The Baron Alexander von Reisden went mad after his young wife died, and in five years he had not got himself sane. His friends were concerned about him. He had tried suicide once, early on, and had not succeeded; this was encouraging in a man who was usually both well-prepared and lucky; but even mad, Reisden might reasonably have assumed that he could shoot himself through the heart without missing, and, knowing himself, at the first moment he could, he would have learned how to do it better. He still had the gun, in a box in his top drawer behind his collar studs, and he still suffered from what had led him to the act, his singular and inexplicable and apparently incurable madness.
“Do you still think you killed her?” Louis asked.
Reisden looked up from making notes in his lab book. “I did kill her. That isn’t the question.”
It was Christmas Eve, 1905, in the cold lab of the chemistry labs at the University of Lausanne. Reisden’s notes on neuromuscular connections were spread out on his lab bench beside a refrigerated box, glass-topped and glass-sided, into which the string galvanometer and Reisden’s other testing apparatus fit; but because one could not have visibility and insulation too, the whole lab was not much warmer than the box. The refrigeration coils and an electric motor took up most of the back wall; Louis had to shout above its rattle. Reisden, cold in his coat, held his hands over the Bunsen burner. In a tin pan nearby lay three frogs half stretched out, stunned by the cold. One of them stirred, disturbed by the shadow of his hands.
“But you know it was an accident,” Louis persisted.
“Of course.” Reisden picked up a pithing needle and opened the glass box. How much, he wondered, will the experiment be disturbed because the experimenter is warm-blooded? He measured the frog’s temperature and brushed his hand across the frog’s back, making it hop, panicked, across the lab bench until it stopped, paralyzed by the cold and the toxins building up in its muscles. Bending the frog’s neck forward, Reisden felt along the smooth skin and slid the needle into the base of the skull, upward into the brain. He moved the needle back and forth. The frog gave one slow shudder and relaxed in his hands. The procedure was supposed to be painless, which Reisden had always considered irrelevant, as if painless death were more excusable. Tasy had died instantly and probably without pain.
I know it was an accident, Reisden thought. I never had any trouble knowing that.
The frog flopped limply in his hand. Frog a moment ago, preparation now. He cut quickly through the skin of the leg, dissecting out the nerve and muscle.
Louis Dalloz peered over his shoulder, snuffling like one of the pigs he studied, puffing vapory breaths like a wrathful French Santa Claus. From the sleeves of his old overcoat rose a rich odor of large animals and barns. His muffler, which his wife had knit for him, bulged the neck of his coat. He looked like an accident with a hat, and even in his own university he had been taken for the janitor. Only his hands, short-fingered and delicate and stained with acid like Reisden’s, looked like a chemist’s. “How can you stand this cold?”
“How do you stand pigs? The cold slows down the recovery reaction.”
“This isn’t an experiment, it’s a hair shirt.” Louis sniffed. He squinted at the string galvanometer. “What happened to your lab assistant?”
“Gone to Zurich for Christmas.”
“And you stay here doing work that any lab assistant could do. If you were in Paris . . . Berthet doesn’t let a twenty-seven-year-old man act like a monk. Not in Paris.”
Reisden reached over and turned off the refrigerator. For a moment the silence deafened them both.
“I’m not going to Paris.”
Louis snorted and glared up at him.
“You will hear me, Louis.” Reisden kept his voice neutral. “I like Berthet’s people. Yes, I’d probably be good there. Yes, I would like living in Paris. We’ve been through that. I am not going.”
“You don’t think you’re good enough.”
“It won’t work, Louis. I’ve seen all your bait before.”
“You like Switzerland. You want to stay here and make money.” Louis fiddled with Reisden’s big microscope, spinning it up, then twiddling it into focus again. “Whose slide?”
“Ramón y Cajal’s.”
“Pretty.”
“New stain. I’m not out of touch here,” Reisden said.
Louis looked up at him. “No,” said Louis, “only with yourself. You’ve locked yourself away so long that you don’t remember how to come into a room with people in it, eh? Or tell a joke that doesn’t have an edge to it. You’re like a wild animal in the corner of a pen, going grrrr”—Louis bared his teeth and growled convincingly—“because he doesn’t know what else to do. And he thinks even to himself, Je suis la bête sauvage, I’m mad. But isn’t he only afraid of what’s going to happen next? Don’t look down your nose at me, Sacha, like the Baron von Reisden. I knew you when you were nineteen.”
Reisden sighed and put the frog down. “Make yourself useful, would you? Write while I measure.”
Louis sighed loudly and took the pen. Onto the string galvanometer Reisden fit a translucent string of frog preparation, once frog. The current barely made the muscle twitch. Reisden moved the dial in tiny increments, reading out numbers.
“Just for a few days, come with me to Genoa,” Louis said. “It’s Christmas. It’s not good for you to stay here alone. Jeanne will fuss over you. We’ll have a nice roast pig. Everyone from the lab will be there. You can look down your nose at our research methods.”
“No, I shall spend Christmas day cutting apart innocent little frogs.”
Louis opened his mouth and closed it.
Now, thought Reisden, we will get into deep waters. Louis would ask, did Reisden know that most suicides happened at holidays? Louis, he thought, look here, Louis, one doesn’t shoot oneself because it’s Christmas.
“You were my best student,” Louis said forcefully, holding up his hand as if he were about to swear to something. “Now you are—” He waggled his fingers, looking for words. “Now you can choose between working for Berthet or Sherrington. But you’re wasting it, you’re not doing chemistry, you’re just being sorry for yourself and calling it guilt. I’m here out of interest for you, that’s all, freezing my ass in this refrigerator you call a lab on the day before Christmas, to tell you that you are being stupid. You didn’t mean to kill her. You had a nervous breakdown and thought you did. And that was five years ago.”
Ah, was it? “And in another country, and besides, the wench is dead. And it will never happen again. But I am not going to Paris.”
Louis glared up at him, his face reddening. “Sometimes I want to throw a bomb at you. Take the job, and don’t play Saint Alexander in the Icebox. It’s not good for you.”
Reisden let that go. He watched the hand move instead. That was Louis’ gesture, what one would take of him first if one were to act him: holding the hand up, wiggling the fingers. This is my hand. Why does it move? At nineteen Reisden had taken Louis’ undergraduate chemistry course because the passion of his life had been acting and he had wanted those French-peasant gestures. He had found instead a question that he had been unable to answer.
And that had kept them allies ever since: that and Louis’ persistence. Sometimes Reisden was grateful for Louis. Not by any means always.
“Look,” Reisden said, “when is the next train to Genoa?”
“Two hours,” Louis said instantly and added, “Will you come?”
“I’ll take you to the train. You don’t want to be away from Jeanne at Christmas, do you? We’ll stop at your hotel and get your luggage.”
“We can’t get a cab at four in the morning. I’ll have to stay.”
Reisden looked out into the dark streets; his breath fogged the ice crystals that grew up the window. “I’ll drive you,” he offered.
“In the auto!" Louis said under his breath, rounding his eyes sarcastically. “In Saint Alexander Reisden’s holy cursed automobile! Vierge Marie!”
I do give rides, Reisden thought, suddenly very tired. I don’t kill everybody. He checked the still-living frogs and picked up one. The frog stirred a bit in the warmth of his hand. “Live,” he said to the frog, and let it drop back among the rest.
🙚🙚🙚
In early morning, the station was a smudge of black and grey. Under the electric lights outside, Reisden’s automobile had drawn two or three station porters into the street. Its racing colors were bronze and a coppery green, the only trace of color in the cold. Louis went off to the left-property office and reappeared wheeling an enormous packing case. "Merde alors,” Reisden murmured; “merde absolue.”
The case squealed desperately and Louis knelt by the breathing holes at one end, murmuring into unseen large hairy ears. “Pig, piggy darling, mon petit chou, just one horrible little train ride, then you will be on a lovely large farm near Genoa where pigs of your beauty are appreciated.” Where in Lausanne in December had Louis found a pig?
Underneath the peasant look Louis was real peasant. As a boy he had tramped barefoot around France, learning the feeding and the raising and the genealogy of pigs. He had been a near-illiterate farmhand plodding through a chemistry course in Paris when the Revolution of 1870 had broken out. When the Paris Commune failed, Louis’ friends had got him to Germany, to the only man they could think of who was asking the same sorts of questions about farm animals. What Rudolf Maty had taught Louis, from remote professorial heights, was that how the pig grew was only a part of it, that everything was a whole of parts, molecules and atoms, linked together into gut and muscle and fat and bone; that molecules broke and linked, transformed from food to what ate the food, that everything ate and lived in a great ring, corn and pig and farmer. “The chemistry of life,” Louis had called his lectures. As an aristocrat, of course, Reisden had been expected to be at best amused by them. One is supposed to know that men such as Louis have nothing to say.
Reisden’s family had been ennobled by Charlemagne. Reisdens had lived in Rezény castle from the thirteenth century until the last bits of roof had fallen, fifteen years ago, sending Reisden’s two decrepit aunts scuttling to furnished rooms in Salzburg. As an aristocrat Reisden was deplorably modem: He had a profession and he made money. It was vulgar to concern oneself with a profession or with the earning of money, Reisden’s guardian had told him; he would marry well because of his name. Instead Reisden had found the stock market, just about the time he had got interested in research biochemistry; and vulgarly, ever since, he had learned how to make the stock market pay for the lab.
“He needs a distraction,” Louis said to the pig. “He should do what you do, eh, little boy?”
Have experiments run on him, be sacrificed for science, or screw pigs? “Don’t bother, Louis,” Reisden murmured. He moved off down the station platform, lighting a cigaret against the faint odor of boar. Louis thought Reisden should marry again. Jeanne picked out good women and sat them next to him at dinner when he went to Genoa. But, Reisden knew, no one hallucinates for a long time without a good reason. Biochemical or genetic? Graf Leo and the aunts were dead long ago and he had no one to ask about bad genes. In any case he had no intense interest in reproducing himself; there would be no more Reisdens.
The electric lights were hazed; it had begun to snow again, sharp half-transparent spicules. As if coincidentally, Louis followed him down the platform.
“Get on the train, you could be in Paris in a few hours. See how it feels.”
Reisden shrugged. “I like working alone.”
“No,” Louis said. Reisden looked at him, startled. “Don’t tell yourself lies. Sacha, you live here like a dead man. You maybe say a word to your lab assistant? And maybe your barber, and the waiter at whatever restaurant you eat at? Sacha, do you always eat alone? You write to me, beautiful lab reports and one sentence at the bottom of them, ‘All well here, it continues to snow.’ You’re usually at your lab at night because no one else is there to mind the cold. Except tomorrow, being Christmas, no one will be there at any hour, so you’ll work in the daytime too. Do you think you’re happy? Do you think something will change without your changing it? Don’t get comfortable. I taught in Germany twelve years, and every morning I prayed on my knees, ‘Don’t let me forget I want to get out.’”
The porter came by. “Monsieur, your train is boarding.”
The two walked out onto the platform. It was grey dawn. The wind had risen and the snow stung their faces. Beyond the city rose snow clouds, coming in fast, and the black shadows of the high Alps, tunneling the wind and cutting off the light of day. They were taller than anything should be. They filled half the sky, massive and fragmented, like vicious dreams.
I would like to live in a low country, Reisden thought.
The wind bit at their faces. Soon the passes would close for the winter. The Simplon Tunnel would not be finished this year; it would be hard to get to Paris, or Genoa, or anywhere. “My love to Jeanne,” Reisden said.
“Hers to you, Reisden.” Louis put his foot on the train step, turned around. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas, Louis.” Louis would worry over him, and there was nothing to be done about it.
Louis’ coat passed in a blur behind the windows of the railroad car; Louis’ face peered out at him. Being insane is like losing one sense, whatever it is that keeps other people sane. One cannot explain its loss. One can only feel unbalanced and wrong. Reisden sighed, out of an inaccuracy of feelings that was not quite amusement and was not quite despair.
Of course one could go to Paris. One was not a chemist if one didn’t. And, for all practical purposes, he was quite sane.
Louis rattled the window down. “You could come to visit at New Year’s—”
“I’ll send you the results from the end of this series at New Year’s. The pass will be closed.”
“Not quite yet; we could talk—” Louis suddenly leaned forward, half through the window, and squinted through the snow.
“Sacha, who’s that?”
On the platform across the tracks from theirs, a man was looking at them. An old man, about sixty—a short, shabby-looking man, wearing a badly cut suit and a comic small hat perched foreign-style on the back of his head. There was nothing unusual about him, nothing to draw the eye, but Reisden felt caught in that stare, the intensity of his look, as if the old man were seeing death, or a ghost, or God: something familiar, lovely, and terrible. It was a look like the moment before death, something to be avoided.
“He knows you,” Louis said.
“No. ” But the stranger raised his hand tentatively, half hailing Reisden and half not, as a man does when he is not sure whether he is approaching the right person. Reisden flinched, appalled. The man began to stumble forward, not looking where he was going, and Reisden wanted to be somewhere else, not seeing whatever was going to happen.
The platforms were a meter or so higher than the tracks set in a well between them. A woman caught the old man’s elbow at the edge of the platform. He said something to her and kneeled arthritically to sit on the brink, carefully let himself down into the well, and began picking his way across the iron tracks and the ties.
Down the track, like melodrama, a train was gliding into the station. The wheels gave a thin mournful shriek, the banshee sound of wheels on snow; the locomotive glided forward, crying warning, seeming not to slow at all. Somebody on the other platform screamed.
Reisden could have jumped down into the well and pulled the old man out of the way. There was time, but he did not move, he stood completely still, not so much as breathing, while two railway guards ran past him, took the old foreigner by the elbows, and pushed him up onto the near platform. And, staggering to his feet, the old man kept coming toward him.
“Richard, do you know me?”
I would have let him fall under the train, Reisden thought.
“I am Alexander Reisden,” he said violently. “I have never seen you in my life.” The worst was that so far as he knew it was true.
‘‘Sacha, qu’est-ce qu’il dit?” Louis called from the train.
“He says I am someone called Richard.” Reisden’s voice was abruptly shaking; he steadied it.
“Then Jay really killed him,” the old man said, and suddenly he paled until his lips blued and his eyes rolled up. His legs sagged and he slumped suddenly between the two guards. They laid him down on the platform, in the falling snow and the slush.
Louis butted his way through the people who were beginning to gather.
“You’ll miss your train.” Reisden leaned against one of the pillars of the platform, feeling odd and cold, and stared at the old man.
“Who is Richard?” Louis asked. Reisden shook his head. The guards were putting a blanket over the old man, but not over the face. “Not dead,” Louis said. The comic hat had fallen off; Reisden picked it up and read the stamping inside the crown. “Dr. Charles Adair. Boston.”
The name meant nothing. Reisden knelt in the snow and put his hand on the man’s throat, feeling for a pulse. It jumped weakly against his fingers. He stood up quickly, brushing his hand against his coat.
“Richard?” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t know at all.”