We were now deep into the most important phase of our experiments, and without a leader. I am unable to describe the despair in which the passing of this man Walter left us. All of us, March no less than Carolus, the hospital director as well as the chaplain, were in shock. Our team sat in the hush of the laboratory, heads sunken on breasts. The only sounds were the muffled stirrings of the animals in the basement and the patients in their rooms over our heads. He was dead, and there was nothing to be done about it.
Our friend lay downstairs in the small, electrically lit autopsy room. We found his instructions in his desk drawer. One of us was to go to the body and pin his war medals to his chest. No one dared to. His gold-rimmed spectacles (broken) were also found in the laboratory. They had been with him for so many years of his life–should he not have them to take along, too?
Finally we voted by matchstick again (it was March who thought of it), but the result meant quite a different thing this time. A match with its head snapped off was placed in a preserving bottle along with three intact matches. Whoever drew the broken match would carry out the mission that no one would volunteer for.
It was not the same thing, of course. I, who thought logically even under these circumstances–because I couldn’t help it–realized that it would be easy to tell which match was the broken one, even with eyes covered. You would only need to finger the matches one by one. But no one else thought of it.
The task fell finally to the chaplain, who not only honored the dead man but also took that opportunity to lay a silver crucifix on Walter’s chest, the same one that Walter himself had taken from the chest of the waterworks director at his autopsy a few months earlier. We decided that it should be given to the doctor to take to his final resting place instead of being pressed into further service. We refrained from examining the body. No one would have been able to wield the autopsy knife.
The findings were clear in any case. The lab report that I now drafted with Carolus, to be deposited with the notary or the governor as agreed, described Dr. Walter’s experiment along with our other experiments as successful and conclusive beyond all doubt.
I had assumed that I would be permitted to be one of the pallbearers at my late friend’s funeral. We had been promised freedom, after all. But I had failed to take into consideration the legendary ponderousness of official process. Besides, our fate was still entirely uncertain. Walter had been the animating force behind the magnanimous administrative decision. He was no more.
The next day, late in the afternoon, the sisters carried the body from the hospital’s chapel to the public hearse in a lovely hardwood casket (the work of convicts). The coachmen (more freed convicts) and the marines provided as an escort were not permitted to come into contact, however fleeting, with any of the occupants of the Y.F. hospital.
Why was this? Nothing would have happened to the twenty-four splendid lads who served as sentries at the shore batteries even if they had shaken the corpse’s bile yellow hands. It was not contact that spread the disease, but mosquitoes. It made no difference whether the body was interred between layers of quicklime or in plain soil. It was for this idea that Walter had died. This axiom was what he had suffered for–suffered more, that soft, sentimental, chaste man, than we could ever know.
But that did not matter. As far as the world was concerned, the old wisdom held true, and neither I nor Carolus nor the dead man’s unfortunate wife was permitted to join her husband on his final journey.
From our window we watched the twenty-four marines form up in full regalia. The evening sun glinted on their weapons and their musical instruments–not only the “bugles” that poor Walter had raved about but also trombones, cornets, and so on, along with the percussion that is usual in military bands. I thought of the military band at the dock.
The top men in the colonial administration, the director of the prison camps, and so forth, strode on ahead. The music started up, the baleful funeral march from the familiar Chopin sonata. Thus they bore our teacher and master away to the lime pit, feet first, as in the old song.
I kept at my work, which had to be taken care of sooner or later. It did not have my full attention, as will be readily understood. I did not relax at the microscope. The lugubrious crashing of the march music had no sooner faded than Frau Walter’s distraught wailing and shouting resounded from the room above us, where she was being held by force. The hospital matron was attending to her, Carolus offered his services, even March came forward–hearing the shrill cries of the poor woman, he had become deathly pale, shooting me one dark look after another from his handsome, foolish boy’s eyes. But all the carrying on was becoming actual fits of madness, she was screaming like a lunatic now, stamping, tromping on the floorboards. All attempts to soothe her, all well-intended words of sympathy, all helpful suggestions were in vain. She had acquired superhuman strength. No one dared to give her a tranquilizing injection for fear of harming the baby. Three nurses, the chaplain, and the entire physician staff were there, trying to subdue the frantic woman through friendly persuasion or gentle force. Meanwhile new patients were being admitted. Some of them were already at the dangerous stage, needed the doctors, the nurses, the chaplain; it was not clear what to do with Walter’s widow, this now very inconvenient guest.
Finally, against my better judgment, I let March drag me up to see her.
I have already reported that I had the ability (possibly inherited from my father) to exert a calming influence on children, the insane, animals, and the ill.
I now calmly went to the raving woman. There were fat, distended violet veins in her neck area. At that moment she was on the point of throwing herself out the window, shrieking intolerably in her harsh peacocklike voice. She was unable to do this, of course, because her enormously protruding belly was too big for the relatively narrow opening. I made no effort to stop her. I asked the others to leave the room. They all seemed to be glad to, with the exception of March, who did as I asked with reluctance, devouring me and the poor woman with his eyes. I had not seen this expression on his face for a long time. But it was too deliberate, this look could not be completely genuine. When everyone was gone, I approached her, took her as gently as I could by the sleeve of her dark dress without touching her, and carefully drew her away from the window. She cried out as she followed me but did not offer much resistance. I pushed her down onto the convalescent’s reclining chair that stood in a corner, here as in every sickroom, and whispered to her a few meaningless words, accentuating the syllables as sharply as possible. Sometimes one must whisper with extreme clarity if one wants to make oneself understood to the hard of hearing. Not shout. She had not yet stopped her drawn-out, deafening cries when she noticed my mouth moving. She looked into my eyes, I into hers. Now she fell silent and read the simple words on my lips. “Your husband wanted me to tell you . . .” She opened her eyes wide and looked at me mutely. At this moment of complete silence came the thunderous shots of the marine honor guard rendering a final salute for her husband at his fresh grave. She heard three blasts spreading over the city’s hilly terrain, amplified by the echo. Her face turned dark-red and white in alternation, the contorted features relaxed. And tears rolled down the unmoving face in total silence.
I must in all honesty confess that, watching her tears start and stop as the shots came and went, I did not have an entirely clean conscience toward Walter’s wife, Alix, her name was. She had let her pretty, somewhat mannish head sink into the crook of an elbow, and the place where the mosquito had punctured her skin was still visible below the hair on the nape of her neck. It was encrusted with the tiny blackish remnants of the insect’s body. Evidently, in her mad anguish, she had not properly washed or brushed her hair since her husband’s demise.
Must one not feel sympathy for a person reduced to such misery? But unfortunately there was more than just sympathy. The inner voice was there, the war was going on within me. One part of me was in revolt against another, and already I knew that good times were not on the way. But the poor creature had just lost her best, indeed her only friend. Was she not a thousand times worse off?
The woman was now complaining of spasmodic lower abdominal pain. Putting the matter as delicately as I could, I asked her if this could be the first labor pains, but she said no, and I presumed that she had enough experience from her previous deliveries to know what her condition was.
My only concern was that she leave the Y.F. hospital as quickly as possible. If she should suddenly give birth here, who would provide the necessary assistance? I did have some obstetric expertise, acquired at the request of my late wife before I opened my private clinic. But I had had enough of risky experiments. This will be readily understood by anyone.
The only one who did not understand it was the very person I had most looked to until then, March. “I guess you want to get rid of her, you don’t want to take responsibility for your rottenness?” he hissed at me when I asked him to use his influence over our late friend’s widow to get her to return to her lodgings in the city (in the hospitable subagent’s house).
“Rottenness?” I repeated the word quietly and held March’s gaze until he looked down. I still dominated him, and he knew it. Something else would have to happen to tear us apart.
But he too could compose himself. He answered me, falteringly, but with irrefutable logic. In this regard he had been schooled by me, just as Carolus had been schooled by Walter in regard of medical and bacteriologic technique. “Don’t you see, Louis” (this was the first time he had confused my name with that of his deceased friend, the “cadet”), “don’t you understand, Georg, that the woman can’t leave this building now? She absolutely can’t go back to her children, we can’t put them in danger too.”
I thanked him silently for that “we,” thrown in so casually. I drew closer to him and asked him never to judge me before he had spoken to me. He promised, just like that. This did not make the problem go away.
I would have been only too glad to be deceived, I trusted him as I had never trusted anyone apart from my father and my brother. It was unfair, for human nature cannot tolerate unconditional trust, absolute surrender of the soul. One must deal with facts only.
Fortunately the delivery did not seem to be imminent. We, Carolus and I, worked out the month of the pregnancy and came to the conclusion that there were at least four more weeks to go. Somewhat reassured, we parted.
As soon as I was alone, I heard the voice of my conscience once again. Was March right? Was it “rottenness”? When I had allowed the mosquito to bite the woman’s neck, I had not only been without “respect of person,” as I called it a moment ago. Up to that limit, everything would indeed have been permitted. But it was not permitted, and, even to me now that I was able to think about it more calmly, it was unjustifiable to intentionally enlist, against her will, a woman so sorely tried by fate in an experiment that, as the example of her husband showed, could very easily end in death. And what then? The vain and superficial subagent was still letting the five children stay with him, out of a kind of sympathy, but this could not continue in the event of a longer illness. And what would happen to the poor tots then? The pension to which the widow was entitled was small. But the amounts allowed for orphans were even smaller. And even if they had had millions, who would take the place of their mother? I knew from my own experience what it was to lose one’s mother early.
I understood now why poor Walter had suffered so much. He had felt regret. He should never have brought his wife, still less his children, into this hellish climate. On his own account he might make sacrifice after sacrifice as long as there was breath left in his body. But that did not entitle him to expect such sacrifices of his family too. When I had allowed myself to be bitten by the Stegomyia and thereby knowingly, with eyes wide open, taken upon myself the entire ordeal, I had made a sacrifice less easily asked of a person of my cold-blooded nature than of someone else. But I was my own master. I had no right to impose that degree of suffering on another person. If the woman now actually became critically ill following the incubation period, then I had intentionally inflicted a severe physical injury. March had not been wrong when he knocked my hand away.
But if she died and made the poor little ones orphans, I would have a second true murder on my conscience, in addition to the murder of my wife, the crime for which I had been deported. Granted, I had not committed this second murder for selfish reasons. But did that give the victim her life back? Did I have to have a conscience? Unfortunately I had one just as I had eyes in my head and fingers on my hand.
My bit of peace and inner equilibrium (all ethics is equilibrium of inner moral forces), it was all gone. I did not love myself. I cut myself loose and was thus entirely isolated. The night that now awaited me was no less harrowing than the nights of suffering with Y.F. during which I had lain in despair and cursed my life.
March was not sleeping now, either. In former times I had often reached over the edge of my bed and gently tugged on my March’s tousled hair as he slept on the floor beside me. If he was awake, he would answer me with his silly but pleasant laugh, and we would spend part of the night talking. But if he was asleep, this gentle touch would not disturb him. I did this now. My hand reached for his head, with its luxuriant new growth of downy hair, like that of a young animal, a week-old lamb, perhaps. But he, awake now, or awake all along, jerked his head away. He did not reply to my whispering. And I would have heard what he said no matter how softly he said it, for my ears had become so sensitive since my recovery that they picked up the scurrying of the rats in the cellar, the marching of the guards in the corridors there and on the ground floor, the light footsteps of the nurses on the upper stories, indeed even the lamentations of the patients in their rooms all over the building, the ticking of March’s watch (a present from Walter), I heard everything in turns, one sound confusedly giving way to another.
I now saw in my mind’s eye, with a clarity impossible in the light of day, what the ill-fated mother and wife was going through and would go through.
I did not want to see it, I did not want to imagine it. I stood up and paced in the cramped basement room as dawn began to break. I ignored March and tossed my boots at the rats, accurately enough to make them squeak but not accurately enough to bring one down. Even this silly hunt could not take my mind off Walter’s widow. Would I repeat my last crime if I now had the opportunity before me, instead of the accomplished fact behind me? The question tormented me, I could not shake it off. Fixed on this one obsessive idea wrenched entirely out of its context, I threw myself back onto the creaking bed and fell into a restless and sweaty sleep over this problem that was not a problem, dreamed about it. I could not make up my mind either way.
It would perhaps do me credit if now I had at least been able to repent my crime properly and done everything to make amends. But I did not have what it takes for that.
When I awoke late in the morning, I was a wreck, more tired than when I had gone to sleep and more despondent than ever before. March had long since gone to the laboratory. He had not touched my clothes, though he generally cleaned them punctiliously and enthusiastically. All my things were in the same disorder, had not moved from where I had thrown them in my despair toward daybreak. One sleeve of my lab coat had fallen into the tub of soft soap, and I cleaned everything with difficulty.
In the meantime shrill cries had begun to echo throughout the building: Walter’s wife, Alix, was howling with pain, wailing as I had never heard a living creature wail. Was the world nothing but a hell?
I immediately suspected that the woman would want me there. In vain did I try to get myself off the hook by telling the matron, who had come for me, that I was not a specialist in obstetrics and had not delivered a baby in ages. In vain did I advise bringing in one of the doctors from the city of C. No sooner was this suggestion out of my mouth than I myself realized its absurdity. We were under quarantine. No doctor from the city could officially come here if he did not want to run the risk of spreading the Y.F. microorganism among his patients. (In reality the prohibition was often circumvented; von F., for example, had come on many occasions. But in view of Walter’s death, it had to be formally complied with.) The matron saw this almost as quickly as I did and said that I should go to the bed of Walter’s widow merely to “quiet her mind.” The woman’s mental state had become unsettled as a result of the recent upset, she said; I, whom she trusted, had it within my power to get her to take heart. In the matron’s view, which followed that of the old hospital director, labor had begun somewhat prematurely but still normally; the vocal expressions of pain, currently a renewed nerve-racking screeching, were surely much exaggerated. Carolus came in, put his (never entirely clean) hand on my shoulder, something very unlike him, and he too reasoned with me. To win a temporary reprieve, I promised to come if the pain did not ease within an hour. During that hour the woman’s bladder and bowel were to be evacuated and she was to be placed in a bath of thirty-six to thirty-eight degrees centigrade–an analgesic method that had often proven itself at the clinic.
I huddled in a corner of the laboratory, lost in thought. March circled me, looking daggers at me, but he did not speak, nor did I speak to him. The hour passed quickly. At most fifteen minutes seemed to have gone by when, as though on cue, the unfortunate woman’s piercing shrieks came once again from the sickroom above the laboratory. Was the sound different–I do not know, I knew only that it was time. It was serious. I understood that I had to go. I had to meet my fate.
I dashed past the dumbfounded March, then went back, grabbed his hand, and dragged him down to our room. I laid out clean clothes for myself, including a white coat that had not yet been used and that I should have worn the day the governor visited our laboratory. March would sprinkle sterile water on it and then iron it with a very hot flatiron. This will sterilize a piece of linen to all intents and purposes. I did not know whether there would be enough disinfected surgical linen in the building. If necessary, our little disinfecting chamber could be used to sterilize gowns, drapes, and some bandaging material. Improvisation has always interested me, and March was clever enough to grasp my hasty instructions and carry them out to the letter. While he heated the disinfection apparatus, I bathed.
Finally we were ready. Carolus and the young resident had knocked on the bathroom door more than once. I had not opened it. It would not have been responsible to appear unwashed at the bedside of a woman in labor. All the laws of morality may not always have been holy to me. But the laws of asepsis were.
I opened the chamber containing the disinfected articles. The gowns and drapes were still hot and steaming. I put on a fresh white coat (not the ironed one) and directed March to disinfect a second white coat and more bandaging material.
Anyone watching me ready myself would have believed that I was confident and self-assured to the point of imperturbability and that I knew exactly what I was doing and what I was going to do. Unfortunately this was not the case. I did things that did not matter, neglected what did. I was racked by doubts: I was simply the creature of my surgical training with all its arrogance and ingrained ways of doing things, of the old school through which I had gone. Just how gladly I would have avoided this task may be seen in the fact that now, at the last minute, outside Frau Walter’s room, I proposed to the young resident that he perform the delivery, that he take charge. He looked at me in surprise, but he accepted. When I asked him if he had ever performed a delivery on his own, he shrugged his shoulders and smiled faintly. There was nothing for it. I had to go, I had to step in, I had to do the experiment, although nothing could have been of less interest to me than doing a second experiment on this incessantly, heartrendingly wailing woman. It was an irony of fate that she was asking for me, that she had beseeched the heavens for me to come, and that she expected a miracle from me. And she knew who I was. Murderer, convict. She knew my past as well as she did my face. But she had faith, and her faith yearned for me!
I composed myself as best I could. First of all I needed assistants. March would have been a good one. A good one? What am I saying? He would have been the best assistant. But could I trust him now? Had he not become half an enemy–twice as dangerous as an unambiguous one? Aside from March, there was only the matron. An old, very sanctimonious, but competent, practical, always firm female who had never seen a delivery in this yellow-fever hospital, let alone assisted at one, but who had nerves of steel and who, buttressed by her rock-solid Catholic faith, was able to face any situation with courage and submission to the will of God.
I wanted to have her by my side, to look to her, not to March, and least of all to Carolus. Carolus’s goodwill was not in doubt, but he had fallen back into all his uncleanly habits since the decease of our great friend. It took no more than a glance at his neglected hands to see that he was not the proper assistant. It would have been irresponsible to let him participate. Nor did he push himself forward. And he, the brigadier general, gave me, the criminal sentenced without possibility of appeal to exile on the island of deportees C., free rein, even where the widow of his friend and collaborator Walter was concerned.
In my heart of hearts I still nourished the hope that the diagnostic findings would be normal and there would be no need for me to perform an intervention of any kind. It was her sixth delivery, after all, and the earlier ones (I remembered what Walter had said before his death) had gone normally without exception.
When I went to her bedside, I was met by a joyful expression in her tearstained eyes.
Joy, in someone who must have gone through truly frightful things in the past forty-eight hours!
A to-the-point (external) examination was enough to convince me that her complaints and fears were only too justified. Her uneasy feeling, expressed at her husband’s bedside, that the baby was “in the wrong position” had a cogent basis. Unfortunately this was not the hysterical moaning and squawking of a querulous female. It was the sound of someone reduced by pain to the level of an animal.
I will try to suggest the medical facts, although I do not know how comprehensible they will be to the lay reader. The baby was in the wrong position. The normal position is cephalic, whereby the head of the baby, the largest and heaviest part of it, is oriented so as to occupy the lowest area of the uterus. The baby was very far from this normal cephalic lie. It was in the wrong position, its lie was transverse.
An analogy, to make this clear. A plum pit that can slip lengthwise through the narrow neck of a bottle and out again will have a great deal of trouble getting out of the bottle in a crosswise orientation. And here there was just as little hope that the baby’s body, lying transversely with its legs by its head, one bulky, shapeless mass, could safely pass through the natural birth canal. Never. Rather, it would tear the poor mother’s viscera to pieces, and even now the screams, the almost continuous hypertonic contractions without any time for recovery, were only too understandable. For the baby’s head, much too far to one side, was pulling at and grinding against the tender internal organs. It was causing contusions, internal wounds, hemorrhages. Even the woman’s most bloodcurdling screams would make sense to someone who knew what was going on inside her. A warm bath may work wonders for a nervous, oversensitive lady whose baby is in the proper position, but here it was as useless as a shot of morphine. Unless all one wanted to do was to give the two of them a painless end, both mother and child. That I could not do. No doctor could.
The conservative school of obstetrics cherished in the bosom of our university faculty for a century had always recommended as the first recourse that the baby’s body be shifted with the greatest care from the transverse lie to the correct one, the longitudinal lie, bringing the head away from the side and downward, if possible without surgical intervention. I, an experimental bacteriologist, attempted this now. I would work only on the outside, on the abdominal wall, where I saw streaky horizontal striae attesting to earlier pregnancies; if at all possible, my hand would not even touch the exposed internal organs. If this was successful, the delivery could take its course in a normal fashion, with the head first.
Then the mother would not be infected by my bacteriologist’s hands; but only then.
Turning the baby’s body from its transverse lie onto its head in the mother’s womb was without a doubt the simplest and gentlest intervention if it could be done by simple dislocation, from outside. Usually the baby’s head lies somewhat closer to the mother’s pelvic inlet, that is, somewhat farther down, than the baby’s bottom. The mother must therefore be positioned so as to be resting on the same side as the baby’s head in order for the delivery to take its natural course.
I asked the matron and a young but competent nurse, her factotum, to give me a hand. We put two beds together on their long sides with a crossbrace and then tried to reposition the mother. Though I was not the strongest person in the world since my illness, I undertook to lift the woman from her single bed. I carried her in my arms to the double bed and established the desired position. Her cries of pain had not stopped. As her blotchy, sweaty face lay on my chest, I felt her frantic, hissing gasps on my throat. She was doing her best to keep from screaming.
Finally she was in the position we wanted. She was immobile. But not relaxed. She should not, could not relax, she had to help. Much as we might have liked to, we could not administer a narcotic that would have anesthetized, sedated, paralyzed her, she had to help us with the delivery by bearing down with all her strength.
Even in normal births it is not easy to get a mother-to-be to deliberately increase her own pain by bearing down to contract the abdominal muscles and squeeze the baby’s head deeper through the sore, tender lower abdomen. And how much more difficult it was in this case! But I had so much power over this woman who was almost unconscious with brute suffering that she did her best. I helped the process along methodically with my hand on the outside of her belly.
The baby does not lie directly beneath the skin and the muscular sheath; it is surrounded by amniotic fluid within the womb. Often, when one thinks one has grasped the head, it slips away again like a fish in water, and the stronger the contractions become, the denser and tighter the muscular wall of the uterus becomes and the more difficult it is for a hand to correct the baby’s wrong lie by pushing vigorously from the outside. The things I tried! The maneuvers I attempted, the torment I caused! At last we seemed to have succeeded. The woman was on her side on the bed, holding on to a support with both hands; her beautiful reddish hair shone, spread out on the damp pillows. Every so often she reached out for me, but then she controlled herself to keep from annoying me, making an effort to stifle her screams.
When everything was taken care of, I put her cold hand back where it belonged, squeezed it, and at the same time counted her pulse on the radial artery. It was somewhat elevated but fortunately gave no cause for concern. Then I checked the baby’s heart sounds by placing my late friend’s stethoscope on the outside of his widow’s abdominal wall. The unborn baby’s heart was clearly perceptible, pounding like a kettledrum. I counted 140 to 142 beats per minute. The young resident (he was wearing his old, no longer entirely clean white coat and his presence here was not to my liking, but what could I do) was very concerned about this high rate, the pulse rate of healthy adults being no more than sixty-eight or seventy per minute. I had to inform him that an unborn child’s pulse rate is twice that. His polite but incredulous smile told me what a good thing it was that I had not entrusted the delivery to him. For he was as innocent as a Capuchin monk.
A slight improvement in the woman’s condition seemed to be at hand. Her haggard cheeks were losing their blotchy flush, her breath was not so spasmodic, and her screams were dwindling to deep, prolonged groans. The muscles in her meager arms were tense: she held on and held out.
I am unable to describe how very happy this slight seeming improvement made me. The woman wanted to say something, she gestured, and when I bent down, she asked me–to send word to her five children in the city? No, Georg Letham, you poor excuse for a psychologist–she asked me to look after the little dog that was shut up in the guest room she had been occupying and was surely suffering from hunger and thirst and loneliness.
All my life I have been vulnerable, ultimately, to sentimental impulses. And I succumbed to them now. First I searched for the woman’s bag, finding it under her clothes on the reclining chair, and opened the clasp to look for the key to her room.
A strange feeling came over me as I found, along with small bills, a tortoiseshell comb, coins, handkerchiefs, lipstick, compacts, the key, and other odds and ends, my friend’s passport and the telegrams to whose composition and dispatch I myself had been a witness not long before. I put everything back, smiled confidently at the woman, took the key, and went out into the corridor. March was waiting for me, feverish with worry and impatience. “She’s doing better, bosom buddy, much better!” I called out to him. I hurried as quickly as I could through the rambling building to the wing where the guest room was located. I could already hear the little dog’s melancholy whine like a repeated question.
But at the same time my ears, so inordinately keen since my illness, picked up unmistakable sounds of distress from the woman once more: not the feral shrieking of the first hypertonic contractions, but twice as dreadful to me in the subdued, weakened form signifying surrender to despair.
I threw the room key at the feet of a young assistant nurse who appeared in the corridor just then, shouted a few incoherent words at her. It hardly mattered whether she understood them or not. I had to go back.
On the way I reproached myself most bitterly for having left the sickroom. But had it been so inexcusable? I, who had always wanted, who had needed, to take upon myself what was most difficult, had felt the desire to be part of something lighter, more human for once. To go to an animal that had been left by itself, that was half dead from hunger and thirst, to show it all the acts of kindness that an animal lover can (I had begun to love animals, and did I ever!)–was that such a crime? It seemed so.
In that brief interval, the woman’s condition had worsened a great deal. She no longer lay compliantly on her side, but on her back, her legs propped on the bar that we had provided. She was moaning and crying out, feebly, but so heart-wrenchingly that no ear could have borne it, even one much less keen than mine.
The matron too was white as a sheet, and the good-natured resident shook like a leaf when the woman in her anguish suddenly lurched upward, sat up on the shuddering bed, got to her feet, hammered with both fists on her spherical belly, and then let herself fall face-first back onto the bed with all her weight, as though to destroy the child inside her with the force of her fall–and herself, too. Only with the greatest effort was it possible to bring her to reason, at least for a short time–and this effort consisted chiefly of a potent injection of morphine and atropine. Dangerous or not. It had to be. Her pupils dilated immediately from the effect of the atropine, which was stronger than the pupil-constricting effect of the morphine.
Now she gradually stopped screaming, but pointed to her belly with both hands. I examined it very gently. The uterus was visibly contracted beneath the thin, brownish, striated skin, with no sign of wanting to relax completely.
Suddenly a greenish liquid poured out of her, the amniotic fluid began to be expelled. The amnion, the amniotic sac, had ruptured. What to do? Act fast? Yes, but how? Was there any way to help? There had to be. The delivery could not proceed naturally. Do nothing, just put my hands in my lap? In hers? Bring in the chaplain, who was knocking on the door, impatiently now, and demanding to baptize the child in the womb with an injection of holy water? The matron was in favor of this. The hospital director, an excellent administrator but an extremely mediocre and unresponsive physician, also arrived, to make matters worse. All of them assailed me loudly with advice, worries, senseless talk. Were they sorry they had put a convict in charge of the delivery? It was too late for that. They were shouting so confusedly that the woman herself was inaudible now.
I do not know how I found the strength to get them out of the room, all but the matron and the young assistant nurse who had followed me with the key from the corridor. Her face, in its chaste, unspoiled austerity, gave me a certain confidence in her moral steadfastness (which proved itself). The air was stifling. We tore open the window. One had to be able to breathe before making grave decisions affecting the life and death of two people.
A colossal cloudburst was now hammering down on the city. The air, with a smell of burning sulfur, was a lead weight in the lungs.
There was a rumbling like the bottom notes of an organ in the branches of a tall jacaranda. Some of the ubiquitous vulture-like nocturnal birds, startled, rose from it, their dripping wings stretched out horizontally.
Back to the bed, which was soiled by the greenish, disagreeable-looking, but odorless, fluid. I placed the stethoscope on the rock-hard, yellowish abdomen, pointing upward like a gently shining dome.
The baby’s heart sounds? They were subdued. The pulse rate was decreasing. It had fallen from 140 to 110.
A bad sign. A terrible danger signal. We had to make haste, or all would be lost.
The air that evening was so humid that our shirts and coats stuck to us as though they had just been pulled out of water. The heat took our breath away. It was like wearing a helmet made of lead, a diving helmet. But this was no time to be thinking about personal discomforts.
All that mattered was the prepping for the unavoidable intervention.
Luckily the room had running water. And outside the windows, water was pouring down as though the sluices of heaven had opened.
The first preparatory procedure consisted of the disinfection of my hands and arms up to the elbows and the equally careful and meticulous aseptic prepping of the woman now half conscious and writhing in contractions. This disinfection could be entrusted to the trained matron and her very skillful, intelligent assistant.
The second preparatory procedure was the induction of deep anesthesia. If I wanted to turn the baby in the womb, the uterus and abdominal musculature had to be as relaxed as possible. The mother could not suffer any more pain. She simply could not take any more. Human feeling and medical duty were one.
This anesthesia I would in good conscience much rather have entrusted to my friend March–who had spent many hours anesthetizing monkeys and dogs down in the laboratory and possessed a natural, inborn gift for this difficult task–than to anyone else, than to Carolus, say, who soon withdrew. He could not watch such things. Thus I called to March, telling him to scrub thoroughly as I was doing and then begin the anesthesia. While I scrubbed, the assistant nurse went down to the hospital pharmacy for an anesthesia mask and the necessary quantity of anesthetic, a mixture of chloroform and ether in alcohol.
The storm had abated momentarily. It was quiet outside after the rumbling of the hurricane-like thunderstorm. Now there was more trouble. The electric light was beginning to flicker ominously. There had been similar disruptions every so often since the death of the Swedish power-plant director. What could we do? There was no time to think. The mother, who was only whimpering now, was looking more critical every minute. She was deteriorating. She was slipping away. I had to operate, even if darkness reigned as before the creation of the world, when all was a black chaos.
I barked at March. Why hadn’t he begun the anesthesia? “Get going! Mask on! Administer the mixture one drop at a time, faster or slower as needed. Grab the lower jaw with your left hand and pull it forward! Then the tongue will come along and won’t lie on top of the laryngeal inlet, so respiration will be free; monitor her breathing, breath by breath! Keep your left index finger on her pulse and count off the breaths till I say stop. Wait! Have you checked for false teeth?” March had forgotten this, and why would he have thought of it? Dogs and monkeys do not have dentures to slip down their throats in deep anesthesia and choke them. “False teeth! Oh, come off it!” objected March, normally so clever and quick on the uptake. “Get that stupid look off your face, you idiot!” I cried. “Open her mouth, and do it right! Like that, yes, and have a look!” “Stop shouting,” March responded resentfully, but he obeyed. (Her teeth were real.)
In my agitation I ignored his defiance. It was enough that he cooperated. My thoughts were elsewhere. When I had almost finished disinfecting my arms, I ran through my plan of action again in my mind.
The young nurse to my left. The old matron to my right. Each would hold one of the mother’s knees. A sterilized drape over her lower abdomen.
One of my hands working inside the mother, the other hand on the drape helping from outside.
Both hands always working together. Neither by itself.
Turning the baby from its transverse lie onto its rump by these manipulations would be a last attempt to bring about a normal longitudinal lie.
If it failed, the woman was lost.
But I was sure of my business. I still had the self-confidence to trust in my ability to perform this intervention, which in its rudiments was very simple and which I had executed at the clinic more than once.
Which hand should I use to turn the baby, that is, which hand should I use to go inside the mother’s womb, the right or the left? Which should help from outside? My best hand was my right. My late friend Walter’s best hand had been his left. In my place he would have preferred his left, just as I favored my right. But this makes no difference in operative obstetrics. One always turns the baby using the hand corresponding to the side of the mother where the baby’s feet are. In the case of the left occipital transverse lie (the baby’s feet on the right, rump on the left), using the right hand. This position, the left occipital transverse lie, was what my late friend’s widow presented with, and thus I had to go in using my right hand.
Without drying my dripping hands, in order to keep them sterile, I moved to the bed.
The woman, with fresh drapes underneath her, was already breathing under the anesthesia. Good. March counted her respirations carefully–they were regular, if somewhat rapid. I put my ear over the mother’s belly, taking care not to touch it. I wanted to know what the baby’s heart sounds were like before I began. My hearing was keen and I imagined I could pick them up without direct contact.
But I had not counted on the thunderous drumming of another heavy squall beating down on the hill and the hospital, shaking the entire building to its foundations, even the posts of the bed on which the woman lay.
No matter. The turning had to be done, the normal lie had to be produced.
On with it, no more hesitation.
Calm, self-control, logical thinking, precise movements, the utmost gentleness and care even with the most intense effort. Heads up! Stay calm! Not a single abrupt movement. Not a single unconsidered maneuver.
The drapes were finally all in place, the two assistants stood by me, doing what they should. The woman was breathing deeply and regularly. March had counted to nearly a hundred–he thought he had to enumerate every breath.
I let him be. This was not the time to be giving him a long lesson. Besides, the counting gave me a yardstick for elapsed time during the intervention, which had to be kept to an absolute minimum.
I took a good deep breath and drew my head up from between my shoulders, where it had hunched due to the great strain of determination that many operating physicians feel before any major intervention. But as I extended my right hand and let my left hand slide over the smooth, cool, damp drape on the woman’s abdomen, the last of my abnormal excitation left me. I was as lucid as I had ever been.
I nestled the four fingers of my right hand together as much as I could and pressed the thumb into my palm, so that my hand would take up as little space as possible. Then I carefully slid my fingertips forward, the soft, warm flesh again clinging tightly to my hand, and reached the inside of the womb, that is, the transitional zone separating the external sexual organs from the internal ones. In a sudden contraction, the uterus snapped at me like a fish snapping at a lure. Then the tension relaxed. At this point, to my relief, I already felt what I had expected to feel: a broad, smooth surface with a faceted ridge in the middle, no doubt the baby’s back and spine.
The light above my deeply bowed head was flickering, going out momentarily. This did not disturb me.
Completing an operation of which one is technical master affords a feeling of happiness like that of an athlete who has set a record. It is a turbulent, but very intense happiness.
But now I became uncertain, and I paused. I became alarmed. The numbers that the faithful March had been counting off were coming more and more slowly and hesitantly, and he suddenly screeched: “She’s dying! She’s dying!” In a flash I removed my hand and ran around the two beds placed side by side to where the woman’s head was, used my left hand to tear off the anesthesia mask, which was coated with saliva and chloroform mixture, and saw what the trouble was.
The woman was not dying. On the contrary, she was regaining consciousness. Hence the apnea, the tachycardia. Suddenly she raised her swollen, velvety eyelids, and the large, bloodshot eyes that rested on me held an expression of returning consciousness. “Go on! Go on! Keep it up!” I cried softly but very urgently to March. Stay calm! Stay calm! I hurried back to where I had been. “Give her a few more minutes! And we’ll have it! Go!”
It took perhaps half a minute until the anesthesia was deep enough for the operation to continue. But this half minute of waiting made me very impatient. Even before the intervention, the baby’s heart sounds had not been the best. For this was a vulnerable preterm baby, at least a month premature. Things must be wound up as quickly as possible in such a case. But I had to wait. No anesthesia, no intervention. So I stood and waited. My hands were tired. My right hand in particular was sagging, as though paralyzed, from working inside the contracted womb.
Very inappropriately, I thought of this child’s departed father. I saw Walter on his deathbed. I saw him saying good-bye to his wife. I saw him making the sign of the cross with his left hand in his last lucid moments. I thought now that the anesthesia was deep enough for me to resume the intervention that I had had to break off so abruptly. There was no time for another careful disinfection. The process takes ten to fifteen minutes. But if I spent that much time disinfecting myself, the baby would have long since suffocated and the woman have bled to death. However, I had kept the hand I needed, the “inside” hand, clean.
This time I did not set to work with the same joy and courage. Taking great care not to inflict an internal injury, I slipped my left hand inside while my outside hand, the right one, on top of the drape, supported the maneuvers of the operating left hand. Something was holding me up. I felt as though I had rushed out of the house forgetting the most important thing, had wanted to turn around at the bottom of the stairs and go back but had not been able to, and was now going farther and farther in the wrong direction on the street, putting my patient at even greater risk. But what I had forgotten did not come to me! It simply was not there.
The drape slipped suddenly and my right hand was lying directly on the woman’s damp, cool, velvety-smooth abdomen.
At last my left hand, folded up to be as small and narrow as I could make it, had reached the inside of the uterus. A sudden contraction, beginning at the top and intensifying as it moved down, clutched at my hand. It is an indescribable feeling to be surrounded by the bleeding, quivering, grasping, vibrating flesh of another body. It is paralyzing. One fights it, one wants to act, to move, to find and seize the baby’s foot once and for all. Wait! Stay calm! Be patient!
The anesthesia took its normal course. The breaths that March continued to count off, functioning as a clock for me, had long since passed three hundred and were approaching four hundred; the intervention had thus been going on for well over ten minutes. But my left hand remained as though paralyzed, even when the grip of the clenched uterus had loosened and I should have made haste to finish my work. I didn’t know my way around in this hot cavity. Everything was strange to me here. I knew nothing. Except that the blood was draining from my head. I felt about uncertainly in the strange interior, as someone in a dark room where he has never been before might stumble, fall, bump into sharp corners. But the place was not strange to me–how could it be! I had explored the terrain no more than five minutes before and found it normal; the baby’s back in the expected place, head and rump where they were supposed to be. Could everything have shifted so much in that short time that it now seemed strange and incomprehensible? Where was the back? Where the tips of my index and middle fingers had felt the subtle but clearly perceptible faceted prominence of the baby’s spine, now I found a soft body surface with no longitudinal bone. Tiny little bones ran transversely, evidently the rib cage, or was it a soft, unresisting mass, the baby’s belly? Where I had felt the foot earlier, now I found the fine, articulated bones and fleshy forms of a hand. Where was I? Had the world shifted on its axis? I stopped. A new contraction was beginning. I had to break off. Rooting about in the dark was senseless and life-threatening. I stood silently. My heart was pounding in my throat, behind my eyes.
March had been watching all my movements and my face with his hostile expression. Suddenly he burst out with the puzzling words, “Which hand?” I stared at him. How did he know that all I had found was the baby’s hand, not the foot that I needed? I didn’t understand him. He smiled with defiant derision. I looked at him dumbfoundedly, and when the woman suddenly groaned under the anesthesia, I groaned too. I said earlier that I sometimes imitated the emotions of others in moments of despair. And I had reason enough for despair. My groans were now really and truly from the heart.
Now I understood March’s question. All was lost! The second time I had not, as would have been proper, gone in with my right hand, which could have finished the job without difficulty and which I had prudently kept sterile by taking care not to use it to touch the anesthesia mask and so forth. Instead I had used my left hand, the unclean, unsuitable, wrong hand, to go inside the woman entrusted to my care, the hand that was not capable of doing the job, or only with the greatest effort, the hand that was contaminated with countless microorganisms.
That was how it was. Those were the facts. I will not and cannot describe what went through my mind. Nor can I reconstruct the logic that finally brought me to a decision. The decision had to be made: Quit? Go on? And if “go on,” should I take the wrong hand out again and insert the correct hand, my right? But now my right hand had been on the skin of the woman’s abdomen and had not been sterile for a good while. There was even less time for disinfection now than there had been before. It was a matter of seconds, not minutes. One question after another. Thinking instead of acting!
I was not a doctor now! My medical certificate had been revoked, almost a year back! I was a convict on the island of C. Tolerated. The recipient of unearned confidence, a fraud, nothing more. Nothing more. A wife murderer. No, much more, something very serious, and that was the significance of the resentful and contemptuous expression on the face of my friend March! I had abused my friend Walter’s poor wife once already, abused this woman who had truly been battered by fate by experimenting on her without her knowledge, against her will, and now I was doing it again! Never had a conscience been so belatedly heard from. Why? Why? And an infectious, clumsy, half-paralyzed hand in an exposed pelvic region!
What’s done is done. In all my life I had never felt so shattered. Incapable of doing anything, deciding anything. I closed my eyes.
But then I rallied myself. I had to meet my fate. Things had to be done. No one was going to act for me, so I would act as best I could.
The baby’s body moved under my hands. A shudder ran through it. Was the tiny creature trying to take its first breath? It would never be able to while it was inside. With this premature breath the baby would inhale the surrounding amniotic fluid and inevitably choke.
A baby’s first breaths are not restricted to the rib cage, the windpipe, and so on. The entire little body tenses up, mobilizes all its strength in its urge to live, to act. No, that’s not the way! Not like that! Not like that!
I changed hands. Better to save one life if both, mother and child, were at risk. I would save the child. For the child it was irrelevant what microorganisms my hand was covered with. Anything was better than doing nothing and knowingly, despairingly, losing both mother and child. I had never really known my mother. I had never had to lose children of my own. Fate had ordained that this mother and this child be placed in my care. At this truly frightful moment I did not think of myself. I forced myself not to feel the terrible burden of my conscience.
My fingertips would do the thinking, I would be guided by my exquisite sense of touch alone. No past. No dickering with the fate that had given me such rotten treatment. No shifting the blame onto my father, who was on my mind at that moment as the one among my betters who had always overcome all difficulties for as long as I had known him. Thus I proceeded. In with my right hand! Again, and even more gently and cautiously than the first time.
Immediately I had the baby’s back and spine before me again. Good! I slid farther down, now to the side, now at an angle and upward, and took hold of a piece of the thigh just below the baby’s bottom.
Now my right hand, effectively supported by the left, outside hand, could slide down the meager leg. To the ankle. This I grasped with great gentleness so that my hand took up as little space as possible, the foot clamped between my index finger on the dorsum and my middle finger on the anklebone.
The tip of my thumb was barely touching the sole of the foot. And now back! Out! Quickly but without haste, forcefully but cautiously, despairingly yet certain of success! The hand holding the foot between two extended fingers of course took up much more room than the same hand had going in. Thus I had to maneuver with particular cleverness, artfulness, and caution, with bated breath, I might say, in going back the same way and pulling the foot down and outside.
As the foot moved down, pulled down steadily by my hand, with my other hand I pushed against the abdominal wall to move the baby’s head upward. It readily did as I wished.
Now my hand, full of blood and greenish mucus, appeared at the opening of the birth canal, and between my fingers was the tiny foot, as though made of yellow ivory beneath its layer of filth.
I waited a moment to see whether the head would follow on its own or whether additional assistance was required. It was the latter. By gentle pushing and pulling, I first freed the baby’s leg up to the knee. The hollow of the knee was directed outward, turned toward me, and so too was the baby’s back: the presentation was normal, thank goodness. Thus I was able to carry the delivery through immediately by extraction. This was easy up to the arms. The baby was not full-term; everything was smaller and thinner than normal. Now I more or less wiggled the left shoulder out by taking hold of the baby’s leg and moving the shriveled, meager body up and down, all the while using every trick to take advantage of the least drag. The baby was luckily not breathing yet, but almost. A convulsive shudder ran through the slender limbs for a second time. Then quiet again. So not yet.
Not a second to lose, go! Keep it up! But no force, no wrenching, no, wait a bit, a little to the right, a little to the left, the hand supporting from below, release the “engagement” with fingertip pressure, not too much muscle. “No more anesthesia,” I cried to March, who was glad to put the chloroform bottle aside. Lucky March! He could stretch, wipe his forehead, take a deep breath! He had no responsibility!
The other arm came now, and already the pulsating, bluish red, convoluted umbilical cord too. Now the main thing, the head. Holding the baby’s body tightly between the palms of my hands, I had quickly rotated it clockwise; the gentlest possible leverage exerted by a finger introduced between the baby and the mother’s body freed the occipital area so that it could emerge, first with difficulty, but then easily, with the greatest of ease. It was coming, it was coming. Keep going! Good! At last the entire head was outside. I turned the baby around, so that it could see me. It was a boy.
“You have a healthy boy, Frau Walter,” I cried to the woman. Perhaps she heard me? I took a deep breath, looked at the baby I was carrying in my arms, which were covered with blood and trembling from exertion. The boy’s nose was flat, the face as though pushed in, bent out of shape, shriveled. No resemblance to Walter. He had not yet breathed, though it seemed he would decide to any second. A good sign!
March had abandoned his duty, deserted his post as anesthetist and pulse monitor at the head of the mother’s bed. He was looking at me. He shouted at me maliciously:
“Mother dead–baby dead–doctor saved!”
I let him talk. I knew better. As I quickly clamped the umbilical cord, ligated it with sterile thread, and scissored it, the little boy’s bluish red body convulsed in a prodigious effort.
But the first breath was like the whispering of a spring breeze in the tiny chest that was so thin you could count the ribs. The nurses, smiling with astonishment, took the baby from my arms. They washed off the blood and residue of greenish muck, weighed the baby in their hands, gazed at it steadily, made kissing noises with their lips, and looked at the baby’s head as though they had never laid eyes on a newborn. But perhaps, spending their lives here in the Y.F. hospital, they had never seen how a human being is born.
Would these two maidenly creatures also have to look on as, after terrible suffering, a mother paid for the existence of her baby with her life, a life that was now irreplaceable for her children?
As I walked away from the bed and went to the washstand to wash my hands and my bespattered face, I must say I was approaching a despair I had not thought possible since my recovery from Y.F. and the disappearance of my inner guilt.
My friend’s spiteful words–which I now took to be veracious, although the prophesy of doom was belied at least by the loud crying and mewling and struggling of the small but well-formed baby–pierced me to the heart. I could not understand how March, he of all people, for whom I had lately begun to feel a tender affection, could have stabbed me in the back. But I pulled myself together, and I believe my face betrayed nothing of what was going on in me.
I went back to the mother, made sure she was properly positioned for expulsion of the placenta. She was regaining consciousness. As the aftereffects of the anesthesia were asserting themselves in gagging and vomiting, she opened her eyes. Whispering with weakness, she told me she was still having contraction-like pains. But when I asked her if she thought she could bear this without sedation until she had been completely delivered, and showed her the baby that the nurses had swaddled very lovingly and very inexpertly, so tightly that the poor little creature was almost suffocating, she, Walter’s widow, brought her pale, moist lips, from which came a strong chloroform smell, toward my hand, and, in her foolishness, tried to kiss it. What could I do? Only one thing, jump back, so that I nearly slipped on the damp, dirty floor. March, who was still present, gave a theatrical, derisive guffaw. But I was soon steady on my feet. I was ashamed of the unfortunate woman’s gratitude, and my only thought was to spare her as much as was humanly possible.
I sat down on the edge of her bed, took her trembling hands in mine to calm her, and waited for the conclusion of the delivery, the normal expulsion of the placenta. This was another critical moment. The release of the placenta is only too often followed by life-threatening hemorrhages, and the woman’s condition was such that she could not afford to lose another drop of blood. Fortunately this moment passed off well. With a heavy but truly unburdening sigh, she sat up, bore down, and quickly forced the placenta out. There was hardly a trickle of blood afterward. We put fresh drapes underneath her, gave her a little cold tea (as cold as was possible in the great heat), placed the baby in a basket normally used by the matron for household purposes (for no one had remembered to obtain a cradle), and turned out the light, leaving only a small oil lamp burning on the night table.
The others had already tiptoed out. The room filled with the regular breathing of the mother as she drifted off, joined by the much softer and more rapid breathing of the sleeping child.
The delicate smell of the iris powder the nurse had sprinkled on the baby mingled with the sweetish odor of the milk already seeping from the sleeping mother’s breasts. I covered them with a light layer of sterile absorbent cotton and before leaving felt the woman’s forehead. The fever that I so dreaded (yellow fever or puerperal fever?) had not begun. Her sleep was not deep. As my hand passed over her face, she opened her eyes and her long lashes brushed my palm. She wanted to tell me something, and, making an effort to lower her normally loud, harsh voice, she started a sentence a few times, but I did not want to listen, could not listen, I just pressed my hand gently to her lips and told her that she needed to rest. For the risk of postoperative hemorrhage is great in any operative delivery.
The assistant nurse came in once more to sit up with the woman overnight. With any luck, no special assistance would be needed. My only instruction was that every two hours the nurse should take the woman’s pulse and temperature and lift the quilt to satisfy herself that there was no hemorrhaging: it has happened more than once after such difficult deliveries that women have quietly bled to death in their beds without a soul noticing. I begged fate to spare this woman.
As I was giving the nurse my instructions, it struck me that her eyes were focused on me with an expression of recalcitrance. I was unable to explain this to myself. Perhaps the thin, flickering, pale gold light of the tiny oil lamp was to blame, I thought.
I returned to my bedroom. I was exhausted and hoped, as I had after the death of the dear little Portuguese girl, to escape my self-tormenting thoughts in deep, dreamless, unharried sleep. But to my astonishment my bed was occupied. March, dressed and with his shoes on, had thrown himself on it as if to proclaim his dominion. He was not sleeping, but stared up at me challengingly. I bit my lip, but undressed silently and lay down on the floor where he had made his bed until now. The one on which March now luxuriated was no French courtesan’s four-poster. How would such a thing have gotten down into the Y.F. hospital’s oil storeroom? Nevertheless it was princely compared to the thin bed of rags with which March had been happy until now. Except that it was mine. But what could I do? Should I mourn the loss of this great child’s love? If I had only known why I had lost it. Or did I know everything and just not want to understand?
I put my left elbow under my head to raise it a little and tried to sleep. Fruitless effort. I was still too wrought up. I could only pretend to sleep. March was as restless as I. He got up, undressed, got himself a cigar (it came from the stock of the brigadier general, who smoked very good, strong cigars that were almost unobtainable here), and began puffing away. I saw the tip glow dull red, heard March jam the cigar in his mouth and draw on it with a smacking of lips, heard it with all the terrible hyperacuity that one who has not experienced its torment could never imagine. All I wanted was some peace and quiet! But he did it as though to spite me! What got on my nerves most of all was his way of taking the cigar out of his mouth with a slight disgusting pop. He knocked the ash off on the edge of the bed, letting it fall on my knee, uncovered because of the frightful sultry heat. Fine, let him do that. I controlled myself. I had much greater problems on my mind.
With the eye of a bacteriologist, I saw the bacilli entering the tissue tears caused by childbirth; I saw the microorganisms proliferate unchecked, saw them vigorously infiltrate the bloodstream of Walter’s widow. Pyemia, fever, sickness, death . . . And no one more helpless than the physician who had caused it. Without meaning to. But not without having to. Should I offer fate another deal? Let Frau Walter live, take back the infection caused by my left hand, take back the infection caused by the Stegomyia at Walter’s deathbed, let both experiments turn out well–and I would pay the price. What did I have to pay with? What could I give up? What else could I do without? Nothing? Wrong! Wrong! In recent weeks, when I had recovered from my Y.F. and our experiments were advancing as planned, I had felt a kind of happiness, a great, often almost glorious vitality, such as any constructive activity that is making progress will lend the spirit. I could let that go. But how? Only by finishing with myself. I could give myself up. I could commit suicide. It was a radical solution, but only by putting an end to my existence could I put an end to my experiments. The fact was that I would keep trying to finish this job for as long as I lived.
Should I do it? Or not? Should I once and for all “sacrifice” myself, to speak this portentous word at last?
A dribble of lukewarm liquid smacked onto my left hand, which was stretched out, palm upward. March had hit me with some cigar spit. I could no longer contain myself and said only one threatening word: “March!” But that was what he had been waiting for.
“‘March, March!’” he repeated, enraged. “Who is your March? What am I doing with a murderer?” he hissed. “Let me sleep and don’t touch me.”
He fell silent, waiting for a response. But he could wait until the sun came up in the morning. I lay awake and did not answer him. Perhaps I should have kept that “March” to myself too. But I was only human.
How much I would have liked to crawl into the deepest hole on earth! How happy I would have been not to go on living! But I could not put a violent end to my life now. I had to face the facts and resolutely go on with the task I had set myself as far as my feeble energies would permit. Everything would have been easier after a restful night. But there was no question of sleeping in, the work in the laboratory had to be done, and above all I had the truly bitter task of going to Walter’s widow, whose excessive and much-too-heartfelt gratitude of the previous evening was still making my cheeks burn with shame.
But if I was afraid that I would be showered with more exorbitant and undeserved thanks, fate had a pleasant surprise in store for me. I was in luck. Why the irony? The facts were perfectly serious. There was trouble even before I got into the room. Bobby, the little dog belonging to Walter’s widow, lay in the sun at the door; a strong wind had come up and the morning was bright and pleasant. Bobby’s silky coat shone. His breathing was calm. He was asleep. Or he was pretending to be, for he could not help pricking up his ears and swishing his bushy tail a little at my approach. When I tried to slip past the handsome dog by carefully stepping over him, over his back with its bluish and golden markings, he became fully awake and glared at me vindictively. He was frightened. Like all alarmed creatures, he was at once vicious and fearful, and I had not yet gotten my left leg clear when he bit down firmly, not with the full strength of his sharp little teeth, but hard enough to draw blood. And the little creature raised his voice, he howled as though he had been stepped on, as though he had been bitten. He panted, whined endlessly as though I were tormenting him the way the now dead and buried Walter must once have tormented him in his scientific experiments. I remembered this, and the dog, who had two names, m-s-33 in the lab report but Bobby to his friends, remembered it too.
Where did these memories get me? Nowhere! Keep going! The room I was on the point of entering was the same one in which that most unfortunate of all creatures, that most enchanting, dearest child, the little Portuguese girl, had lain, and now Walter’s widow was sleeping here with her tiny infant brought too soon into this hard world.
Was the woman febrile? Was she on the road to recovery? Or to the grave? Through my doing? I did not venture forward. I waited.
Regrettably I was still not entirely my own master after my sleepless night. I was thinking about things that were long past and could not be changed, yet I needed to focus on what was all too glaringly present, what was taking from me the confidence I needed that morning more than ever.
Some of these inopportunely remembered details had to do with the little dog that stood at the door snarling and panting relentlessly and would not let me pass. I had had an encounter with him many weeks back. Walter had needed the animal for an experiment. March normally performed services of this kind but had been busy with other matters, and I had been obliged to go get the experimental animal out of his pen in the basement corridor, to put him on an old leash that was used only for this purpose and smelled of blood and chemicals, and take him to the laboratory. I still remember how he willingly followed me at first. But the closer we came to the laboratory and the muffled sounds of distress and pain emanating from it, the sounds of one of his fellows suffering on the operating table, the more reluctant he became. He dug in with all four feet, his fur bristling like quills (to use that painfully accurate expression), in his handsome golden brown eyes an expression of panicky terror–an almost human terror. I felt I had never experienced anything of the kind. “Let’s go,” I exhorted myself, “Move,” and yet I hesitated, not daring to cross the threshold. But what was the use? I had to do what was necessary. The animal had then suffered a great deal. There were no scars. Everything had healed. But he had not forgotten. Suffering had made him vicious. For he may have resisted us, Walter and me, who put him on the table, and Carolus, who did not take part actively but looked on, but he did not resist with teeth bared as he was doing now.
So did the creature’s bitter suffering not elevate him? Or is betterment through suffering peculiar to man, who is more highly developed? I don’t know. What awaited me now as I chased the animal away and entered the sickroom through the slightly open door gave me no evidence either way.
The woman lay in bed. The room, brightly illuminated by the morning sun, looked peaceful and very tidy. A small, old-fashioned zinc washbasin stood on a chair. Clean, damp diapers had been hung to dry in pairs over the backs of chairs and on lines. There was a smell of milk and chamomile tea. A makeshift vase, a water carafe, held some magnificent flowers, orchids, if I remember correctly. The woman was pale, but her eyes were clear. Still no fever. Her eyes as they looked at me were clear and malignant, filled with hate. The woman had spread her husband’s old camel-hair blanket over the bed and pulled it up to her chin. The child lay sleeping, its mouth half open, in a basket to her left.
I was uncertain. Should I go first to the mother, despite her blazing eyes? Should I take care of the child first?
Happily, it was plain that Y.F. had been unable to lay a hand on the tiny creature, no matter how the experiment on the mother turned out.
Had I been my old self, I would have gone to the mother first. Perhaps, thanks to the power I had always had over people, I could have become master of the situation. But I turned and bent over the child, as an involuntary but for that very reason all the more furious flush (what a rare occurrence with me!) spread over my face, to the roots of my hair. I had already taken hold of the slight little body from underneath to lift the baby out of the cradle, had begun to take comfort in the moist warmth that a baby’s body gives out, when the mother, however weak she may have been, abruptly sat up in bed, bent down for the baby with a sudden movement of her upper body, and violently knocked my hand away, hurling these words in my face:
“Keep your hands off my baby! I know everything!”
But this passionate outburst was all she could manage. She was unable to hold on to the baby. Her days and nights of terrible suffering had left her with only a fraction of her strength and she had to let go of the child. A good thing the young nurse who followed me in and had planted herself in front of me was able to tear her furious eyes away from my face in time to attend to the infant, which was beginning to mewl softly. She hastily took it from the mother and soothed it in her arms with one hymn after another (as though that was all she knew).
“Oh, just go, would you, please,” she hissed at me, interrupting her singing briefly. Her broad, flowing white hood rippling, she nodded angrily toward Walter’s widow, who now tossed like a madwoman in her creaking, squeaking bed, threw the camel-hair blanket to the floor, groaned, tore her hair, and in her jarring voice cursed me and herself and her husband all in the same breath.
“I know everything?” I reflected. She and the nurse could have learned the truth only from March. But if only she had vented her rage and despair on me, instead of on herself, I could have left the sickroom with a lighter heart, I must say.
I looked at her. Her lips were pale, contorted with feeling. Unconsciously she pressed her heavy breasts together with both hands. She mastered herself, evidently because of the child–turned her face away from me and toward the wall and got herself under control just as suddenly as she had been overcome by her fit of rage. Suffering had helped her grow as a person, at least.
I understood that I had brought about an irreparable change in this woman’s existence. She had trusted in me; in her delusions about life, which she refused to recognize for what it inescapably is, she had grasped at me, a vision, a phantom. She had seen in me a misunderstood humanitarian, a benevolent and knowledgeable physician unjustly condemned and deported, had invoked the testimony of her late husband in my favor. Perhaps she had even seen in me her future sustainer, for she knew of a bequest that Walter had made to me. She may have been thinking of letters we had drafted together, she knew of our last conversations. And she thought that if there was anyone to whom she owed her life and that of her child, it was me.
The child was going to be baptized at noon that day, as I learned from Chaplain Amen, and she had wanted to christen it both “Walter” and “Georg” in the holy sacrament of Old Catholic baptism!
She had wanted to do that. No longer. For it was I, Georg Letham, who had tried to infect her with the same terrible disease that had killed her dear husband. Y.F. How can one explain this?
One cannot explain it.
One tiptoes away from the scene of one’s crimes, eyes averted. Quietly closes the door behind one after gingerly letting the little dog in to comfort the woman as best it can. The little dog barks joyfully and dances about the room. The nurse glowers, the child mewls, the dog barks–and does the poor woman laugh? How I wish she would. If only she is saved!
Perhaps Frau Walter, in her boundless desolation, had begun to love me, and this unnatural, ill-founded, pathological love had then turned into an equally unnatural and pathological hatred. But neither her hatred nor the animosity, now constantly on furious display, of the once faithful March could bedevil me more than my conscience did. Yes, Georg Letham the younger–with a conscience! And yet so it was! I wanted to maintain a humorous, ironic attitude as I bore everything that came along in this atrocious and farcical world. But who can make himself be calm, act superior and amused, when, through his own doing, a flourishing human life is about to be brought down?
Fortunately it turned out otherwise. In one case out of a hundred, a woman will withstand without ill effect an infection during delivery as grave as this one had been. And this was that one case!
I am unable to put into words the truly wild happiness I felt and my beatific sense of relief when the first week passed without fever and I saw that everything was going to be fine. No puerperal fever! And, what is more, the perilous four and a half days’ last respite that most of the subjects of our experiments had had between being bitten by a Y.F.-infected Stegomyia mosquito and coming down with Y.F. passed in Frau Walter’s case without the appearance of fever symptoms. So neither childbed fever nor Y.F.! What a stroke of luck, I say again. These were hard days for me. A great deal of work, as March no longer did anything without a direct order from Carolus, and Carolus, temperamentally phlegmatic as always, let others make the decisions unless he absolutely had to. He practically had to be forced at gunpoint to sign his name to anything. But in a really urgent situation, a critical moment, he showed what he was made of, and the hellish climate had not sapped his strength of will. Even if his intentions and objectives were not always the same as mine, we got along, and I had a mainstay in him despite the great disparity in our natures.
March’s antagonism may have affected me deeply, but it had no power to truly injure me once I had adapted to it. For the time being he was letting the matter rest with his first and most consequential rottenness, his disclosure to Frau Walter of my Stegomyia experiment on the evening of her husband’s demise.
When he saw what he had caused, he backed off. He was not happy about it. Until that time he had presented a comparatively good appearance. But from then on he began to decline. He couldn’t live with me and he couldn’t live without me. It was like knives cutting him up inside. No one could have helped him. I least of all.
I had to be content with moving our experiments forward to some degree. The external difficulties mounted from day to day. But fate’s interventions on my behalf–Frau Walter’s continued good health and the unexpected success of what had been a desperately difficult delivery (I could not imagine what would have become of me if she or little Walter had died)–gave me new courage.
Walter’s widow remained one of the chief difficulties. In her hatred for me, she went so far as to slander me with elaborate, ingenious accusations, like a lunatic with persecution mania. In addition to the serious but unprovable crimes of the attempted murder of her and her unborn child, I was also alleged to have committed a theft. She maintained that when I had looked through her purse I had tucked away some of the loose banknotes, a not insignificant sum all told. Now in former times I had often been without resistance to the allure of money. But if there was any respect in which I had changed, it was this one. I had taken out the key and that was all. Was it March who wanted to pin on me this small but for that reason all the filthier crime? Our things had been searched while I was away from our basement room, and some banknotes had been found among my possessions. But it turned out that they had been enclosed with the letter I had received from my family when I had been severely ill with Y.F. March was my witness. It was he who had removed the money before giving me the pages of the letter. Through this clever shift, he had kept the money from being ripped to shreds, the fate met by the letter, whose contents and even whose author remained unknown, to my sorrow. March himself was forced to clear me. He did it grudgingly, but he did it. I was able to point out that Dr. Walter had on repeated occasions entrusted large sums of money to me (this was a violation of the regulation prohibiting the possession of money, but it had been relaxed in our case) and that I had never abused his trust. And what could I have done with the relatively insignificant amount in my situation, and what would I have done given the plans I had? But some of this stuck, and the sidelong looks from the hospital staff were not always easy to bear. Were they meant for the man who had perpetrated the attempted murder of Frau Walter, if passively standing by while the mosquito bit could be called that, or for the alleged petty thief?
The woman’s hatred was evident not only in such grave charges but in little things too. I have not yet reported the fact that in addition to wood and leather, clothes and linens soon begin to rot in this sultry climate, because they never dry out, literally falling to shreds in the hands of the washerwomen. Now Carolus (who was particularly open and generous as long as it was other people’s property that was involved) had had a small bequest from Walter’s estate in mind for me, namely, an assortment of his surgical gowns, his linens, his tropical suits, of which he had several dozen and which were made of a very robust material, silk, I believe, blended with linen, or a similar blend of fabrics. After the doctor’s illness these articles had gone into the disinfection chambers to be sterilized in jets of pressurized steam at a hundred degrees centigrade, as a result of which they had lost none of their durability but a good deal of their beauty and glamour. If I would not be reaping the benefit of them, though I had been blowing my nose with nothing but filter paper for weeks, they could also be used as dishcloths. And this was the purpose for which Walter’s widow had intended them. All the persuasion of the good Carolus was to no avail.
I had other things on my mind, and I had no trouble getting over the loss of these items, to which I had no claim.
Diapers could have been fashioned from these things too, of course. But no one thought of that. Instead the necessary articles, very expensive and of very poor quality, were purchased down in the city. Was the old stuff going to be dragged all over the world as a memento of Dr. Walter? I said nothing on this point.
But another point was more critical. I reported earlier that Walter had had to take out and sign a new policy with the insurance company’s subagent under which any liability on the part of the company was excluded in one precisely circumscribed case, namely, that in which the holder of the policy, Walter, departed this life by suicide or by “self-inflicted accident.” Here the subagent, whom the wife had set against the husband, was of course thinking of Walter’s experiments on his own person.
Now Walter had clearly perished as a result of his heroic experiment (and his inner conflicts, to which no one of his sort is equal). Once this was established, the widow would not get a penny. The family of six children, four boys, two girls, was so poor that public assistance and the like would have been needed even to raise the money for the return trip. For how far would the widows’ and orphans’ benefit go? It would hardly even cover the most pressing debts! But if the death of that great hero without a weapon, Walter, was found to be “natural,” the widow would immediately come into possession of a relatively large sum of money, the interest on which would give her and her children the means for a modest but adequate life in simple circumstances, say, in a country town in England.
So now what? Carolus, who was entirely on the side of Walter’s widow (if only out of fear that she might go to him with new demands for money in the event her claim fell through), locked himself in with Frau Alix for hours on end. The woman held her baby, which was thin but agreeable and cried only rarely, in her arms, nursed it, put on its diapers or took them off, or else she played with the little dog. She sniffed at her eau de cologne or shredded the lovely flowers she had received from the subagent. And she discussed with her husband’s friend how her financial problems were going to be solved. My evidence, albeit only that of a criminal sentenced without possibility of appeal, was not unimportant. I had been the right hand of the deceased at the end, after all, and he had entrusted his last writings to me. I was ordered in, not offered a seat, and regarded in baleful silence, but Carolus whispered to her and convinced her to reconcile with me. He himself did not have such a tragic view of the inappropriate experiment on her. In his opinion she ought to be able to get over it with a little effort. But she bared her pretty teeth instead of smiling. She pursued me remorselessly with a hatred that I believed I did not deserve in this form, any more than I deserved the hatred of my former friend, who was quietly doing me as much damage as he could. But the woman lived and gradually began to flourish again, became more beautiful than ever, while poor March in his self-destructive fervor gradually became “a shadow of his former self,” as the saying goes.
With his treachery, March had hurt me a great deal–our enterprise even more. We had to break off for the moment. How could I have been so wrong about him? I had taken him for a “man in full.” Or, if not that, then at least a “frog.” Never a “rat.” But he was both. I realized that my father’s excellent teachings were wonderfully applicable after the fact, but of no use while life is actually being lived.
March had told the woman not only that I had exposed her to infection by a disease-bearing mosquito when she had been bending over her dying husband, but also, to twist the knife, that I had said she had false teeth. I had never made that allegation. The woman’s teeth did not have the smooth bluish sheen of fired porcelain dentures. It had been simple medical conscientiousness when I had had him check her mouth for dental prosthetics, something I would have done for anyone, no matter who it was, before administering anesthesia. March understood that as well as I did. He was a person of extraordinary intelligence. Otherwise he could not have learned the skills necessary for our work as quickly as he had. It was not until I no longer had him by me for anything and everything that I noticed how necessary he was to me and to our work.
I did not allow it to come to a confrontation. And this was the worst punishment. I was silent.
I did not want to punish him with silence. But I had no choice.
I cared about him, I cared like nobody’s business, as people say. I was thankful to him for the many fine services of the heart that he had done me on the ship and here in the hospital. He was almost a substitute for all human company. He had become, and this is no figure of speech, like a brother to me.
I no longer hated my real brother, I understood him. My father had a lot of money, my brother needed it. Not for himself, for his family. Was the solution to the puzzle so difficult?
But I could have spent my entire life on a lonely island with no one but March for company and perhaps never have needed anyone else. And yet I was unable to pluck up my courage, collar him, and lay before him what was in my heart, my misgivings, my hopes, my sufferings, my joys.
We remained distant. Time went by. The woman had long since risen from her bed of pain, the child, delicate but healthy, was carried outside in a woven basket, which, tightly netted from top to bottom against mosquitoes, was set down in a shady spot in the rampantly flourishing, stupefyingly fragrant hospital garden.
For some days I had had my bed back. One night I returned to our basement room later than usual and found March sound asleep in his old place on the floor. My clothes and other personal items had been cleaned and straightened up, as though nothing had ever happened between us. And one day the foolish youth–one never knew what he might do, yet he was only too understandable, in his way–surprised me by quietly smuggling into my things a half dozen monogrammed handkerchiefs that had been among Walter’s possessions. He had wheedled these articles out of Walter’s widow. She would not have given me so much as a rag. Toward March she was all sympathy, gratitude, comradeship, and friendliness. And yet neither he nor she was happy. She never stopped trying to turn the hospital director, the resident, the matron against me and imputing to me all sorts of crimes and warning everyone she talked to against the devil in human form, the wife murderer, the Mephistopheles brazenly wearing physician’s garb that I was as far as she was concerned. She also threatened to do what she could to prevent any other human being from falling victim to my diabolical experiments.
By that time all her threats and fulminations were harmless to us. They were much more dangerous for her. For the poor dissatisfied woman was ruled day and night by hatred of me. It had become an idée fixe with her, overshadowing even her grief over her late husband and her worry about her five children, who had in the meantime been taken in by the family of one of her husband’s comrades from the shore batteries.
She should long since have been capable of leaving our building (“our building,” I call this dreadful Y.F. hospital, as though it had actually become my home!), should have been made to go. Anything but that. She did not want to leave here, or leave me. What she wanted to do was sweep past me (an unbelievably chilly expression on her face), with her silk Spanish shawl wrapped about her and showing off her once again slender figure, she wanted to cast poisonous glances my way and try to make me persona non grata with Carolus and the chaplain. But for Carolus I was a sine qua non.
As long as all this affected only me, an individual of no consequence, I did not regard it as anything serious. But now that sunshiny, sweltering weather had begun, the hospital was filling up with patients. She and her delicate infant no longer belonged in this dangerous place of contagious illness. Not only were there Stegomyias in test tubes here, but there were also free mosquitoes flitting about (not to mention a thousand different kinds of nocturnal creatures) and laying their eggs in any discarded jam jar that had a few drops of stagnant rainwater in it.
We all wanted Alix gone, March not excepted.
Her husband had died as a result of the experiments. An avoidable death, as I saw it, and was it grounds for continual bitterness against us? Yes, and against the dead man too. She hated me. But it was possible she hated him just as much–as though he had intentionally left her in the lurch!
Carolus became the savior of our plans. I had given him too little credit at the beginning, on the Mimosa. He was neither a lummox nor a dry-as-dust pedant, nor yet a mere ambitious grind. But why sing a hymn of praise to him, which would have to be quickly followed by the qualification that must apply to all of us frail mortals. The facts showed how fortunate it was that our little team boasted not only an extraordinarily noble and in my view perhaps even great man like Walter, but also someone like Carolus. He was very far from mediocre, though it had taken me some time to realize that.
He grasped the situation before I did. He reproached me, in the languid tone that would once have exasperated me, for my imprudent experiment on Frau Walter, and he did this upon examining our experimental records, in which I had not yet entered the infection of the woman at Walter’s deathbed. I had not been afraid to do the experiment (fortunately without repercussion), but I was afraid to record it. He, great statistician and by-the-book type that he was, could not tolerate this lacuna. We therefore worked together to draft a simple statement of the facts, and only as an aside did he take me to task to my face for having breached, on my own authority and very much to the detriment of all, the law of solidarity that we had unanimously and of our own free will imposed upon ourselves at the beginning of the enterprise.
I had to concede the point. Thereupon he merely shook his long, sallow, withered, hairless head, which I had once likened to a thin, jaundiced baby’s bottom, and returned to business as usual.
We discussed how we could induce Frau Walter to leave the island. She had to go. Our experiments were imperiled as long as she was here, and the climate was certain to be her and her children’s undoing in the long run. And it had been our late friend’s last wish that she return to her family in England. Now there was still the nervus rerum of money, that is, the life insurance, and this was the salient point. Carolus conducted this part of the negotiations with Frau Walter and the chaplain and me as a group, or at least he planned it that way. It was not easy to overcome the woman’s practically savage hatred for me. Nearly four weeks after the attempt on her life by mosquito, though no harm had been done, she could still hardly look at me. She chewed her lips, turned red and white in alternation. Once she stepped on her little dog, then took him onto her lap and stroked the flat, densely furred head of the worried, golden-eyed, dumb brute, who didn’t know what was happening to him. But we had to achieve some result with her, and since the new experiments had to begin soon or not at all, we had to achieve it quickly.
One might have assumed that the poor widow would have welcomed nothing so much as the prospect of getting away from this epidemic-ridden island, with which she could associate only the unhappiest memories. Not so. The fancy the unfortunate woman had taken to me, currently expressed only in hatred and suppressed outbursts of fury, drove her to put one obstacle after another in the way of our plan to send her and the children away from the island as quickly as possible.
We were at pains to explain how the insurance matter was to be settled. She leaned in, cupping her ear as though unable to make out what we were saying. As she did so she brushed my cheek with her slightly wavy, rustily lustrous hair, in which there were already a few quite pale, colorless strands. I reared back as though stung by a tarantula. Anyone else would have noticed this abrupt, unexpected, I might say explosive, flinch of mine, and, as hard of hearing as the woman pretended to be or actually was, her eyes were good, and she must have seen it. But she acted as though nothing had happened and continued with her objections, which were based on the idea that the tightfisted insurance company would not pay her anything but instead initiate a major court action; for this she would have to prepare, and to prepare she would have to stay. We disagreed and said why, and the discussion went on. A corner of her pink raw-silk housedress, which was tailored for pregnant women and now hung much too loosely on her once again slender figure, fell on my left ankle. I pulled my foot back but could not prevent the wide, Japanese-styled sleeve of her dress from touching my hand as it hung by my side. “Why do you want to get rid of me?” she said, apparently referring to the business negotiations. “I’m not hurting anyone.” What clumsy maneuvering by a woman who could not have been much for tender caresses, a woman more masculine than maidenly!
Then she suddenly took a new tack. “Who’s going to tend my darling’s grave?” We said nothing. “What? Eh? What?” she screeched in her strident voice, looking at me with eyes blazing. I said nothing. Carolus was admirably calm, taking another stack of papers out of his briefcase, a barely perceptible smile on his thin lips in response to this inappropriate outburst. I got up and stood behind Frau Walter. Now there were neither meaningful looks nor the old “What? Eh?” and suddenly she heard every word. But to reveal to me what had been no secret for a long time, she rocked back and forth on her chair, showed off her still firm, lovely, heavy bosom, and tossed her head, perhaps in order to “accidentally” brush me with her hair again. Decent women are often the very ones who are coarse and tactless in their demonstrations of love. I saw the place on her neck where the insect had bitten her. She must have guessed my thoughts. She felt her neck with her narrow white hand, on which she was wearing her wedding ring and Walter’s, but said nothing to me, simply stopped rocking.
The woman was intelligent and now understood the situation completely. She let everything pass and we were soon agreed. That is, she and Carolus were agreed. The chaplain’s aid had been enlisted too; he was passive and forbearing as always and stayed neutral. But it was not easy for me to concur. They were quite right, the huge pile of insurance money had to be secured, and that could not happen by the direct route. Her husband had too knowingly taken part in life-endangering experiments. His spirit of sacrifice might entitle him to a bronze memorial in front of the hospital or back home, he might be entitled to an entry in the encyclopedia, perhaps even the Nobel, but for all that his heirs were not entitled to the insurance money.
Cash was needed. What to do? The global insurance company that was worth millions had to be lied to and defrauded for the good of the financially weaker but morally stronger party.
The full insured amount had to be claimed through the subagent. The claim would run as follows. Dr. Walter had indeed been researching Y.F., as was his duty and official job. But he had never conducted life-endangering experiments on himself, and his highly regrettable death had been caused by an infection whose route was still unknown. An occupational hazard of which the insurance company had taken full cognizance, both in the first policy and in the addendum.
This Carolus, the chaplain, and (mainly) the resident, who had taken formal responsibility for the expert opinion and was putty in our hands, had to put in writing. They had to sign their names to it. In the likely event of a lawsuit, they would even have to swear to it. Ill-gotten gains. Do they profit nothing? Everyone was for it, everyone but me.
I was going to declare our work null and void? Pretend to? A written, sworn declaration is not pretending. It had been the last wish of the deceased that the results of our work, which we had obtained not in an ivory tower but in epidemic-ridden sickrooms and laboratories, be deposited with a notary.
Thus I expressed my opinion candidly, and it was No. The widow turned to me, enveloped me, unseen by the others, in an imploring, beseeching, distraught look, in which all her fervent love and hate were intermingled, and then she said to me with the sweetest, with the gentlest, the tenderest, the most girlish, the most caressing sound her raucous voice could produce: “I’ll forgive you for that word!” Unexpectedly, abruptly, with touching awkwardness, she began to smile, whispered to me that I was a good doctor, perhaps too good, she was not ungrateful, she knew how much I had done! I flushed, but she displayed her full complement of beautiful teeth, and remarked, with a mischievous smile like a seventeen-year-old girl’s, that she really didn’t have false teeth. This? Now? Such coquettishness at a moment like this! And out of the mouth of the wife of someone like Walter! She exhibited her open mouth, the dazzling rows of teeth revealed by the two moist, pink lips, as though she were offering herself to me. I backed off, forced a polite grimace, murmured something about pressing work that couldn’t wait, and withdrew in great distress.
It never makes me happy to be loved. But the other part of it, the great, overpowering feeling of loving, was not something I had a gift for, either. If I loved anything now, it was not human beings, at least none that were still attainable in my life, but something else. In its entirety it resided in my work.
Further very great effort was required in order to finally induce Frau Walter to leave the Y.F. hospital.
I will not go on about the pathetic woman’s various attempts, either the ones that failed or the one that eventually succeeded, to come together with me in some fashion and “have it out” where there was nothing to have out. She loved. I did not. I saw in her simply a sick person whose illness expressed itself not in the body that had been blessed with such tremendous robustness and splendid will to health, but in her mind. It was not within my power to cure her mind. I had no choice but to punish her with silence, because every word I said to her would have encouraged unrealizable hopes, to her certain undoing. The woman had other things to take care of. The future of her unprovided for children had to be more important to her than any phantasm that happened to appear to her. For it was only a phantasm.
Eventually we would all have the pleasure of seeing her leave the Y.F. hospital. The valediction took a week.
I spent most of my time hiding in the laboratory, and we put it about that entering the area was more dangerous than ever. In this way I protected myself from her last good-bye. Sometimes I thought back on the truly frightful physical and mental suffering she had gone through, I might almost say in my hands. But there was no trace of it left in her face, which, framed by the beautiful wavy, reddish brown hair, she occasionally, and most desperately on the last day, pressed against the glass door that connected the laboratory with the corridor. And her mind?
I pitied her from the bottom of my heart. Let no one doubt this brief statement.
At last she was sitting in the subagent’s automobile, which the subagent had gallantly sent up the hill to the convent hospital. The young assistant nurse was going along to look after the infant during the coming days and help the widow with the eventual move. Everyone overlooked the quarantine. It had to be done.
The little dog too kept his rendezvous with disinfection. To his horror he was shaven smooth, brushed down with sublimate solution, and sprinkled with phenol, and now he was huddled in the automobile, barely recognizable and hoarse from hours of barking. He was looking forward to better times.
I was not spared the task of putting my name to the aforementioned document concerning the cause of death in the case of the heavily insured medical officer Walter. I had to do it, against my better judgment, as Carolus did against his. It was with a peculiar feeling that I traced my signature, for the first time in a long while. I thought of the day when, my hand guided by my father’s, I had first scrawled it in an exercise book using his otherwise jealously guarded gold fountain pen. Now, after the name Georg Letham, I wrote: Gr. 3. Convict, third grade. In my youth I had also written: Georg Letham, Third Grade. Gone. On! Thus do all things return in this short life. On all the more!
In C., as in his former posts, Walter had always enjoyed the greatest respect and love. The insurance company, which often had to rely on the goodwill of the administrative authorities, knew this and for-bore from making further difficulties for his heirs in a legal challenge. More detailed investigations were also dropped. And it was better that way. The resident’s medical opinion was admitted, although it did not deserve to be. But we were all firmly resolved to make ten perjured statements in favor of the widow rather than deliver her almost destitute to a cruel fate.
After five years of unbroken service on C., the governor was no longer in the best of health.
A short vacation in Europe or some other Y.F.-free country was out of the question, for the simple reason that an absence for any length of time would have caused him to lose his immunity to Y.F., which he had survived shortly after his arrival here five years before. He was not staying here unwillingly and was socking away a lot of money and lived like a prince. Where did that get him? His liver could not cope with C. any longer, and he had to leave.
Thus, as a convenient consequence of His Excellency’s weakened health, a relatively large, comfortably appointed ship intended to accommodate the governor was also able to take Walter’s widow and her children to Europe. It was already lying at anchor.
As we stood at our windows watching the great two-funnel steamer (not the little Mimosa) getting fired up and the government launch speed from shore and back again, the telephone, whose harsh jangle had so often startled our late friend from his work, rang once more. Carolus picked it up, listened briefly, then called me over and handed me the receiver with a strange smile, baring his long yellow fangs. I will say nothing about the substance of the conversation. It was the last adieu of the widow, who had been unable to bring herself to leave without saying something. She had tried and “succeeded at last.” The discussion did not drag on. It cannot have lasted more than two or three minutes, and I myself hardly got a word in edgewise.
More or less as a service in kind, Carolus, who had lately been treating me as someone in his league, had a favor to ask of me. But it was impossible.
I was grateful to him. I could only be, had to be grateful to him. And yet I could not comply with his request, his first and only one (which he had expressed on the Mimosa, to no effect then too). What he wanted was no more and no less than that I remember my duty as a son and brother and get in touch with my family at home. I could not. That life, I felt, was dead, I had it behind me. I could as little take it up again as nourish myself on shit. Not even for the sake of our enterprise. No. Other, greater men, heroic types who are able to rise above the fray, they could have. Here I will cite only that brilliant discoverer of the syphilis spirochete, Schaudinn, who experimented on himself using human excrement. Humanity was already in his debt for a tremendous, epochal, seminal discovery, but he perished in the prime of life a few years ago as a result of this abominable experiment, “as the law he set himself commanded.”
I could not conquer myself that way. My father was the land of my birth. The land of my birth lay behind me. I had been deported. I had been deported inwardly. I wanted to regard my former “loving hearts” as dead. I wanted to be dead to them too. I wanted to wish for nothing from them and have nothing to fear from them. Is this understandable?
He did not understand it. I only shook my head in silence at his request, no matter how earnestly he put it in his awkward, grating way. I appreciated old Carolus’s good advice.
That evening, after we had watched the government boat vanish among the craggy black islands in the wine-dark sea, trailing a golden banner of smoke, March, my former friend, approached me again for the first time. He did not have glad tidings for me. He was seeking consolation from me, and I–I tried to give it to him, determined as I was to wipe the slate clean of everything that had passed between us. He wanted to leave here. Our experiments were over at last, weren’t they? He yearned for home! And for me! And number three on his list was the “loving hearts” he had left behind, his morphine- and cocaine-addicted father, who, as the son had learned from his mother’s letters, had run afoul of the law for perpetrating the most devilishly clever frauds and scams, always at the expense of the poorest, out of whom he had wormed everything they had. Thus it might conceivably come to pass in this most farcical and most atrocious of all worlds that the degenerate old druggist would turn up here among the deportees in a puce uniform, a black number on his chest, perhaps on the very day that his son, pardoned for his heroism, left this accursed deportation island.
I did what I could to calm him. I dodged the questions about the experiments and the ones about my feelings. But I strove to paint the prodigal father’s conviction as unlikely, even though I thought it very possible. I preferred to believe that the morally debased old man belonged here much more than the son, whom I still did not want to see for what he was. I did not want to know what he was. I laid all the blame for the way things were on the clumsy or malicious hand of fate. And that very night I would see to my sorrow that I was still not equal to the world as it really was, what was it I said, to its mindless earnestness, “beyond improvement” in the best, the most hopeful, or in the worst sense. Was there no way to improve it, to change it? Did one have to regard it and oneself as the butts of a cruel, inhuman, cynical joke? Could I laugh, could I smile, if that was what everyone had to do?
That night I awoke suddenly. Even as I gave a start I knew that something much earlier had been the cause of this abrupt awakening. I turned the gradually fading dream over in my mind, listened to the rustling and nibbling of the rats that dashed about in great numbers among the many crates and kegs in the cellar and sometimes scurried under our bed, too. Our bed? I was now becoming wide awake and noticed that March’s place on the basement floor at my feet was empty. I waited a moment, imagining that he was answering the call of nature, for we had come to an understanding between us that there would be no relieving oneself in this bedroom. Sissy that he was, March had been in the habit of doing this from boyhood. It had required a fair amount of effort to break him of the practice of employing for this purpose a familiar article of indispensable utility to children and the infirm. But what was keeping him now? I became concerned, got up, and went looking for him. I hurried through the familiar corridors and up and down stairs. I knocked on the door of the room in question. Everywhere silent as the grave.
How odd! I had something like a feeling of home as I walked through the Y.F. hospital. I felt, as I looked for March, something of what I had felt as a child the times I had gone looking for my–my only too dearly beloved father in our big, often very bleak house.
To make sure I had looked everywhere, I rushed back through the labyrinthine architecture of the rambling building, which had been completely ruined by numerous additions over the many years of its existence, and ran finally toward the laboratory.
I ran, I walked, I slowed and stopped. I did not want to go on. I told myself that March and I must have missed each other and he was surely long since back in his bed. It was only out of a kind of dutiful opposition to my own inclinations that I conquered my misgivings and forced myself to go into the laboratory.
It was horribly hot and I was dripping with sweat underneath my tattered pajamas.
At last I was at the laboratory, not at the entrance with the glass door, but at the other end, in front of a solid door, and to my happy surprise saw a chink of golden light. I told myself how foolish it would have been for me to have trusted my feeling and gone back to our bedroom.
I opened the door softly and to my great horror saw, in his familiar red-and-white-striped pajamas–my dead friend Walter, bending over a little table by a corner window and doing something with mosquitoes in jars. “Walter!” I cried involuntarily. He straightened–and what I saw staring at me was not Walter’s unforgettable, gaunt, serious face, but March’s handsome mug. March was whey pale and no less aghast than I. One of Walter’s colorful pairs of pajamas had come his way through Walter’s widow and he was wearing them tonight for the first time. “March?!” I whispered in consternation. “What are you doing here?”
March stammered a few incomprehensible words, and, a hot flush spreading over his features, he made himself laugh, a laugh that was croaky, unnatural, and yet came from deep in his chest, a laugh that continued almost nonstop throughout the ensuing brief conversation. I had gone up to him quickly and I saw that he had two jars in front of him. The smaller, empty jar was labeled “m. (St.) g. II Y.F. 5 /9 11” in blue grease pencil. This meant second-generation mosquitoes (Stegomyia) fed on the ninth day with yellow-fever blood from a patient who had fallen ill after five days of incubation. In the other, larger jar, numerous mosquitoes startled by the light were flitting confusedly and occasionally clambering about on the walls; it was labeled simply “m. (St.) II III 0.” This was thus the large cache of insects, all in their second and third generations, that had so far not fed on human blood and were being kept in reserve for further experiments. It takes fifteen to twenty-three days for a larva to develop from egg to adult insect, and the mosquito is fecund two to three weeks after emerging from the pupa.
“What’s going on? What is this? What are you doing here? Where are the mosquitoes?” I asked. March’s foolish convulsive laughter prevented him from answering. His eyes flooded with tears and he hung on to the laboratory table with both hands, so that the two jars knocked together and rattled violently. The smaller one had lost its gauze top. There was not a single mosquito in it. Or so it seemed at any rate. For after a long moment had gone by and I was still gazing at March in perplexity, unable to find any plausible explanation for all this, a young, unusually small mosquito emerged bashfully and perched on the rim of the jar, sitting hunched over as these insects do and jiggling its long hind legs, the white markings visible on its dark abdomen; in two seconds it had spread its elongate wings, and, the white lyre-shaped marking clearly visible against the lip of the jar under the light, pushed off. After a few zigzags it found its way to the ceiling and the lamp, where a fair number of its kind were already performing their familiar jerky dance. There was mosquito netting over the windows, so the dozen Stegomyias up there, knocking about in choppy corkscrews and steep parabolas, could only be the previous occupants of the jar.
Who had let them out? March. Why?
I had no time for calm consideration. Immediately my blood was stirred, as the saying goes, I felt my temper get the better of me, and, face terrible, fists clenched, I advanced toward him. He was laughing, white as a ghost. He backed off, still laughing idiotically, and whispered between fits of laughter: “Go on, hit me! Cut me down! Riddle me with bullets!” He reached into a pocket of his pajamas. “Stop that laughing,” I whispered. Extremely silly of me, for (as I realized at once) he was not laughing of his own free will at all, but out of compulsion. “Stop that foolish laughter now and help me catch them. Get a ladder!” Still laughing, he brought a ladder on his shoulders. The late doctor’s nice pajamas were soaked with his sweat. “Hold the legs,” I said, “and when I get up there, hand me the bottle and the cotton wool.” I gave him a piece of cotton wool and a bottle of chloroform, the same one he had used to anesthetize Walter’s widow. “Spread the stuff one drop at a time, not too much, not too little,” I said, or rather I shouted. But this time he did not dare to retort, “Stop shouting!” His laughter was broken, it was threatening to become compulsive weeping. He was trembling all over. The swaying ladder, rotting and weakened like anything made of soft wood in the tropics, picked up the trembling, and I felt the vibration. That we did not need. I had in mind to stupefy the freed Stegomyias with the not overly concentrated chloroform-alcohol mixture, which was evaporating quickly in the heat, so that I could catch the highly infectious beasts dead or alive.
But that was easier said than done. The wad of cotton wool was too wet or too dry, I held it too high or not high enough, I could not jump while I was perched on the clumsy, unsound, half-rotten ladder, but the nimble creatures up there in their element could. Finally we had recaptured seven of the eleven fugitives. The others we had to leave for the time being. They swerved so cleverly as they flitted about on the ceiling that they got away from me despite all my tricks and stratagems. March and I were more dead than alive ourselves from the fumes of the chloroform mixture, from the effort, from fatigue, from the heat and the excitement. We checked the mosquito screens on the windows once more to make sure the dangerous creatures could not find their way outside, locked the doors carefully, and retired. Or at least we tried to. It was about two in the morning. I was as though drunk from the enormous amount of chloroform I had used. Incapable of thinking clearly or acting with any sort of decisiveness.
The true brother of a man like me is not the one nature gave him. March had come to mean more to me than my brother had. That night I realized this more clearly than ever. And yet I had no choice but to separate from March.
The question was, should I keep my reasons from him or explain them. Or rather my reason, the reason I could never trust him again after what had happened. People can live together without love, if necessary, but not without trust. He could get personal with me, abuse me, if that was the way it had to be; that was fine. It was understandable that he did not want to be merely a “means to an end” for me. I understood why he had lost faith in me over the experiment on Walter’s wife that was of such fundamental importance to the progress of our research. It certainly had nothing to do with love for her. March’s abnormal orientation meant that she had no power over him. No, it was only jealousy of me, and especially of the research that had gradually consumed me body and soul, that had made him stop being consumed by me body and soul. What did he care about all the world’s women and widows? What did he care about the unborn child?
Ungovernable as he was, he wanted to possess me. He wanted, if a physical union was impossible, to play the most important, more than that, the only, role in my emotional life. He wanted to be on top–and be a man. To assert his dominance, he had installed himself in the bed on high and shown me my place in the pit of hell, cheek by jowl with the rat pack. I had gradually understood him and had forgiven him. Without a word. One need not speak. Without reproach. One need not square the accounts. But now I understood him even better, for on this last night he had made me see the unbridgeable chasm between us. I could no longer ignore it. How little we know of what we do! Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. Fine, with pleasure, March, dear boy, life companion, as long as it was only me. But if he turned against my work and tried to destroy it? Never. My final word? Without the slightest hesitation my final word.
The next morning I saw the signs of desolation in the face that had once been so pleasant, had become a fat and happy face here, but was now nothing but skin and cheekbones. Again he hung on me with his fine blue-gray dog’s eyes, expecting some reproach, a fit of temper, some “human” emotion from me. It was hard for me to do what I had to do.
I went to see Carolus up in the room that he had been sharing with the young resident since Walter’s death. Carolus was brushing his long yellow teeth. And the way he did it! He dipped an old, discolored, sparsely bristled toothbrush, repeatedly and without rinsing, into a glass with three fingers of mouthwash in it. Economy! Economy! He stinted, even here. And the drops ran down his nightshirt.
I interrupted him while he was thus unappetizingly employed, asked him to hurry, and went to wait outside the door.
March skulked by, head on breast, once, twice. Like an animal without the power of speech, he nudged me with his elbows. The way a dog bumps his master behind the knees to elicit from him a response of some kind, to ask for a walk, a treat, or simply, in his naïve brute way, to remind him of his, the dog’s, existence. March, don’t worry, I thought to myself, without acknowledging him, I won’t hurt you. But, March, you know as well as I do that it’s hopeless, we have to part, and you can’t go into the laboratory anymore.
Carolus had the best relations with the acting governor and his staff. His influence and his general’s rank could accomplish a great deal. Through his mediation I wanted to make sure that the overly devoted, overly emotional March suffered no consequences, but instead received a comfortable post in the administration of C., which was within his capabilities thanks to his innate intelligence and his willingness to work. Then too there was the prospect of special amnesty, under Walter’s plan, for those deportees who had volunteered for life-threatening experiments and had in fact become ill, as March had.
Carolus came out of his bedroom, washed and tidied up with as much attention to detail as he could manage, and we went to the laboratory. Much to his astonishment, I shut the door in March’s face. March had been slinking gloomily behind us.
Carolus had an indestructible trust in me. And I, now I realized it, had the same in him.
Without mincing words I explained the situation to him, touching on the personal side of the matter as little as possible. Our first order of business was to get the missing mosquitoes out of the dark nooks and crannies where they had hidden, as these creatures do during the daytime. Little by little we collected quite a few.
Eventually we had even more than were missing. Mosquitoes were relatively uncommon on the rise where the Y.F. hospital was built, but some of these must have slipped in from outside. And how could we distinguish, while the creatures were still alive, those that had fed on human blood from those that had not? Unfortunately we had no choice but to put all of them together in the now inaccurately labeled jar and kill them all with chloroform.
Carolus had confided to me some days previously that the simple soldiers of the shore batteries had not been unmoved by the noble examples of Walter et al. We were going to have the opportunity to work with these splendid young men. And now they were here, but the infected mosquitoes were not! What to do? We had to get fresh ones from the insectarium and, toiling side by side for many hours, get them to consummate the act of feeding on severely ill and dying Y.F. patients. And then wait. For ten to twelve days, optimally. What might not happen in that time?
My face was grim and I vouchsafed March not a word. My suggestion that a place be found for him in the office of the chief of public health for C. had met with the approval of Carolus, who was now beginning to rely on me unquestioningly for many things. But we know how slowly the wheels of bureaucracy grind. Thus it happened that March, unemployed, languished in quiet despair, and then, after dark, in loud despair, and finally, wordlessly but also unceasingly, tried to appeal to my sympathies.
I kept him hanging, until, on the eve of his new employment, I told him. Clearly, succinctly, and as gently as possible. He blanched and grabbed me by the neck in a frenzy. But then, in an abrupt transformation, the expression on his face changed, his menacing gestures turned into an awkward but for that very reason all the more touching caress; his trembling fingers had sought my chest. No more harsh words, he no longer appealed for my forgiveness; he merely asked me, in an artificially firm voice, whether I did not stand in awe before my godlike self.
Godlike? I was only doing what I had to do, and I did not respond to the mute and tender supplication in his eyes. I stroked his hair, which had begun to grow on his head like the downy plumage of a young bird. Perhaps he prayed to me, as people pray to God, unbidden by Him.
And if I did not want his doglike submissiveness, I did not want what he did that night, either. He had sneaked into the laboratory, his paradise lost, for the last time, had mixed up a terrible intoxicant out of the pure alcohol on hand there in bottles (he was his father’s son, as I was mine), and, toward morning, after God knows what kind of awful night (I had no inkling, I swear it! I was asleep!), had tried to shoot himself in the heart with Walter’s army revolver, his hand made unsteady by alcohol and fear of death. But his hand must have dropped at the crucial moment. He hit himself. But he hit himself in the epigastric region, the area below the left costal arch, not in the heart.
I had never toyed with the young man who now, unconscious and white as a sheet, breathing shallowly from the upper chest like a woman, his abdominal muscles rigid, lay before me on the laboratory tiles. I had never toyed with him, I swear it by the holiest things there can be for a man like me, I swear it by my self, that I had never experimented on him. Rather he had experimented on me: he had tested me to see how much he was worth to me. Could he really have thought he could make my life and my work easier through his suicide? He had wanted to be my god, as I was his. But I was only a human being like too many others.
His experiment having failed, he had lost interest in life and tried to exit. I gazed at him a moment with tear-dimmed eyes (as the phrase goes). Then I did what was necessary.
The pulse was thready, very rapid, between ninety and a hundred, but still perceptible, and it remained so. The face displayed that rapt, unnatural expression that is seen in the field often enough in cases of severe abdominal injury and that physicians call facies abdominalis, “abdominal face.” It was not his heart that was killing him, but his abdomen. Irony is far from me now. The facts are what they are. I cut his clothes off his body with great caution. He did not have much on. He groaned heavily, seemed suddenly deeply unconscious. The entry and exit wounds caused by the small-caliber bullet were about the same size. The entry wound was contaminated with powder residue and shreds of clothing, the shot had apparently been fired at close range. So he had been serious.
Both I and the stunned Carolus, who had lately become almost as fond of the good lad as I was, were just as serious about trying to save him, whatever it took. Carolus, with his unduly high opinion of me as a surgeon (he did not know the circumstances of the difficult delivery), advised me to attempt a lifesaving operation at once. In all probability the intestinal walls had been pierced by the bullet; a blood vessel in the abdomen might also have been hit. I considered, and shook my head. There was no way I could risk an operation here. I had no competent assistants. I no longer had any. A difficult delivery might possibly be improvised by a daring physician with luck on his side; a technically complex operation like opening the abdominal cavity, never. I said so to the brigadier general.
He did not want to see it my way. Perhaps he was afraid it would come out that the convict entrusted to his custody had not been supervised, or not closely enough to prevent him from obtaining the deadly weapon. My fate hung in the balance too. Would I continue to be left unwatched now that there had been a killing (suicide is killing, too) using the gun? Had March and I deserved our “freedom” here?
But for me there was no conflict. The situation was clear. I drew the consequences and aseptically bandaged poor March, who was just then awakening with a groan, gave him one injection of camphor after another, and asked Carolus to telephone the main hospital of the penal administration. A passably modern operating room and an X-ray department had been added there only a few years earlier. (This was after an inquiring, courageous, and high-minded journalist had exposed to a horrified public, in grisly but brilliant reportage, the dreadful conditions prevailing on the island in general and characterizing the medical care provided to the deportees in particular.)
Carolus was happy to have someone give orders and pedantically carried them out to the letter. All that remained was for me to administer an analgesic injection, as the unfortunate youth had regained consciousness. It might be the last favor I could do him in this life.
The effect seemed to be markedly slow in coming and weak when it came. Had the poor devil become habituated to morphine? A review of our stores of drugs confirmed this suspicion. Not just alcohol, but narcotics too! Here again young March was his father’s son. He had long ago fled from his seemingly insoluble difficulties into morphine. And I had seen nothing! It had all escaped the attention of the observer, the friend. He had long since given up. But why play the sober, objective physician and primly draw the veil over his fate? Was I blameless? It affected me as I thought nothing could since the death of my beloved little Portuguese girl. I bent over him. I thought he was finally under the soporific influence of the morphine. But he was still lucid.
He knew what he was doing when he hooked his thin, feeble arm around my neck and drew my head down. I did not resist his lips. I will not conceal it. It was the first kiss I had given anyone since the death of my poor wife. But he–did he take this first kiss for what it was? I don’t know. It seemed to be making him gag. He pressed his lips together tightly. Did I understand him correctly? Was it his body, or was it his mind that made him seem to be spewing my kiss back out? Gummi Bear! Which is it now, you or me?
Had he spewed me out? And that most justly, in the words of Scripture. For this is just what will befall those who are not warm and not cold. But could I be any other way?
He bore his pain bravely and did not ask for another injection. His face sagged, and he began belching continuously. Not a good sign. It was a wonder that he was still alive and his heart was working. He refused the third injection I tried to give him. My medical objective was not only to provide an analgesic, but also to shut down the autonomous movements of the injured viscera and delay the spread of infectious microorganisms as long as possible.
To spare him any unnecessary jostling, we had made him a bed on the laboratory table as best we could. Now he held tightly to my hand. I thought of the time I had first held this almost abnormally soft, seemingly boneless hand in mine, that moment so long ago when I had awakened aboard the Mimosa, close to him, under his protection. All his sufferings and passions were there to be read in his handsome, clay-colored face. I thought of my prognosis when I had first encountered him. He has suffered, he is suffering, he will suffer. But how senselessly he was suffering! My wife had died quickly.
At last, after more than three hours, the car came for him. The trip over the marshy log road from the catchment hospital had not been as easy as I had assumed. But that was not the only problem. Another was fear of entering the pestilential Y.F. hospital and–what did the public-health department and the administration of the great catchment hospital, accommodating some hundreds of convicts, care about the life of any particular one, still less one who wanted, as this March did, to leave this best of all possible worlds? I waved to him, I waved him good-bye.
As I saw him being carried out of the building by trained bearers on the stretcher that had been taken from the vehicle, I did not know if I should be happy to be spared the sight of his death. Should I hope for him to be saved by a miracle from heaven? (Are there miracles? Is there a heaven?) Should I grieve? No, I did not ask that. I cast myself down, racked by abnormal dry-eyed trembling, in my basement room, from now on and forever and eternally my room, which he would never again share. I did not weep. Nature did not want to give me that consolation, that relief. That valve does not open for me. I thought–just one thought.
I still had in my pocket the nickel case containing the syringe.
Never in all my life, even in the worst of times, not in the remand prison observation unit, not during the first nights on the Mimosa, had I felt the hunger, indeed the almost invincible lust for stupefaction that I felt now.
But in the other pocket of my white coat I was also still carrying the precisely made gun that Walter had owned. The magazine held six cartridges. One was missing, five were there.
I told myself: If you can’t go on living, fine! Die! But don’t drug yourself. Destroy yourself, but don’t escape!
A person wants to live. Even if, like March, he takes his life, deep down he wants to live. Just in a different way. He tries to blackmail fate. He experiments with his last stake, and no matter how the experiment turns out, he still perishes . . . I didn’t want to do it. My suffering and my death would have proven nothing. Changed nothing. I was not deceiving myself. This consolation too was beyond the reach of my father’s son.
If anything kept me going during this period (I do not say difficult, I will not call it terrible, hellish, these words do not express it)–if something kept me going during the period after March was taken away, it was the demeanor of the brigadier general. He was accepting of me in a way I did not deserve. Indeed I myself had not allowed “humaneness,” as it is called, to influence my actions. In my hardness, which was not cruel but only logically consistent, as the business required, I had perhaps, who knows, gone too far with poor March. I had sought to pluck out the eye that offended me, in the words of Scripture. Could I moan? I was all the more surprised by the comportment of Carolus, this man who was bourgeois, narrow-minded, and pedantic in all his endeavors but who had become absorbed in our enterprise and for its sake eventually sacrificed what was most difficult for him to part with, his money. But of that more later.
During the first few days, he spared no effort in doing everything he could do from his remove to help March, who was in critical condition. He was persistent on the telephone just as Walter’s wife had been. Two or three times every day, he did not rest until he had obtained precise information on the condition of the would-be suicide. Surgery had been ruled out. I do not know what state the unfortunate lad had wound up in, whether he was looking so grand or was so clearly at death’s door that the gentlemen in the catchment hospital did not want to attempt an intervention. They must either have believed in miraculous spontaneous healing or have regarded him as a goner for whom nothing could be done, providing him with painkillers and otherwise leaving him alone.
Fate (call it God or the devil or nature–it comes to the same thing) proved kind to me. Fate had dismissed the little Portuguese girl from this delightful earth she had barely trod. Fate had silenced the great Walter just as he was beginning his most brilliant work. (I had studied the notebooks he had left. In them he had sketched out scientific and medical ideas of incalculable value, whose realization had been kept waiting due to the pressure of family worries and was foreclosed by his early death.) But fate had saved the son of a bitch Suleiman on the ship, had given the dockworker who was a burden on the entire world the gift of convalescence from Y.F. here in the hospital, it had left Walter’s widow and his posthumous son alive (his mother then had him christened Walter Posthumous). And now the mortally wounded March, so it seemed, was on the road to recovery! He had gotten lucky, had probably only nicked his spleen, and would soon mend.
I am unable to describe my feelings as I received the news, every day less pessimistic, from his sickbed. Finally he passed–what a prosaic conclusion to his act of passion!–his first normal bowel movement. The young man was thus out of danger. About two weeks later Carolus arranged for March himself to come to the hospital telephone. Carolus spoke to him. March’s voice was apparently weak, and Carolus, whose hearing was not what it was, could not always understand him right away, and thus I heard his dreary but very soothing voice repeat those ritual words: “What? Eh? What?” But March was not only on the road to recovery, he had even regained his gallows humor, and though I could not hear what he was saying to Carolus, I saw a very reassuring smile on the old man’s leathery features. Then Carolus noticed me listening in. He was annoyed. His face darkened. He waved at me–was he waving me over? No! He was waving me back to my work. He exchanged a few more words with the convalescent, apparently ones of great importance. “What?!” he asked then, his voiced raised. “Why not? Are you serious?”
He came out of the booth and closed the door gently and carefully. He did not look at me and did not speak to me further. The next day I waited in vain for the telephone to ring. Carolus was not waiting for it. Slowly I understood what the final conversation had been about. Carolus had asked the recovered March whether he wanted to come back to us, whether he wanted to see me again. March must have answered “No” or “I don’t know.” He did not want to come back.
I tried to bear it with humor. To take it philosophically. Perhaps humor is no different from philosophy and philosophy at bottom nothing but humor. But true philosophy and true humor are rare. Enough of that. Now I come to the change in Carolus’s attitude that I hinted at earlier, the change that loosened his purse strings.
When, for the first time since I had known him, old Carolus spoke of contributing his considerable financial resources, it seemed he was doing all he could to stimulate what remained of my spirit.
At this point we had to continue our experiments on a larger scale. The Y.F. hospital, now beginning to fill up with patients who were not “true” Y.F. patients, was not the right place for this. Our experiments would have a disruptive effect on the normal operations of the hospital, and, conversely, normal operations in the hospital would take up the space needed for our experimental patients. This was crystal clear.
But why not say: “Enough experiments! Enough horrors! Enough deaths!”
Why not take poor March’s lot as a warning from fate that it had been tested enough? Why not content ourselves with simply caring for those human beings who had contracted Y.F. by the natural route? Pointless questions. We still knew far too little.
The chaplain had dropped out too; his professional activity had become extraordinarily intense. So our team was down to the two of us, Carolus and me. We complemented each other. We had each other’s number. We put up with each other. We were in agreement as to our ultimate objective. Our answer to those questions was “Because,” or better yet we studiously did not pose them. We wanted to go on. From etiology to treatment, or, in lay terms, from knowledge to action. From the microscope to medicine.
We received word that the “American” commission, which actually included a highly gifted Japanese, had not been unsuccessful. Regardless of the substance of this success, our work would either refute or confirm the results of the American commission.
We could not rest satisfied with what we had achieved. We had to strive to approximate the truth as closely as we could.
Before long I would once more be bringing to bear my old energies and joy in my work (it was a true, wholehearted joy, and it remained my only one); Carolus had yet to turn to account his very considerable financial means and his name, his standing, his military rank, his impeccable past. He did so now without hesitation.
One might have thought the government would have done all it could to support our endeavor. No. The post of governor was still vacant. No one would say yes, no one would say no. The penal administration had its own public-health officers. The men in the bureaucratic back rooms held mysterious conclaves, the top public-health director in the penal administration produced a report on the most recent wave of the Y.F. epidemic, including statistics worthy of old Carolus. But this man pridefully took no notice of us. He had lived and worked here for twenty years and had found nothing to speak of. So what did we think we were trying to do?
Without the old rivalry between the colonial administration (Ministry of the Interior) and the penal administration (Department of Justice), and had Carolus not played them against each other, they would have put paid to our work. We would have been not only not encouraged, but stymied. But when Carolus put his considerable financial means into the hat on top of everything else and certainly used part of them for “diplomatic purposes,” that is to say, for a kind of bribery, the way became clear once more.
Without wasting time we began–to act? No, to think in earnest. We drafted a comprehensive new work plan that would enable us to achieve definitive results that could not be disputed by any objective person. Good.
I will give as brief an account as possible of our next experiments, with which we intended to bring our research to a provisional close. These experiments were in part novel ones, in part replications of the old “controls,” as they are called.
The difficulties are not easy to describe simply. Anything that can be found without difficulty today, now that science has already discovered all the easy things, is usually wrong. One must therefore keep a sharp eye on oneself, check everything down to the last detail, be suspicious to the point of pathology, and yet retain the ability to believe as one perseveres.
There was a bit of a delay at the beginning: the money that Carolus wanted to use had to be transferred from home. This was done by wire, but still took some days.
Meanwhile we located the site for the experiments. It was a place between two warehouses. A plot of land that had been cleared by the convicts over a period of years, treeless, covered only by the brambly scrub that grows in these regions, with no water source nearby. That is to say, as far away as possible from the habitat of the insects known as Stegomyia fasciata. It had a small tent camp on it, consisting of five tents, plus two little cottages. We could be cut off from the rest of the world, almost as isolated as my father and his companions had been on the polar sea; it was not easy to think of everything we would need to study the transmission of Y.F. there.
The administration let us have the property free (no great sacrifice!), and also provided gratis the barbed wire that is available in great quantities in a penal colony. So the administration and the government were occasionally good for something after all! Still more important was money. We needed money to buy test subjects, in the form of people. People cost money.
But there are also people who will, that word again, sacrifice themselves for nothing in a cause they believe to be important. The best case–no cost. And among them were some marines from the shore batteries whom Walter had known when he was an army doctor. Carolus offered them a sum of money that was comparatively large by their standards. But to our surprise, they responded: “Herr Brigadier General, our only condition is that we receive no compensation whatever for our voluntary service.” Carolus blushed, a phenomenon I had never before observed in the leathery old medical statistician. He wasted little time in thanking them for this generous gesture. He accepted it and treated the youths as the gentlemen they were.
One of the fine marks of our time is that generosity has become an untranslatable foreign word, I said once. Obviously I was wrong again!
Just the fact that people of this uncommon type existed in our mean old world at all lightened the load I had to bear, which was frequently not easy to do now without my friend March. But why speak of myself? My personal fate was now bound up with the success or failure of our experiments. This is all I want to report on in the end. Incidentally, two criminals also came forward, lured as much by the hard cash as by the chance of an early parole, and they were newcomers to C. like us: they had been on the transport that had brought me. One of them was Suleiman, who had been so lamentably worked over on the Mimosa, whose face still bore highly disfiguring scars from his wound, and who wept day and night; that is to say, the torn nasolacrimal duct continually discharged aqueous matter with the chemical properties of tears. He recognized me immediately, even though he was half blind, asked, laughing an uncouth, teary laugh, after “precious March,” and furtively proposed to share the promised payment with me if I would set up the experiments “mercifully.”
I said no. He understood yes.
He, Suleiman, could not believe that venality had limits. Thus he awaited the experiments with great equanimity, convinced in his heart that I would exempt him from actual infection so as not to pass up my thirty pieces of silver. And he was deeply determined to cheat me out of the money he had promised me. He took me for one of his own, and with one of his own he thought all was permitted. But I was a different kind of criminal. I had killed. But not trafficked in human flesh as he had. He wanted to swindle the swindler, but it did not come to that.
This time we began the experiments at the “negative end.” To be demonstrated was Axiom I, that Y.F. can be transmitted only by mosquitoes.
Only transmissible by Stegomyia fasciata means not transmissible any other way.
Does this help? At that time it was still widely believed that Y.F. was communicable by contact with a sufferer’s clothes, bedding, and other articles. Or the culprit was even thought to be bad air (“mal-aria”), or rainwater and cistern water used for drinking.
We were going to investigate and solve the problem in the two cottages. Each was four meters long, six wide. One entered through a double door set up in such a way as to keep mosquitoes out. The cottages had two south windows, on the same side as the doors, to eliminate drafts. Then a small wood-burning stove was installed, which ensured that the temperature never fell below twenty-one degrees centigrade, even now, in the cooler season, or at night. Water tanks kept the air as suffocatingly humid as in the rainy season in the midst of the jungle, in the heart of the primeval equatorial forest. Into this cottage two volunteer assistants from the shore batteries (whose heroism was sorely tested by having to watch the first experiments) brought some tightly sealed crates. Then the two convicts, Suleiman and his crony, were taken into their nasty accommodations with the bad air. In their presence the pillows, blankets, and sheets were taken out of the crates, soiled with . . . But why spell this out? The two convicts were prevailed upon to undress, put on the dirty pajamas, lie down on the stained sheets. You’ll stay here now! Eat here! Sleep here–and die here? Could we mean it? Suleiman threw me appalled glances. I made no comment on these preparations. During the days that followed we had nothing else to do but keep watch like veritable Cerberuses on these men in their horribly hot, evil-smelling cell.
None of the familiar awful symptoms of Y.F. appeared. You should have seen the faces of the two criminals. They rejoiced no less than we. Their steady temperatures, their ascending weight curves, and their thriving appearances announced the disconfirmation of the false hypothesis–hence the confirmation of Axiom I.
After three weeks (which were a torment only in their tedium), this experiment could be regarded as finished.
Next we considered the following question: Was the experiment really absolutely probative? True, neither of the guests in Huts A and B had gotten Y.F. But how could we know if they were susceptible to Y.F. at all? The chaplain in the Y.F. hospital had not been susceptible, it appeared, and very likely Carolus had not been either. Therefore we had to do the counterexperiment whether we wanted to or not, and we did it. Suleiman the weeper had thought himself saved. He was now hoping for release. Not that he had been wasting his time here. He remained the most revolting voluptuary, every bit as filthy in his soul as the Y.F. pajamas that he wore. His comrade was to be pitied.
In the worst case, namely, that in which Suleiman was set at liberty but had to stay on the island, I believe he was going to go halves with the docklands gin-mill proprietor and join with him, another bloodsucking insect, in bleeding the convicts dry. But for that he would have to stay. Behind the barbed wire. Here with us. He had promised, he had accepted a lot of money, we took him at his word. He did not understand much, but he suspected something. The whole thing was giving him the creeps, but the hard cash, the fat silver coins in little bags, a hundred in each one, that Carolus jingled before his ears, were too tempting. He nodded to the brigadier general. He winked at me. He meant I should not forget our pact. I had not made one.
Using our old methods, Carolus and I placed on one of the two men, namely, Suleiman, mosquitoes that (through the offices of the young resident) had been amply fed on the blood of the sick and dying in the Y.F. hospital. The other man we injected with the infectious blood of a patient in the Y.F. hospital, directly under his skin.
In keeping with the axiom, both became ill, promptly and severely. Suleiman died even before he reached the apyretic period. In his ravings he cursed me and himself and the world. Even a vile human being’s suffering could be very touching. I felt sorry for him. But that changed nothing.
The sailors carried him to his grave, hastily getting him under the ground at the edge of Camp Walter. The other man’s case was serious, but fate was kind to him and he made it through. Later he received not only his own honorarium but also the money that had been intended for Suleiman, and I suppose he took his place with the gin-mill proprietor too. He still lives here and is healthy and wants to have his family come, if the administration permits it.
We still had to demonstrate the inverse–and attempt to find a cure. To do this we experimented on the sailors who, carefree, idealistic youths that they were, had been generous enough to put themselves at our service.
By then we, Carolus, the sailors, and I, were living together as a sort of family. The boredom was deadly, but nobody died of it. Carolus told us of his deeds and adventures, or rather those of his children and grandchildren, among which loomed large the droll utterances of the little granddaughter who, with her nanny, had come to the dock to see him off on the Mimosa. I neither saw nor heard anything of March. Both Carolus and I were preoccupied with the prospects for our discovery. These were happy thoughts. We pictured a grand future but did not talk about it for fear of tempting Providence, instead just grinning at each other a lot.
We had named our camp Camp Walter, and Walter was in our thoughts, though we did not speak about him. The next experiment used the two sailors, who had been joined by a third, one of their comrades. Two of them were housed in Hut A, which was divided in half by a fine wire mesh. The third was in Hut B by himself. Both cottages had been remodeled. We had had a door made in the north wall, so that each building had two doors. Fresh air could now blow through freely; the two doors were closed only by mosquito-proof netting. The experiment was designed in such a way that Sailor X, freshly bathed, as healthy as the climate permitted, wearing a thoroughly disinfected nightshirt, took up residence at twelve noon in his cell, if I may call it that. A jar containing fifteen female mosquitoes fed on infectious blood had been opened in that area of the cell five minutes earlier.
During the first quarter hour, X received a bite from one of the female mosquitoes. The others had holed up in dark corners. They got busy as soon as the sun went down, and by nine o’clock that night, fifteen to seventeen bites could be counted. His neighbor to the left, Sailor Y (the control), was in equally perfect health, also wore a disinfected nightshirt, came from his bath just as clean, but the fine wire mesh meant that the female mosquitoes could not gain entry to his cell. Sailor Z was housed by himself in Hut B. He moved in at the same time as the others, but was left unmolested for some days.
For this experiment we had selected the pluckiest and most morally steadfast of the three, a man who never lost his sense of humor. We wanted to hold off from infecting him until Y.F. had appeared in Sailor X. That is, five days after the preliminaries just described.
Z meanwhile remained fit as a fiddle, but had unfortunately lost interest in this tedious bivouac (he was still entirely isolated), suddenly considered it all futile, bloodthirsty tomfoolery, wearied us with complaints and grievances, and demanded to be sent back to the shore batteries. We had been wrong about his character. He was a gentleman, a grand fellow, very funny and witty, knew the best card tricks, and spoke three languages, but we could not discipline him to the most important thing, patience, and in any case we were unable to do as he wished. He thought he deserved special consideration for his generosity in putting his health and his life at our disposal. But this man’s past and his present, all the ins and outs of him, were of no interest to us. It was all neither here nor there as far as we were concerned as long as the experiment had not been completed. He, Z, had to submit.
The authorities of the convict camp had furnished us with guards, just as they had assigned us construction workers and other tradesmen. We also needed a large staff, for there was not a drop of water in our camp. The healthy test subjects had to have food, their clothes had to be washed, their meals had to be brought to them, their personal hygiene had to be scrupulously maintained. The sick test subjects had to be cared for, and their care could not be one iota worse in our primitive cottage lacking all medical facilities than it would have been up in the well-appointed convent hospital above the city of C. The truly incalculable labor that Carolus and I had taken on may be imagined when I say that the two of us had to get by on five hours of sleep, and even that was interrupted often enough by the medical care required by the sick men. Carolus had never come down with Y.F. But when the old man, afflicted by rheumatism, constipation, and the circulatory complaints of his years, voluntarily exposed himself to such strain, when he declined before my eyes and lost the little bit of color he had gained in the interval between the experiments–then I had to ask his pardon for all the derogatory things I had said about him. You were wrong, I had to tell myself. Forget what you know, Georg Letham, and change your ways in your later years.
During these critical days I began to see a father in him. He saw in me a son, he began to call me by my first name, and he spontaneously changed his unappetizing habits, much to my delight, for we lived together in one tent. If I had been able to get him used to handling his cigarette by the business end instead of the other one, to holding his teacup by the handle, taking the spoon out, washing his hands a bit more often, and brushing his beard, then everything would have been joy and glory. But if only that had been all I had to worry about!
Let us not talk about me now, but about the test subjects. X became severely ill, but passed the crisis after almost three solid weeks of terrible fever and recovered.
But now the most important thing. To infect a man, but use serum to protect him from becoming ill.
For this experiment we had to use the recalcitrant man Z. He had watched the terrible suffering of his comrades. He had seen for himself that the mosquito-proof walls between him and the bloodsucking insects had been the only thing preventing him from getting the disease. And there we were with the same insects, expecting him to hold out his upper arm. Carolus doubled his bonus. This man Z, though capable of noble impulses at bottom, irately rejected Carolus’s proposal. But this experiment was as essential as the rest of them. They were all fundamental.
I, the social outcast, did my best to efface myself as usual. But when I saw Carolus, who was now dear to me, going away with a literally long face, I resolved on a step that may appear strange to some. I sat down with the unruly, exceedingly rancorous young man, told him candidly who I was, explained to him what we wanted, and promised him that he would absolutely not become ill. And this man Z did not ask whether I would be able to keep this promise even if I wanted to. He trusted me, like so many before him (and fortunately after him).
Trust is the foundation of the world, is it not? He spat furiously, jabbed me with his knees, and called me a cunning criminal and a brutal slave driver; but all the while he was putting out his upper arm and holding on to it with the other hand to keep it from jerking and getting in the way of the experiment. And when the first mosquito had bitten (we had three, to be on the safe side), he began to laugh, and from that moment he was his old self. He calmly let himself be injected with the blood of X, who was pale as a corpse and almost wailing with enervation–and remained healthy.
Toxin against toxin makes antitoxin. Hosanna! This was the best thing that could happen.
During this period Carolus received many letters and telegrams from his family. They had expected him to be gone for three months, but it was more than twice that now, with no end in sight. He was an old man, sixty-seven. He was attached to his daughter, to his son-in-law, to his only grandchild. He was attached to his beautiful big house, to his friends back home, to his chess game and his bank account, to his cactus collection, to his honor and dignity. Every day here–but why speak of it, when he himself never did? We were completely taken up with our XYZ. But one day he violated our unwritten compact to keep anything of a personal nature to ourselves and told me, so happy that his head bobbed like a hen’s, that we had been pardoned. We, meaning March and I, Suleiman (†), and the fourth man. As a reward for our spirit of sacrifice (and thanks to the efforts of my influential father?), we were being pardoned. March, whose crime had been one of passion, could return home; I, who had committed a worse offense, would remain in exile, as would the fourth man. But I was exempted from forced labor, and steps were being taken to make it possible for me to practice my profession in C. I did not ask about March.–“Don’t you want to thank your father? Won’t you” (Carolus amended) “write to him?” “My dear Carolus,” I said, “what can I do? I’ve forgotten what my father looks like.”
During this period there were two pieces of news. One came as no surprise to us. The old pharmacist von F. lay dying. What he had prophesied four months earlier had come to pass almost to the day. He had preferred a death in his comfortable bed to one on the lab table. Could he be faulted for that?
He left no great riches. The city was impoverished. The environs were almost entirely depopulated, apart from the masses of deportees. The city was so down-at-heels that no doctor could prosper there even if he devoted himself to the well-being of the populace for almost fifty years, as the old pharmacist had. The brigadier general hinted that I might take over that post. I shrugged my shoulders and said nothing. I had no interest in a job like that. And yet it would soon emerge that fate had nothing better in store for me. The second piece of news was more important. It concerned the commission mentioned earlier, the one that had been studying Y.F. in Havana. One day Carolus appeared, pale with shock, and murmured that he had something of grave import to tell me.
I thought of March, who had still not left the soil of C., though his commutation allowed him to and he was fully restored to health (an indestructible man!). Carolus, in a gallant gesture, had given him some money to permit him to travel home on a small packet steamer. March had taken the money but had been seen not long before in the old part of the city. I did not want to believe it, but he had been drunk and in the company of some clapped-out old thieves and vagrants whom earthly justice had given up all its efforts to reform. I did not exist for March. He would have had plenty of opportunities to approach me, if only just to pay me a visit at Camp Walter, which was now deserted–but he did no such thing. And I could hardly have needed him more. I considered our problem solved. There had been a time when this outcome would have made me proud, vain. I would have announced the results at a medical congress and would have accepted the congratulations, the honors, the appointments to professorships of pathological anatomy and experimental bacteriology as a fairly earned reward, too skimpy if anything. Now, here, it was something else again. My personal life meant nothing to me now unless I had work, this kind of work. For me work was truly forced labor, though not as most people understand that. And now I would soon find my work completed and my existence futile, superfluous, and absurd.
But it was nothing of the kind. This was only the slump experienced by every working person at the end of a working day, soon vigorously overcome and gone without a trace. And I soon had to put my strength of will to the test. This was made necessary by the second piece of news that Carolus whispered so discreetly into my ear.
The commission had been successful in its work in Havana. My face lit up. Carolus did not understand. “Don’t you see, they didn’t find what we found.”
“Impossible,” I said calmly. “They found the pathogen–and we didn’t,” he said. “So much the better,” I responded, “we’re now far enough along that we can pool our results, and the best thing that can happen to us is to have the opportunity to compare our results with those of the American commission.” “Whatever you think,” he said worriedly. “You’ll see, we’ll have them here today or tomorrow.” “The sooner the better,” I said. We sat all night in Hut B, which, well disinfected and thoroughly aired out, was quite tolerable now. We formulated our experiences as is done in scientific reports. As old Carolus was leafing through our records, he was strangely overcome. He cried like a child. A crying child is poignant to see, but that is something natural. Tears being shed by a man successful in life and (ultimately) in science, rich, well regarded, general, grandfather, recipient of high honors–is this not a grotesque sight, one that might provoke laughter as much as pity? But I had understood what this only outwardly ossified man was. I stroked the smooth, velvety skin on the top of his bald head (he did not notice this). He instinctively put his thin arm around me and with his somewhat unclean fingers gestured at our dead friend’s chart. But I quickly drew his head away so that his tears (and the ash from his big cigar) would not dirty Log W. and smear the writing and the diagrams. The old boy soon got a grip on himself. We sat together until morning by the light of a petroleum lamp.
Camp would be struck before long. Where would we live then? Should we go back to the Y.F. hospital? What was there for us to do there? The epidemic was on the rise again in C., and there was little room for us up in the hospital. Where should I go? The new governor was still awaited. No one wanted to take any steps without him. Everything was still entirely up in the air when the aforementioned commission arrived.
We, Carolus and I, were compelled to take up quarters in the Y.F. hospital, and the next day we were visited there by three gentlemen from the commission. They drew blood from a severely febrile patient and were able to show us the Y.F. pathogen in dark field. Not immediately. We sat at the microscopes from morning until night. Finally a specimen of Leptospira (its scientific name) was gracious enough to show itself to us. And even this one Leptospira was a fluke. The tiny thing was that much of a rarity. I recognized it. I had seen it before the Japanese who discovered it. But this is a frequent occurrence in the history of discoveries and inventions.
The gentlemen had brought some excellent slides, and we were able to examine the pathogen closely. It is an extremely delicate, supple entity about 4 to 9 microns long and 0.2 microns wide. In dark field it is active, exhibiting lashing lateral movements as well as rotational and very rapid retrograde motion, the latter clearly produced by the propeller-like torsional action of the ends, the “whips.” The international (“American”) commission was also able to culture the microorganism, which stains with difficulty and is found only very sporadically in the blood of the sufferer, playing hard to get, but all the more dangerous for that. The artificial culture, the bacillus patch, was invisible to the naked eye. A misty opacity was all there was to see on the culture medium, even when growth was the most abundant. But the microorganisms were there. They were infectious to guinea pigs. It was possible to use them to infect guinea pigs artificially and follow the phases of the infection in animal experiments. Walter’s experiments at the Institute however many years ago were thus confirmed in their entirety. This did not surprise me.
What the commission showed us was impeccable and we happily recognized the correctness of the research that we had failed in (that I had failed in, thanks to my mistake, as I have related). Their discovery and ours complemented each other ideally, like the two halves of a letter torn in the middle. They had the pathogen; we had the means of transmission and the prophylaxis, the method of epidemic control. The only problem was that the commission (headed by a man with whom I had had a scientific feud–this had been years before but was still vivid in my mind) regarded our results with the greatest skepticism. It was unwilling to believe us.
We had just come from the funeral of our colleague von F. “Why are you bothering with his old theory? That was rigorously disproven decades ago.” They would not acknowledge the Stegomyia. So were we supposed to start the experiments all over again? We could never have convinced these men. They held their ground: breathing the air or (or!) drinking infected water was the cause of Y.F. One member of the commission favored the air. Another member the water. A third left the question open. Three heads. They could not agree. Meanwhile everything was going on as before, and the patients were getting to know element number three, the cold, cold ground.
They were dropping like flies.
But I was a criminal sentenced without possibility of appeal and a former convict, and the gentlemen did not think me worthy of another glance. They looked down on old Carolus, and Walter’s death wrung from them no more than a regretful shrug. It was not their theory that his passing had corroborated.
We collapsed when they left.
Carolus had completely lost his equilibrium. He cried on my shoulder. Good.
After the setback delivered by the American commission, there had to be a windfall, and it came from the least likely quarter, the new governor. He was none other than my father’s one-time assistant at the Ministry, La Forest, some of whose career I have recounted earlier in this report. I do not maintain that he was more benevolent than his predecessor toward me, the son of his former mortal enemy, possibly out of some antagonism toward my father, who had turned his back on me. The motives are irrelevant. The facts speak for themselves.
It happened that we presented ourselves immediately after the high official’s arrival and laid our results on the table.
Ten men, ten reports, ten experiments.
We all expressed ourselves freely. Now I must report something that will be difficult to understand. It may have been exhaustion due to the excessive strain of our work, or it may have been the effects of the Y.F. that I had passed through and had still not properly recovered from–I don’t know why, but I was now filled with doubts about our Axiom I. I doubted myself, I doubted everyone.
When our report was lying for review on the official’s desk, I returned to our accommodations, uncommunicative and trembling as though with chills. I was now living with Carolus in the apartment of the late municipal medical officer, von F. the pharmacist, whose position I was going to assume. But was I up to the job? I didn’t know. I saw none of our dearly won results as certain. I was filled with regrets. I had lost faith in my godlikeness. Walter’s fate, March’s, that of Walter’s widow, the children, even Suleiman’s death, weighed heavily upon me. Would I have done it all over again? Perhaps so! I would have done it again–and regretted it again!
And even if everything accorded with the truth, how was it possible to credit Axiom I? Were our experiments convincing? Perhaps we had done too few after all! How often investigators have deceived themselves! If the commission had refused to believe us, would it be possible to convince a governor? I think not even Carolus was free from doubt. It is very difficult to be a judge in one’s own cause.
Even without speaking we understood each other very well, and soon I was able to master myself sufficiently that the next morning I ventured a small jest. A silly thing, hardly worth mentioning. Carolus used a rather worn-out old shaving brush to lather himself. He neglected to rinse his face properly after he shaved and there were bristles from the brush stuck in the creases on his cheeks. I pointed out with a laugh that he had become young and blond again. He replied equally gaily that I had become old and gray. It was as though he had responded to my innermost being and not to the silly thing I had said.
But how were things with him really? Only one who knew how to read his face could see the dreadful unease in it.
It was also in the words he whispered into my ear before we visited La Forest for the second time: “Whatever you do, Georg, keep calm! I’m not giving up on our cause, even if it costs me the last years of my life and the last coins in my pocket.” Nevertheless we came out onto the street in a very somber mood, and this state of mind did not become more cheerful when I ran into March on a street corner, again in the company of some completely wild riffraff. And he was no different, he was every bit as seedy looking, I might almost say every bit as brutalized, as those pitiable creatures that the colonial administration was allowing neither to live nor to die here. Shall I describe him and them, shall I repeat their snatches of cynical talk? Why should I? He looked past me, his eyes glittering abnormally. The pupils were tiny. He was evidently under the influence of alcohol and morphine. How he could have fallen so far, what had stopped him from finding his way home as anyone else in his place (except me, probably) would have done with boundless joy, what had become of the money that the generous Carolus had given him–of these matters I will not speak. They are of personal significance only.
Now the enterprise was front and center. And if anything could console me for the loss, the seemingly inexorable decline and fall of my friend, it was the discussion that we began with La Forest that afternoon and that stretched into the night, with short breaks. It was mostly between Carolus and La Forest. Since my experience with the commission, I had felt it was best not to push myself forward. I, the pardoned convict G. L., could serve our cause in no better way than to efface myself entirely. In all the scientific publications that would soon appear presenting our work, I am cited only as “Case 4.” The honors that attached to these events in the course of the year accrued to Carolus and to Walter’s memory. My name was not mentioned. Here in this report I have also concealed my real name.
The most important thing was that La Forest stood as resolutely with us as the American commission did against us. Neither had verified Axiom I. Such terrible experiments could not be simply and mechanically replicated, nor were they. But the governor, a practical administrator, showed us another way to validate them. He let the truth prove itself in practice. He devised a two-year program (later extended). He was going to wipe out the mosquito Stegomyia, genus Culex. Then (if our theory was correct–and it was, it was as sure as death) Y.F. would be wiped out too. In one of the camps, which bore the number 54, a fresh Y.F epidemic was just then breaking out (the first among the deportees in a long time). He drove out to the camp with us. First we reached an agreement with the director of the penal colony. We put together a new team; it was not the last. La Forest had not studied at my father’s knee for nothing. He knew the art of handling people, he could strike a chord in everyone, play a tune anyone could dance to. For the first time in the history of the colony, all sorts of different departments worked together harmoniously. Success came. Quickly. Regularly. Unimpeachably. The statistician’s heart in Carolus was gladdened. Mortality, which had attained monstrous dimensions, declined with every passing month. My old friend soared! He became young. He was in the pink for the three years that he held out before turning home.
The administrative district gradually became free of Y.F. Coupled with this were measures to combat malaria. We found that the two closely related insect genera did not have at all the same habitat. The genus Culex prefers to lay its eggs, standing on end in the shape of an artful little boat, in artificial reservoirs of water, rain barrels, cisterns. But Anopheles, which causes malaria (actually it is the vector of the disease), places them in natural but small pools of water. The eggs are loosely arrayed, perpendicular to the surface of the water, so that any gust of wind will disperse them. Uncontrolled rivers and streams overflow almost everywhere in the tropics at certain times of year; puddles and stagnant pools are left behind when the waters retreat. This is where the mosquitoes live. This is where the public-health people must go to work. Free-running water does not harbor mosquitoes.
In the initial public measures, high-flow trenches, frequently cleaned, were used to drain bodies of standing water, or else they were filled in. We built. We had cheap human material in vast quantities; the work was beneficial, it was possible to substantially improve the circumstances of thousands of people who had been merely existing, their lives more wretched than those of animals. To combat the mosquitoes, we used asphyxiants, agents known from long experience in malaria regions, which work by sealing the surface of the water off from the air. The mosquito larvae die because they have to keep coming to the surface to breathe through their tracheae or respiratory tubes. We used disinfection and mosquito-proof doors and windows to inhibit the transmission of Y.F. We had an unbelievable amount of work, but an even greater amount of success.
We gradually cleaned up an area larger than Europe. We brought mortality down to a fraction of what it had been. We stamped out Y.F. here. Others followed us. The battle to eradicate the mosquitoes and develop the fertile region was a fascinating one that lasted for years and turned out well.
The territory flourished.
This is where I leave the scene.
I disappeared into the crowd, and that is for the best.