I will not describe the life of the deportees in the archipelago. Much as I would like to, others have already described it better and more movingly than I could.
Disembarking from the ship was less exciting than boarding it had been. Suleiman was still alive; he was half blind and unable to walk. He was carried down the gangplank on a stretcher, cursing a blue streak. March was pale with anxiety and clung closely to me.
When we arrived, the epidemic of yellow fever (which, for the sake of brevity, I will henceforth refer to simply as Y.F.) had evidently passed a peak. Among the convicts–who lived in large camps far from the city of C., as well as on the other small islands of the archipelago–it had not yet wreaked its havoc. The civilian residents of the city had been affected to a much greater degree. But a rainy period had recently begun–that is, one of the many rainy periods that took the form of titanic downpours of short duration, followed by torrid, insalubrious heat and malignantly luminous gloom–and the Y.F. had abated.
At the last census, five years earlier, the city had had a population of about twelve thousand. Thirty years before that it had been forty thousand. Its fortunes were like those of a person of whom one says at age twenty: A genius! At thirty: A man to watch! And at forty he is simply a name.
Late in the evening we were led through the squalid streets, which were filled with almost blackish rain pouring down in torrents. It was evil-smelling, dark, dank, and almost deserted everywhere.
Conditions in the camp where I spent the first night, the faithful March at my side, were not much different from those on the ship. The convicts were awakened at four in the morning and they began their work at five, felling and trimming trees in the mangrove forest and removing the trunks, clearing land and putting down log courses for a road across the great woodlands (laid out many years before, it had never progressed very far), and so on and so forth.
But first a few men were taken out of the work gangs, either for office work in the very large administrative corps or, as in my case, for “special service” in a field hospital. Weak or strong was irrelevant. It was accident or caprice. March was also among those selected (because he had been an official?). No protest was possible. We were not asked about our wishes, talents, or capacities.
The most interesting diseases were rampant in the camps–skin conditions of all kinds, malaria in the most beautiful forms, tuberculosis, and the insidious condition of intestinal worms, whose victims wasted away, becoming true skeletons–but, by a happy twist of fate, not a single case of Y.F. had been found recently in any of the numerous convict camps.
March did not leave my side. He knew that Carolus had designated me for very hazardous work as a morgue attendant in the epidemic hospital that stood on a rise in the center of the city. It was a large-scale catchment hospital primarily for Y.F., dating from the city’s better days and run by nuns.
No doubt that good child March had no idea what this meant. Otherwise his handsome face would not have been shining with delight on the way. Or else he trusted in his star.
And why would he have left me? He had given himself. And whether I accepted him or not–he stayed. They would have had to shoot him, or cut his hand off, the hand that clutched my coat. But the administration did not consider such barbaric measures. Despite his childlike nature, March may have been able to look out for his own interests properly. He had not banked on his past as an official. God knows how he had obtained more money. But he had some. Those minor officials who kept the rolls also kept a sharp eye for the main chance, and were no doubt every bit as impressed by his generosity as they were by his devout wish never to leave me.
Thus we were brought arm in arm to the old convent, which, with its yellow patients, was at least as well guarded up on its hill as the camp with its convicts was down below. For everyone was terrified of the epidemic and helpless against it.
Now, during the day, the city almost looked bleaker than it had the night before. Dereliction and crumbling walls everywhere, many churches, few shops or restaurants, here and there a warehouse or shed by the shore, crates, barrels, and bags lying outside unguarded in the alternating rain and steamy heat. Hungry dogs, ravenlike vultures looking for food. Muck and refuse all around, wretched paving, ragged people hurrying along, heads down. Magnificent plantations, avenues of palms and breadfruit trees and so forth. But we ran into four funerals on the short tramp that had taken no longer than forty-five minutes. What devastation the epidemic must have caused among these people in the worse times that had just passed! Suddenly the rain stopped and the sun burned down. The sea gleamed, the dogs scratched, the vultures soared, and the vegetation between the cobblestones gave off a scent that seemed ambrosial, or feral.
We passed a burnt-out area, deserted and still smoldering. I learned that the people there had tried to protect themselves from the epidemic by setting fire to some disease-ridden buildings after buying them from the owner for a high price in hard cash.
But the epidemic took no notice of this extravagant prophylaxis, it slipped nimbly around corners, a house here, a house there, three cases here, five there. And the entire city would have had to be burned down, from the harbor to the farthermost houses already sinking into the slopping, bile green swamp, from the barracks to the administration buildings, from the bank to the theological college, everything would have had to go up in flames like Sodom and Gomorrah in order to conquer the Y.F. The city? What am I saying? The entire coastline, as far as the eye could see, and much, much farther beyond that, to the Pearl Archipelago, the region of the Panama Canal to the north, and an equally vast distance to the south! And even that wouldn’t have been enough!
As we panted up the hill, we saw hordes of ragged, hollow-eyed, deathly pale, half-starved men emerging from dark little side streets steaming after the downpour. These were freed convicts who had hidden from the epidemic in some corner of the jungle, living on raw fruit and orangutans that they had hunted, and who, now that the epidemic had apparently abated, were seeking the way to the imaginary fleshpots and shot glasses of the city. They envied the two of us as we climbed up the narrow little zigzag road to the convent hospital side by side, preceded and followed by guards, or so it seemed as they twisted their scrawny, naked vultures’ necks and watched us. One of them even began to run after us to beg, but the others held him back from this foolishness. Certainly they assumed that since we were wards of the state, that loving, faithful provider, we were being given the necessities of life. They did not know that something scarcely enviable was in store for us.
The bell at the hospital gate rang. Two old black women and a stern-faced white nurse in stiff blue cotton, all with large silver crosses on their breasts, came out tiredly with a stretcher. They were very surprised to find healthy people seeking admission. The guards on duty as a quarantine cordon could hardly get over their astonishment either, laughing so uproariously that the whitewashed, pungent-smelling passages and corridors of the old convent rang.
But it was not us they were laughing at. An old man had come with us and joined us on our walk to the examination rooms, a man wearing a costume more original than anything at a carnival. About seventy, tall but stooped, narrow-shouldered, olive-skinned, with a leathery face and dark, deep-set eyes of unbroken fire of which one never had a direct view. For this vigorous and characterful old face was hidden by a faded yellowish green nun’s veil. A veil? What am I saying? Two of them, one behind the other, stiffened in front with semicircular wicker strips, so that no unchaste glance could offend this maidenly granddad. Ah, but it was not indiscreet glances that this elderly he-nun was afraid of, but, strange to say, mosquitoes! And perhaps not even that. It was morning, and mosquitoes never bite in broad daylight. So it was something else: a show.
For this striking aristocratic gentleman was none other than the pharmacist and municipal medical officer von F., the renowned originator of the mosquito theory of Y.F. He was just now paying his first visit to our Herr Brigadier General, the head of the commission, and the army medical officer Walter, its scientific director. The news that Walter had arrived here astonished me greatly. This was the greatest coincidence, the most unfathomable of the many unfathomable things that had befallen me in my lifetime. And yet it was logical. Meeting this man here! But what role should I assume? Old comrade? Fallen man? Eternal sinner? Scientist with a thirst for knowledge? I was apprehensive. But everything seemed to happen naturally.
We all went into a clean room, formerly a convent cell, where the two top men already were, surrounded by splendid, spanking new equipment. That is: Brig. Gen. Carolus, the mastermind, the state dignitary, human knowledge personified. Then Walter, my old comrade, the idol of my youth. He recognized me. I bowed, and he nodded. He was very worn, not unmarked by time, but still the same good fellow as before, a man with all sorts of degrees who was much more knowledgeable and capable than he let on. The pharmacist and retired municipal medical officer Dr. Felizian von F., the man behind the veil, shook their hands warmly after much ceremonious bowing and flowery language. He had brought them some mosquito eggs in a matchbox as a small token of his esteem. They looked like coffee grounds. He smiled quietly and proudly, as though this was something of the greatest interest. Then he extended his hand to March and to my humble self. The door was closed, the chapel bells tolled outside, we looked at each other. The commission had been convened, and the great sphinx known as Y.F. lay waiting for us to penetrate her secrets. I was tired and yawned discreetly.
The hospital director was at Mass. (A weekday!) His aide, a young resident, was away on vacation. But pharmacist von F. was in his element. The son and nephew of physicians, though his children had left the trade and gone into business, he had been begging the authorities, learned societies, patent offices, and physicians to take his theory seriously for years. But anyone who looked this comical fanatic in the eye could hardly help laughing. His bearing solemn, not really stooped but stiff as a poker despite his sagging, crepitating knees, the little box of mosquito eggs in his gloved hand, he led the way along the twisting corridors to the autopsy room. But could this be right? Stop, friend! Instead of telling us all about how you carefully culled Stegomyia mosquito eggs from marshy pools (painfully bending your bad back), watch where you’re going, don’t take us into the waste room, where there must be reeking offal in a state of the rankest decay. But he turned his wise face to us, holding his veils together, bowed, every inch the Spanish grandee, and ushered us into the dissecting room.
A stench for which there is no name, so nauseating and intolerable that the demonic imagination of a Dante could not have conceived it, assaulted us from the small, electrically lighted, relatively cool underground room. March clutched me with a low cry. Even the leathery, phlegmatic Carolus trembled all over. Only Walter and I did not lose our composure.
Lying in its perfume was a blond corpse, quince yellow, poison yellow, wearing white gloves and a shirtfront, a once white but now very unsightly dress shirt, on its concave chest. In its gloved, graceful, long hands a silver crucifix.
In this place, at that moment, I was encountering Y.F. in nature for the first time in my life, and I silently paid it due reverence.
In fact my life changed fundamentally that day. For the better? In any event it was different. And that was a great deal for a man so dissociated from himself and from the world as to be convinced that he–twisted man of the spirit and man of doubt–and it–the world of futility, of misleading appearance, and of undeniable tedium–would never be reunited, and that his existence would therefore go on being the most superfluous thing in this superfluous world . . . But why these thoughts and memories? Back to the present, that was exciting enough.
I would be lying if I said my dignified bearing was entirely genuine. The smell, an outrageous, abominable stench utterly beyond description, something purely sensory yet beyond what the nervous system could make sense of, made me, believe it or not, cry. Shed tears, to be more precise. I wanted to vomit but did not allow myself to. I had to manage that much self-control. I needed to live up to the upbringing my father had given me, and I did. And, as strange as it may sound, at precisely that critical moment I became aware in every nerve fiber of the mysterious spell of scientific investigation. A thousand reasons for controlling myself and doing my best to will the nausea away, even if tears were shed.
It was as though I had an inkling that I would soon need all my strength of will–that I would need it to master fate lest I be mastered myself. I overcame my revulsion. I pressed March’s hand, which was trembling with horror (he had perhaps never seen a dead body before the death of his beloved Louis). A feeling of sympathy for him awakened in my heart. Reluctantly, but nevertheless. There is something to be said for having a living person by one’s side at a moment of crisis.
And another odd thing happened in that instant. I saw not only that golden yellow corpse in its ugly, stained dress shirt, not only the heavy silver crucifix in its gloved hands, the gloves just pulled on, not buttoned, but also, through a strange association of ideas, a scene from my childhood in which my father and three or four rats (as big and as distinct as he was) figured, and then a scene from the happy period with my wife of which I have not been able to give a report as yet. And what finally appeared in my overly scattered (or concentrated) thoughts was the grand, blazing night sky I had seen on the Mimosa before our landing, which had put me in mind of the illusory, all-too-beautifully painted mask of nature.
At that moment the pharmacist, who had let down his portable mosquito netting to chest height, dropped his little box of mosquito eggs. I, gentleman that I am, stooped at the same time as he did, we bumped heads, I found the box first, and, as the old grandee was excusing himself profusely with a thousand baroque old formulas, I put the little box in the breast pocket of my prison livery.
But enough of these trivialities. The work began.
Not for nothing had Walter gone through the Institute’s rigorous methodological training. He had spared no effort in preparing the ground for our bacteriological research; there was a good microscope, there were incubators. But when Carolus mentioned that he owned an especially powerful instrument equipped with all the latest innovations (dark-field illumination!), even two eyepieces, whereas the microscope that belonged to the epidemic hospital was not a recent model, it was agreed that he would go get his own while we did the first culturing experiments. We, I say, for the second time. I used this wondrous word the first time to express my fellow feeling for the deportees, who, by virtue of their common suffering, their common ejection from civil society, had constituted a we of sorts. But a we full of boredom, full of spitefulness, rancor, cynicism, piggishness, an appetite for brutal fisticuffs, full of unnatural love and unnatural hate, futile snarling at the authorities, though they frankly deserved no better. Here, on this first morning on C., as initial preparations were being made for a systematic and exacting epidemiological study amid the pestilential stench of the Y.F. corpse, there was also a we, but a different one. Neither on that day nor during the days to come did I hear among us a contentious word. Nor an overbearing one. Everything happened naturally, at an excellent pace. We were frankly not always of one mind, perhaps not ever. But we worked together nonetheless, and did our utmost.
I personally did not believe, could not believe it would be possible to get a grip on the Y.F. pathogen using ordinary methods. Too many investigators, ones who had been too good, had failed, Pasteur among them. Nevertheless, from the first moment, as soon as March and I had disposed of our highly disagreeable clothing, I was a zealous participant in the bacteriological investigation. For the first time in years, I was absorbed, knew no fatigue, I had a truly pervasive feeling that there was a constructive reason for me to exist, and the others too. If only fate willed it that this go on! That was all I wanted! Was it too much to ask?
So, down to business. There were two primitive incubators in the adjoining laboratory. More than a hundred cultures were started in short order.
The departed had been the director of the city of C.’s small power plant. He had passed away during the first stage of the disease, on the fourth day following initial symptoms. He had arrived three weeks previously on the packet steamer with a group of various administrative officials and the like, had paid his first visits to important personages such as the governor, and was just beginning to get the rather shabby plant into some sort of shape when he became ill with Y.F. and died. To go by his fair hair and skin, he must have been a Scandinavian, perhaps a Swede. His name, Olaf Ericsson, suggested the same.
I return to the first morning. This must be an orderly and methodical report.
“Let’s write, please–and clearly!” Walter said to the somewhat astonished Carolus when he returned with the microscope, expecting God knows what respectful thanks from us. But let it be said to his credit that Carolus neither sulked nor assigned this menial task to me, the convict, but sat down at the little table, took his black fountain pen out of the breast pocket of his uniform, and wrote: first the precise autopsy findings on the Swede, which were typical, and then the sequence of bacterial cultures to be produced from the blood, the devastated liver, the affected gastric and intestinal walls, the inflamed renal cortex, and so on.
Would luck favor us in this Y.F. problem where so many had failed, including none other than the great Louis Pasteur himself? Miracles may happen, but not in bacteriology. Over the following days, weeks, and months, not a single bacterium grew. The flasks containing liquid culture medium kept in the incubator at a constant thirty-seven degrees centigrade would remain abacterial. For us as for all researchers who had worked on this disease.
All four of us, Walter, March, Carolus, and I, had been busy with this one case until midnight, and the black nurses whose job it was to look after us came repeatedly to call us to eat something. Eat! Nothing could have been further from our minds. Let the reader try working for an hour in the deadly, pestilential stench characteristic of Y.F. and then sit down to eat. Even with nectar and ambrosia on Limoges china in front of you, that hellish perfume will have taken up residence in your taste buds, in your oral mucosa. The choice was either to get used to it, by denying it, or to get out and stay out. For me, as for the others, the first alternative was the one that prevailed in the long run. I ate, I bathed, I changed my clothes, I slept, I began my work early every day and did not finish until late in the evening. The waning of the disease was short-lived, by the way. It was all gong and no dinner, as the saying goes. But the strange fact remained that not one case of Y.F. had yet been reported among (for example) the recently arrived criminals. What was one to make of that? The only thing to be made of it was the theoretical result that the wise Carolus had already obtained from his books–but all in due time!
However mysterious the pathogen and however puzzling the pernicious disease’s mode of transmission, the clinical picture was classically beautiful in almost every case. High fever out of a clear blue sky (clear blue sky? downpours in incredible swarms, separated by radiant tropical sunshine and humid, leaden heat) with extraordinarily rapid onset, jaundice. Seeming recovery after the third or fourth day and then all hell would break loose, vomiting, dreadful abdominal pain in the region of the liver. Throat, gastric, intestinal symptoms. Headache. Lumbar pain. Overwhelming feeling of illness, blazing red eyes with vividly inflamed conjunctivae–everything was there, shall I say unfortunately, or shall I say thank goodness in the interests of our research? The contagion appeared as implacably as it had for centuries, then subsided again, war and peace, no end in sight.
The authorities had to add their two cents, of course. The wire chattered, Walter and Carolus put their heads together over brusque telegrams. “Give special attention to matters related to the cause of yellow fever and its prevention.” If only! Eventually we had examined eighteen cases, from head to toe, inside and out, we had scrutinized patients at all stages. For purposes of control we used the famous double microscope in pairs–Carolus and Walter, March and I. We stared until our eyes were sore, and at the end of those terribly hard days knew no more than we had on the very first day, the day of the yellow Swede who had long since been buried in his white gloves and dress shirt.
Walter and Carolus would not have been the classically trained doctors they were if they had not done animal experiments. Monkeys from the nearby jungle, guinea pigs (easily obtained at home but here a resource difficult to come by), rats, mice, parrots and other exotic creatures too, even a world-weary nag housed in a shed in the old ruin of a convent, all of them received injections of blood from patients, of blood from cadavers, of extracts prepared from dirty laundry. The four of us seemed to be equal participants in these vivisection experiments.
But our roles had changed, in a way that was quite perplexing and will undoubtedly appear very curious to the reader of these lines. Carolus, who had formerly always shunned living flesh, who had always avoided vivisection experiments, was now fired up about them–and I, I, Georg Letham the younger, was now unable to overcome my inner resistance to them. I did not directly refuse, but I was adroit enough to pass these distressing tasks on to my colleagues and contented myself with the other part of the work, the culturing experiments, the staining methods, the preparation of histological organ sections, their fixing, hardening, enhancement, and precise sampling.
I am unable to say why. But I did not touch an animal. Not even rats, although this species stood on the debit side of the ledger in my life and I continued to find these creatures a bane of creation, a misbegotten horror that had unfortunately been allowed to exist, one of nature’s mistakes. I preferred to have old Carolus do the guinea pig injections when necessary, and the result was not long in coming. One of the guinea pigs perished, the sole casualty among the animals in this series of experiments. But was it the unknown pathogen of Y.F., or simply the uncleanliness and poor technique of the brigadier general, whom the good Lord had wrathfully made a bacteriologist? Was this the way it had to be? Did I have to have this bias against him? I will speak more of this.
But, by way of compensation, the entirely professional Walter received unexpected assistance from–March. No one who has not seen that brave, handsome little fellow at work can have any conception of that unbroken young person’s cleverness, of his thirst for knowledge, of his manual skill, his tireless industry, indeed his passion for the work that surely must have repelled him, disgusted him.
Nor was he deterred by the negative result of his work. Every day he rose to do it knowing his appetite would not suffer because of the stench, whereas Walter and I both lost a great deal of weight during this period (it was July, always an abominable time in the equatorial region) and were often near tears from exhaustion. But we held up.
For all March’s help, Walter had to wire the result to his higher-ups–the result that he had nothing positive to report.
Cases of the disease continued to vary in number and severity, but material was always there.
We worked. It was often enough to drive one to despair.
But, apart from Carolus’s one casualty, the inoculated animals enjoyed the best of health.
From the beginning we had all thrown ourselves into our research with the greatest passion. The setback had to be correspondingly great, and so it was. I said before that all the inoculated animals (except for a single guinea pig) survived the introduction of infectious material without any perceptible deleterious effect attributable to Y.F.
The brigadier general was looking around for something else to do and remembered his statistical tabulations; with these–here as in Europe–he was in his element. He felt at home wherever there was a box of paper slips, a chart, little flags and pins, the old fool. But when I say “the old fool,” as earlier I called him a “lummox,” I must ask myself if this is not the voice of envy speaking. Envy not just of his military grandeur, his general’s insignia, but envy of his sheer philistine certainty. Of the fact that he had borne life as it was. But the brave Walter had done the same, and I do not call him these things.
Here there may be an internal contradiction in my character, a self-destructive false foundation, which gave way when I committed my crime, assuming it would support me, and would probably give way when I came to make any important life decision. It was something unfathomable, but with the force of a natural law. That is to say, ultimately just as incomprehensible as any law. I would not speak of it at such length had my antipathy to such a person as Carolus not cost me a great success. But all in due time. Here I will restrict myself to our old medical statistician’s conclusions, alluded to earlier.
He observed (always on the basis of his maps, charts, and statistical methods) that a case of true Y.F. occurred, let us say, in the third house from a certain corner in the city of C. (on the right side of the street coming from the harbor). The next (luckily it was possible to make a precise observation of this now, when cases were relatively sparse)–the next case was found not in the house next door–that is, not in the second or fourth house from the corner–nor directly across the street, but around the corner on another street, perhaps, or even around the block, separated from the first epidemic center by a large vacant lot covered with piles of refuse, cisternlike pits full of water, pools and puddles, piles of rubbish and empty cans, bodies of animals and sawdust, hutches for small domestic animals, and relatively small rundown planted areas. It was determined that there had been no contact between the first case, that of the Swedish engineer, let us say, and the second, the wife of a senior administrative official; they had never seen each other. How had the contagion spread? On the wings of angels? I asked sardonically. At the time none of us was able to draw the correct conclusion. No doubt it was too simple.
Secondly, it was determined that people in the hospital became ill relatively rarely. The building was situated on a rise. At this time of year it was exposed to a particularly blistering sun–what idiot had decided to make the Jesuit convent a hospital? The sickrooms were thus true hellholes comparable to the “steam rooms” of blessed memory, the torture chambers on the Mimosa (do you remember, dear heart, fair, dear March, is that why you’re smiling at me?), and some of the examination rooms had to be located in cooler basement areas, where it was necessary to work by artificial light, preferably in the evening hours or the first few hours of the night.
But who could always arrange this so conveniently? It was frightful in the sickrooms, especially the ones under the flat roof. And yet it was very seldom that transmission occurred within the building. The staff remained healthy, as did the black women who dealt with the mostly dreadfully soiled clothing and so forth. So: why was it that the nightmarish contagion lost its infectious power here within these walls, where the chapel bells tolled death knells often enough? Crossword puzzles are easier. We had no answer.
The third observation was that the patients often came in waves. There happened to be a lull when we arrived. Then there were three or four cases; then there was a lull of about ten days; then the epidemic resumed with renewed virulence. Could it be some plant that took ten to fourteen days to bloom and then sprayed the poison of the yellow-fever plague from its resplendent, showy stamens? Carolus’s statistical curve was very distinctive. But what did it distinguish from what? Connoisseurs of these things such as the good pharmacist von F., the old man with the portable mosquito netting around his patrician head, were consulted. He was questioned closely about these three matters. But all he had on his mind was his mosquitoes and their fine points. These he had observed and studied in minute detail, but he had neither made his own observations of the three particulars of interest to us nor had his attention drawn to them by others; nor yet was it possible to induce him to attach any special importance to them, no matter how hard we tried. Not that he really grasped our problem. The eye of an inspired statistician was needed in order to see these three points at all–and Carolus was one. And he was even more than that. By no means the lummox I had called him in a moment of abject envy, not in all situations. For, to my discredit, let the following be reported at last.
It will be recalled that the sole casualty of our many experiments was one of the three guinea pigs he had inoculated. I had gone through the corridor into the basement rooms where there were ranks and files of animal cages. All the animals alive and well, except for this one guinea pig, a male with rust red and yellow-white spots, that would not eat, had yellow conjunctivae, and seemed to be feverish. I took its temperature: thirty-two degrees centigrade. Was it any wonder? The clumsy hand of a Carolus had wielded the inoculation needle; everyday contaminative microorganisms had evidently gotten into the bloodstream. The animal whined softly and piteously and shortly died. I told Walter, who nodded gloomily at my (false) report–general blood poisoning with hepatomegaly–and seemed very depressed by the negative result of all his (our) efforts.
“Is that all you’ve found?” he asked.
“See for yourself!” I replied, producing the specimens. And he, who had himself once determined or at least rendered it very probable that guinea pigs could be inoculated with Y.F. serum, was satisfied with my superficial finding. He put terrible trust in me, and I wanted to put my trust in my preconceived idea. But I could not. I was more conscientious than that. I stained the guinea pig’s greatly softened, inflamed liver, placed the tissue sections under the microscope, and found, instead of the usual pyogenic organisms, suspicious microorganisms, pale objects more intuited than really precisely detected, with a spirochete-like form, that is, shaped like corkscrews–and this in one spot, in one section out of six. Now the most obvious thing to do would certainly have been to report this problematic finding to Carolus and Walter. To pursue it. To give the specimen special attention. To repeat the staining, try all known methods, from flagella staining and osmic acid mordanting to the familiar spirochete tests, as it is the duty and responsibility of every honest, respectable bacteriologist to do.
Did I? By no means. I was too ashamed to admit that my first report had been inaccurate. I also begrudged Carolus, whom I knew to be a bungler, his success. So quickly was the team sundered. In dealing with a lummox, I thought, anything was permitted. I preferred to convince myself that what I had seen had been “shadows” of bacteria, remains of spirochetes from another case. For the administration was thrifty, and the glass plates on which we stained the smears had been used before; March was supposed to have washed them carefully in hot caustic soda liquor, but, pigheaded as I was, I had my doubts. So out of antipathy to him (a natural reaction to his unwanted, importunate love) and hatred for Carolus (a reaction to his indestructibly assured, parochial, stolidly happy nature), I neglected everything that should have been my duty. I was every bit as frivolous and small-minded as so many mediocre researchers, and hence what I was looking for eluded me just as it does them.
Had I done what I should have done, and had I not done what I did do, I would have been spared many hard lessons. I am not softhearted. Not even toward myself. But, after all that had happened, I had believed that my capacity for suffering was exhausted and that now I would–but let’s not get carried away. The facts and nothing but the facts are going to have to go on doing the job of conveying my joys and sorrows.
So far I had dealt only with nonliving material–and with the animals. When (thanks to my failure) the futility of our efforts to date had become fairly clear, I had to expect that I would be put back in a camp with the other felons and from that point on do hard physical labor, such as road building. In the best case I might hope to be sent to one of the municipal offices as a clerk or bookkeeper. In the environs of the city and on the surrounding islands, there were rubber plantations of no mean significance; there were deposits of gold-bearing quartz, which, though sizable, had not been adequately worked due to the climatic conditions; the precious woods in the immense and to some extent still virgin forests on the peninsula were traded internationally by a wood-utilization company. Even within the numerous convict colonies, which included a leprosery and a few more or less primitively equipped hospitals (also a modern one), there would have been plenty to do for a man with an academic education who was willing to work. And yet it was decided that I would remain in the old convent hospital, the collection point for Y.F.–and why? I had said not a word, I had made no requests, but my highly placed father had brought it about that when deported I “be employed in my profession where practicable.” My profession was primarily experimental bacteriology. Experiments were being done here in C. They had to do with bacillus X. Would that do? Of course it would. And when there was no longer enough for me to do in the laboratory, idleness being the very worst punishment for a man like me, I was put to work, as I had been aboard the Mimosa, caring for some severely ill patients.
I had always had the ill-fated ability to awaken trust in people. And now the hospital director, who was old and not overly bright, but capable and experienced in his specialty, had me brought to him, looked at me for a long time without saying a word, and then assigned me to take charge of medical care in one of the many sections of the hospital that stood empty these days more often than not. It was understood that this would be a test. And so it was, though not at all in the way he and I expected. He trusted me. I saw that.
To approach the disease from a clinical perspective, that is, from the standpoint of bedside observation, I was to study fresh, recent cases especially. Smiling politely, I bowed deeply before the old gentleman (sunburned, with snow-white hair and beard), while he sat smoking his good cigar. As I did so I brought my chin down onto the neck of my lab coat, and in the breast pocket I felt a rectangular object. In the sickroom where I was taken, I realized what this was–it was pharmacist von F.’s matchbox of mosquito eggs, some of which had now hatched into little mosquito young. Later I will describe these curious insects in the depth these strange children of promiscuous Mother Nature deserve. Here I note only that one of them had inquisitively forced its way out of the box through a tiny crack and was producing its peculiarly high, piping, piercing sound, like the buzzing of a string, as it sought to make good its escape. Which it did not succeed in doing. The room, the sickroom I mean, was in semidarkness. Not only had the green wooden shutters been lowered, but the windows were also hung with red woolen or silk fabric. At a minimum I would have to remove it in order to perform the initial examination of the sick child. For it was a child, as the hospital director had intimated. There was one more person in the little room (its construction, the high Gothic vaulting and so forth, indicated that it must once have been a residential cell for inhabitants of the convent).
Before I laid eyes on the partly hidden, fearful patient, the chaperone, her ayah or nanny, came to my attention. This was a woman in her midsixties, in claret-colored Sunday best, with freshly starched white cotton petticoats, broad white gauntlet cuffs around the worn, gnarled, coffee brown hands. The close-fitting bodice was buttoned to the throat; around the shoulders, hunched with age, was a small, triangular fringed shawl. Long earrings made of green paste in gold filigree settings hung from the earlobes, which were greatly stretched out. The wide, rubbery mouth was tightly set with emotion. The bony fingers moved agitatedly, a strange rosary made of large silver spheres rattling between them. Her eyebrows were shaggy like an old man’s, as gray and coarse as grit. The animated, sparkling black eyes moved restlessly from the director and me to her charge, of whom only the neck could be seen at first, as the child had buried her head in her sky blue satin coverlet out of fear of me, or perhaps to avoid the strong light. As one neared the bed, by which the old woman was standing, one noticed first the rather sharp odor characteristic of the mulatto’s black race, somewhat reminiscent of the perspiration of animals, but then one noticed another smell, stronger every moment, like that of the old Swede and the other corpses that had come to our basement table, only not so penetrating. Y.F. There could be no doubt after all.
The director told me briefly who this was. She was a girl of fourteen and a half, Monica Zerlina Aglae, etc.; the family name, a Spanish-sounding name consisting of many individual names, is irrelevant here. He gave me to understand that the young thing was the only child of very well-to-do Portuguese parents. The father had worked for three years here in the old section of the city as the director of the large wood-utilization company. The child had been brought up in a convent in Europe. But at the fervent request of her unreasonable, doting mother, the old nanny had brought her here. Here? Certainly! She was lying there before us, was she not, looking at us with beautiful, velvet brown eyes already inflamed by the disease and smiling imploringly.
Her mother had known of the danger of Y.F. Indeed, she herself had long been in constant fear of it. So why stay here? And why in the devil’s name bring an innocent child into this atrocious climate, this hell for criminals known the world over? Her husband was putty in her hands. He had no choice but to stay, and he could not live without his wife. And she not without her Monica. Logical, no? He needed to earn a lot of money. The wife had led a life of luxury in Paris in recent years, had bought crazy amounts of jewelry and so forth; it was precisely here, in such a perilous post, that the husband could hope to recover a large fortune in a short time.
The child had evidently been in good hands in Europe. Everything going swimmingly, had not the foolish woman been afraid every moment of catching Y.F. And of having to die without seeing her one and only again, her child! And the husband weakened as men often weaken toward women they love, even to their downfall, and gave in. He accepted the mad notions in the doting mother’s simple, stupid doll’s head and had the child come. The ayah missed her little girl and had pushed for it, too.
When the ship was already en route, the epidemic, then in a quiescent period, broke out again with renewed virulence. What to do? Send a wire? In vain. There was no way to call it off (or was it that no one wanted to call it off? Any ship can be reached by wireless telegraphy!), but vows were made. The fearful mother (afraid for herself? for the child?) promised heaven everything, ten years of her husband’s earnings, all her splendid jewelry (I would make the acquaintance of some of it). But heaven showed no consideration. Why should it?
Heaven showed no consideration, I say, but did I?
I must speak, I must tell how it all happened–and for the first time I am seized by a diffidence inexplicable even to me, I don’t know what to say, what not to say.
My innermost feelings are now responding for the first time since the death of my wife, I am speaking of the only human being toward whom I have felt what I have heard described as “love.” Ill-fated love? I don’t know. So positive a feeling as love can never be ill-fated, if it is genuine. Such an enormous test of the human heart can never be all for naught. What a load of sentimentality and slippery ideas. I have pledged, I have promised myself, that I will speak only of facts.
The first sound I heard from the child was a low, brief cry of pain. What I now saw of her was a small, brownish, plump, but long-fingered hand, feeling about on a slender neck beneath dark blonde pageboy-cut hair. But she did not find what she was looking for. All there was on her fingertips was a little blood, at which she gazed in wonderment with her large, still quite childlike, yet already womanly eyes. A mosquito, no doubt one of the young ones from my matchbox, had bitten her and, disturbed before it could finish its meal, not satisfied with that little bit of blood, was still humming about the bed, taking that unpredictable zigzag path that is familiar to us from moths in our climes and is so frustrating to hungry animals. The little insect, gleaming silvery and black, pleased with its newfound freedom, circled quite unconcernedly about the night table, upon which lay all sorts of fruit, little dishes of compote, bottles of mineral water, and a small bowl of ice chips in fairly large clumps. Finally the mulatto was able to shoo the mosquito away with one of her cotton kerchiefs. The insect flitted out the window and into the hospital courtyard, where its wings flashed in the afternoon sun and it vanished.
The little Portuguese girl had sat up and was looking at me. Despite her feverish condition, she was amused by the chase after the mosquito. Her strawberry-colored lips, which were swollen now and perhaps for that reason had a somewhat sensual appearance, with a shadowy suggestion of dark fuzz over the mouth, curved in a smile. She seemed to be mocking herself for having taken seriously something so trivial as a bite on the neck by a mosquito. It was just this pluck, this mischievous irony, that I found so captivating. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and she returned my gaze. Or was she only looking at her new doctor with childlike curiosity? I have said that I had the gift of being able to awaken trust, and what could be more important for such a young creature, one who is seriously ill, than to find a doctor who inspires trust at first sight? Then she will hope, believe, and trust.
Many physicians have this ability. It can be seen in pediatric clinics when an exhausted tiny creature, in the midst of its suffering–suffering that can only be bewildering and thus all the more terrifying for it–will instantly stop all its wailing at the sight of a certain doctor, wipe away its tears with hands almost too weak to do anything, and with an indescribable expression of pure submissiveness, of courage, indeed of faith and even delight in the midst of distress, give itself up to the physician who, responding to the illness, not the gaze of the sick child, is preparing to examine it.
I was given this ability, as are many others. I don’t know why. The venerable age or imposing beard or practiced manner of the physician or friend to children cannot be the reason for this mysterious trust, this devotion, this touching absorption of the suffering little creature in the strange doctor.
But why the theoretical discussion? All because I am unable to bring myself to report my love for the child. Let the reader fear no new horror stories! Let him expect no weepy fiction, either. What is at issue here is the typical medical history of a girl somewhat older than fourteen, and the futile efforts of an older man disillusioned with himself and the world to save her and become at one with himself and the world once again.
It was, as grotesque as it sounds, love at first sight. Can that have been an accident? Or did I, Dr. G. L. the younger, sentenced to lifelong hard labor on C., embark upon this absolute self-abandonment, hopeless from the outset, because I suspected that it could never be fulfilled? That Monica was just as doomed in her way as I was in mine? Or was I still hoping, in some corner of my heart? That is the question.
I don’t know, and I didn’t think about it. I had no thought of the future. My heart beat, I was with her. It was that simple.
I stood on the left side of the bed and began the examination. The mulatto on the right side, breathing heavily with agitation, watched tensely. She wanted to be in the room at all times, would no doubt also want to improvise a bed for the night here on the cotton-covered reclining chair of the kind often provided for convalescing patients. Whenever I was with Monica, she was there. We were never alone, even for a minute. Or no, we were, before the end–nearly alone.
My examination yielded the following picture. She was a girl of normal development and stature, of the southwestern European type, with good, strong musculature and gracile, regular bone structure. The dentition was complete and well-formed. The fever was moderate, 38.9°c, the lips and pharynx swollen, though only slightly at first, the tongue coated, dry, the conjunctivae reddened and highly sensitive to light. Hence the red cloths over the windows. The liver was only negligibly enlarged, not sensitive to pressure, but the abdomen was somewhat distended, with dull pain. The onset of the disease had probably been three to four days previously. Carolus’s statistical findings–the particular vulnerability to infection of new arrivals from cooler regions, healthy, strong, muscular types, white people–were borne out here, except the fact that men tended to be more susceptible than women, which I had cynically regretted on the ship. At that time I had been sorry that men, the more highly organized of the sexes, were more sensitive to Y.F.; now this injustice angered me. For now, seeing this blossomlike, chastely sensual, truly enchanting creature with the slightly frowning, strawberry-colored lips and the downy shadow above them, when I had this creature afflicted by the great misery of Y.F. and the small misery of a mosquito bite before me, close enough to touch, and when I felt: here now in your life is what you have always yearned for and always dreaded–now I would have wanted all men to be subject to the epidemic and all women to be safe. What madness feeling is!
But what can words convey? For the first time I see the meagerness, indeed the factitiousness of what at the beginning I called my “report.” “Close enough to touch,” “chastely sensual”–what drivel that is, fraudulent, sentimental drivel. For the thing that really happened and happened with outward banality, yet with inward unfathomability, here as so often in life, I am unable to put into words. I doubt now that anyone will have any feeling for me in this part of my story, very likely with good reason, for I know that very likely no one will understand me.
The child had fallen back onto the hospital pillows without taking her eyes off me. The plump down comforters with embroidered cambric covers that she had brought with her into the hospital were sprawled on the reclining chair, which, covered with bright repp or cotton, stood in the corner of the room and which I have already mentioned.
The eyes were glassy, the conjunctivae bloodshot, as one sees in drinkers in a state of advanced, blissful alcoholic befuddlement. I have already reported this, have I not? But drinking! Befuddlement! This was remote from Monica. Not even fever was befuddling her now. She was lucid, and answered my questions in French as precisely as she could. She was bright beyond her years and perhaps had an idea what was happening. Speaking was already difficult for her. But she even raised herself off the pillows as if to make herself more clearly understood, pulled her cream-colored, brightly flowered chiffon pajamas, which were held around her throat with a green ribbon, still tighter, so that her somewhat too thin neck emerged like the stalk of a flower. The carotid artery could be seen throbbing beneath the fine skin with its blond down. The pulse was rapid, 125 beats per minute, the heart within normal limits, strong, as is generally the case in the flower of youth.
Presently she put her hand to her brow, behind which she felt severe pain, and I hastened to fill an ice bag with ice chips for her, first crushing them as finely as possible, and then placed it on her forehead. Crushing the ice chips required some strength. It is usually done with a mallet, not with the hand. But it seemed to be easy.
I had acquired new energies since entering this room.
Someone in the full bloom of youth–could I not hope to save her? If it was humanly possible. Nevertheless I was not able to devote myself to this patient alone. Two more Y.F. patients were brought in on the same day, or rather one Y.F. patient and a second man whose symptoms were similar to those presented by Y.F. sufferers, but who in fact had a different, less dangerous ailment.
This was a man in his late fifties, worn out before his time due to alcohol and nicotine abuse, a tavern owner from the docklands. His establishment was said to be small, lucrative, and disreputable, as it was frequented by the most dubious elements of the city, freed slaves, thieves, and scoundrels, usually swindlers rather than murderers; also lepers–who furtively traded the poultry bred on their (officially) hermetically sealed leper farm for absinthe and whiskey–half-caste women, and the like. He had the best relations with the administration, for which he acted as an informer for love and money both. For who if not he was so knowledgeable about what the dregs of the population were up to? Needless to say, he took advantage of the trust placed in him by the authorities for the purposes of extortion of all kinds practiced against his peers. He shamelessly cut people’s throats and then boasted about it later; he was one of the richest but most despised men in the city. He was proud of the livelihood he had created for himself and did not hide it from me. He had, by the way, also provided us with some of our experimental animal material and had not made a bad profit.
When he had suddenly fallen ill with ague and hematuria and a yellowish tint had appeared on his bloated, flat features, he had been hospitalized involuntarily. He was in a state of high anxiety that his house might be torched while he was gone or that he might or would become infected here. He ranted and raved, spat incessantly, would not stay in bed despite his patently serious condition, and his raucous presence had the quiet, gloomy hospital in an uproar. Bellowing like a chained bull being burned alive in its stall, he wanted to fly at the director, at the old nurses, and it took all the art of calm persuasion I could muster to at least get him to permit a thorough examination.
I have said that I possessed a certain power of suggestion, both with children and with raging patients. Here again it did not fail. No doubt it lay in my gaze and my laconic but strong-willed nature. He yielded to me, mastering himself only with the greatest effort. His limbs still twitched. He rolled his eyes like a ham actor playing a villain; his head, with its oily, slicked-down hair, jerked back and forth on the bed under my hands while at the same time he strained to pull it backward away from me. But the instant I made the first exploratory maneuvers, he grew visibly tranquil, like a mesmerized rooster. Yes, he grinned at me, took my hand, looked me in the face, and he was off and running. He took me for one of his own kind, had known right away that I was not one of the hospital’s staff physicians, but rather a convict (as he himself had been), and that (like him) I enjoyed the undeserved protection of the authorities. His eighteen years on the island, where there were always more sick people than healthy ones, more people dying than being born, had practically made him a doctor too. For the region was just not a healthy place to live. He took me by the wrist, guided my hand beneath his left costal arch, and had me feel a moderately hard mass jutting out into the middle of his left upper abdomen beneath his skin, which was feverishly hot and covered with dark hair.
At the beginning he had blustered, raving, spluttering, shaking off spittle, had balled his fists and gouged furrows in the soft wood of the night table with his long, cracked nails. But now, quickly soothed, he had silently guided my hand.
He was a criminal, a vicious parasite upon human society, but by no means stupid and, even with a temperature of more than forty degrees, he was in control of himself.
And he was right. What he had was anything but Y.F. In all likelihood it was a severe tropical malaria that had made him ill, and, as would emerge, neither his first nor his last bout of it. What to do? Honestly tell him that? For was he honest, did he even understand what the word meant? He was not without experience of tropical diseases, as I said, for anyone who has lived (if you can call it living) for long years under the hellish sky of this jungle region, in an area where epidemics take turns with each other and have worked out a peaceful coexistence, is familiar with all the plagues of this blessed Eden. What he had had me feel with my hand was, he believed, an enlarged spleen due to severe malaria, and so it was.
Again, what to do? Could he be discharged? Rightly or wrongly, he was now within the Y.F. cordon. If he were allowed to go, who could assure the custodians of municipal health that he was not bringing the unknown microorganisms with him down into the city, perhaps in the black grime under the cracked nails that had dug into the wood of the night table? If they were bacteria, might they not lurk there and elude all attempts at disinfection? One question after another.
And keep him here? At his peril? Who could assure him, who was after all a human being, whose morality or immorality could never be permitted to have any bearing on his suffering or the decisions made about it, that he would not contract Y.F. here in earnest? Could one say: Look here, you old extortionist, you trafficker in human beings (retired), trafficker in animals, bloodsucker, you filthy brute, you criminal who may have been punished but are by no means reformed, you engorged tick on the poor, sick, afflicted body of civil society, listen, we who work here in the hospital are just as exposed to the danger of Y.F. as you are. The following have sacrificed themselves. Brig. Gen. Carolus, a high-ranking military dignitary, irreproachable, a man of the spirit and of science, has readily put himself forward for the sake of the commonweal, with no thought to his wife and child and grandchild at home. Likewise Walter, a man far above the common standard, a scholar and humanitarian, also a husband and the father of no fewer than five children, a man of the highest worth, both as a human being and as a scientist. Quite apart from the director of the hospital, the chaplain, and the altruistic, entirely selfless nurses, everyone from the old mother superior down to the washerwomen who have to clean the dirty sheets and pajamas of the Y.F. patients, for someone has to, and down to us, March and me, we have all taken upon ourselves the risk of Y.F. Why don’t you follow our example and do the same!
What to do, I repeat. Compliance could have been expected from a person with any philanthropic cast of mind, in his silly muddleheadedness (if I may be blunt). Not this man. He was in the right, that was certain. He had been done an injustice. For he should not have been brought here by force (and in the meantime have had his belongings rifled through) without a thorough examination.
But there, it had happened. I shrugged my shoulders, freed myself from his flattery, bald assurances, and crass attempts to creep into my good graces, and left. I asked the hospital director. He could not be induced to make a decision (although there must often have been such cases here), but referred the matter to Carolus. Carolus would not have been Carolus if he had been able to bring himself to a clear, resolute decision. So on to Walter. Walter had been my youthful ideal, I credited him with all that I myself lacked in unbroken will to live, positive attitude, and affirmative belief, but today my expectations of his high-mindedness were bitterly dashed. He said nothing, put the tips of his index fingers together, looked at us with his serious, masculine gray eyes, and then, still without having said a single word, went back to his specimens. He had equipped this laboratory with everything that was needed, and exemplary order prevailed. If the matter had had anything to do with him, he might quickly have come to a decision, for he was one of those devout, heroic men who may be called upon to do great things and actually do them provided their own interests are involved. Not if those of others are.
But he withdrew into himself, shrugged his shoulders; he took off his wide gold wedding ring abstractedly, putting it between the pages of a notebook bound in red leather that he kept in the breast pocket of his white coat. This unconscious, mechanical movement of Walter’s suddenly reminded me that I still had pharmacist von F.’s box of mosquitoes (Stegomyias). I interrupted the discussion and asked Walter for permission to breed the mosquitoes. He had nothing to say either for or against it, and, with the help of March, who had been listening silently, I readied a wide-necked stoneware vessel, closed at the top with thick gauze, for the pretty naiads. Then I went back to my three patients.
What a pleasure it had been in the old days to play the god of fortune! This had now palled a great deal. I humbly returned to the old tavern owner. He looked at me with a cocky but worried expression in his feverishly glittering rat’s eyes. He should have become truly hardened to all the horrors of life on earth during his eighteen years on C., but he was frightened of nothing so much as of contracting Y.F. in the hospital. Did he want to live forever? As far as the welfare of the lovely city of C. was concerned, whether he was permitted to take off or had to stay came to exactly the same thing. Since no one had the remotest idea how Y.F. was transmitted, the cordon around our building could be freely lifted, the guards could be sent home, and, for his part, this good man here with his pleading eyes fixed on me could be restored to his noble profession, his dear family, his “loving hearts” down in the old part of the city.
Until such time as he was released, he would give the poor nurses and me no rest. He would be a constant disruption; his angry, vengeful clamor would be worse than the delirious clamor of the Y.F. patients who were actually seriously ill. So off with him! If for no other reason than to let poor little Monica in the next room have some peace and quiet and get a little sleep.
I had another feeling, one new to me. No longer did I ask myself whether I was even capable of love. My life had changed. I even used a different tone of voice with him. Was it true? Could it be? Was it thinkable, had it ever occurred in the annals of the human heart, that someone far past midlife was still capable of so radical a change? Or was I deceiving myself again? That someone past forty might feel and suffer from and delight in something he has never known in his eventful life?
Responding to him just as if he were a human being, I asked the innkeeper if he felt strong enough to be taken home. For if he was without a doubt free of Y.F., well, he did have severe tropical malaria. His tobacco-stained, widely spaced but strong teeth were chattering with fever–but he did not hesitate. He wanted to be off no matter what, if only to die down there. If he had to die, he didn’t want to die of a disease that had been imposed upon him here, even inflicted upon him, for the sake of human society at large.
So arise then, gird your fat loins, and clear out!
What happiness, what rejoicing!
If only fate willed it that the charming little creature in the next room leave this accursed building alive, alive, alive! This was all I asked of fate, which had so far mercifully protected me from the worst! But could I believe in a reasonable fate? I, who had had to recognize the unreasoning, impassive horror of the way of the world from my first lucid moment? Had my father taught me what life was like for nothing? Had he dwelled among rats for nothing? With all his intelligence and energy, was he still wretchedly inferior to them after all, to this aspect of nature?
Suddenly the lights went out. This had been happening occasionally since the director of the municipal power plant, Ericsson the Swede, departed this life. The convicts who operated the machinery at the edge of the forest under the supervision of junior officers and kept the plant’s boilers running with freshly felled timber did not always understand the voltages and control panels, and the lights often flickered, sometimes going out for minutes at a time.
I hurried to the young girl, but even at the door I saw the twisted filament in the little green hospital table lamp blaze up again with golden light and, after a bit of wavering, go on calmly burning.
May it be a good omen! And I, who had never been superstitious, grasped at this insignificant portent, I rejoiced that the child seemed to be sleeping quietly, while the old mulatto continued diligently working on her knitting without lifting her eyes. Occasionally she fluttered her needlework to shoo away the flies circling around the light and the little one’s head.
Meanwhile the tavern owner had already set about getting dressed. He fumbled into his clothes, swayed on his short, bearishly clumsy legs, and attempted his first steps. Suddenly, cursing under his breath, he seized the beefy Bordeaux red roll of neck that bulged out of his narrow, grimy collar. An insect seemed to have stung him, he had grabbed for it, and the little beast, besotted by so much fine blood, had chosen to be squashed rather than give up its prize.
He now held the mortal remains of the mosquito between his sausagelike fingers, muttering something about his sweet blood, whose allure neither the girls nor the mosquitoes could resist. But what did they mean to him, either of them? He had plenty of money and could buy himself the best quality love (by his lights), and as for the mosquito bite, otherwise so dangerous, the mosquitoes had already given him a token of their esteem, he already had severe malaria, which was known always to be spread from person to person by mosquitoes.
This last mosquito bite would not hold him up. He, who had vanquished, had given the knockout punch to so many episodes of malaria with plenty of quinine and whiskey, was hoping that this time too he would be back on his sturdy feet after a few days–or else in the grave.
A third patient had been brought in along with him. I had had the least to do with him so far. Firstly because the diagnosis of Y.F. was unmistakable, and secondly because he seemed beyond human help–beyond medical help, that is.
It had struck me when I first arrived at the Y.F. hospital that there were very few physicians, though there were many nurses. The old hospital director, who was swamped with administrative work, was supported by only one young resident, and he was on vacation.
For it was characteristic of this disease that the work of the nursing staff was often much more important and meaningful than that of the physician. I had not wanted to believe that human ingenuity and science could be so utterly powerless against Y.F. And yet they were. There were a substantial number of nuns, older ones and the candidates known as postulants. And that was good. For the physician had to content himself with giving general instructions. The clever helping hands of the nurses, the efforts of the hospital kitchen, the provision of ice and so forth–these were the main things. Science had nothing to offer; everything came from the ministrations of the compassionate heart.
And spiritual comfort! In his first hours here each patient received spiritual comfort in the form of the sacrament, whether his condition was critical nor not. The tavern owner ran into the chaplain at the door. But imagine the smirk on the face of the man, full of merriment and insolence despite his fever, as he escaped the nonplussed white-haired father’s clutches.
Two old nuns took the innkeeper to the hospital office; the discharge formalities took some time. Meanwhile his family had been informed and he was to be taken away. But how? Still gripped by terror of Y.F., he refused to get back into the hospital ambulance (drawn by a donkey and a mule), and so there was nothing for it but to bring two burly fellows up from the harbor, released criminals, to literally carry the idiot to his domicile. The next day, after taking three heavy doses of quinine, he would be back behind the zinc bar of his smoke-filled tavern.
I still had to finish with, I mean take care of, that man whom I had given up for lost and whom Walter too, after a summary examination, regarded as hopeless. This was a man of only thirty-four, but already aged in personality and appearance, white-haired, emaciated, skin and bones, homeless, unemployed, the bare ruin of a man who had worked for a time on building the Panama Canal. He was saffron yellow from the roots of his hair to his deformed toes and was now in a delirious state.
When he was asked about the primary location of his pain (for one wished to and was required to provide palliative care even if any true curative treatment appeared hopeless), he pointed now to his low brow, now to the lumbar region; his scrawny, hirsute legs twitched, as though he had calf cramps. The conjunctivae were yellow, shot through with distended scarlet venules. He too gave off the foul, carrion-like stench that is characteristic of the disease. Every slurred word hurt the poor wretch, any intake of food or liquid was associated with raging pain. And no wonder. For when one opened the mouth beneath the wild, stringy, matted gray beard and found that the tongue and oral mucosa were unspeakably raw, as though the top dermal layers had been removed with a grater, taken down to the bare meat, then one understood the extent of his suffering.
And if only he had at least been able to suffer and make an end in peace! But the heaving in his belly was unremitting, the abdominal musculature, pressed against the backbone, underwent paroxysm after paroxysm, and the stomach, tortured by constant vomiting, retained nothing, not even the ice chips that the hospital aide offered him. The vomitus was initially watery, later tinged with thin threads of blood, and finally brownish like coffee substitute, dark and granular.
He was allowed not an instant of peace. The chaplain came in and, wishing to administer the last rites, spoke of the gravity of his religious mission.
The canal worker was not listening. His exhausted features, altered beyond recognition by the disease, showed only complete cachexia, if anything at all.
With the greatest effort he raised himself from his bed, lifted himself up, his joints crepitating, as though he might have an easier time of it in a sitting position. He even tried to stand, clutching the night table with both hands, a yellow skeleton, bloody mouth beneath bloody beard, staring out of red eyes, retaining of the nobility of the human spirit only the ability to suffer. A grim, no longer manlike thing.
He was tormented by intense thirst, and it was poignant to see him vacillate between the desire to drink and the fear that he would have to vomit everything again amid the most wretched paroxysms.
The chaplain, filled with divine patience, a man well acquainted with sickness (also a man with a peculiar past, by the way), held out a crucifix for him to kiss. The poor devil put his bare lips on the silvery metal and cooled his raw tongue, stripped of the top dermal layers, on that emblem of human suffering.
I could no longer bear this sight. Honestly, did I want to? My presence was unfortunately superfluous for the time being. I repaired to my bedroom, expecting to be called during the night for the poor fellow’s last moments.
The little Portuguese girl’s room was quiet. Only the soft rattling of rosary beads could be heard. I did not go in.
Carolus and Walter, who were still absorbed in their investigation, working with undiminished interest though entirely without results, also retired late that night.
The two of them occupied the room of the vacationing resident, while March and I were housed in a basement room that was also used for the storage of wood, coal, vinegar, oil, and the like.
March was touchingly tender toward me. Why speak of the many kindnesses he did me just when I really needed them, the silent services of his hand and heart! I would have to enumerate every detail of our daily life in order to convey how he took care of me. I had never known anything like it. And I will say frankly: I could never have done anything like it!
And nevertheless I did not love him. I was fond of him, I thought highly of him, I needed him. I took his hand in mine and stroked it–but my gaze and my thoughts were elsewhere, they went right past him. Before I could doze off, I got up to check on my patient again.
She was not asleep. The black governess nodded in her corner, dozing in a sitting position; her sweat-bathed, copper-colored face shone among the many fanciful lace pillows and doilies. I woke her and barked at her impatiently. If she was going to take it upon herself to look after her precious one, then she couldn’t sleep. She murmured something in her lingo and began rattling her silver rosary beads with her hard fingers. I took them away from her. Didn’t she understand anything? From the adjoining room I heard the muffled clamoring and restlessness of the laborer and the ministrations of the nurse and the urgings of the old chaplain, who had not yet retired.
My patient’s appearance was fortunately somewhat better than it had been late that afternoon. It was now getting on toward eleven at night. The fever had fallen, the pulse was full and regular, the pain bearable. She smiled at me, as though she had awakened cured. On her lovely brow–no, I do not wish to speak of her beauty. There is no way to do justice to the essence of beauty, just as it is impossible to put into words the essence of music. What is more, even if I could convey this moving beauty here, I still would not be able to put into words what went on within me.
The most profound despair: my bleak situation, that of one deported for life, my entire frightful past, the impossibility that my feeling could ever be understood by this child in her purity, never mind requited, I a relic of more than forty, she a spoiled, charming mama’s girl of little more than fourteen. Enough said. End of story.
But everything would still have been wonderful had a severe disease state not existed. Or was it severe? Was she not lying there like a little nun in a casket, the ice bag made of white rubberized material spread across her lovely, velvety, cream-colored brow? Was it sleep, was it fainting, was it the marvelous calm of the beginning of convalescence? Against all reason, my life and hers seemed to join together and I felt a sense of happiness.
I was happy at that one instant when, for the second time that evening, the lights went out. I had leaned over the child to change the ice bag. I was still standing there, my head bent over hers, when I felt her outstretched arms reach around my bare neck in the darkness–I had stopped getting fully dressed in the evening because of the heat and was wearing only my white coat over my undershirt–the sleeves of her chiffon pajamas slid back to the elbows with a swishing sound, and her face, the somewhat pouty lips half-parted, slowly but distinctly came up toward mine. But long before her lips could touch my forehead or my throat, her head sank back onto the pillows, the thick, silky, loose hair unfurling, and at that same instant the lights flashed back on, brassy and steady as ever after a few current fluctuations.
We had not said a word to each other. To this day I do not know whether she did not kiss me because she was afraid of giving me her disease or because her strength failed her. For only too soon I would see to my horror that I had underestimated the seriousness of her condition.
Her improvement was only apparent. Was mine real? I still did not know.
I now did everything that lay within my power. This was, of course, not much. Then, with the heavy heart that can be produced by great joy just as much as by great, inconceivable suffering, I went back to March.
I did not weep. I did not say what had happened. I only took March’s hand from the coarse pillowcases as he was attempting to smooth them, and I said to him: “Stand by me, March. I’ll stand by you.”
They woke me that same night, and I had to go, making my way through silent corridors and stairways–not to the canal worker, but to her, who had called for help and asked for me.
Will I be believed when I say that I set out slowly and with hesitation? I had a bad feeling about it. But I should have hurried. I did not.
To get to the sickroom on the third floor, I had to go through the basement corridor containing the animal material. It was getting on toward morning, the electric light was burning, most of the animals lay sleeping quietly. The monkeys, in adjoining cages, had lain down in such a way that their heads on both sides rested on the bars between the cages, and some had even put their long fingernails through, into the next cell. The dogs too (some very handsome ones among them), which were housed individually, slept pressed against adjacent walls. The smaller animals were kept in common cages. They were identified by small rectangular metal tags tacked through the cartilage of their ears. The guinea pigs, now only two of them left in a very spacious cage, had been awakened, they nibbled on what remained of their food, glanced curiously at me with their glistening little eyes, then silently went back to their slumber. They rarely made their whistling noises in captivity. A dog howled with a hollow, infernal sound, but this was not an expression of suffering; the animal was in a deep sleep and was vocalizing as dogs do when they dream. A rhesus monkey craned its neck, turning its flat, naked, brown nose and conspicuous wide black nostrils toward me. It lifted its left leg and briskly scratched off a bug. As it did so it brought its round, clear, amber eyes up to look at me, its strange gaze so remarkably like a human being’s. Some time earlier we had given it a painful injection (which had not had any consequences). But it seemed to have forgotten this, or it did not recognize me as one of its tormentors. (I had only been an onlooker–but does that distinction matter to an animal?) As the long bare toes with their horny oval nails felt for and crushed another bothersome insect, the monkey’s circular eyes, standing out brightly against its dark brown face, closed sleepily. It twisted and turned its neck with supple movements so that its head was again by the wall of the cage. And with a languorous sigh indistinguishable from the sigh of a weary schoolchild, it prepared to go back to sleep. It breathed slowly and deeply, bringing the hot, heavy air of the basement corridor in through its nostrils. Thus I left the animals all sleeping peacefully. Only a couple of rats, restless as they are known to be, were nervously active in their wire cage and suddenly began to run about in circles behind me in their prison, scratching and biting furiously at the wire.
The windows of the sickroom corridor looked out over the old part of the city far below, the fringe of palms and plantain trees at the edge of the restlessly heaving sea, the buildings with their flat red roofs, separated from one another by more allées of trees. All in the pearly, opalescent gloaming that is usual in the tropics just before sunrise. For the transition from night to day is very rapid here. Farther away from the city, army regiments could be seen on the beach, around them the security forces’ barracks covered with glinting sheet metal. And now, when the light from the east was suddenly reddening more and more, one could see in the lifting mist, within the territory at the edge of the vast woodlands, the huge colonies, the hutments of the camps in which hundreds and thousands of convicts dwelled more or less peaceably under the shadow of loaded weapons. Off the coast a craggy island of black rock gleamed faintly.
It had not been long from the time I left March’s side until I reached the patients’ corridor, yet I had seen all this, the repose of the animals and that of the archipelago and the slate blue ocean gently surging to the shore, the buildings on the harbor, the chain of islands in the misty distance–did I have some suspicion that I needed to prepare myself for a terrible sight?
Monica’s appearance this morning was no more dreadful than that of the canal worker with Y.F. had been the evening before. But what can I say? It was more ghastly than death.
The girl’s condition had worsened dramatically. She had Y.F.’s well-known brief intermezzo behind her: in almost all cases the fever abates for what is unfortunately only a short time, the pain eases deceptively, lucidity returns as though in mockery, and the temperature falls. The heavens are thanked. For the patient believes he is saved.
That was the moment when she reached out her arms to me. She had thought she was cured, was with her mother in her heart, with her boarding-school friends, with her dolls, I don’t know. Who can interpret an impulsive gesture? Was she thinking of her foolish, doting mother, from whose arms she had had to be wrested by force a few days before? Or did she want to cling to me, trusting in my help? For the sudden turn for the better had come when I appeared.
Only too sudden, too brief. The course of nature was only too diabolical. The fever was invincibly on the rise once more, over forty now. The suffering began again.
When I saw the column of mercury above the red line indicating forty degrees, I knew that all was lost–short of a miracle.
But to believe in miracles now, when I had never been able to? I had, needless to say, known the typical course of Y.F., had learned and had not forgotten how one dies of it. And yet I did not want to believe that now. I took refuge in childlike faith instead of science, neither the first nor the last to do so. But the first vomiting bringing up only water had already begun. The child was astonished. She had just taken peppermint tablets for ozostomia, and now her gorge rose with a clear fluid smelling strongly of peppermint. She was unwilling to vomit, she fought it, she was ashamed, well-bred as she was, in front of her nanny and–in front of me. She had hardly a minute of rest. The old ayah had been using a silk handkerchief to dry the now markedly pale lips, which stood out against the canary yellow face, but had not yet finished when the nausea began again. No! No! No! She wanted to take a deep breath and recover from an agonizing exhaustion that must have been new to her experience. But it didn’t let her. Before long thin filaments of blood appeared in the vomitus, soon mixed with black granules, and in a very short time I saw that she was already vomiting almost exclusively blood.
She was unable to complain, could only whimper–without forming real words. And who could form words with a bleeding, swollen tongue?
I provided the assistance, the treatment, that the head physician of the hospital had suggested to me the day before. But this treatment was palliative only, it could not really help. I would have been delighted to be able to ease her symptoms at least. But even this was too much to hope for.
Any heart, any heart that was not yet completely dehumanized, would have ached to see even a low fiend like Suleiman suffer as this blooming, enchanting, innocent, childlike creature was doing now. I gritted my teeth. I answered the fearful, imploring, desperate expression of the doomed creature with a hideously grinning grimace that I meant to be a consoling smile.
Since a poison had invaded the bloodstream, every effort had to be made to eliminate it by flushing the renal system as thoroughly as possible. Would serum be used to combat the vomiting? No. Medication? No. Just horizontal positioning of the body. That was the treatment! And when paroxysms still came up from the distended abdomen, when more retching convulsed it, I gently held the child down on the bed in the vaunted horizontal position, the only proper one. What a joke! Y.F. and a temperature of forty-two–and horizontal positioning and ice chips to swallow are the best I can offer!
I spoke encouragingly to the child. I did not stint on promises that I knew to be false. The mulatto, who had been watching these terrible things and whose face had become as pale as a black person’s can, would not leave the child. I pushed her out the door, chased her off to the hospital kitchen to bring up some chilled lemonade. In the kitchen area there were special vessels with finely chopped ice between the double walls (this was neither the first nor the last case of its kind). The child refused it. I sent the nanny, who had not yet had a real break, back down for champagne from the director’s private cellar. With a table knife I cut the wire that held in the cork. The child had as little interest in it as in the lemonade. Perhaps the carbon dioxide in the champagne, the acetic acid in the lemonade caused more irritation of the inflamed, raw membranes of the mouth, throat, and stomach. The nanny had to go down again. She muttered and looked at me spitefully with her brown dog’s eyes. This time I had a sorbet brought and patiently fed it to the child after having to take the spoon out of the nanny’s clumsy hands. I tried to keep the spoon from touching her lips and swollen tongue.
I was called to the other patient, the canal worker, who was somewhat better, but still wretched enough. I did not go. March turned up, wanted me to accompany him to breakfast, I said no, he went, and then (that boy!) he came back with fruit and a freshly washed handkerchief. I sent him away. I thought about nothing, was unable to think about anything but the little creature whose fever continued to climb, though her hands and feet were cold to the touch. More than forty-three degrees.
The little Portuguese girl seemed to want something. We, the mulatto and I, were unable to make out the stammered word formed by the bleeding tongue amid the constant retching and vomiting. The black woman hung her silver rosary around the child’s neck and also Mama’s valuable pearls–the foolish, godforsaken mother had given them to the victim of her doting love to take along to the hospital. But none of these things was what the child wanted. A last wish–and unsatisfiable like all true wishes!
For a long time we–that is, the mulatto, the Portuguese girl’s former nanny, and I, her doctor–couldn’t understand the stammered word. We finally did. It was wine. In short order I obtained a bottle of soft golden wine instead of the champagne. But she only shook her head, vomited with effort, and, already half dazed, repeated her request in a failing voice. At last we understood. She wanted not vin, but raisins–grapes. Possibly the juice of freshly pressed grapes would be especially mild, sweet, easy on a tongue that had lost its epidermis–or possibly she just thought so now. Perhaps she had been comforted by freshly picked grapes while under the weather with some innocuous ailment at the Swiss school. Grapes thrive in the sunny parts of Switzerland, particularly the Vaud region. But here, practically on the equator?
Could it be completely impossible to get hold of such fruit? The people in the hospital’s business office just shook their heads at this odd request. It was all I could do to make sure someone at least tried to find grapes at the produce markets. What was the use? They came back with everything but grapes. Giant yellow mangoes that looked like Calville apples, a few thick, sticky drops oozing from their lacerated, ruptured skins like resin from the bark of a tree. Fine stuff. Terrific fruit. We mixed its juice with bits of ice, but the child refused it. We brought fresh local sugarcane, almond green, fibrous, somewhat woody stalks a yard long, which had a strange fragrance perhaps most comparable to wine (the native population believed it quenched the thirst better than any alcoholic beverage, and without increasing the perspiration). She refused it. She began to weep. It was an unnatural, drawn-out crying, from the chest and throat. Babies cry like this, but from their loose, slobbery lips–weary of the world and of life even before they have come to know them in their full glory. It rang in my ears, it was ghastly. It was not the weeping of a half-grown person. It was the sobbing–soulless, mechanical, perhaps, but for that reason all the more poignant–of a completely childlike being. My heart broke with the bitterness of it. I thought I would do anything to at least make this weeping stop. So still more fruit from the Eden-like gardens. We brought her West Indian bananas–here they had none of the insipid flavor of the unripe fruit imported to Europe, but tasted of honey and cloves. She only opened her mouth to vomit; she wanted neither the bananas nor the fresh bluish dates with a tinge of white bloom, a rarity here in the tropical zone, that the head nurse had gone to great lengths to obtain. We offered her pineapple, freshly picked that morning from plots outside the city, still with its corona of spiny sap green leaves. The mulatto sliced it with a silver knife. Grotesquely amid all this misery, her own mouth was watering, the rubbery black lips were dripping saliva, for she had eaten nothing in forty-eight hours, so absorbed was she in the care of her darling. But we had no luck with the fresh pineapple, either.
Someone had also brought a lovely flower, a wild orchid with an exquisite vanilla-like scent and marvelous coloration on the long, pendulous, bannerlike lilac pink blossoms and the blazing, saffron yellow, luxuriantly brimming pistils.
That sunken eye was blind to the wonders of this terrible world.
The worst was when we had done everything we could think of and had nothing left to try.
The monotonous, aching, endless sobbing filled the cramped, humid little room, broken only by the buzzing of the insects that had been attracted by the strong smell of the fruit. They harassed the poor defenseless patient so much that the fruit had to be removed. The mulatto woman, a “loving heart” of the first rank but only a mediocre nurse and not someone who could get used to order, flung some of the fruit out the window into the courtyard, where it fell with a slap. The matron came in and gave her a severe look. The mulatto blushed and tossed the rest of the delicacies into a pail. In other respects too there was not as much order as the matron thought necessary. The mulatto sullenly buckled down to work. The heat was frightful.
Now the disease’s smell of decaying flesh–which came from the loveliest mouth I had ever seen–mingled with the scent of the rapidly wilting orchid. No one bothered to water it, for why should it live when the child had to die?
Beyond saving, and me a doctor–even God couldn’t make sense of it, I said. But now in my despair I clung to the idea that there must be a way out “with God,” some act of violence, some thunderclap that would lift the world off its foundations–and save her. Foolishness! Madness! This was the megalomania of desperation, no more. Smash the thermometer on the edge of the table, the fever would remain. We looked on and said nothing.
Walter appeared, and just his standing next to her gave me a glimmer of hope. Had I not always justly looked up to him, thought him capable of things I myself was not? For me he was the European archetype of the brilliantly practical man, equal to life, unsentimental yet benevolent and humane; more than I, he exemplified natural, clearheaded human understanding, the sum total of all medical knowledge and skill. He represented the lucid mind dominating the vicissitudes of nature, the genius of the great physician. But all he did now was use his four-color mechanical pencil, held in his left hand, to enter the patient’s temperature on her chart in red, her pulse in blue. And while these two lines described the oscillations of a steep wave whose excursions continued to climb, the curve for urine output, in black, fell with every new tabulation.
Intoxication was increasing. Detoxication, in black, was decreasing. It pointed downward like a finger.
On the evening of one of these days (eventually I no longer knew how much time had gone by, whether the sobbing and retching, the fever and deterioration had been going on for three hours or three days), Walter asked me if I had done the usual blood test. A blood test? How could that help? So why do it? For the sake of knowledge? For the sake of clinical and scientific exactitude? I was supposed to puncture the arm of someone I loved more than I loved myself? Yes, even now, when the signs of death were becoming unmistakable and when, with its poison yellow mask, the face that had been so lovely had taken on a ghastly ugliness, yes, only the silky dark blonde hair still held a little of the Monica of the first day–everything else was abysmally ugly, repulsive, abominable, the cracked lips covered with bloody scabs, the skinned tongue, the swollen, bleeding gums, the mouth that I saw gape like a corpse’s amid the endless sobbing, there was nothing lovely, nothing adorable left in this apparition; she was no longer a sentient person, her suffering was heavy, wordless, a ghastly spectacle, her sobbing not an expression of conscious affliction but an automatic reflex of the vagus nerve, made oversensitive by the Y.F. toxin–and yet, even now, when everything was as it clinically had to be, I prepared the blood lancet to draw some blood as Walter had instructed me, I had the nanny squeeze the thin, saffron yellow arm above and below the crook of the elbow to pool a little blood at the puncture site–but I did not press down. I did not prick the skin.
I cheated for the sake of appearances. I took a tiny drop of the blood flowing from the gums and spread it on the glass slide, to simulate a specimen for Walter.
That evening Monica often reached for her throat, sometimes with her left hand, sometimes her right, gasping as though she were suffocating. The nurses took the valuable pearls from around the child’s neck and washed both with warm water, first her neck, then the necklace, then put the necklace back on her.
It had great value, it was real.
I remember that in my old life I once called money the best medicine.
It was another person who said that, another mind that had believed it.
I want to say something else, since I promised myself that I would be completely honest, as honest as the human spirit, deceitful from the womb, can be.
It was at bottom quite an insignificant matter. I mention it here more for the sake of completeness than anything else.
Adrenal extract is recommended by many physicians for hemorrhaging from the mucous membranes, as in this case those of the mouth, pharynx, stomach, and bowel. So that nothing would be left untried, I had the preparation brought from the hospital dispensary. I had filled the standard Pravaz syringe, holding one cubic centimeter, with the colorless, crystal-clear liquid. I had placed the syringe on the night table with the bevel of the needle facing upward and outward and had begun cleansing the injection site.
At that instant the poor little one’s dreadful sobbing had increased. I could have borne anything else more easily, even the shrillest screaming and the most furious struggling. Anything but this monotonous, soulless sobbing. I couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear it anymore.
I stroked the child’s hair, I fed her a little vanilla ice, melted, yellowish, with tiny particles of vanilla in it, which ran back out of the corners of her mouth mixed with bloody froth. Fruitless effort, fruitless torment.
I saw that all was lost. I saw something else. The pharmacy nurse, who for want of a staff pharmacist was the one who took care of the prescriptions in the hospital dispensary, had been unable to decipher my handwriting, had prepared a solution ten times the proper strength, and had conscientiously noted the abnormally strong concentration as such on the vial, with an exclamation point. I immediately sprayed the lethal dose through the needle into the air, and because I wasn’t careful enough, a droplet of it got the label wet, so that the black ink of the pharmacy nurse’s handwriting ran. One zero too few or too many–it was illegible now. Good poison–or useless medication?
At that moment I thought of my wife. I saw before me the vial of the toxin that I had used to murder the poor woman, I saw the finely made old syringe that I had used in my crime glinting on a mirrored tabletop with the bevel of its slightly bloody needle pointing outward and upward. “All things return in this short life”–this thought flashed upon my mind. Flashed like a light, and I saw.
For a second I hesitated. I understood my fervent wish that this dreadful sobbing, this mindless animal suffering of a totally doomed being simply cease. Whatever the cost. Why not fill the syringe again, give this wasted yellow arm a jab–a split second, one deep breath, and it’s all over. Horribly over, but over. Only those who have sat with someone beyond help for weeks or even just days or only so much as a few hours, with ears and eyes and heart and soul rebelling furiously against this useless torment, will have understood me.
But I did not make this split-second movement, and will that also be understood? That I, Georg Letham the younger, let fate take its course?
I almost believe that the meaning of my punishment flashed upon me at that moment. I was the only one who could sit in judgment upon myself now. I was the only one who could punish myself. Part of the punishment I had to serve was to have to watch my darling’s agonizing death and be unable to help. Never in my much-too-long life was it ever so difficult to do something as it was now not to lift a finger. But I understood that a human life has an absolute worth. I understood the connection between what went before and what came later. Was that so difficult? It was difficult. So difficult that until that day it was impossible. It was not until I had set my foolish, blundering heart on such a person, unalterably, against all reason (what could I expect of the beloved child, what did I know of her but the long since wasted face, the ravaged features–I had scarcely heard the sound of her voice, had never seen the child walk, dance, be happy!), not until now, when I had taken my place among the infinitude of suffering, pointlessly doomed people, as one of their own, that a loss could wound me, that I could do penance. Could? Could? No! No! Had to.
If I had not murdered, I would never have come to this point.
I gave the world my consent. I had to. I kept to the straight and narrow, did not stray. It had to be.
By the time I had diluted the solution properly, the pulse had already become imperceptible. The injection was now evidently useless. And thus I let it pass. The child lived several hours more, for she was young, had never been seriously ill–she had come to her parents on C. unbroken in body and spirit. It took many hours for the Y.F. poison to break the little Portuguese girl’s body and spirit. I sat and watched her. I stifled my wish to act, to do something. I put my hands in my lap. Not on the dying girl’s brow, not on her morbidly bloated, bright yellow body. Had there really been no way for me to leave my late wife, even her, without doing what I had done?
Why give one more stab to someone in biological decline from the first day of her life, who from earliest youth, from the womb, was wilting and dying? Why murder, why make someone suffer? Leave it! Leave well enough alone! It wouldn’t be worth all the treasures of Golconda.
Murder is for nature the merciless, or for God. Look on, you excellent physician Georg Letham, you winsome, well-loved son, husband, and lover, fold your hands and keep silent! Despair, be silent, and die! Things are the way they are. You no longer pray, because you can’t, and no one helps you. And why beg for sympathy later? What good are these silly tears flowing from the mulatto’s red-rimmed eyes and down her velvety brown old lady’s cheeks?
I am unable to weep. I had made fate an offer, I had been ready, provided the bargain was kept, to sacrifice myself for my beloved. Sacrifice, what a sentimental, pompous old notion! But all right! Was it not an experiment too to stay constantly by a patient who had a high fever and was passing contaminated blood and so forth, that is, was infectious? And not an unhazardous one? But fate had not favored me (as it had not favored my poor father). My offer to fate had been: Let me have her, cure her, and give me hell–and it gave me hell. But it had not actually hurt me. For it had not accepted the object of exchange, Georg Letham the younger, as valid, and I stayed alive, I left the sickroom, broken, yes, in despair, yes, as though I had been hit on the head, weighed down by unspeakable fatigue. But fit as a fiddle.
What did she mean in the greater scheme of things, the little Portuguese girl? What did she mean to the progress of our noble scientific mission? No more and no less than Ruru did, the good dog that went with my father to the region of the North Pole.
I wanted to, I had to find meaning in my life, indeed I sensed it, I believed it was there to be found, was confident that it could be understood, and yet I went off mutely, head down, teeth gritted, yes, so help me, as I ducked out I ground my molars, as my father had always done at critical moments in his later life. The room was filled with the old nanny’s primitive and uninhibited howling as I escaped from it, leaving her with the dead child. To clothe her in a dignified manner for her final repose.
Shortly thereafter I inevitably ran into the chaplain. He looked at me, and I nodded. I looked at him, and he shook his head and smiled. He had devoted himself with special love to the care of the old canal worker. Now it seemed the latter was on the road to recovery! Yes, the chaplain had a good line to the man upstairs, as was evident in his “blessed touch.” The laborer would live. What good fortune! Thus the childless prole, senile at thirty-four, would leave the hospital in one or two weeks, pale but cured, restricted to a light diet, and very much in need of rest and recuperation. Yes, a light diet. When the man didn’t even have enough dry crusts of bread to keep his scrawny body from starvation, no roof over his shaggy head to protect it from the down-pours of the coming rainy season–no matter, no matter! He had to be restored to humanity, and she . . . she!
. . . I said nothing. But the chaplain seemed to understand me. He drew me into a corner, one safe from spies and eavesdroppers (the building’s regular guards were tramping up and down in the flagstone corridors nearby because it was cooler here than out in front, where they actually belonged), and there he revealed to me–his secret? No, not quite. He only batted open his no longer entirely clean, well-worn cassock, opened his rough shirt at the collar, and showed me the word tattooed in blue letters from left to right across the base of the throat: Amen.
Not a word was spoken. I could have said something, and what stopped me? Another word: Omen.
He quickly did up his clothes, eyes downcast, and climbed the stairs I had descended, to make arrangements for the child’s consecration and burial.
Why hide it? I was ashamed of my misfortune. I holed up in my underground cell with the oil and vinegar bottles and left the treatment of new patients to the resident, who had just returned, and the head physician.
First I slept for nearly twenty hours straight, I believe. When I woke up and awareness of what had happened returned to me, I would just as soon have given up in despair. Would have?
Nothing on earth could have rid me of my mortal despair, I believe now. I ate nothing, drank nothing. I sweated, was silent, and suffered. The notion lives in many very unhappy people that, if they weaken themselves to an extraordinary degree through fasting and deprivation, their mental suffering too will become much weaker, more moderate, easier to bear. But unfortunately there had long been no question of moderation. During the second, completely sleepless night (and why had I idiotically indulged my exhaustion so thoroughly on the first night?), I ground my teeth so much that the faithful March woke up and sat down next to me in his pajamas. How could I explain to him this desperate love for a totally unknown dead girl? I realized that, had I heard the whole story told about someone else, I myself would have listened in silence and never understood it. And why should someone like March understand me? And even if he did understand me, how could he console me? How could he take the place of the one upon whom I had inexplicably focused all the feeling I had in me?
There was no light burning in our cell. Not much illumination came down through the high basement window. He wanted to see me. So he lit his cigarette lighter and shone it in my face. His sleep too had no doubt not been the most restful, for he had had bad news from home about his youngest brother, the watchmaker’s apprentice. And he had thought of him fondly so often, had soaked the stamps off all the foreign mail for him, had dried and pressed orchids between sheets of filter paper for the herbarium that his “bitty little brother” kept. Now the bitty little brother was sick or had debts or had stolen something or was out of work, who knows? Did his distress make me feel better? As cynical as it sounds (the cynicism of hopelessness), even his disconsolate manner was no help at all. It gnawed at me and plagued me cruelly to consider (my mind was working whether I wanted it to or not) that I lived in a room directly below the one in which she had died (not true, by the way, but I was connecting everything with her), or that my white coat hanging on a rusty nail on the basement wall still bore traces of her terrible days of suffering. And yet I was silent and said not a word to March. He saw my brow knitted tensely, forming the usual two deep furrows above the root of my nose. So he patted down the skin there, or rather he tried to. No sooner had he, in his childlike, foolish goodness, smoothed my brow (as though that could wipe away the cause of my frightful pain!) than it automatically knitted again. What could I do? Did I want to do anything?
He had tact. What he had never shown in his relationship with his cadet, this he now showed toward me, who had not asked for it and to whom it meant precious little.
He asked no questions, for he knew I would speak if I had anything to say. His stupid lighter crackled and shot off sparks as he waved it about and read me something from a letter that had some importance to him. I understood nothing of his gabble, but simply nodded.
Why was it that I had no peace? I never had any.
Meanwhile daybreak came. I watched the demijohns of vinegar with their wickerwork wrapping and the fat, dust-covered little drums of oil take shape in the shadowy gray light.
He got up, dressed, got water in a tub, reached into a vat of green soft soap for two handfuls of the slippery stuff, dissolved it in the water, and was on the point of putting my coat in it, the doctor’s white coat that I had worn at her deathbed. I gently took it from him. We stood there half-dressed like a couple of imbeciles, and suddenly he, who had understood none of it, began to weep. Perhaps at the thought of his foolish little brother, who could not help him and whom he could no longer help. Or was it on my account? A harsh contempt gripped me. I contorted my facial features as he did his.
Weeping, as is well-known, involves the same grotesque facial distortions as grinning, differing from it only in the shedding of tears. I mockingly imitated his blubbering, as, in better days that would never return, I had sometimes imitated the laugh of a happy person–I have already spoken of this. And, do you believe it, this grimace, the despairing grin of Georg Letham the younger, turned into a true weeping, a sobbing! The unending sobs of a heavy, half-insensible soul suffering unto death. It was like the weeping I have described in the throes of Y.F., representing the curious reflex of the vagus nerve under toxic stimulation. A moment of laughter for all of us now. After everything I had seen and experienced in my forty-one years, the only thing I could do was imitate the little Portuguese girl who had sobbed herself to death before my eyes two days before.
The good March had primly looked away from my outburst of excessive feeling (is there any other way to describe it?). Amid tears he had soaked the white shirtlike garment in the foaming, greenishly lustrous liquid. Bubbles boiled to the surface. He rubbed the sleeves of the coat together with the front so that the pearl buttons clacked, scoured the bottom parts with the top parts to get the dirt out. Suddenly he gave a yelp–he had cut his finger on something. It was the slide with my darling’s blood on it. This little sheet of glass, wrapped in white blotting paper and labeled in blue pencil with the patient’s name and the date the blood was drawn, had been in my breast pocket. The strangest memento that a lover had ever kept in remembrance of his departed fair Juliet, or rather would not keep.
My tears ebbed, I got up, dressed, went upstairs, bathed, had breakfast, and set to work in the laboratory as I had done before my vigil at Monica’s bed. In a corner I saw a preserving bottle of mosquitoes. March had taken the Stegomyias out of the stoneware vessel, perhaps at the request of Brig. Gen. Carolus, who had suddenly become orderly, or because the inquiring Walter wished to observe the cute, truly adorable insects, the object of such vile calumny, through the glass. But what was there to see? There seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary about them.
I note in passing that Walter’s heart was in his work just as little as mine was, though he said nothing. For when scientific work has gone on beyond a certain point without yielding the slightest positive result, the researcher is gripped by a sort of paralysis, an intellectual despair, a stubborn apathy. One sits diligently and steadfastly over the microscope, assiduously checks the cultures, or, to be precise, the dishes of abacterial medium that one removes regularly every morning from the tightly sealed incubator kept at body temperature; only to find, again and again, that cipher, that nothing. The sterile internal organs, the untroubled expanse of broth, the smooth, virginal surface of the solid, gelatin-like culture medium still showing the slight scratches, like old ski tracks on a glacier snowfield, left by the platinum inoculation needle. A very pleasant sight, but eventually an infuriating one. Sterile work, literally.
No wonder the good Carolus’s nose, long enough by nature, was becoming longer every day, though he personally had made the greatest use of this time. Under Walter’s brilliant tutelage, he had absorbed exacting, scientifically rigorous bacteriological research methods from alpha to omega. Should he have to leave C., where the epidemic was again gaining strength, with empty hands, even if he had to leave that instant, he might conceivably be able to use these skills in the future to achieve something fruitful in another, more easily accessible field.
But for now the mission’s bad luck weighed so heavily upon us all (with the possible exception of the indomitable March) that a piece of news brought by the fateful pharmacist von F. came as a thunderbolt that left us practically devastated. For, as in the case of my father’s expedition (all things return in this short life!), here too a competing commission was underway, provided with strong financial backing and a capable scientific team; it was in transit from the States to the American epidemic centers in order to get to the bottom of Y.F. once and for all. The epidemic was costing so many precious human lives in Havana that there was no way either to colonize additional areas or to build the all-important canals that would transform the continent until something definite was known about this enemy of the American people. Yes, the American people! The American nation, noble sister of those of Europe and their great competitor! What a feather in Uncle Sam’s cap if the Y.F. pathogen were discovered under the glorious Stars and Stripes! And we–empty-handed! Ignorant we had come, ignorant we must go!
There was thus a great danger that our little commission, consisting only of Carolus, Walter, and us underlings, might be forced to regard its business as finished. There was laboratory work for another one or two weeks, why not? Another hundred or five hundred sections of diseased, inflamed livers, gastric walls, kidneys, and so forth, could be fastidiously preserved in formalin, tricked out with all sorts of sophisticated staining methods, labeled, and then scrutinized by the sweat of our brows under the microscope at a thousand times magnification (never was the Biblical brow-sweat so literal as here in this continual steam bath, which was never less than thirty degrees centigrade but very often more than forty in the “shade”)–we could methodically do all that, record the negative results as systematically as we would have recorded positive ones. And if Walter was the great master of experiment, Carolus was nothing less in the systematic statistical integration of the results. But zero plus zero never makes one.
Everyone but me was in communication with the outside world by mail, Walter by telephone too.
Not a single sign of life reached me during this period. Not so much as a picture postcard in kitschy colors from my brother, on some steamship tour with his wife and children! Whenever a mail boat was spotted from the elevated vantage of the hospital, tacking carefully through the archipelago and steering among the buoys in C.’s marshy harbor, the faithful March looked every bit as glad as the two top men, and even if the mail that March waited for with such longing (thoroughly censored, by the way) contained almost nothing but the joyless news that his family thought it should not keep from him (the breakup of his mother’s marriage because of the scandal about him, the ominous illness of the youngest child, the “bitty little brother,” the money problems of the other siblings, and so on)–he was at least not as completely cut off from the living as I was.
I made no attempt to break through these walls. I could certainly have begun a correspondence. Yes, mail was screened and had to be cleared by the director’s office; but, like every deportee, I was permitted to send one letter per month at the expense of the penal administration. Not once did I exercise this right. I had even given away most of my stationery, to March, whose joy at this proof of my sympathy is beyond description. Never was a gift easier for me–and never had anyone thanked me more.
At that time I was lulled by the belief that the slow-witted youth’s affection for me, which, though it got on my nerves, was profoundly comforting in its persistence, would go on forever and that I could toss him a crust of bread from time to time like a pasha. He was so very grateful for everything. When, for example, I advised him about how to advise his mother to help out his unemployed brother-in-law, an insurance agent–yes, this big fat zero’s worth of love, was this not something for which I should have thanked him? For it represented a connection, however crude, with the world beyond our four well-guarded walls. It kept me from complete inner numbness.
As incomprehensible as it may sound, so it was: my present condition, down to almost the last particular, resembled the mental lethargy, the psychic paralysis, that had enveloped me immediately after my crime. But that was a crime with serious consequences, taking from me at a stroke my position in society, my scientific reputation, my respectable calling, my financial means, my erotic relationships, and very nearly bringing me to the scaffold, to use that sententious expression–whereas this was nothing but the commonplace death of a velvet-skinned fourteen-and-a-half-year-old Portuguese girl with whom I had never exchanged a single word other than strictly medical vocabulary. I was as innocent of her demise as I would have been of her providential recovery.
What had I meant to her? What could she mean to me?
And yet when I watched the canal worker, the convalescing Y.F. patient, hobbling along in the hospital courtyard, or sadly regarding his greatly emaciated, bony, myasthenic arms, which were tattooed with blue and red anchors and naked women and over which a conspicuous bile yellow shadow still lay–then my gorge rose. It took all my not inconsiderable strength of will not to imitate the Y.F. patient’s retching and vomiting out of spite just as I had imitated the poor little one’s weeping some days earlier in distress.
If only it had been possible to at least seek distraction in work! But this was beyond me. I was not permitted (the deportation authorities demurred!) and frankly did not want to return to the sickrooms. And so I stood around half or entirely inertly. Despite all my friend’s love and tenderness, I floundered more and more in the atrocious heat.
I need not detail what has been noted by all observers with regard to the opium-like effect of time spent in the humid and perpetually overheated regions and climatic zones of the tropics. For many constitutions (and whether ours might not be among them, particularly Walter’s and my own, was not yet certain), the equatorial regions are felt simply as an illness, and a deadly one in the long run. An illness even when those affected remain free of tropical diseases, that is, ague, dysentery, malaria, and on through the entire alphabet of ailments to Zuckerkrankheit or diabetes mellitus.
This was known not only to me, but also to Walter’s wife, whose acquaintance I would soon make in an indirect fashion, that is, by telephone.
There was a telephone booth in a corridor adjoining our large common workroom (formerly the refectory of the nuns in the convent). The lady was, as I heard, a woman of over forty (that is, the same age as our good Walter), the happy mother of five. She lived in the old city, or rather she was penned there like an animal, for what problems did that quarter not have? The absence of laundry facilities! The filth that lay on the crumbling brick stairways! The repulsive bare-necked vultures that boldly patrolled the streets, cleaning them as no one else would! Nowhere to buy quality linen goods, stockings, dresses, stationery, cologne, insecticide! The criminal riffraff, turned into beasts by their lives of poverty and vice, that prowled about just outside the door, begging, mooching, and threatening! I heard it all thanks to Frau Walter’s powerful, sonorous voice and the good acoustics of the imperfectly soundproofed telephone booth, whose doors had warped from the damp and did not close completely. Her husband too–otherwise moderation and calm incarnate, patience itself, the very model of a high-minded gentleman–often raised his beautiful voice to an unbecoming volume in order to make himself understood to the mother of his children, who was unfortunately deaf.
Because she was hard of hearing, she screamed her head off into the receiver. As if volume mattered! But he caught the bug too. As paradoxical as it sounds, when he spoke slowly and accentuated the final syllables, while keeping his voice down, we would hear only his wife’s voice from the telephone booth. Then we did not understand him, but his wife evidently did, and that was what counted. But if he began to shout, the wife’s “What? What? Sorry?” would come out of the hallowed chamber, far away but distinctly shrilled in the highest piping tones. Muffled by the walls but still understandable or easily guessed. Walter, resourceful as always, would occasionally hang up and sit down to put the substance of the thing in black and white for his wife in his clear but somewhat careless handwriting. Gently but resolutely he would push his colleagues’ voluminous papers to one side of the desk and neatly stack up the medical books into which the incorrigible slob Carolus habitually and obstinately stuck his used toothpicks as bookmarks. And if only unappetizing toothpicks had been as far as it went! But Carolus even put culture tubes there, and if these had not been as chaste and untouched as a fourteen-year-old virgin, then the greatest disaster could easily have resulted.
But no matter, the good Walter would hardly have sat down to write than the telephone would ring again with brazen insistence and Walter would have to go.
The good wife and devoted mother left no stone unturned in trying to induce her husband to break off his fruitless work. She knew there was still no result up here. That gave her words such weight that Walter would emerge from the little cubbyhole cowed and perplexed, and would seem to be wordlessly asking us what he ought to do. Another call! Not enough housekeeping money. Threats of divorce. Bulletins on his daughter’s bad complexion, the poor progress being made by his son, once so promising, in his private lessons. And the horrendous prices of groceries and clothing. The “horrible people” she had to live among–criminals and their overseers. The miserable apartment. The wife’s yearning for her husband. What was he to do?
And what about us? What did our mission mean? Our duty?
Mission and duty were not necessarily the same thing in Dr. Walter’s case. As far as the mission was concerned, to him, as to all of us, though we had not discussed it lately, it appeared to be probably infeasible by the available means, that is, those of bacteriological science as currently constituted. As far as duty went, however, that big word necessarily meant something quite different to us, I mean March and me, than it did to those two men of spotless reputation Walter and Carolus. And even between them the roles were not evenly divided.
Carolus could go on doing what he had been doing until his dying day. He had earned the right to leave wife, child, grandchild, the fine library he had begun building, and the superb cactus collection he had tirelessly, patiently nurtured to obey the beloved fatherland’s glorious call. He had taken on the cause with all the commendable application and enthusiasm of which a man of his stripe is capable. Whether he was successful or not, he could be sure of a respectful reception when he returned home.
He carried on a lively correspondence with all the learned societies of general pathology, bacteriology, and biology, both domestic and foreign (March collected the stamps for his “bitty” brother); upon his return he could expect to be made an honorary member of those august organizations. This courageous citizen could also be certain that the top public-health authority, the Ministry of the Interior, would be among those bestowing such honors. He could even expect citations and decorations without so much as lifting a finger. And in the end he deserved these signs of favor from a magnanimous nation (happily generous as long as it costs nothing) just as much as any office poobah who spends thirty years sitting on the round leather cushion of his rotating desk chair until it’s as flat as a pancake, but not as fragrant. Not that rank acquired through long service and devoted administrative work means anything. I knew how my father had disdained such men. He called these people turtles and said there was no way to get rid of them. You had to sit on them and ride them.
Walter’s situation was quite different. For him there was much more at stake. But he–and, curiously enough, cute little March–kept at it, almost pigheadedly, no matter how unproductive their efforts were.
Walter’s life was not easy. With a good head like his, he of course had more doubts, less confidence, than some full-of-himself nitwit would have had. No doubt he told himself that he might be wasting his time, and certainly he was often short of money. The excellent Carolus worked full-time; his salary, augmented by the “tropical bonus,” kept coming in. But Dr. Walter’s official position was not entirely clear–I never really understood his actual administrative grade (“attached” but not “assigned” to the shore batteries, or the other way around). Our commission was a voluntary one. There were, of course, allowances for expenses. But Walter was not financially minded enough and was too wrapped up in his work to apply himself to carrying out the tricky calculations of hours lost, increased outlays for the family, and so forth, in such a way that they came out to his advantage.
Yet the value of ready money was not unknown to him. He was perfectly aware of his responsibility toward his wife, who, after ten years of untroubled marital bliss, was becoming excessively hard-headed. Thus he found himself in conflicts of all kinds, and this was only the beginning of his difficulties. The “loving hearts,” if that fine phrase is permitted here, both made his day-to-day life difficult and took from him the drive and great intellectual persistence that he needed in his work.
But what a lucky dog I was! I was so constituted that nothing took from me the drive and great intellectual persistence that I needed in my work.
Yes, I saw that now. And I saw something else. I saw the last moments, what am I saying, the last hours, of my departed sweetheart, lying in excrement, soddenness, and filth. And I had stood before this still living and sobbing corpse. And had stopped any man or woman from disturbing it.
No flights of feeling! Let us come back to reality! Walter’s wife desired only that her husband finally discontinue his futile efforts. That he return as quickly as possible to the fleshpots of the civilized world along with her and the children, who could not be given a proper education at this remove from any sort of culture, indeed could barely be provided for decently. As a good, much-sought-after practitioner, he would always find opportunities for scientific work at home, would be able to relax at his microscope after his day of toil and trouble if he preferred that to playing bridge or having family members over or chatting with his wife about household matters or about how to find apparel that is both cheap and attractive. Intelligent, mature woman and faithful helpmeet that she was, she allowed him every freedom except that which he was now exercising, as she believed, to his family’s undoing. But Walter, with all the love and tenderness he had toward his Alix, was not a man who gave in.
He turned a deaf ear. His wife’s were deaf already. Thus it got to the point that the woman screamed raucously on the telephone and we all became unwilling witnesses to these petty squabbles.
Walter made it through his ten or twelve working hours day after day. Anyone who has spent a few months in C., whose climate is a sweaty, suffocating steam bath from which one never emerges and where dry laundry, a good night’s sleep, adequate digestion, and a cool hour of leisure are things one knows only by hearsay, will understand what that means. Not without reason was it a penal colony.
I was glad I had already made the acquaintance of “red dog” on the Mimosa. I took precautions now, I did whatever was necessary to take care of myself. But what could be achieved in the end? Anyone can guard against cold, with fur-lined coats and boots and hats (I am thinking of my father’s stories). And if it becomes impossible to continue on the ice, one can crawl underneath, where the stinging snowstorms cannot reach. One digs tunnels beneath the surface and waits them out.
But here there is no protection from the heat and the extravagant humidity. There is only escape from it, to a cooler, drier climate. To the highlands, the mountains. Or into alcohol or morphine.
But one had only to observe a man like Walter for an hour to realize that anything of the kind was profoundly abhorrent to him. If he escaped, it was to the bosom of the church at worst. Every Sunday, wearing his white tropical uniform that the hospital nurses had washed and ironed for him, he went to the Mass held in the chapel of the old hospital, to return an hour and a half later, his linen suit with all the starch taken out of it and his red, haggard face dripping sweat, but inwardly fortified. A pious man who had remained true to the religion of his youth and would remain so to the end.
To what extent this faith sustained him in his inner conflicts was beyond my ken. He discussed this with me as little as I told him of my unremitting suffering, my never-ending thoughts of the poor child. Not until just before his death did he share his problems with me.
With God he was always at peace. He was easy to help. He would have been easy to help, I mean.
He was invariably friendly to me. He called me Dr. Letham and shook my hand when we met in the morning. But otherwise not a word of an intimate, personal nature was exchanged. It was not that he was too proud. He was much too self-effacing to bother someone else with his private affairs, even a lawbreaker such as myself, convicted for the murder of his wife without possibility of appeal. Nevertheless the rest of us were as well-informed as he was about his private affairs, in fact rather better in certain respects.
I said earlier that we learned more from the caterwauling of his wife, who often strained her voice to the limit because of her deafness, than might have suited the proud and reserved Walter. But things soon changed.
Our poor doctor was getting two or three calls a day from the start. The quiet of the workroom (normally interrupted by nothing worse than the sounds of the experimental animals) was broken by the ring of the telephone, which seemed particularly harsh in this context. Plenty of calls. But after a while his wife seemed to be answering his questions evasively. At first broadly and rhetorically, but then with only a stock “I don’t know.” Whether the doctor was inquiring after the health of his oldest boy or about whether his second-oldest daughter’s dreary pruritic skin rash had gone away or whether the household money had been adequate over the last decade (all public-health officers think in decades) or how things were going in the hardware business that supported the dear wife’s family back home–he received the same deadly, vacuous answer every time: I don’t know. Although it had nothing to do with me, it filled me with a kind of horror, and when I saw the happy husband and father hurry back from the telephone booth to his lab table, outwardly melting in sweat, inwardly not heartened, as he had been after Sunday Mass, but distressingly drained and troubled, I privately compared his state of fulfilled love with my own of ill-fated love. His wife, that dear woman, had not even been able to resist answering the doctor’s good-bye with “I don’t know.” He was agitated, in despair, he might have wanted to curse, to slam the door of the booth, but that gentleman was in control of himself in all situations. He closed the door quietly, said nothing, set about his work with gentle hands, and, it will not be believed, he submitted to this game many times a day with the most good-humored expression in the world. Instead of having the number changed, which could easily have been done from the head office, he always yielded to the shrill ringing of the telephone. He did not believe it was right to let his wife think he was not there. He preferred to acquiesce to her diabolical attempts to manipulate him. He tried to understand her. Not vice versa.
Or did he even think she was right? It was her belief that, in the interests of the family, a family that was going to wrack and ruin, anything was permitted, even required, in the face of his stubbornness. That was just what she believed, and people with unshakable beliefs always have the advantage.
Why had Walter brought his family here? Was he any better–that is to say, was he behaving more rationally than Monica’s mother? Was it not madness, the whole thing? Walter’s wife was someone of pure, more than that, of practical, rationality. And she was someone with lively female wishes and desires.
If she was a normal woman, then she expected a normal man in Walter. Had she not made enough sacrifices, and had she not always been told that this was absolutely the last one she would have to make?
Thus he listened patiently to her infernal “I don’t know” and then went back to his work with silent dedication, to find for the thousandth time that yellow fever was a terrible disease, but its nature and its mode of transmission still entirely unknown.
Sometimes the chaplain paid us a visit in the late afternoon, bringing the news from the city; he would invite us finally to play a card game, puff-puff, if I understood correctly. He was very concerned about our health and state of mind, we not so much about his. We would listen to his talk with seeming raptness, but soon one and then another would edge away and go back to work. What choice did he have? He would take his leave in his quiet, polite, impenetrable way, the way that elderly priests have about them. He did not disturb us, for, what with the fruitless yet very hard work in the oppressively hot, indescribably humid laboratory reeking with every horror there is, a brief interruption was always welcome.
Another visitor sought out the doctor during these days, behaving with rather less delicacy. This was an agent, who called himself a general agent but was really only a subagent, of the various shipping companies that would berth a foundering tub like the Mimosa in the city of C. every so often. He was also the representative of some large North American life insurance companies and had made a not inconsiderable fortune through all sorts of more or less legal deals (with the criminals here or against them, needless to say).
The subagent had come on a business mission. He would not be deterred from entering the laboratory. Everyone knew him, must surely know him! He was fearless because he already survived Y.F. during a great wave of the epidemic three years earlier compared to which the current one was a trifle, and since that time had not traveled. For if one leaves the soil of the Y.F. site, one’s immunity disappears and the whole farce can start all over again. But the dandified gentleman, decked out in a diamond stickpin, gold cuff links, and similar gewgaws, was protected from this danger. He was a knight in shining armor with a pith helmet, for he was exerting himself on behalf of a lady who had been slighted, threatened, who was in peril. And this lady was not a widow, her children were not orphans, it was Dr. Walter’s wife herself who had sent him here, even if he denied it in his genteel way, as an emissary of reconciliation. With a palm branch in his beak, but a poisoned arrow concealed under his left wing, if I may put it that way. The palm branch was the greetings that the good man conveyed from the languishing wife and helpmeet. This was not a surprising piece of intelligence in view of the quarantine under which the husband had been kept for almost two months now and which would continue for an unforeseeable length of time. The business was soon settled, and Walter ushered the literally oily little gentleman out the door.
But, even behind the glass door of the laboratory, he shot his poisoned arrow. This was the insurance policy that the able subagent was formally canceling in the name of his company. Walter, prudent paterfamilias that he was, had taken out a policy providing his wife and children with fifty thousand American dollars in the event of his death, at particularly favorable, exceptionally low premium rates, as the subagent had ebulliently claimed.
So the current premium hasn’t gone unpaid, has it? Of course not, acknowledged the subagent. All right, what then? We don’t have a lot of time, said Walter with a trace of impatience. No wonder, when an experiment that was in progress had been temporarily halted and, if the moment was not seized, would have to be repeated the next day. The subagent bowed. He hadn’t closed the lab door, he had a foot in it. He wasn’t about to go, he was just getting started. The insurance company cannot assume this risk, he said as earnestly as a psalmist, gesturing through the corridor window at the courtyard of the building, where at that very moment a Y.F. corpse wrapped in a white sheet was being carried to the basement autopsy rooms.
Walter understood. But he said, No, I don’t understand, I thought it was the company’s business to assume the usual risk of a physician in an epidemic area and the terms included that. Yes, but just the usual risk and no more, replied the subagent. If someone goes tumbling over Niagara Falls in a leather kayak, my insurance company might possibly, possibly assume that risk, but it has to know about it beforehand and will set the premium accordingly high. Anything else would be commercial suicide and could not be expected of any business. The fact that you would be willfully and deliberately exposing yourself to the most dangerous contagion for months on end was not known to the company when, through me, it signed this document, he said grandly, indicating the bumf he had under his smelly armpit. “Fine! I’ll guide myself accordingly,” Walter replied, and bowed. The subagent finally had no choice but to leave. The guards in front of the hospital door greeted him with great respect and stood at attention, for he had spared no expense in order to be allowed into the quarantined research areas. He was a “pretty man,” a half-breed, and like many of his race afflicted with social ambitions. What did we care about his beauty, his race, his ambition, his business? Walter’s face was very somber nonetheless. But he said nothing and went back to his work.
I empathized with our collaborator Walter all the more easily because my own experiences along the same lines with my wife were still fresh in my mind. For it was at that very time that I was preoccupied with an absurd but nonetheless very intense interior monologue in part to do with my late wife and my old father, in part with the late little Portuguese girl. What would have become of these people if . . . Is there anyone unfamiliar with those annoying obsessions that will not loosen their grip on one’s poor tormented heart and mind no matter what one does? So too are those cobweblike draperies known in the lands given to poesy as “gossamer” unwilling to let go of the hair of a person out walking, even in the strongest autumn storm, or of clothes whipped by autumn winds. They do not let go voluntarily. One has to use gentle force. But what kind of gentle force is there against terrible memories?
The good March’s love and trust were only a mild consolation. If he had at least been able to do without any sort of requital, if he had left everything to me, if he had made things easy for himself instead of difficult–what might not have happened. As it was, however, all that happened was that I tried to bring it home to him for the thousandth time that I could not reciprocate his absurd feeling, now less than ever. And why, he asked naïvely. What response can you make to that? Only to stroke his hair and look away over his shoulder.
But for Walter, the love of his good wife, that exemplary normal woman and mother who wanted her husband to return to her and her children, was every bit as painful and crippling. Dispatching the pretty man, the subagent, was not her last attempt. She found a much more vulnerable spot than his material interests–total altruist that he was, other people were the only ones who ever got the benefit of his worldly goods. Money was just money for him. Of what percentage of the people of Europe, among whom money is absolutely worshipped as something holy in life, can that be said?
The telephone conversations were now becoming very brief. The lady indicated that she did not want to detain her lord and master, she was much too lowly, too small, too insignificant, much too much a domestic drudge to disturb her husband at his important, public-spirited, promising, earthshaking work. As cheap as this irony was, it wounded the doctor, both hurting his pride and damaging his feelings toward his wife. Nevertheless, though at first glance he seemed softhearted and considerate, he was someone of indomitable character who knew just what he wanted to do and pushed it as far as it would go.
As far as it would go? Or only as far as he was permitted? The wife, availing herself of almost diabolical means, was beginning to distract her husband from his crackbrained, time-consuming, life-endangering experiments. On this day, for example, she demanded, quite coolly and even with a kind of gay composure, her passport. Her passport? She had never had one. There was only one passport, the one issued in the names of Dr. Walter, his wife, Alix Rosamunde Gabriele Therese, and their five children. Yes, that was the document the wife wanted. She no longer threatened divorce, or suicide, she indicated that she and her (her!) children felt they could not cope with the grueling climate, though it was quite good enough for convicts, that she wanted to move abroad, go to her mother and her brother, who were carrying on, after a fashion, the old hardware business that had belonged to her father, now three years dead. He, her husband, shouldn’t worry, he’d be kept posted and would now be able to finish his humanitarian researches undisturbed.
As may be imagined, the good doctor, cut to the quick, did not have a snappy comeback. This tone, so calm, so composed, so acutely calculating, contrasted utterly with his wife’s usual impetuous manner, which was the only one he was hardened to. For the plan did not come from her own foolish brain but from the brain of the subagent, who knew more about human nature than the doctor had at first assumed. But the subagent was hardly mentioned, except when the wife casually let fall that the doctor need no longer be unduly concerned about his family’s financial situation, the subagent had relieved her of the most pressing household worries, was taking care of everything for her and the children, for she herself was fully occupied with preparing for the move to London. And that was that. Bzzz–gone! The good Walter was so stunned that he fairly slumped (by the telephone) and then sat mutely in front of the microscope, his face grim. It was the microscope of recent manufacture, the one with twin eyepieces through which two people could observe and examine the same field of view at the same time. The brigadier general had brought it from Europe, and Walter had more than once used this splendid instrument to demonstrate to the good Carolus a beautiful (but uninteresting) bacillus specimen.
Now too the tall, gangling, rawboned Carolus went to Walter, gently took him by the shoulder, and leaned against it so he could see the field of view. But Walter could not bear being touched, or he was too apathetic to work. He stood up and left the microscope with the double eyepiece to Carolus, though Carolus had no clue about how to use it. But Carolus was more tactful than I would have given that “lummox” credit for. He did not ask and also restrained March from asking any questions of the poor husband and father, who did not compose himself until late in the evening, after he had played a match of puff-puff with the Reverend Amen and had lost in style. For his thoughts were elsewhere.
That poor martyr was going to be roasted over a slow flame. His time spent in the accursed telephone booth was probably as harrowing as March’s in the notorious steam rooms on the Mimosa where he had been locked to stew in his own juices as his reward for his true love. For now there was another phone call, this one of laconic brevity. We heard only the doctor’s startled exclamation, and thereupon his wife’s two words: I know. The good Walter, thunderstruck, had the receiver in his left hand; he had opened the door to the booth with the other and was gazing at us all. I know? What did the wife know? We looked away. We were ashamed for her. There could be only one secret that a wife whispers so confidently into her husband’s ear–we had guessed it long ago. A sweet secret.
Now it was all as plain as day. An ultimatum. Either abandon the experiments and the research immediately, depart the epidemic-swept island with its calamitous climate, particularly so for expectant mothers of the white race, and return to temperate zones–or the consequences were unforeseeable. Unforeseeable? Actually not. One could foresee exactly what happened.
To leave his theater of activity with only the entirely negative results to date, which would not have taken up even as much space in the learned journals of general pathology as the results of the remarkable expedition of Georg Letham the elder to the North Pole had taken up in the learned journals of descriptive geography–to exit and leave the field of research to the second commission–that was one alternative. And the other? Was there another? Was there anything left untried?
Walter wandered restlessly about among the microscopes, the two incubators, the bottles and dishes of experimental material. He threw into disorder the rows of books that the excellent Carolus had now learned to keep in splendid order (only a tiny ear curette made of cream yellow horn protruded from an encyclopedic handbook of bacteriology). He, Walter, opened the lab book, cast his eyes upon it; in his loose, untidy, flapping, broad-sleeved coat, he roamed about like a soul-sick priest among the cages of living animal material (only too merry, and in unbroken health), and it was very affecting when one evening he let a dog, one that had been barking at him particularly piteously that morning, out of the kennel and took it for a walk in the hospital garden, still waving his hands and carrying on a silent dialogue with his wife, or with fate. The dog barked, leaped, and rejoiced.
Pharmacist von F. had not been around for a long time. I can still see the dismayed grimace on Walter’s face when the telephone jangled once again. But it was a false alarm. Pharmacist von F. was promising to come with an important piece of news, that evening if possible, otherwise the next morning.
It would be the next morning, and that was perhaps for the best. For that evening Walter was completely worn out (there must have been another of those infernal telephone calls, I don’t know), he was deaf to reason and logic. He probably would have decided to break off the investigation and return to his family and to a bourgeois, orderly life, leaving us. After all, his wife had reproached him especially for choosing, of his own free will, or rather out of callousness, the society of “avowed murderers and bandits” over the “devoted warmth” of his “loving hearts.” What won’t people do for love?
The irrepressible doctor and pharmacist von F. (for whom the quarantine rules seemed not to exist) appeared this time without his famous mosquito veils. But he could have dressed as Salome and not gotten a rise out of us. Even Carolus turned away in boredom, Walter listened with half an ear, and March only had eyes and ears for me. I alone, on my face the indulgent smile with which one submits to the harangue of a monomaniac, had time for the ancient gentleman’s story. His report had chiefly to do with himself. Like many very old people, he assumed that everyone else was vastly interested in his private affairs. Walter was listening for the telephone, which today was noticeably quiet, Carolus was digging the remnants of some fruit from between his incisors with a toothpick whittled from a match and regarding the stuff he brought out with tender attention (which, God knows, would have been better applied elsewhere). The atmosphere was thus not promising for the old pharmacist. But there he sat, reciting his pensum.
If one had been able to muster a certain sympathy, it might even have been worth the quarter of an hour. For he was making his will before us, just as if we had been four witnesses. The last will and testament of a humanitarian medicine man grown old and yellow in the tropics who was, regrettably, a mediocrity, and had long since been overtaken by the modern era. He had seen much; his father and grandfather, long-dead doctors who had left various writings (as he told us), had seen still more.
Each son in this family of doctors had stood by his old and infirm father in his final illness, had prepared the author of his days for the coming end–only pharmacist von F., whose children had other worries, had had to make a self-diagnosis (chronic renal atrophy and arteriosclerosis). But he was fortunately free of sentimentality. His composure in the face of his demise, which he expected in about three or four months (he was not mistaken), won me over. I must admit that I (green-eyed as I am) envied the children of this comical old tropicalized humanitarian–they were lucky to have such a father. They did not understand him. And did we? I took his mosquito eggs, which this time, to be on the safe side, he had packed on cotton in a pillbox edged in gold foil, and weighed the featherlight thing in my hand.
If only we had been able to understand each other! There was a clinical tradition in his family. His observations, at least those concerning the life history of different kinds of mosquitoes, had all the precision to be expected of a modern natural scientist. He carefully distinguished his mosquitoes, the Y.F. mosquitoes, Stegomyia fasciata, from the Anopheles mosquitoes, the well-known carriers of malaria. He knew how these sat, how those jiggled their hind legs, and so forth. The two subspecies also deposited their eggs in very different places. Such keenness, such minuteness of observation, brought to bear out of what must have been pure idealism, on top of the old man’s professional activity, so difficult to carry on here in the tropics!
Touching in his senile naïveté, he inquired about the fate of the first mosquito eggs. At that time I knew only about the one insect that had escaped in Monica’s room and had bitten her. Possibly it was the same one that had later attacked the tavern owner and drunk his sweet blood. If he had then fallen ill with Y.F., the pharmacist’s absurd theory would have been proven. Yes, “if”! It would have been a giant step forward. But was not. Out of curiosity I asked him about it. He didn’t know a thing. We even pursued the matter, thorough as we were, and telephoned down to the city. The tavern owner was healthy and fit, apart from some scratches and superficial wounds that he had received from his cronies in a scuffle three days before. So it was a dead end. The old fool’s bleak face, with the stamp of death already upon it, was something to see.
All that was left of his first lot of mosquitoes was the mortal remains floating in an oily liquid in the gauze-covered glass vessel. Particles of the powdered sugar that had served as food for them were still sticking to the walls–and at the bottom was the residue of the chloroform that fun-loving old Carolus had used to send them to the better Kingdom Come of God’s dear creatures.
I must say that even the slightest reminder of the Portuguese girl (the bite from the mosquito and her sunny, mischievous, courageous nature) still upset me every time. I had not recovered from this love. I still felt it. And thus it was difficult for me to resist the pleading eyes of the old man, who wanted his fondest wish fulfilled before he died. “At least have the insects feed on the patients, and then put them under the microscope. Could it do any harm?” he asked. The memory of the Portuguese girl had put me in a tender frame of mind.
But my response was not what the expression on my face had led him to expect. “Why haven’t you let yourself be bitten by the Stegomyia?”
“Haven’t I tried often enough? Unfortunately I didn’t think of it until I was already too old. What can I do, they don’t like my blood, and I think such experiments are against our religion, too . . .”
As he uttered the word “experiments,” a strange association of ideas flashed through my mind. I had always told myself that he did not understand us. But then again we did not understand him, either. For us, what he said was nothing but unproven and unprovable twaddle, and he in turn, that old practitioner of direct observation, had no clue about our statistical findings on the transmission of the disease, those three peculiarities that old Carolus had worked out, the sparklike leaps . . . “Sparklike”? What does that mean? Get rid of it! And “leaps”? “Flights”? Can this metaphorical language capture the essence of a natural phenomenon? I am a man of reliable memory, and the ironic phrase I had used, “On the wings of an angel,” came back to me. What was that again? Yes, no, it was not on the wings of an angel, but very likely on the wings of a mosquito that the disease might, come on now, “might”?–must be transmitted from a sufferer to a healthy person, and if the tavern owner had not been infected a thousand times by the bite of a mosquito, how many things might not explain a negative? Had the tavern owner had Y.F. before? Might he be immune? I asked pharmacist von F. But I did not wait for his answer. I did not want to know. I wanted to shed some light on the problem by doing experiments.
Stop dissecting! Start doing experiments! I pulled him by the sleeve of his thin, blue silk jacket, beneath which I felt the coarse weave of his net undershirt, to the worktable where Carolus and Walter were once more diligently but fruitlessly examining the same field of view together, each at one of the lenses, and said quietly to my comrades: What Herr von F. suggests might tally with our observations after all. The illness might be transmitted by something that flies through the air. Across a courtyard, perhaps even from the east coast of one continent to the west coast of another that has the same warm and humid tropical climate, twenty-five to thirty degrees centigrade, neither the north, nor the desert, nor Europe. That addresses point one.
And if nurses and washerwomen and so forth remain free of the disease despite the unappetizing things they handle–and that was your point two, Herr Brigadier General–that proves that the clothes and the excretions of the ill don’t contain the invisible virus. Or if they do, then in an inactive form.
And if, point three, the cases come in waves, that might mean that the invisible virus matures in the body of a mosquito, as is known in other epidemic diseases, specifically malaria and hookworm.
This was very simple. Hence difficult to believe. The gentlemen would have laughed in someone else’s face. Not in mine.
I have already related, have I not, how beneficent Mother Nature gave me a healthy dose of logicality to make up for goodness, cheerfulness, and beauty, and for a good, warm heart with human feelings. But it would have done me no good had I not also received the gift of the ability to awaken trust. Among ill and healthy alike. As now.
The gentlemen, who had just been joined by the chaplain with his deck of cards for a very ill-timed session of games and chitchat, looked at me with surprise and said nothing. I continued: “What I have said is just theory. It needs to be proven.”
“What? Proven? How?” asked the foolish Carolus.
“What a question. With experiments, of course!”
“But haven’t we already done enough experiments? Monkeys, rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs, rats, what else is there?”
“What else? People!”
“People?!”
Little March, who evidently took this remark for a joke, gave a silly laugh. I found this very unpleasant. The other gentlemen were on the point of going off to consider the matter by themselves. If that happened, I would have to drop my plan. This was impossible for me. I was, I felt at that moment with certainty (but not too much shock), just as fanatical, as blinkered, as credulous as old von F. was. I had gotten hold of something. I was not about to let it go of it: this clue was worth making an effort. It was mine, it was my private war, as they say, or, expressed less grandly, my job to do.
I found their weak spots. First Carolus. “Animals in nature are certainly immune to Y.F. But people aren’t. So sooner or later, any commission, no matter what its nationality, is going to have to do human experiments. As you know, Herr Brigadier General, the American mission is disembarking even now. It’s government-supported, has unlimited funds. We have to expect that its members, imbued with true patriotism, are ready (not to put too fine a point on it) for anything!”
Carolus was less thick-skinned than I had expected. “If that’s all it is” (namely?) “I’m prepared to let myself be infected by one or two bites from Stegomyia mosquitoes. If the theory is right, we’ll be accepting the risks of success and will obtain a positive result. If the theory is wrong, it’s a mosquito bite, and let’s not waste a lot of words over it.” Well roared, lion. You’ll get your medal on your scrawny hero’s chest, a sword-and-enema-syringe war decoration on a golden breast band. That takes care of him!
“But this is impossible, gentlemen!” croaked the servant of God with the blue “Amen” tattoo on his throat, an earnest look on his face. “Think a minute! You’ve seen what this disease is. The death rate is forty-five percent to . . .”
“Oh, isn’t that old news?” said Carolus irritably. Here he was the expert.
Pharmacist von F. sat toying with his matchbox like an old abbé with a snuff tin. His eyes moved in bewilderment from one person to another; he apparently understood nothing. “Be that as it may,” said the man of God emphatically, and no one could mistake his tone of voice, except March, who was still grinning, the idiot, “be that as it may, I can only regard it as a sin, for one may not do experiments on living human beings, one may not interfere with Divine Providence.”
“Where in the Gospel is that forbidden?” I asked. And when he made no reply–doing up, then undoing, the worn cloth-covered buttons of his cassock, which was either gray with dust or green with age (it varied between the two)–Walter spoke, his words like a shot from a pistol:
“I’m in.”
“‘I’?” I repeated thoughtfully. “We don’t want to carry out this experiment as individuals, nor can we. Either we all agree or it won’t be done.”
“Dr. Walter,” said the chaplain, “I’m not speaking on my own behalf. If, with my insignificant life, I can render a service to science and to the general welfare of humankind, I’m ready to do my part. I suggest that you restrict yourselves to those among us who have no dependents, no family, no obligations. I’m alone in the world. The families of the two of you at home” (he indicated March and me) “have no expectation that you’ll ever return [?]. But you, Dr. Walter, have a wife and five children here, down in the old city. What would be permitted for the rest of us, perhaps even a moral imperative under a charitable interpretation of Holy Scripture, if that would leave your family helpless after your death, for you it would be . . .”
“One, two, three, March, you, and me, that’s not enough,” I interrupted shortly. “We’ll never wind this up if we start getting into personal matters. I propose that each of the six of us take a match. If he wants to be in, he’ll toss it just as it is into this marmalade jar where the dead Stegomyias are floating in sugar water and chloroform. But if he has any reason to exclude himself, then he’ll tear–no, he’ll snap the top of the match off and toss the rest into the jar. The vote will be secret. Here are the matches, one, two, three, four, five, six. There’s the jar in the corner. If all five matches (six, including mine) aren’t intact, we’ll drop the whole thing; unanimity is required. Each of us must speak for all of us. All of us must speak for each of us. Very simple.”
“Very simple,” echoed the steadfast March.
At that moment the telephone rang. It was the time when the dear wife usually called. “Would one of you be so kind,” said that gentleman Walter, his voice trembling with emotion, “as to tell my wife that I can’t come just now and that I’ll call without fail very early tomorrow?”
“With pleasure,” Carolus said. He proceeded to the telephone booth, closing the door behind him. Very soon the chirping of the hard-of-hearing wife, the human annunciator, came to us, her usual “What? Eh? What?” low in the distance, but clearly discerned. But Carolus was not one to lose his calm. Someone who is able to do statistical studies of a few hundred dog-tired felons by the light of an acetylene lamp on a ship en route does not lose patience too quickly. He nodded his long yellow head like a bent fire lily (also called Turk’s cap), but by the time he left the telephone booth he had fixed everything.
It was evening, and the lights went out as they often did.
“Wonderful,” I said, “a sign from fate! May it always smile upon us. Now each of us can vote without being seen by the others. Just one thing. These matches don’t all have the same weight. My vote will be cast by a man sentenced to lifelong hard labor for the murder of his wife, that of my comrade March will be cast by someone who cut down his friend as one butchers a rabbit. Why mention it? I only want to anticipate this argument so that no one makes it against us later. We’re playing for keeps. Ethical scruples can be raised now, there’s still time, but not later.”
In the marmalade jar were–five matches, all with their russet heads. Not six? Was the decision not unanimous? Of course it was. That ninny March had thrown in his lighter instead of his match and was now fishing it out, a smirk on his good-natured face. To proclaim his willingness, he had tossed not just a match but an entire lighter into the ballot box! I could not deny myself the pleasure of giving him a good box on the ear out of sheer joy (I was as though inebriated and did not come to my senses until later)–I believe the only one I have ever given anyone in my quadragenarian’s life.
I have no wish to make our decision seem more momentous than it was. Physicians have experimented on human beings from time to time for as long as medical science has existed. It has not been exactly the rule, but by no means the exception, either, that physicians have ventured to experiment on themselves. We were not the first and will certainly not have been the last. Whether this undertaking would involve murder (voluntary manslaughter?) or suicide in legal terms was our (my) ultimate worry.
We were prepared for difficulties. But only for difficulties, not for something that was plain unachievable. Our task did not require genius. Only courage. Method. Discipline. Were these too much to expect from the six of us?
Unfortunately they were. The initial obstacles came from the man of whom I would least have expected such a thing. From old Dr. von F. His mission and his duty coincided, and yet he shirked them. He could have perished honorably for his idea, but he preferred to wait out the final consequences of his chronic geriatric disorder and drink the cup of life to the dregs. He did not have courage, nor did he abide by the method, nor yet did he evince discipline. I said that he had appeared to me to be free of emotionalism. But the sentimental tears that now flowed down his sunken, leathery cheeks set me straight on that score. Pasteur certainly did not cry before his experiments. But let the old imbecile von F. have his effusion, we were in his debt for the crucial hint.
Of greater importance was another point. It goes without saying that absolute secrecy had to be maintained as far as the outside world was concerned. The fact is that the average person, burdened by preconceived ideas, responds to such experimenta crucis, as science calls them, with ethical scruples. Further, financial considerations (such as the matter of the insurance) were involved; opposition from the high authorities was to be feared. Now that we were really going to poke our noses into the yellow plague, no one needed the goodwill of the gentlemen in the bowels of the bureaucracy as much as we did.
So were we not our own masters? Of course we were. But our experiments on ourselves were only the start–we all understood that. A problem like this one was not going to be solved by a series of experiments on only six specimens of Homo sapiens. Sooner or later we would have to have recourse to other “human material,” as one must bluntly call it, and if the voluntary decision to give up one’s life on the altar of science should perhaps become something not entirely voluntary or clear-cut in one case or another, then the issue of murder would become more salient. What could happen to us? To me not much, certainly. Far more to our work, which we wished to finish, had to finish. March and I, individuals lost to civil society, admittedly had nothing to fear, for the threat of disciplinary action could not intimidate us. But the other four? One of them was a man of the highest social position whose rank of general meant that he had to bear responsibility for everything, a second was the husband of a faithful, unprovided-for wife and the father of five, humane, a gentleman, and a Christian, the third was a man of the cloth with old-time qualms of conscience and an inadequate understanding of the ethics of bacteriology, and the last was the old pharmacist von F.
I had called him a humanitarian. And until then he may always have been one–at least nothing to the contrary was known. But I had not reckoned on his vanity. And I had given far too little consideration to the fact that the experiment we all faced was one he could have done on himself long ago, while his noble hidalgo blood was still fresh and sweet and would have been pure nectar to the hungry Stegomyia mosquitoes. He had not done it then because his fear of being infected had been even greater than his vanity and his desire to make the name von F. world-famous. We will not speak of his humanity. For he never put it to the test. And whether one believes it or finds it fantastic, the very next morning after the matchstick ballot, this man at the mercy of death from a chronic incurable illness fought tooth and nail against our plan to include him in our series of experiments.
I could have gotten over it. Even five is a good number to start with. But the accursed man could not manage to keep his triumph to himself–that he had at last been taken seriously. While his mosquito eggs were still hatching in the incubator and we were racking our brains behind closed doors and windows about the proper way to set up an insectarium for them, and while the deeply distressed but resolute Walter was evading his wife’s calls under always novel but ever more implausible pretexts, that old blockhead von F. had long since spilled the beans about our plan down in C. Walter found out from his wife that his intention was known. He, and we too, had to listen to the pregnant wife threaten in utter despair to throw herself and her children out the window and onto the street. What choice did he have? He swore to her by all the saints that it was all mad talk on the part of the pharmacist. That we had wanted to indulge the old sick fool von F. during his last days, but had not taken his fantasies seriously for a minute, and as proof he proposed to meet with her in three days if she found the courage to get near him. Yes! Was she thrilled! She’d love to, that dear, faithful wife! He’d help her in making the long-planned move from C. She’d finally be allowed to take the children and leave this awful place. He suppressed his sighs, sketched out the travel plans with seeming coolness. And the wife was happy, overjoyed to hear this. At bottom she expected that she would be able to take her husband with her when the time came. She had every confidence in the power of her love.
So then one day, after a long private talk with Carolus, the good Walter disinfected himself from head to toe and, resplendent as a bridegroom, freshly pressed and bemedaled, but reeking of cresol instead of eau de cologne, he tried to leave us, to hie to the waiting arms of his yearning wife. For the time being the children would not come into contact with him, until he had proven to be free of infection.
How long should he wait to press his father’s kiss to their brows? Not a living soul in the inhabited world knew. Each did what he felt he could accept responsibility for, and it was left, how shall I say, to the divine grace of God or to chance.
The good Walter did not promise us that he would be back punctually in a week’s time (the wife had already bargained the three days originally granted up to that much). He had never been a man of particularly many words.
We expected that the insects would have pupated and matured in six to eight days (though it took longer) and be ready to feed on the blood of the Y.F. patients and hungry enough to bite five people after that. That is: since each of us could be used only once in the important experiment, others would have to be present to carry out the necessary observations, tests, and examinations, record the findings, and so on. So at the last minute, while Walter was already looking impatiently out the window at the sea, the ship, and the islands, a plan was devised whereby first March and I would deliver ourselves over to the experiments while Carolus and Walter made their observations of us and took charge of our care. The chaplain was conceived as a reserve. He would step in either as an experimental subject or as a record keeper. But he could not replace even a Carolus, never mind a Walter.
What I am going to say will sound brutal and repugnant. But I cannot express it otherwise than comports with the facts. Our plans were unfortunately disturbed once more by the foolish, garrulous pharmacist, who did not even understand what damage he had done. We suggested to him–Carolus, that is, with the gentlest, mildest face in the world, while the rest of us shrugged indifferently and looked down–that upon further consideration we had thought better of our decision to do the experiments. So he was released from his promise. Go in peace! Give us your blessing and clear out! But the dismayed face of the old fool when he heard the bad news was something to see. He had been so sure we would stick to our guns and make his name known the world over.
Walter stood up at last, after he had asked March to get one of the experimental dogs out of its cage, the same one that he had walked. He wanted to take it to his children. What a kind heart! Pharmacist von F. smiled, but he did not go. Pharmacist von F. stayed. We looked askance at him, but he was not ashamed of his intrusiveness. He even became a pest. If there was anything good about it, it was that at least he was able to tell us about his latest, most exhaustive observations of the life history of the insect under suspicion. If these had been no more reliable than his self-control and discretion, they would have been unusable. However, it became apparent that a weak personality and a vain and craven character have no bearing on the precision, fidelity, and subtlety of one’s observations of nature. We checked his statements about the biology of the Stegomyia mosquito insofar as we were able. Almost all were dead right.
We passed the time with these things. We had to wait for Walter. He was coming back. Of that we were all certain, without having said a word.
He needed us, we him.