gesture. For the time of our departure was approaching, I needed gear, I needed money. The attorney was astonished that I was asking him for money! Had he not already done everything humanly possible for me and done it all for charity, a wage unpopular with busy lawyers?
I suggested to him that available assets of mine had to exist in such an amount that the small sums of money for him and for me were negligible by comparison. Suddenly recovered from his befuddlement, he fired off figure after figure. Bankruptcy proceedings had been instituted against my entire estate, the expensive furniture and genuine carpets had been bought up from the bankrupt’s assets for a minimal sum by my stepdaughter and her husband. My creditors had wanted to settle for an amount corresponding to fifteen percent, but it was doubtful whether this was attainable. My son-in-law and his lovely wife were too shrewd! And my insurance? The attorney, playing with his glinting monocle, smiled and shrugged his shoulders. (I was so unaccustomed to seeing a smile that I imitated it, much to his astonishment.) The insurance company had raised an objection that seemed to him, the attorney, very sophisticated: they had contested the policy–which the highly virtuous wife had taken out, not I!–as immoral. (I had expected this and still could not believe it!) He had lodged a protest, very much in his own interest. My brother had joined the proceedings. But the outraged public, in the figure of the press, had taken the insurance company’s side against me. My brother had moved heaven and earth and made great personal sacrifices to at least bring the insurance company to a compromise settlement. But he had come up empty-handed, and his legal expenses had been greater than he would have liked. Fine. That was still not enough of a reason for his silence, but it would have to do. In all seriousness, was that all the attorney had to tell me?
He was the last link to my former life. In his beefy hand, covered with a great many blond hairs and brownish freckles, he worked the fluted rim of his monocle in a circle as though winding a watch. He was no longer really paying attention to me at all. He wagged his double chin, carefully closed (buttons and lock) his expensive briefcase smelling of morocco leather, glanced about to make sure he had not forgotten anything. When I tried to shake hands with him, he flinched, bowing so deeply that I could not pull my hand back quickly enough. I looked as though I was about to bless the bald-headed, pudgy, blond, elegant man in the ecclesiastical manner. Need I say that this was far from my mind?
Until the last day, I waited longingly, I declare it openly, for a sign of life from my brother, whom I credited with a “loving heart.” Need I say that this sign of life from a loving heart never came?