Who could my handsome companion be? Conceivably he was someone from the cultured classes. I reached for his hand when I awoke the next morning. Very much unlike his bony, noble face, it was somewhat flaccid, effeminate, but one wanted to take it. Stroking the palm was like running one’s hand over a newborn baby’s dry cranium, warmed by the spring sun, beneath it a pulsing where the bones are still soft, rubbery, not completely fused.
It was a pleasure to tickle the inside of his hand with my index finger as he slept, unaware of what I was doing. But the youth was not asleep at all, he had noticed it. Or I was not even acting spontaneously, and he had succeeded in tempting me to a caress.
He told me his name, March, and I told him mine.
Heavy iron heating pipes, like steam ducts in basement corridors, ran across the ceiling of our cage. Steam heat in the hold of a ship on its way to the tropics? Where now, in the morning hours, it was already as hot as a steam bath? Once the eye had adjusted to the half-light, it could be seen that these steam pipes were open at one end. Could they be attached to the boilers that powered the engines, for spewing out hot steam to make us see reason, should that become necessary? Discipline or scalding, that was the choice. It was not a choice. We would all be well-mannered and stay that way.
March looked at me, but refrained from caresses. He pulled out the gramophone, examined the records. He desperately stroked the one that was broken in the middle, followed the microscopically fine grooves with a sharp fingernail. The others cast covetous, almost fierce glances at the battered little toy. No one else had anything like it.
It was worth more to him than money. I would soon find out how much it meant to him.
He showed me something inscribed on the record, actually two signatures, one scratched on each of the pieces. Louis and Lilli. They were similar hands, straight up and down, regular, perhaps those of a brother and sister.
Meanwhile work had been assigned in Cargo Hold 3. Some of the men had to help in the galley, others had to clean out the filth in the holds while they were vacated during the “walkabouts,” the half-hour promenades on deck. I will not speak of the arrangements for washing, which practically made one dirtier instead of cleaner. Let the reader take a shower in seawater and describe the result! But even these most primitive of facilities, which might have sufficed in the time of Columbus for the personal hygiene of his hydrophobic crew, had to be maintained.
The troughs for drinking water had to be rubbed down inside with metal shavings and seawater. The two together produced a corrosive acid, and the hands of the convicts entrusted with this cleaning job soon became unfit for work, or fit only if miserable pain were no object. I had this job.
I tried to laugh, but it was a false laugh, a croak. I resented this work too much! The others gloated as they watched me, and laughed laughs that were true.
It was not until the third day that I reported for a walkabout. I toiled along in the line like a beaten man.
The sea was frothing. The officers lay smoking, drinking, playing cards, red-and-white-striped awnings over their heads. Brig. Gen. Carolus was nowhere to be seen. Over our own heads were only the plume of smoke that wafted from the ship as it labored against the swells and the good, kind, vast blue and gold sky with its already almost tropical heat. The clogs of the convicts clattered in rhythm on the planks of the ship. The surface was slippery. Why was that? Many were seasick, unable to appreciate the fresh air. I lost my footing in the muck and steadied myself by taking hold of my companion’s hand with my injured one. He squeezed back. Back?
My face was stony.
I had overestimated my comrade’s age. I had taken him to be well past his midthirties, but he was only in his late twenties. One day soon I would find out more about the fancy he had taken to me.
I was very depressed, suffered greatly from physical symptoms, I was itchy inside and out. I had expected to be ordered to the sick bay, where I assumed life would be easier; I had believed that Carolus would show some human feeling toward his one-time laboratory mate.
I was mistaken, as it appeared. The days passed, and nothing happened. But I said nothing.
Silence is the most powerful magnet. One who contains himself, one who does not speak, need never fear rejection. He is safe. His position is good, or at least he is better off than the one who is driven to speak.
My handsome companion was one of those who must speak. On the dock he had been able to contain himself. For twelve hours we had been attached to each other, and he had not said a word to me. Now there was nothing binding us together, and yet I soon had an idea what had brought him here. This crime had to have some bearing on his feelings toward me.
March wanted to, I did not. It was so easy to scare him off–a frosty look, that was enough. When he launched into his confession for a second time, I mentioned my hand, on which there was now a painful eczema from the metal shavings and seawater. And the scab had come off the wound on my wrist, the place where the manacle had injured me as we were climbing the rope ladder. If only that had been the extent of it! My entire body was burning, as though I were wearing the shirt of nettles from the fairy tale. So had I had enough? Assuredly. But what did I do? I closed my eyes and yawned loudly.
The good March hung on me, his eyes drinking me in. Perhaps he thought he could appeal to my sympathies, to my warm compassion? Hardly. Nothing isolates one more than suffering. He couldn’t take that away from me. I said nothing in response to his questions, I lay on my belly in my bunk, I tossed about, I could not rest. Not a wink of sleep.
At night the light of the moon came to me through the porthole. The petroleum lamp swayed and stank. Almost none of the convicts slept, a few dozed. One rooted through another’s hair like a monkey. Others played cards, many told stories, but groups kept to themselves, there were sudden scuffles, boxing matches in the middle of the night, almost no words exchanged, only blows, bloody duels of unimaginable brutality. A master of the art of tattooing offered himself to the gentlemen as an emissary of the fine arts, demanding sums of money that no one could pay. But the most coveted object (after the leather shoes and the flannel vest that had somehow found their way aboard) was March’s old children’s gramophone. The gentlemen imagined that marvels would come from this music box. They expected the music of the spheres from the scratchy old records. March could have asked anything, and they would have given it to him. But he did not. What did he care about goods and chattels? He had no thought of such things. Feeling was his life.
And the proof of his affection for me? A kiss? A warm hand squeeze? A declaration of love, an emotional speech, a vow that he would be my friend forever, that we would be blood brothers until the two of us escaped from C. to Brazil? That he would care for me tenderly if I came down with yellow fever? No! Something much bigger and yet much less great. I will have to explain–no one will ever guess.
Almost everyone had three or four changes of underwear. After the long train trip, only what was at the bottom of the bag was still clean. But what if there was nothing there but two little books of the greatest cultural but no practical value, Hamlet and the Gospel? What if one had been relying on the excellent authorities to look after all one’s needs, even those most intimate ones? If one had been counting on a dear blood brother, had calculated that he would come at the last minute to the embarkation point, the port city, bringing, aside from poignant words of parting, some clean drawers and undershirts? Yes? No? No! Then one would have miscalculated foolishly, and the idiot doing the miscalculation was me, my father’s son, who had only a single good pair of underwear and two not very clean shirts to his name. Anyone who was a man tried to help himself: man and fate were one. A dirty pair of drawers should not be the cliffs upon which the intrepid experimenter was wrecked. There was enough time, what should he do? He should go to the tap and wash his underwear in plenty of running water, injured hands or no injured hands. Yes, that would have been good advice! If only I had tried to follow it from the outset.
I did do it the next night. And what was the result? Yes, some of the dirt came out at first, because, like a complete imbecile, I failed to conserve the soap that was so precious and for the time being irreplaceable. But, when I had finished washing my dainties, not all the soap came out, still less, unfortunately, all the seawater. And now these anything-but-sparkling whites would be dried on a line stretched between the frames of two portholes, or, better yet, ingeniously attached to the iron bulkheads. The next morning one would slip one’s undies on and sweat through them. And fifteen minutes later find oneself in hell. But no, my dear Georg Letham, let’s not exaggerate, it’s only a mild condition known as red dog or prickly heat. What does the physician Dr. Georg Letham the younger have to say? He goes to Dr. Georg Letham the younger, listens to his tale of woe, looks the fellow over, and says:
“Red dog is a disease with which almost every newcomer to the tropics during hot weather becomes acquainted, usually even during the passage. It is an acute inflammation caused by profuse perspiration leading to excessively moist skin. The material of the under-clothing is often an irritant, also sometimes soap that has been poorly rinsed from it during washing. Extremely small, slightly raised papules densely distributed over the skin form on those areas of the body where there is the most friction from clothing: initially the waist and the forearms, later also the shoulders and the chest, back, and neck. These are extremely itchy and hence highly detrimental to the general condition of the sufferer. In particular, nocturnal pruritus can lead to severe insomnia . . .”
Severe insomnia? Is there a mild kind too, Dr. Letham?
“. . . Continual scratching generally aggravates the inflammation. Scratching to the point of bleeding will readily induce further inflammatory processes, infections by pyogenic bacteria, furuncles, and eczema formation.”
Fervent thanks, esteemed doctor and benefactor of mankind! Where would we be without you, man of the spirit and custodian of medical knowledge? What do you advise? Powdering? With whose powder? Frequent washing with pure, nonsaline water? What pure water? Alcohol compresses would be excellent too, but to use alcohol for compresses, here in Cargo Hold 3, what a grotesque fantasy!
Oh, you loving hearts, I’m not laughing at you now! I’m not yawning. March had everything I needed, and he gave it with pleasure.
He had long understood my condition, he had powder, he had pure water, for he had saved up his supply of the fresh water we had been receiving, a liter ration poured into our canteens every day after the walkabout. He himself had suffered from severe thirst, and his tongue, long and narrow and purple like a dog’s, had passed across his parched lips more than once.
He was capable of making a sacrifice, his ideal was worth something to him. But did he expect a reward? Was he capable of working pro bono in the service of an ideal?
Why worry about it? Shouldn’t one just be grateful? It helps, yes! It’s a balm, yes! It’s a good deed. Let’s switch roles. You be the doctor and I’ll be the patient. In any event I slept well and deeply that night, very deeply.
That was when I dubbed March “Gummi.” Rubber gum is wonderful, one of the things that make the world go round. To create the chicle plantations necessary for manufacturing rubber, broad swaths of land in the colonies are cleared, the natives’ idle Eden is razed. The black plebs are worked to death, and if they rise up, if they want to return to their nation’s way of tropical idleness, war is declared on the colony, there is not the slightest hesitation about using squadrons of fighter planes to drop poison gas. Man passes, rubber goes on.
What is the individual? March was lucky to be taken seriously as one, so seriously that he got a new name, no, two new names. For as soon as I saw his relentless sentimental smile, I named him not just Gummi, but also Bear, “Gummi Bear.” His warm heart was never anything but a gummi bear. Step on a gummi bear, lick it fondly–it will always be what it is.
“Sweetheart, you bore me,” I would say to him when, at night, he would resume his life story. I was tired, I had been saddled with duties. I had been released from the job of cleaning the water tub, but if a criminal suffering from typhus in the sick bay was pining for an enema, I was the one the guard called.
Thus my glorious achievements as a physician were being borne in mind. Was that not what I had wanted? It was thought that an old doctor like me was best suited for these delightful tasks. The guards, officially appointed and much too lavishly paid for their work, were so lethargic that they even fell asleep on their watch. For the heat was blistering. Even under the open sky, it was oppressive enough to take one’s breath away. But all the more so where we were, down below or in the sick bay, that little room in which men lived cheek by jowl like rats! The less said the better!
When I returned from my charitable work one night, I felt an unexpected breath of fresh air. A gentle salt breeze caressed my brow. What a turn of events, by the grace of God! Gummi Bear, who had not been sleeping well because of the goings-on inside him, never mind the heat outside him, looked at me with swimming eyes. Suddenly I felt something wet and salty on my upper lip. What was there to cry about? But no! It was real, lovely, salty seawater, the porthole above my head had been smashed while I was gone. I had the marvelous godsend of a fresh breeze.
A thorough investigation. Who had broken the unopenable window? A tribunal loomed.
What would the punishment be? Who was going to be punished? How would it be possible to punish that miserable ship’s passenger more than he was being punished already? Easy! Near the engine room there were some little rooms almost hermetically sealed by iron doors, true hellholes, outlet ducts standing on end, not much broader than an average man. If someone needed to be disciplined, he could be shut up in one of these and allowed to stew in his own juices. The stokers were relieved every three hours, and a Gummi Bear was roasted for forty-eight.
How had Gummi Bear carried out his crime? With the crank of his gramophone. Oh, that gramophone, what a marvel of technology! The most beautiful melodies in its innards. A poignant keepsake from the life before. And a tool now too, so that I, the bosom friend, might bask in fresh air.
Fine! Gummi Bear went to the steam room. That was his reward for his good deed!
But what won’t love do for love! After forty-eight hellish hours, he staggered back, covered with dirt and almost blind from being in the dark so long, to all outward appearances hardly a man anymore. But in his heart more joyous than ever! Gummi Bear was despairing and joyous at once, submissive yet gifted with extraordinary energy, male and female–a mixture of contradictory psychological traits that an experimenter might find stimulating. “Poor little nipper,” I said to him as I loyally returned to him the things he had left in my keeping, the gramophone and the rest of his possessions, “you poor dear pet!” And Gummi Bear smiled beatifically.
The ship was rolling wildly. There was no way to replace the smashed pane of the porthole during the voyage. The cool fresh air was a balm that would sustain me for the entire trip, but, since the battle with red dog that I had so ingloriously lost, I had the greatest respect for sea-water. But why else did one have a Gummi Bear? When seas were heavy he stuffed his precious bag into the opening, letting the harsh, caustic seawater get into anything it wanted to. At least I would be protected and would lie tenderly in his arms. Yes, in his arms, I suppose that was what he wanted, but he would never have that. I swore that I would protect myself from this love.
I suspected that it was this love that had brought him here. No longer did I want him to keep his mouth shut, I wanted to hear his story. And once he had recounted the saga of what his brimming little heart had driven him to, then I was going to look at him, full of love, pucker up for a kiss, and say to him as tenderly as a wily anarchist and enemy of love can: No! You expect me to do that?!
Or was it better not to let him get that far? I wasn’t going to be assaulted by him. I emphasized the word him, not I! Other men had been assaulted by other men here in this Cargo Hold 3 of the Mimosa, for I had seen it, and the others had seen it, and the guards had seen it, and there were cries and moans and murmurs and all the silly panting and sobbing eruptions of a sensuality repressed for months among these brute hearts, and the good Gummi Bear had tried to cover my eyes so that I would not see these abominations. Did he have four hands, to cover my ears too? Why worry about the eyes and ears? The soul! What did that mean to me!
The next morning the brigadier general glanced my way. He made no response to my meek and plaintive greeting, but looked away as I stared at him. Oh, Herr Brigadier General, I’m the one who should be disconcerted!
He was the king of the ship, but, like all kings, he was lonely in his exalted position. Even the ship’s commander was many ranks below him, the commandant of our group was at the lowest of the officer grades, while Carolus twiddled his thumbs at the top.
I did not push myself forward. I bided my time. A single word from him was precious. Short of that, I hung on to what I had, this “loving heart,” this March, who flattered me. I had no idea how it was that I, no longer young, no longer handsome, had “bewitched” this poor devil, to use his word, but it was so good to be pampered, to have the choice bits of food slipped to me, to be taken care of like a child! It touched me when he offered to start up the gramophone, which as yet had made no sound, for me. One of the convicts, Suleiman, the two-and-a-half-hundredweight man, the copper-faced colossus, his mouth protruding pinkly and fleshily beneath his bold, hawklike nose and taking up almost all of the lower part of his brutal face, a monster of a man who despite his baseness (rape and murder, child abuse) was not without a certain oriental majesty and cynical authority, had offered him a good sum of money for the machine. To no effect. Then more. People are children. Not to be taken seriously. Gummi Bear was no different from “Sultan Suleiman,” the colossus, the rich man. All impulse, nothing more. Why should I struggle against the love of Gummi Bear? Let’s have it! Open up! Tell it, go on! Sing your song!
Gummi Bear’s ambition was to be, not a gummi bear, but a diamond. His proud bearing on the dock, his reserve, lately again maintained with particular desperation, through which an irrepressible passionate nature always shone–it was unfailing. A criminal? No. But a dangerous child? Yes, he was that. His story was much less romantic than he thought. For he was one of the “loving hearts,” and when he pitied others (such as me), he was pitying himself. When he lied to others (such as me), he was lying to himself.
He told the story of his betrothal. The girl is the daughter of a big shot (a high-ranking municipal official); he calls her sometimes by her first name, sometimes, as though inadvertently and then immediately correcting himself, Countess. The third party is the cadet, though in fact he is not an aspirant to high military rank but a prospective senior clerk or bank official who would still be attending business school now if he were still alive. Quod non.
Gummi Bear could not lie for any length of time.
Everything else is true. March’s feeling is true. Gummi Bear’s motive is true. The tragic outcome is true. The two pieces of the phonograph record entitled “Under the Bridges,” on which the brother and sister, Louis and Lilli, solemnly scrawled their names as children, each on one fragment, are true. And he, March, who at first professed to be the son, the only son, of a manufacturer, an industrial magnate, eventually turned out to be just one of the brood of a pharmacist perpetually on the edge of bankruptcy. During periods when business was bad, March’s father managed the books for a cinema owner or labored fruitlessly to concoct new shoe-polish compounds or herbal teas. But when the needs of the family became still greater, he also dealt in narcotics, at first obtaining real drugs and reselling them at high prices, but then substituting chalk and perpetrating such a clumsy fraud that informers turned him in. The informers did not have the clearest consciences themselves, the matter was dropped, the druggist could be punished only for violating the pricing regulations for pharmaceuticals; of course he hadn’t been distributing narcotics.
And this is the way he always squeaks by.
In this atmosphere young March grows up. His father, at a relatively advanced age, has acquired a taste of his own for these narcotics; wised up now, he no longer sells them to others at predatory rates, but uses them himself. Haltingly the son recounted the stunts his morphine-addicted father had pulled, the great expense not spared by his mother, brave, competent, healthy, and entirely devoted to her sick spouse, in her effort to break the rapidly aging man of his craving.
Success at last. Rejoicing in the bosom of his family over the return of the prodigal father. But in the sanatorium where the pharmacist goes for withdrawal treatment, he meets a young woman, a star of stage and screen, falls passionately in love with her. He absconds again, this time for good, from the family, for which March, the oldest son, is now responsible.
March becomes a minor official, an organized, hardworking person aspiring to better things. Ten years of work, of scrimping and saving. Domestic tranquillity. Amen. After these ten difficult years his mother remarries, his brothers and sisters are working, a younger brother apprenticed to a watchmaker, a younger sister engaged to be married. Thank goodness–and March breathes again.
He is no shining light as a city official, but well thought of, welcome everywhere, a respectable, unassertive, retiring person who is already mentally in the bosom of his family at the close of working hours and who thinks only of providing security for them and giving them nice surprises from time to time. He does not yet feel very attracted to women. He has his mother, his sisters, after all. Fatherly feelings have awakened in him toward his younger brother, who is very delicate, perhaps conceived during his father’s morphine phase.
So young March’s life is taken up with his family. The passions, whatever they might be, have no chance to develop, the only perceptible abnormality is a childish vanity, clothes, underthings, personal hygiene; also a concern for a higher profile, a striving for greater prominence in society. And then a certain natural adulation and worshipfulness, a mental genuflection before male persons of high position, such as a young clergyman of lordly blood who left his “castle” to travel as a missionary to Africa, returned with a case of malaria, and replaced the priest of the parish in which the good March lives with his family. The abbé has nothing of the lord about him. He has a lean, expressionless face, the skin seemingly clinging to the bones, cold hands damp with sweat and limp to the touch, and his tonsure covers not only the occiput but the whole of his angular skull, for, despite his youth, this aristocratic Christ has not a single hair left.
This abbé is March’s first love. March has not realized that he loves men more than he loves women. But he feels it. He sorrows over the abbé’s somber indifference, he suffers from the emptiness and tedium of his bureaucratic existence. A change presents itself, no voyage to Africa to proselytize black children, only a regular promotion from Grade 6a to Grade 6b and, along with it, a move to a small provincial town in the north of the country. So good-bye to mother, stepfather, sisters, brothers, and the rest of the family, up and away! After his last confession, the handsome, shy youth, profoundly agitated, presses the hand of the brave reverend, who looks with astonishment into March’s wide eyes, continues with his stiff, dry sermon, and wipes his hand with a rough handkerchief, whether because it is sweating excessively or because the handshake of a bourgeois, featherbrained civil servant disturbs his train of thought, or simply because he is preoccupied. Nothing more happens. If only the lordly abbé, with his knowledge of human nature and love of mankind, had earnestly taken the official to task on the spot (fond handshakes between confessor and confessant are definitely not done), poor March’s aberrant tendencies might have been corrected in time and he might have attained salvation. As it is, however, a calamity will have to happen in order for the youthful March, so blind to this vital point, to understand the gift that Mother Nature has thoughtfully bestowed upon him.
And this may also explain the desire cherished by the poor frog, his fond wish to tell me everything–because now, much too late, he knew himself and because he felt a new passion stirring within him and because he wanted to protect himself and also (I can only hope, my friend!) myself from the effects of his wild temperament. But I can see you, little one! I do have some knowledge of human nature, even if I am no lover of mankind! I see you for what you are!
Wild temperament? You? Nothing but a misunderstanding. Children are not criminals, certainly. But to give free rein to everything in their dim little brains, that would be dangerous. The embrace reflex does not interest me. I am not a female frog. Prevention is the best defense. That way it can go no further.
March rattled on in the sultry gloom of the subtropical night, but unfortunately did not command as much interest from me as he had expected. What was his abbé supposed to mean to me? What did I care about his private stirrings? Though they were no longer so private–the good lad made no secret of his thoughts, he posed no puzzles for me. He was tedious. He had been more interesting as a silent man chained to me.
So on with the story, you charmer of a man, you heartbreaker from the provinces, who is not satisfied with inflaming the passions of the daughter of an exemplary executive secretary and becoming formally betrothed to the young woman, a golden blonde, in the midst of family gathered from afar, but has also managed to wreak devastation in the heart of her brother, the dark-haired cadet.
How lucky this quite handsome, but not very interesting, man was with people! Here too, in Cargo Hold 3, he had already made conquests, without meaning to. The coppery oriental, the pasha Sultan Suleiman, cast fiery glances his way. Compensation for March himself would evidently be added to the selling price of the silly gramophone if he smiled upon the rich, crudely sensual criminal. So go on, March! I won’t be jealous. Love in any form is beautiful and restorative for the average person, so go ahead and accept it, don’t wallow despondently in old memories! Life beckons, it’s made for pleasure. Let your Louis sleep the sleep of the just!
But a man like me was preaching to deaf ears, the good March was unable to tear himself away from his memories. For the tenth time he ran through his litany, which began with the pledge of eternal loyalty between the sister, Countess Lilli, and the brother, Louis the cadet, symbolized, much as in the ancient heroic saga, by a phonograph record broken in the middle, and which never really ended. During the final spring they both cling to March and shower the delirious fellow with love, possibly trading off on even-numbered and odd-numbered days. But poor March! What is pure torment to him with the sister, pretty as a picture, bursting with health and sensuality, luscious, golden blonde and gray-eyed, would be a much-longed-for happiness with the brother, dark-haired, pale, gangly, somewhat arrogant, his eyes sunken in deep hollows. He, March, does not hesitate between them for an instant, he plumped for the brother the moment he laid eyes on him, he is deferential to him, lets himself be tortured by his bored, languid smile, the tight curl of his lips, and he is tortured too by the tight curl of the sister’s lips, the lips of the sensual, hale, good girl, his fiancée. She is much too proud to let on, but she is too much a woman to put up with this. Her vanity has been wounded. She neglects her appearance, a sign that she wishes only comradely feelings toward March, her fiancé, and that, in all innocence, she wants to live with him as sister and brother!
Whereupon he, March, delighted that the conflict has been so easily resolved, shows comradely candor, he reveals to her what he has not revealed to himself, that he is passionately fond of Louis, that he is “bewitched” by him. He expresses himself so poetically, the timid Grade 6b official. And she, Countess Lilli, strokes the hair of March, her fiancé-brother, she is kindhearted toward him, he is the apple of her eye, and she is all his, and when she spends entire afternoons at church, on her knees praying, she is kneeling only for him, praying only for him–and the frog sighs and believes.
Then abruptly she sends the engagement ring back. Unfortunately she loves him too much, she cannot settle for what little he can spare her. But the cadet remonstrates seriously with March, insisting that the wedding must take place, March must make up with the Countess, or . . . And for the first time the pale, arrogant youth toys with the idea that he might crush March, or possibly give himself to March–it might be high-handedness, it might be out of curiosity, perhaps out of pity, out of vanity, or just for fun. It is not clear. Perhaps out of real love for his sister, who is the most important thing in his life. And always will be. And March, who once expected a simple, untroubled life by Lilli’s side, under the protection of the prominent father-in-law, is now, with his good heart, his weak will, his abnormal but strong urges, in a state of the most terrible confusion. He neglects his work. He no longer sleeps. Finally he goes back to the sister, and promises her–out of weakness, out of pity, out of Christian mercy–that, though he will not break with her brother, henceforth he will look upon Louis as no more than a future brother-in-law. Thus he pledges that he will see Louis only once a week and in Lilli’s presence, perhaps they will dance, one of them will wind up the new portable gramophone, and he and March will take turns dancing with Lilli. Innocent, childish frolicking. Great solution, of Solomonic wisdom! But, of course, things happen otherwise. Lilli winds up the gramophone, but only Louis and March dance together, and suddenly it seems that poor Louis’s mechanical daily work at the business school is no match for March’s passionate, fanatical love, it has infected even the cool, languid, arrogant heart of a precocious, sickly, callous, already faded youth.
And Lilli is supposed to watch this? Is supposed to air out the smoky room afterward and tidy up while Louis and March go for a walk in the summer rain, sharing an umbrella, sit side by side later in a bar, a café, arms around each other yet gazes chaste, huddle in the darkness of a cinema. Louis and March love each other, yes, but purely and truly chastely, like angels or frogs.
Lilli, sensual, healthy, and young, unbroken, does not believe it. She won’t share, not another minute. But her threats cut no ice either with the cadet or with her fiancé, and one day, while Louis is being visited by his bosom friend, yet a third man comes to his room, his father, the prominent municipal official, a man of principle. March flees on the wings of an angel. He is driven out of the office, he has to move out of his lodgings, he faces public opprobrium, and Lilli’s farewell letter leaves no room for argument. And to make matters worse, his own father now appears, the morphine-addicted unemployed pharmacist: seedy, a beggar–March is supposed to help and has virtually nothing to his name, for, vain as he is, he has devoted almost everything to his appearance.
March paused. The other convicts amused themselves in the evenings according to their natures. Only the tamest played cards, or let off steam in their brutish way, or roughhoused. What most did, men among men for months starved for “love,” this March tried to hide from me, he tried to enthrall me with his chaste tale, and when I asked him coolly, “Dear heart, why are you telling me this?” he dropped his eyes, nestled against me imperceptibly, and responded somewhat huskily: “So you won’t think I’m one of them!” Ah, I wasn’t supposed to think he was a common criminal like the rest of the bunch? I wasn’t supposed to think he was a man of manly love?
I closed my eyes, I tried to snore. But he had sharp eyes and ears. Even in the semidarkness he could tell a mask of sleep from genuine slumber and real snoring from feigned. So I gave up. I raised myself on my elbows, looked out through the porthole, still lined with jagged glass. The lilac tropical sky was filled with almost abnormally bright, densely packed stars.
The sea was high. Now and then a fierce spray came showering in, onto my wild hair, my heavy, unkempt beard. March suddenly said something about a hotel room.
Because of the scandal, he is evicted from his cozy abode. No one in the small-minded little town wants to rent to him. And yet his love for Louis, the cadet, is so pure, so chaste, so restrained. A little more tolerance! Just a little bit of forbearance for him! And he, March, would have resigned himself to everything, would have become a good official and a good citizen–at least that was what he said now that the whole thing was over and done with.
Thus he lies despondently till noon in the same bed with his father, who is stuck to him like a barnacle. The weather is bad, he lies in his hotel room, propped up on his elbows. And looks at his papa. Affliction and inexorable decline are written on the features of the former pharmacist and drug dealer. Sharing a bed with him is no fun. Nor does this meet with the approval of the hotel staff. But necessity knows no law. Until now March has always sided with his brave, life-affirming mother; that was where he belonged, that is where his heart is. But now, when he is beaten and disgraced, when he feels within him, in his own sorrow-consumed heart, the misery of the mortal world botched by God yet not consigned by Satan to fire and brimstone soon enough, when people avoid him on the street, when he has lost his job between one day and the next, when he is refused entrance to the office, when he cannot imagine that he might see Louis and Lilli again–now he understands his father, and the two of them decide–to go to his mother.
March described his eyes falling on the brown-varnished spruce-wood dresser, almost the only piece of furniture in the shabby hotel room apart from a rickety chair and a rusty iron washstand. On the dresser are two suitcases and a bluish cardboard box. One of the suitcases is made of leather, the other of pressed fiber; both are his. The leather suitcase is where the famous gramophone, “a present from the kids,” is kept. The blue cardboard box belongs to his father and contains the last of the underthings that the old man has rescued from ruin. He has no washing things, but at least he has retained some idea of cleanliness (at someone else’s expense).
March cannot stop him, his father, from using his son’s expensive soap, his English razor, or his toothbrush. So did his father bring nothing with him? No, he has a gun (in addition to an ample supply of morphine), which, in better days, he obtained from a down-on-his-luck Baltic prince so that he would always have a “way out.” Not a bad idea to sell it to pay for the trip to March’s mother, but no one wants the old piece of junk. March has a nice gold watch. Without a solid cover, but genuine and monogrammed. But he will never part with this, the only gift from his dear mother. So every penny has to be saved. Father and son survive on rolls and, after their lunch from the bakery, sit in a public park and yawn with hunger at each other in the misty cold.
At night the son goes past the house with the father, showing him the windows behind which his Louis and Lilli live. But his father’s teeth are chattering with cold and hunger, the hour is late, the train will be leaving in half an hour. They are going to spend the night on the train to avoid paying for a hotel room. So off March goes, accompanied by a castanet performance, gazing miserably back at the windows, stumbling over the cobblestones, his eyes full of tears and his heart full of cares.
They arrive at March’s mother’s house early. She is contented, meaning she is happily remarried for the time being, she is the wife of a dentist, a recent widower, and, quite frankly, she is disquieted and ashamed in front of her new family when her old family, in the shape of her distraught son and down-at-heels first husband, appears here in her respectable house, where everything smells of disinfectants and the vulcanized rubber of false teeth.
Neither son nor ex-husband dares to tell the whole truth. The two of them do give her to understand that they are in a fix, but all she does is nod and pretend not to hear. March is thunderstruck. This is the thanks he gets? For this he spent the best years of his life moping around the house, gave his mother every last penny on the first of each month, made it possible for her to live a carefree existence for almost ten years? So that she can cut them loose with literally a crust of bread!
But she has no use for him. Her main concern is to find an acceptable way to get rid of the two unwelcome guests.
The three members of what was once a family, father, mother, and child, sit together in spiteful silence, listening to the low drone of the drill and the suppressed shrieks of the harassed patients from the dentist’s laboratory. As the morning passes, poor March’s feeling toward his family, that of the executive secretary, takes over, it becomes overpowering, he is as though in a daze, can hardly wait for the end of lunch, which is being eaten at a late hour because of the dentist and his patients–March is in love, he is in love and must return to where the heart is. There he will be understood. The engagement has been broken off, his job is gone, his lodgings rented out, but he still has “loving hearts” back there, and Gummi Bear, tender and tenacious as he is, must return to them.
The old addict sees this with the cynicism of despair, hits his ex-wife up once more (his morphine supply is running low), and disappears from this story.
Along with the old addict, however, something else disappears, which takes us further in the story of that great child March or Gummi Bear. The two good suitcases containing clothes and underwear disappear, and the cardboard box containing dirty underwear and the still usable, but unsellable, unpresentable, antiquated revolver remains. It is a wicked joke of the humorously inclined father to have added to these articles the son’s “keepsake,” the children’s gramophone. But in exchange, the good son March’s gold watch is gone. The father tenderly pressed his dear child to his shaggy breast, tears flowed down his thin cheeks, and he closed his eyes, the lids now swollen like sponges, but his hands did not tremble as they nimbly plucked his choked-up son’s last valuable item, the gold watch, from the lower left pocket of his vest. Lament upon lament! Lament? What am I saying? Profound despair, vast disappointment. This is how people can be! This is how a father can behave toward his son! Beyond description how much he longs for Louis, for Lilli, even for the severe but morally staunch municipal official who drove him, March, out of paradise and now stands before him with fiery sword.
March gathers the last of his strength. Late that afternoon he comes again before his petrified mother and tells her everything. His mother stands with her fists clenched in the pockets of her blue-and-white-striped apron and, aghast, keeps whispering to her son: Shh! Keep it down! So that the good dentist won’t hear. Only now does she grasp what has happened. With a man! Why? A man! What for? Aren’t there enough pretty young women? And you were engaged! You were all set! I was, March admits in his despair. He is helpless.
His mother goes through the cardboard box. If only the gold watch were still there, “at least”! Perhaps Papa, her ex-husband, was only playing a joke, perhaps he hid the watch there. Nothing. March says not another word, he gnaws his lower lip and wishes he could leave, he distractedly feels for the watch in his vest pocket, although on this unlucky day he could hardly be less interested in what time it is. His mother thinks. Couldn’t they set the police after her grifter of an ex-husband? No, says March, that would be no help and would destroy his mother’s (at bottom highly problematical) marital bliss and happy home. So, what then? his mother asks. In order to have something to say, March says offhandedly: I’m going to America.
His mother seizes upon this plan. She sees a way out. That very evening she finds the necessary money for her son by dint of the most fantastic exertions, she washes and darns the prodigal father’s undershirts and socks overnight, stealthily fixes everything up, and the two of them scribble ten penciled calculations in the margins of the newspaper to make sure the money, lent without interest by the wife of a well-meaning relative of her husband (the dentist), will hold out to the other side of the ocean. It will have to, March says at last, his eyes drooping with fatigue.
He falls asleep. He dreams of his friend.
The next afternoon, of course, he is not at the port, where the ship bound for South America is ready for departure, but waiting for his Louis at the entrance to the business school. They greet one another briskly, as though there were nothing wrong. First March speaks ironically of his situation, mentioning casually that he is going to America. Just as casually, young Louis says, Wish I could go, I’d be there in a flash. At this unconsidered statement, the utterance of a silly boy, March takes hold of him. He lays his arm around his throat, his voice trembles, but he does not weep. He tells him that he has always known what a difference there was between Louis and his own family, a promise is a promise, loyalty is loyalty, love conquers all, words once spoken, and suchlike malarkey, he could kiss Louis’s hand, etc.; he talks absolute nonsense. In the presence of his dear one, who would like to hurry home for lunch, he has no control over himself, he could never ever live without him. He calls on all the saints and everyone else in the calendar, imploring him to come along; Louis, the cadet, could have the steerage ticket, March would carry coal, wash dishes, find some money somewhere, hock his watch. But his watch is gone. The youth is abashed. Despite his arrogance, this doglike adoration touches him, as my wife’s adoration once touched me, he smiles indulgently, the way one smiles at a handsome, blond-curled child when it first tries to walk. They arrange to meet that evening by a monument in the park. March is there, Louis is not. March waits all night. He is hungry. Better to curl up his toes and die than turn his Louis’s travel money into bread and sausage. Father and sister must have put poor Louis in chains, or he would surely have been there long ago. Surely! March learns what despair is if he doesn’t know already.
The next morning he makes a decision to visit the home of his precious boy. His frantic ringing brings his former fiancée to the door. She is terribly surprised to see him, she sees the cares, the hunger on the features she once loved, she lets him in, makes him some chamomile tea to steady him. Compose yourself, Herr March, take it easy! Confused about how formal to be. If only March knew something about people, were a bit of a diplomat! In some dark corner of her heart, Countess Lilli is still holding out for him. But he suspects some treachery, says Louis must be surrendered to him, or something bad will happen. Surrender? Who? Louis. Something bad? Yes, and he lifts his box and lets it drop, the heavy revolver in it making a thud as it lands. They’re supposed to tremble before him, the idiot! Lilli loses patience at last. She does not want to indulge him a moment longer, but she controls herself, she puckers her healthy red lips to blow scornfully on the hot chamomile tea, then says that March should “take his time” but drink up, have a couple of cakes, and clear out once and for all. Not without Louis. Louis is at school. Impossible! Louis at school as on every other day? He wants to search the apartment, Lilli does not stand in his way, but when this witless tour reaches the hall by the front door, without hesitation she pushes him, not exactly gently, out the door and–locks it behind him.
March related all of this calmly. His eyes became fierce only when he mentioned the door locking behind him, and I understood what had happened later that evening. March had fallen to his knees, beseeching Louis to come with him–or to shoot him. When poor Louis had begun to cry, March–who only a second before had had no inkling of what was going to happen–had brought out the gun and pointed it at his loved one’s chest, and before the youth could push the barrel away, the old but still serviceable piece of junk had fired. Off went the first shot. Down went the poor love slave Louis. The second shot was aimed at March’s own chest and failed. Obviously! Still more obviously, courage was lacking for a third. Sad, but true. Thus this chaste love story of a frog ended with twenty years of hard labor.
Who would dare to moralize to such a pure heart? Who would be so unfeeling as to look into the furrowed face of the good March, smile sardonically, and tell him that this sort of extravagant love always made him (me) sick. I don’t dare. I don’t have the courage for such an experiment.
I must try to escape the vicinity of this overly ardent heart in some other way.
I’ll be an attendant in the sick bay. Better to be hedged about by the ill than by the overly ardent love of a loving heart. How will I get away? Would money help, even here? Perhaps through the intercession of a certain seasoned junior officer grown old in the colonial service, whose family troubles would give him reason to make the crooked straight and the straight crooked for a few pieces of gold. He has very quickly grasped suggestions to this effect. Only the cash is still lacking.
So how to come by some money? My brother abandoned me. My attorney coldly stuck to business. My father took to his heels. But if fate swiftly sent me a “loving heart” in the form of Gummi Bear? And if Gummi Bear has in his possession a treasure with which he has only to part in order to obtain as much money as I need to get away? And to get away from him most of all, from March?
Come, dear heart. Don’t tell me about your feelings.
It’s morning now, and you have slept better than I, who was almost constantly awake. You pat my hand and return to your task of cementing the broken phonograph record. And what might clever hands not be capable of, what might a tube of fish glue not make whole again! When, at noon on the dot, we are led out on deck and into the atrociously scorching sun for our half-hour walk, you take your record along, carefully put it in a corner near a partly open cabin door; you happily pick it up on the way back to Cargo Hold 3, carrying it like a sacrament, a smile playing on your lips such as has not been seen in these holds, on this ship, for a long time, not even among the big guns and demigods, the ship’s officers, the brigadier general.
When night falls (and night falls fast here in the tropics), you wind up your machine for the first time aboard the Mimosa, put the repaired record on the platter, and set the mechanism whirring. And the record plays. The music that comes out is not quite what it should be, for the halves are misaligned by one groove, so that the melody is limpingly disrupted every few beats in a highly amusing fashion. The crack runs straight through the center of the record. But what we hear is pretty much the same sweet tune, with the same syncopated rhythm, same saxophones, same drumrolls, and great delight is reflected in the faces of those in the audience, including the fat Suleiman, whose lips bulge lewdly like the inside of a luscious, dark red, overripe fruit, half rotten and beginning to ferment. The guards are gathering out beyond the bulkhead, too, and I am able to catch the junior officer’s eye.
So now to business. The song is over, the convicts are waiting for more music and for their dinner. But I close the gramophone, pull March into a dark corner, I ask him in a low voice to be true to his word for my sake and sell the gramophone. Thus I am holding him to the boyish promise he so unconsideredly gave. He thinks. Thinking does not come naturally to him. Nor does he trust me completely, for March is not stupid. But when was a thinking brain ever a match for a “loving heart”? He straightens, pulls me too out of my half-crouching position. He wants us to be standing together at the open porthole, the dangerous mouths of the steam pipes above our heads, wants us to be looking at the sea, the lightening, violet tropical sky, just blissfully in love, and the silky curls of his thickly growing beard brush my hair with a soft rustling sound. And how subtle are the unfortunate March’s caresses and how chaste are they in all their sensuality. His frog hand slides between my chest and my shirt, which he himself did his best to wash last night. He whispers to me that he has been thinking about becoming a tutor or getting an office job “on the other side.” He has no trouble imagining everything. The bagnio is a fable. Yellow fever, malaria, and so forth, none of it exists for him. Nor do the thousand different kinds of misery, the fiendish climate, the milieu of criminals. I have said nothing about it–but he believes, he hopes, he loves.
Only one who has looked into my soul can have any idea how much these demonstrations of devotion horrify me. That they come from a man is not what is so terrible. Love knows no difference between natural and unnatural. But I can’t now, I can’t. He reminds me of something I hope to keep buried deep down, something that can never come back: he reminds me of my poor departed wife and her end. I can’t be a brute, can’t push him away, mistreat him, shudder in my own voluptuous fevers–I can’t do it. Love and desire are finished for me, gone for good. I have to betray him, I have to break away, today. For he touches me, he affects me so deeply that perhaps something intolerable to me, something that can never be, may yet begin again. Not without reason have I been silent about my wife for so long.
If I loved him, I might push him away. But since I don’t love him and can’t love him, I leave him be. Get what you can! And when he turns away and looks raptly about, he encounters the lustful gaze of the Sultan. Let him have the gramophone, the keepsake, the memento of Louis! How generous March is. He doesn’t have much. But he gives it all.
If only I could be like him! He lifts the gramophone from the bunk, unscrews the crank, opens the lid with his left hand while with his right hand keeping the box pressed against his heaving chest. You’ve bitten off too much, dear boy! The record that was just glued together with such care falls to the iron-plate floor of Cargo Hold 3 and shatters. No matter. Even the Sultan is magnanimous. There is no haggling over the price. The money in hard gold passes from the very unappetizing place where Suleiman has hidden it to March and immediately from March to me, and that very evening from me to the junior officer, and that night I am ordered to take charge of the care of convict 3334, a typhus patient. I pack my things and hope not to see March again before we land.
The sun is directly overhead in the cloudless sky. When I return from a short walk on the upper deck, the handle of the door to the sick bay is so hot that I need my handkerchief to touch it. Tar from between the planking is stuck to the soles of my shoes. Sleep is unthinkable during the day, even though the patient’s condition is not as hopeless as it was when I came to the sick bay.
At night no one can sleep. Great schools of dolphins follow the ship, cavort in the moonlight, spray silvery water about. No land. But it must be close, for we have been on board for over two weeks. The Mimosa made a stop to take on a herd of livestock, sheep, swine, oxen. A small animal has been slaughtered every day, a larger one every two days. The herd is now down to a few animals. The sheep are woefully thin. They sullenly grind the dry hay with their long teeth, rake their parched tongues over the bottom of their water tub, bleat tremulously and miserably. The two cows lie breathing heavily, their bellies swollen, and they will die of exhaustion if they are not slaughtered soon. They are held fast with ropes and chains to keep them from slipping off the deck when the ship rolls. No one pays any attention to them except the ship’s cook, who comes on deck to feel disdainfully along their thin backbones, and the convict March, who feeds and waters them as best he can. Food and fresh water must be conserved. But even if there were plenty of fresh food and plenty of fresh cool water, the rocking of the ship and the torrid heat would make this voyage an unnatural torment for the animals. Tormented or not, they serve their purpose. Their lean, juiceless meat is better than nothing.
The night is hot and clear. A large sea turtle drifts past on the open sea, carrying a silver bird, a heron, on its woody brown back. The turtle is about two meters long. Deftly yet placidly it paddles forward with its long webbed feet, extending its tiny head, dipping it into the gentle deep blue swells, and bringing it up again. The ship’s cook points out the animal to the officers, who still make attempts to hunt at night by the light of the (repaired) acetylene lamp. But as eagerly as they blast away, this quarry escapes them.
The heron calmly rises from its swaying perch and is soon floating in the moonlight, turning in ever higher circles, its long neck outstretched, its sharp bill thrust forward, its great wings barely moving.
After a long while, far behind our ship, now the size of a butterfly, it lets itself back down with motionless wings onto its own vessel, the swimming sea turtle of the species Chelydra from the Galápagos or the Gulf of Panama. The turtle’s tiny head has long since vanished in the bright, moonshiny wake of the Mimosa, and the officers, yawning, tired and sleepless, go back to the clink of glasses in the lighted mess.
Other signs of approaching land are becoming more frequent. Limbs of jungle trees as long as the ship drift by in the night. Gnarly treetops without leaves. But hardy creepers with lilac-colored flowers are still hanging like nests in the smooth olive or dark green branches. The tree trunks, which have floated to the sea from the great South American rivers, are covered with birds. Pink flamingos, standing on one leg, heads tucked under wings, asleep, travel on branchy rafts carried by the current under bluish white moonlight almost as bright as day.
If only rest were possible! If only sleep were possible! I have been a stranger to the deathlike release and celestial comfort of the deepest sleep since the first night here on the Mimosa.
No wind disturbs the hot night air. The chains of the rudder rattle, the little steering engine chuffs, the big engines work steadily, the screw propeller turns underneath the sick bay at the stern of the old steamer. From the mess comes the sound of the officers laughing and talking loudly, unable to sleep in the tropical night any more than I can. Nor is there rest down in the convicts’ dungeons. March’s gramophone plays constantly, the monotonous blare of the records does not cease. From my porthole, the one that the faithful March broke, the only one that is open, a white cloth is blowing. Perhaps laundry that has been wrung out and left to dry.
A rat scampers past my feet toward the restless, cruelly harnessed food animals and disappears beneath their bundles of hay. A soft squeaking, a weary baaing from all the sheep, a rattling of the chains of the cattle.
From the bridge can be heard the low, muffled commands of the officer to the helmsman over the ship’s radio, answered promptly by the clanking motions of the long chains that work the mechanical steering, and abruptly the ship, which for miles has been making a beeline and leaving a straight wake, shifts its course to port in a long curve.
The drifting branches are gone. On the wavering shimmer of the horizon are the contours of something solid, either hills on one of the many islands or just cloud formations.
Just an hour of rest! To lie down on the deck, look up into the inexpressibly clear sky filled with stars, constellation next to constellation, the Milky Way a wide, swollen, luminous river, tender, all-redeeming, and full of deathly repose. Different areas of the inexhaustible light, power, and grandeur of the heavens come into view with the rolling of the ship.
A patient is moaning in his berth. I tear myself away from the sky and go to him.
But he seems to be the only one not awake on this almost palpably humid, starlit, moonlit night, the only one catching up on his long-denied sleep; and he will stay undisturbed. Die if you can, live if you must. You will not escape yourself, base yet pitiable heart.
Sky, stars and firmament, turtles and herons and branches peacefully traveling over the water with a crew of animals, a great school of dolphins dancing and playing and spraying fountains of water in the distance–who would credit this witchcraft! But this is only nature’s painted mask. Everything beautiful, nothing true. The unearthly beauty of nature is just as excruciating as March’s love. What does it mean to me, what could it mean? The dream of a doomed man before his execution. Morphine without an injection. If only belief were possible! Knowledge is necessary–belief is not possible. Not for me.
Better for me to return to the foul-smelling, hideous typhus patient, disinfect his sleeping area thoroughly, submit to the hardest physical labor in the breathtaking humidity and heat of this endless night–so that I won’t be alone with myself for long.
Then, in a corner of the vestibule, the hall with doors leading to the patients’ berths, the ship’s pharmacy, and the patients’ lavatory, make a bed out of blankets and an old straw sack, throw myself down, and seek the sleep of the just, the most wonderful thing of all, until, toward daybreak with its purple glow, the one bearable time of the day, it comes at last. For now, at five o’clock, a cool, refreshing wind blows, stronger, drier, one that gives some consolation.
At seven I am awake again and quickly get up to put all the areas of the sick bay in order. The lavatory door is unlocked, I open it, and there sits–the brigadier general on his throne, an unlit cigar in his mouth, deep in thought. He does not move. If such weighty, profound meditation could take the place of the work of a creative scientist, his voyage would be destined to succeed. God be with him! I gently close the door, wash and feed my typhus patient, the mugger, and think about nothing.
The brigadier general is expending the sweat of his brow on a lot of little slips of paper, some round, some square, of various colors. He has been going through a mountain of medical journals and pinning the slips of paper (with the pins between his long front teeth, the good man resembles an old seamstress) onto a large map, to the horror of the captain, who did not permit the use of his valuable map for this purpose. But the rank of brigadier general is too godlike. Everyone bows in awe and deference.
Through unremitting hard work, the worthy Carolus has evidently obtained two results. No, he has not discovered the yellow-fever pathogen. This can be achieved only on the battleground of the most terrible, most dangerous epidemic since the bubonic plague. If it can be achieved. Nor has he discovered the epidemic’s mode of transmission, its precise epidemiology. Here we have as many theories as there are scientists who work on this tropical enigma.
One of them, an old physician on C., even wanted to make mosquitoes the culprit. Without proof, of course. Mosquitoes! Anopheles! Stegomyia! As though this disease, the “yellow plague,” were a kind of malaria, which is known to be spread from person to person by the bites of mosquitoes. What a difference, what a confusion, what a flight of imagination!
Carolus has at least one thing going for him. He has no imagination. He has clumsy hands, worse, he has unclean paws, he is incapable of isolating a pure bacterial strain, he is afraid of living flesh, of the pain of his victims! He pokes infectious material into the faces of poor, defenseless convicts, he forces them to wait for hours, exhausted and hungry, while he makes statistical tabulations of strictly academic interest–but he has one thing going for him: he believes only what he knows.
A simple principle. And yet this is the only solid difference between a man of exact science and an amateur.
The first of Carolus’s two results has to do with the air temperature of all the places where cases of yellow fever have been reliably documented. Yellow fever requires an average night temperature that does not fall below twenty-two degrees centigrade and an average daytime temperature that does not fall below twenty-five.
The second result concerns the geographic range of the epidemic and its history, which he dictates to me as follows:
“Yellow fever, also called yellow plague, is an infectious disease, reports of which began reaching Europe soon after the discovery of America. The accounts of Father Du Tertre in the nineteenth century, when yellow fever was widespread in the Antilles, are the first in which the disease is unmistakable. It is, in fact, native to tropical America. From there it spread to North America, West Africa, and Europe. Its primary zone lies between the two tropics. That is, in the equatorial region.
“Within the two tropics–the area below the twenty-third parallel in the northern and southern hemispheres–it is the American and African coasts opposite one another where cases of yellow fever are attested. That is, the east coast of Africa and the west coast of America. To be geographically precise, the region of the Gulf of Panama and vicinity, and in Africa the Ivory Coast and Gold Coast. The disease cannot spread significantly in temperate zones.
“Susceptibility of the races: Europeans more susceptible than mixed-race individuals. African Negroes and Mongolians appear to be immune; that is to say, they may live in epidemic areas, may come into contact with the ill, and yet are not infected. The most susceptible” (what a sardonic smile, you old Pharisee–do you think your general’s insignia is going to give you some protection from the disease that we poor felons don’t have? Not likely!) “–the most susceptible is the newly arriving European, the more so the cooler his country of origin.” (All of us! The righteous and the unrighteous, thank heavens!)
“Men more susceptible than women.” (Too bad!) “Adults more than children.” (Sad!) “Strong young people more than the old and weak.” (Eternal lunacy of “kindly,” “benevolent Mother Nature,” as we like to call it, that painted old whore.) “The poor more susceptible than the rich.” (From the circles of hell to the spheres of heaven and here too, preferential treatment for the moneyed classes!)
Finished, old itchbag? He drones on, mouth stretched wide, scratching himself with his apishly hairy hands, now on his chest, now on his long, columnar skull, with its patch of pale gray-blond hair seemingly in the wrong place, like a slipping toupee. No, he has a lot more theory to dictate, many more slips of paper to pin up. In one hand I have the pins, in the other the box of paper slips, and I’d need a third to write down all the important scholarly discoveries.
As the head of the commission, the brigadier general has the powers of a governor. If I can stay with him, everything will be fine, everything. I am going to be allowed to, will be, must be. He bosses me around sternly, orders me to join the other deportees when we land, but then to report to him. As a research assistant? Oh no! Only as a manservant, who will assist in autopsying yellow-fever cadavers and so forth. God does not forsake those He loves. He does not forsake them. So I’ll be the first to be infected by the yellow-fever cadavers and will snuff it in no time. March, darling, you’ll be avenged. Play your gramophone when they carry this old sinner to the grave. And don’t cry for me. G. L. the younger doesn’t deserve it!
My charge, the typhus patient, is fortunately on the road to recovery, and even the brigadier general is gracious to me. He addresses me again, from the depths of his narrow bureaucrat’s breast. And what does he say? Does he thank me for my hard work? Does he commiserate with me? Does he marvel that a man of my background, of my (his) station, is a criminal convicted without possibility of appeal? Or is the good man thinking ahead, does he want to have a friendly chat about what he’ll be up to on the other side in the near future? No, none of these. “You owe a great deal to your father.” Long pause. His eyelids lift behind the smoke-colored, horn-rimmed glasses, he focuses on me, and says again: “You owe your father a great deal.” That’s it, and the tall, thin, impassive fellow, lightly clad, turns his endlessly long, stiff back to me, and with his storklike walk returns to his cabin to pore over encyclopedia volumes, study British, American, German, and French reprints, and copy out extracts from them.
But my troubles aren’t over. Yes, the convalescing typhus patient has at last put his legs, sharp and bony, covered with black hair, over the edge of his bed, climbed down unsteadily, and taken his first faltering steps with my help; he eats solid food (in tremendous quantities), is mentally lucid (intent on thievery), keeps himself more or less clean–but the sick bay has a newcomer. The man who caught my attention during the chief’s examination with his great, feverishly glowing eyes and hollow cheeks, their red circles the badge of jailhouse consumption in all its misery, has been hemorrhaging heavily due to congested pulmonary circulation, as is not uncommon in people with severe lung disease when they arrive in very hot regions. He is a young man, not much over twenty, a city kid, cunning, vicious, but fun, full of boisterous humor (“There’ll be pie in the sky by and by!”), of irrepressible high spirits. Lie down? Rest? Take it easy? Keep quiet? What for? Delighted with his unaccustomed freedom (he spent long years in prisons, busily sewing mailbags), he roves about all over the Mimosa. He even intrudes on three men suspected of having leprosy who live sequestered in a room of their own in the sick bay, tending each other’s nasty wounds, spending most of their time in a twilight half-sleep, and preparing their own scraps of food, as apathetic as animals at rest. They are even heard singing at night or early in the morning. But the lung patient wants things, he leaves me no peace. At night he stands at the rail and admires the sea, spitting cigarette butts down, almost asphyxiated by the smoke; during the day he scurries past the guards with a polite smile and into the officers’ galley, where he begs tasty morsels from the chef. If only he could stomach them! But nothing stays down. Incredible that this man, doomed in equal measure by pulmonary and intestinal tuberculosis and with the signs of both of them stamped all over him, is still alive at all, talking and moving around. Why does this candle go on burning when it has neither wick nor tallow left? No matter. It is burning.
And yet he is still a man, that is to say, he is vain. He has rooted out his shaving things (a forbidden possession) from among his belongings and tries to beautify himself for our arrival in C. Are there women there? he asks. Are there ever! I promise him. Not women, dames, he means. More, you poor dog, than you’ll ever have any use for. But he is happy nonetheless and hopes. There is no mirror in either the sick bay or the ship’s pharmacy. But the clever boy finds a solution. Every microscope has a mirror that can be turned to reflect light into the light collector or condenser–and this the ingenious youth has turned to his own purposes. The microscope’s wooden box was locked, the brigadier general had the key. But a thief as good as that, even one on his last legs, can find a way. A bit of wire and any lock opens for him. And there he sits on the laboratory stool, keeping his balance with effort amid the rocking of the ship, shaken by coughing and trembling with weakness, looking infatuatedly into the microscope mirror with his great beautiful eyes and doing himself up. Who would have the heart to stop him? Even the brigadier general kindheartedly looks the other way. All the tidbits the poor emaciated fool has begged fill the pockets of his convict’s overalls. He likes to keep them around, he who cannot keep them down. But at least he has them.
He also makes music. On a well-used comb already missing some teeth–it belonged to the mugger, who lost all his hair from typhus–he plays stridulating, sweetly buzzing versions of popular songs, “Under the Bridges” and “La Carmencita,” stamping on the deck to beat out the rhythm (his wooden clogs are loose on his emaciated feet). He smiles, he is happy, he sleeps peacefully despite the heat, despite the coughing that plagues him. He coughs and gags constantly, yet sleeps as though he were in the bosom of Abraham.
No other creature on the ship is so happy. The officers have given up the shooting at dolphins with which they amused themselves a few times. The ship’s cooks struggle to concoct delicacies for them out of canned goods; nothing appeals to them, they just sit sullenly together in the mess, give the crew a hard time, avoid the convicts like the plague, drink whiskey, and play poker, their money passing from one to another in turn, all except the brigadier general, who never plays, never drinks, and is never bored.
The oxen up on deck have no interest in food, either. March, poor fellow, strives in vain to get them to accept some hay and water. They only pant, grunt reluctantly, lift their broad heads, strain at the tight chains binding them to the masts and other uprights. I want to be there when they are slaughtered so that I can use their blood to make a nutritive medium for culturing bacilli (blood flowing straight from the bodies of animals is almost sterile). We still have some days to go, and I have to work, have to keep busy.
March must have heard about my request to the purser. He has volunteered for slaughtering duty even though he has a horror of blood. To other criminals it would have been a pleasure: blood is blood.
And the unfortunate March, this man who is completely blinded by his infatuation and whom one is justified in barring from human society for that reason alone, tortures himself by butchering a beast that had once been a fattened ox but is now only a prisoner. Just to be able to see me and look into my eyes. But I do not look into his. I sterilize a tin basin with denatured alcohol, hold it into the stream of blood, and then take it away, leaving as I came, without a word. He is distraught. What was he hoping for? What am I supposed to be to him? He to me?
Hard-hearted, me? Only one who is equal to the world at last.
In the sick bay I follow my patient’s example and check the mirror on the microscope before putting it away. The mirror is flat and beautifully polished on one side, concave and beautifully polished on the other. Precision is precision. I look at myself. And why not? I’ve been wanting to. I never found the moment for it before.
I look at myself. I see myself as I always was. I have not changed. My father certainly had a mirror on his voyage to the far north. Not on his way back. That I can look into this mirror, without love, without hate, face immobile, without a smile, without a grimace of pain, without hope, without feeling, do I have him to thank for this too?
The lung patient has finally taken to his bed. He can no longer smoke and suffers painfully from doing without. “You smoke!” he says to me. I smoke a black cigarette that has almost entirely disintegrated from the heat and blow the smoke into his waiting nostrils. He turns away if the smoke is too strong (the paper is the main thing, the tobacco is incidental), but then he brings his wax-pale, skeletal face back, his eyes full of longing. He has no desire to eat. Or is now unable to eat. “You eat!” he says, and I eat, and he avidly watches my throat and yearningly inhales the smell of the food, his eyes burning. It irritates his throat, sore from laryngeal tuberculosis, just as much as the tobacco, but he is enthusiastic about the strong broth for which we can thank the world-weary ox slaughtered yesterday, and in his awkward, ludicrous voice, the dying man wheezes to me, “Go on!” He clutches at me with his emaciated hand, looks at me with his great, beautiful, dark blue eyes. He smells disaster coming but refuses to believe it. The bacilli demolishing his lungs, stomach, intestine, larynx, etc., secrete as a by-product a wonderful toxin, essence of euphoria, whose effect is that he always hopes, always believes, is always happy, always laughs! There’ll be pie in the sky by and by. He dozes off. As he falls asleep, he asks me to open the porthole. But it has been open for a long time.
The night is blue, lit by the floating moon. Not the slightest breath of wind. The stokers shovel coal into the fireboxes. The ship’s officers quarrel, then laugh, and singing is heard. In the convicts’ catacombs, things are especially wild. But no music, just clamoring and scuffling, strident hooting, muffled crashing.
There is a gleam on the horizon like oxidized silver. The piled-up clouds are vast, complex edifices, like Indian temples with endless gingerbread and turrets, everything sharply defined, flooded by the bewitching whitish blue of the moon.
Down in the water by the sides of the old ship, a spectral shimmer is passing by. Tiny sparks flash, little flames strewn in a plane phosphoresce and die down. All in the shadow thrown by the ship. They materialize from some realm of light, tremble on the surface of the water, which gleams under the moon like a single piece of cast bronze, then fade behind the ship, where the smooth, shiny, silvery blue-green backs of the splashing, dancing, leaping dolphins toss in the wake. They reappeared this evening and have been following the ship in a large school. But little sea creatures play in the soft shadows on either side of the gliding ship, phosphorescent plankton and undulating medusae, squids on the hunt and being hunted, tiny organisms brought to the glistening surface of the ocean by the hot, still night.
The lung patient has awakened. His body feels the end coming. But his mind, addled by the happiness toxin, has only a blind sense of well-being. He asks me for his suitcase, and from the bottom of it he brings out scraps of illustrated magazines. Photos of naked and half-clothed young women, in candy-cane colors, posing provocatively. He turns the pages with his pencil-thin, tobacco-stained fingers, and suddenly he begins to cut the figures out with his nail scissors, laying them out on the grubby blanket in front of him. A children’s game? You little lamb, white as snow! So this is a harmless person, someone who arrived on this convicts’ ship just because of a moment of recklessness? Pie in the sky? Pie in perdition too, I fear. Just look at the dark red lips twisted with lewd destructiveness in the pale, gaunt face, their corners still showing traces of the blood he lost this morning! Look at the depravity in his pathologically glowing blue eyes as he carefully, precisely, dismembers the paper figurines with the scissors as though they were living, suffering flesh. Off comes the left foot, extended in a toe dance, then the right foot, then the delicate, supple left forearm. The typhus patient looks on, a smirk on his face. Take him away, off with him! But I leave the dying man undisturbed. Now he hesitates: should he first cut the paper head off straight across, or slice the slender lingerie-clad midriff top to bottom? Pure evil at play is an exciting thing to see up close. For him who understands it. Rejoice, poor soul! I do as he wishes and leave him alone. Fifteen minutes later he is again in a deep sleep, the blood gone from the corners of his mouth. The next morning he can barely breathe. “Am I going to die?” he croaks. He’s dead already! There are no scraps of paper lying about. But when he is lifted from the sweat-soaked bed, there they are on the sheet. I give him the dismembered figures to take on his final pilgrimage. A man must have what he needs.
The brigadier general comes to view the deceased. He gazes at him with a sage expression. He touches the dead man’s fallen-in chest with his black fountain pen like a Chinese medicine man with a chopstick and sends the deceased to his final repose. And a cross is entered in the rolls. Prisoner 4431 is no more.
We are near land. Possibly an island is not too far away.
A ring, now much too big, is taken off one of the dead youth’s fingers. Imitation gold, with a fake stone. The junior officer checks his mouth for genuine gold crowns, but, what a pity, the boy still has all thirty-two of his teeth, gleaming white, flawless. So without further ado. The body is decaying from within, and one more hour on board in this hellish heat would be too many. Where can it go? Not to heaven. The other way, where we all must go. Down.
Scattered butterflies, the size of grape leaves and with the same ragged shape, crimson and sapphire blue, or dull mauve, float through the rigging on the forecastle of the Mimosa. They encounter obstacles and come to rest, their long, dove gray antennae vibrating, behind coils of rope, winches, chests, nothing giving more than the scantiest shade in the blazing equatorial sun.
Behind the ship is a frenzy of activity: the school of dolphins. Several hundred magnificent ones and more every hour.
Gleaming like niello, they are so densely packed that they almost lift each other out of the dark blue water; they spiral into the air, spinning like dragonflies over a brook. Broad heads, white snouts, small eyes, slapping dorsal fins, laminate tail fins lashing and reflecting the highlights in the water like mirrors. Above them gulls and pelicans: shrill cries, rippling wings, banking, powerful climbing, lightning plunges as they slash into the water, flinging up silver-bellied, finger-sized, slim little fish. Above it all the unapproachable grandeur of the sky.
This is the hour when the convicts are led on deck, in squads, double file: a boarding school with a prefect. Bayonets in front, on the side, in back. Quick time! Move! Move! A tender rifle butt in the back, a kick in the meager behind, forward, march! Flex those muscles! A little exercise never hurt anybody! I will not describe the gray faces.
No church bell tolls to announce the burial. The convicts do not care. Their faces are agonized, sullen. Many drag themselves along like sick birds, like lame animals. But what primal strength still lives within them! Strength to suffer!
With my help, the junior officer has wrapped the not yet cool body of the consumptive criminal in one of the typhus patient’s sheets. Throw in a piece of iron bar, and then the whole thing into the sea! One, two, three, hup! But the piece of iron comes loose and flops into the water. The featherlight corpse beside the ship is carried to the wake and then back to the dolphins.
They play with it: the fun-loving lad floats between heaven and earth as the animals in mad high spirits toss his mortal remains back and forth, until at last the whitish naked corpse disappears in the dark mass of silvery dolphins.
I was awakened by shouting. I heard shots being fired. I say awakened, and yet I was unable to wake up properly. It was hard to breathe, there seemed to be a lump of lead the size of a man’s head on my breastbone. I was dreaming about being awake, tearing off the few clothes I had on, yet they kept being there, clinging tightly to my sweat-bathed body. There was an unnatural, pathological longing in me, the half-sleep refused to lift, and I had to realize that the shooting and shouting had stopped (waking thoughts alongside the sleeping ones) before I could summon the energy to wake up. And this after close to three weeks of almost total sleeplessness.
When I finally became fully conscious a few hours later, I thought it was still night. My cabin seemed strangely gloomy; the ship was abnormally quiet. The horizon was completely draped with brownish black clouds resembling coarsely woven old sacks. The air was dark, the sun breaking through only at rare instants with an unpleasant gleam. Here and there on the horizon toward the west and the south, little rain showers sprayed down from the clouds, creating a fraying fringe lit by rainbow colors.
The sea is not turbulent. But abruptly whitecaps appear, the ship shudders as though it has run onto a sandbar–the throb of the engines stops, then sluggishly starts up again. A dense lilac curtain forms in front of the ship to the north and northeast.
The surface of the sea is wan, flat, dirty, gray. Without warning a cloudburst hammers down out of the low sky onto the planks of the ship. All decks are flooded. The junior officer and the black guards wade through tepid ankle-deep water, carrying an apparently lifeless heavy man on a stretcher.
The convalescent typhus patient, happy not to have to be below in the common area, makes himself useful, sets up a bed in the sick bay, blows the dust off the night table. The heavy man is Suleiman, the Sultan. He is breathing heavily, wheezing, his head moving beneath a bloody rag; he prods with clenched, bloody fists at his face–a shapeless, bloody mass, a seething, twitching expanse of raw flesh. The men carry him carefully into the sick bay. He twists his head back and forth, unable to see.
His face is unrecognizable. It has been leveled, so to speak. Where the bold hooked nose once was, the pride of its owner with his manly beauty, now there are only lumps of flesh and the two nostrils. A warm, sickening stream of blood, air, and discharge pushes out of the nostrils, jagged bones have broken through, white ruins of teeth guard the entrance to what was once the oral cavity, and there is a steady trickle of something flowing down through the wild beard. As strange as it may sound, this is tears! The nasolacrimal duct is torn. There is no way to stop this out-of-character stream of tears.
The rain pelts down with the force of a hailstorm. With his dirty fists, the injured man tries fruitlessly to lift his eyelids, swollen and bluish with bruises. Is he blind? he rasps out. He is fully conscious.
He was trampled in a brawl in Cargo Hold 3 during the night. He may have lost his sight, or he may be lucky. His good friends were among those who stomped on his chest. Three ribs are broken on top of everything else, and he is coughing up frothy blood.
It is so dark now that the light has to be turned on in the sick bay. The man lies on the improvised operating table. He is in the hands of fate. Not much can be done. The bone splinters can be deftly removed with forceps, the wound can be dusted with iodoform. It is terrible to see the sausagelike fingers, covered with more bruises, clench during the painful procedure: the criminal who has been savaged by his fellows suddenly raises his hand in fury and shakes it at the physician. The physician notices now that the left thumb is broken too, dangling from the plump, blue-tattooed hand like a branch snapped by the wind and held on by a bit of inner bark.
As the wound is being carefully cleaned and the finger is being splinted, the rainy gloom outside the porthole suddenly lightens. In the distance the heavy, bluishly livid murk lifts like a curtain, and the vast sapphire blue surface of the sea can be seen again.
The overcast lifts, the sun shines.
The planking on deck steams with evaporation. An ox, the last of its tribe, lifts its glossy, heavy head, lows loudly, and clanks its rain-wet chains, the sheep shake the moisture out of their dense dirty-gray wool and bleat, and–March appears, to tend the animals as he does every day. He is sweaty and pale, and the sunshine only makes him look even more miserable and more grief-stricken in his lovesickness. Oh, those wistful glances!
A commission consisting of the brigadier general, the commander of the guards, and the captain conducts a hearing with the injured Sultan Suleiman. But he is uncooperative. He shakes his wild head, spits a bone fragment out of his lacerated mouth now and then or shakes one inelegantly out of his ruined nasal structure, curses savagely, but he will not name names. Will not give his comrades away. He only wheezes, lisping with his swollen tongue, “Bathtards, bathtards! You wait till we meet again! You wait!” That sweet baby, the s is too hard for him to pronounce. Even this brute of a man has become an innocent child again. We all have.
March, who crept in after the officers abandoned the futile hearing, looks him over nervously. His tread is gingerly in his heavy, hobnailed shoes. The Sultan cannot see him. Whether he will ever see again at all is the question. The giant may be fallen, but he still terrifies March. Are we to believe that it was March (along with the others, but their true ringleader at bottom) who trampled on this no-longer-human face tonight when there was no other way to fend off the bestial assaults of a pathological criminal, a satyriasis case?
Dozens of small storms have appeared on the horizon and passed over within a short period. The air has become still more oppressive. After each cloudburst the heat seems to be worse.
The authorities are nervous now. With good reason? I don’t know. The steam pipes running to the cargo holds are going to be tested. When the alarm is sounded, the convicts rush on deck. Scalding hot steam is diverted to the cargo holds below. The convicts are made to hear the hissing, it is impressed on their innocent young minds what awaits them if they revolt, if they kill where there can be no killing. Only fate can kill with impunity. The state: war. Nature: yellow fever, typhus, cancer, pulmonary tuberculosis, and other fine inventions of God. Hunger and the struggle for existence. All will continue as long as the world exists.
But the test of the steam jets has had one good effect. The steam, at a hundred degrees centigrade, has roasted a good two dozen plump rats. When, in the midst of another storm, the all-clear signal is sounded, the convicts toss them into the sea, holding them cautiously by the tails so that the cooked skin will not come off the bodies. The convicts laugh and go back to Cargo Hold 3 while 1 and 2 receive the same lesson.
Four days later we arrive safe and sound. You can come back now, March! Now I can come back to you. On solid ground I’m safe, and we’ll be the best of friends as long as you stay sensible.