Georg Letham (12 page)

The brilliantly sunny corner of the dock where we had been taken in a long column early that morning was thronged. It was a provincial town: the gradually silting harbor provided its sole industry, an old but insignificant one, though it did have a fairly strong garrison. Our deportation was an exciting event, something like the arrival of a large circus. The attention was flattering to many of us.

As remote as the town was, a few tourists had strayed here nonetheless. What a place to bring the Kodaks! I had been here once too, and there may even have been some shots of the area in my photo album. And now! What a sight we must have been in our puce-colored penitential garments, bulky sacks and heavy bundles on backs and under arms, prisoners' caps askew on shaven heads, coats with military-style hip and shoulder straps, covered with dust, our life stories written on our faces! We were just as exciting to the good people as a stage play, and much cheaper.

A newspaper photographer, apparently on vacation, was setting up his equipment. Before he was ready, we had gone past. I looked back.
Next to the photographer stood an older man, very like him, perhaps his father or older brother. As lightly dressed as they were, sweat was running down their faces, they were practically bathed in it.

As we neared the harbor, the two newspapermen tried to squeeze past the guards and follow us. I was the star of a sensational trial who had already been dragged through all the papers while it was in progress, and no doubt they were itching to get pictures of this VIP as he was beginning his sentence.

For doggedness and zeal they were nothing compared to the convicts' loved ones. They were surging rapidly from the many small streets and alleyways, down stairways, out of hotels and bars.

A crippled man of about eighty was being pushed in a wheelchair by a husky, sunburned lad. Another, younger, man seemed to be a little drunk. A thin, angular woman in black held her whey-faced infant in one arm and waved with her free hand.

The date of our deportation had been kept from us until the final evening. (Inexplicably, the cell where I would be spending my last night had felt like home to me.) But the loved ones must have heard. What they did not know was when we would be arriving. They had not expected us until sometime toward noon. Now we were there, and they were within range.

But it was no use. The guards were like a wall. They stood with their legs wide apart, holding their cocked and loaded rifles horizontally in their massive, brownish hands so that each silvery, glinting bayonet point touched a shiny, smooth-worn, chestnut-colored rifle butt. Every third man had an egg grenade on a strap to the left of his belt buckle. Almost all of us had been in the Great War and knew what a live egg grenade tossed from two or three meters away would do. But did they
mean it? The fragments would have claimed as many victims among them, the guard soldiers, as among us. They feared us. We feared them. And, that understood, we were as docile as lambs.

The guards had the best intentions. They were going to protect us from love. All joking aside! Could it be anything but futile? What could parents do for their children, children for parents, brothers for brothers? What heavenly delights of love could girls and women bestow upon their heroes? Where would this belated excess of sentiment get anyone? It made no difference. Not anymore. Yes, go in peace! Good. Good. Possibly the “loving hearts” had forgiven and forgotten all our misdeeds. They thanked thanklessness with thanks and presented their cheeks to be struck as my poor wife had once done. But had the
crimes
been undone on that account? You who are entirely free of conscience, step forward! I am not among you.

True, most were unaware of their situation. Not all of them had the misfortune to have to live with their guilt forever, unable to stamp out every bit of human feeling in themselves. Most did not have analytical, ruminative natures like mine–not many were really even capable of thinking logically. Knowing that they could still scuttle about on the surface of the earth at all was very likely the most positive thing in their lives. And the “loving hearts” must have made this feeling, the only thing they had left, difficult to bear. Or was that true? Could they have brought consolation? Love in the form of consolation with no practical results of any magnitude–would that not make the punishment even worse?

My brother did not bring me consolation. He did not appeal to my questionable conscience. He did not make my punishment worse. He had now in all probability become a happy father once more. Very likely my father had given him financial assistance and asked in return that
he leave me to my fate and to myself. I have no way of knowing that this is what happened, but it would be as much like my father as like my brother.

My brother struggled bravely through life with his mediocre gifts and had written me off. My father had tried to deny my name, a dramatic gesture, but I had still been able to see in it a kind of curdled love, suffering with its object and consumed by it. In my brother's disappearance, I saw only the coldest reason, coldest because the most guarded. I was happy that he was not pestering me, while at the same time (always that contradiction in me) I felt a terrible hunger.

Nothing in the world could deter the “loving hearts.” And they kept coming. A late-arriving old woman, dripping with sweat under garments and flowing skirts that had been coffee-colored but were now caked with dust, raised her thin voice to a screech and, through the tremendous din, wailed out her mother's heart to a fat lout in our midst. I could see her in some peasants' collective, standing unsteadily in front of a tumbledown shack covered with rotting straw and shouting like this–stopping to cough asthmatically and then frantically resuming–to call a straying kid or a pullet feeding in a neighbor's yard.

She lifts the gift of mercy in her bony hands. A pair of new shoes, soles as thick as a finger and glinting with stout gold-colored hobnails around the edges. She swings them on their long russet leather shoelaces high above her head, on which she is wearing an ancient bonnet held on with large pins. Her heart is in the right place! No doubt the village shoemaker used special heavy-duty cowhide to make sure the prodigal son's poor feet would be protected up to the ankles from snakes
and worms as he felled trees in the jungle out on the deportation island. May God preserve you, afflicted old lady, and may he preserve your dear son!

A drunken middle-aged man is apparently unwilling to let go of a half-empty schnapps bottle. It sparkles eye-catchingly in the sun.

Some old provincial, broader than he is tall, is standing on tiptoe; over his hoary head (bearing a sturdy, low-crowned derby) he is waving a sheepskin-colored flannel vest with neat piping. He has probably sewn his nest egg into the lining. What is the son going to get from the father whose love has so lately awakened? Very likely more than the spoils of the crime for which the youth (there are very many among us who are quite young) has been sentenced to deportation and hard labor. And this miracle vest is supposed to keep the body warm, to guard against liver diseases, intestinal worms, perhaps even yellow fever. I can see it now–the parish priest giving it his solemn blessing after High Mass; sexton, father, and priest shedding tears, all three of them. What a scene it must have been. As a man of scientific training and a former physician, I know, I can state with certainty thanks to my bacteriological expertise: if, on the other side of the ocean, on the island or peninsula C., yellow fever really is raging as fiercely as has been reported for months in both the medical journals and the daily newspapers, then prayer will confer no protection as far as science currently knows, nor will tears, and least of all a garment sewn with the needle of love and the thread of mercy from the vesture of the downtrodden like the one the distressed father on the dock is now waving about, a flag of Christian love, in the air that ripples and quivers in the heat.

Yellow fever is on the rampage down there. It follows natural laws that are not yet precisely known. No one knows how it comes. No one
has any idea how it goes. The processions move slowly and the burials are done quickly. The hearses are busy day and night. And this sun of yellow fever shines on just and unjust alike. That is to say, it wreaks the same havoc and devastation among the penal colony guards who stand over the criminals as it does among the criminals themselves. Likewise at the Panama Canal among the white engineers and the dark-skinned laborers. No different in Brazil's great, thriving city Rio de Janeiro.

Nothing does any good against the epidemic. Nothing and no one.

Up on the rickety balcony of the small hotel,
Zum König von Engelland
–blue-washed, narrow-fronted, old (I recognize it: on my earlier trip I spent the night there with my wife, we had breakfast on that balcony, and I remember the enraptured and yet unmistakably lascivious expression on her face–only the eyes were expressive, the rest of her face was enameled like a porcelain doll's)–the newspaper photographer has stationed himself on this balcony along with his brother. He tirelessly holds a white umbrella over his head to protect him from the midday heat. He has put a telephoto lens on the front of his squat, boxy apparatus, a reflex camera. The lens is like a short, thick revolver cylinder (the little Bulldog revolvers have such cylinders) aimed at our group. Or, to be more precise, at me and my handsome blond companion, to whom I have been joined since this morning by an intimate bond (made of tough English steel). With a lock.

But now the sun is like the flames of hell. Twist and turn as one may to hide the skull between the shoulders, it cannot be done. Shade! Shade! Oh, for an hour in the dark prison yard on a winter's morning!

The brown prisoner's cap is my only protection. But, as dangerous as the sun is, I would rather hide from the photographer's lens. I spoke
of twisting and turning, but my companion would have to help me, and I would rather not talk to him. Is my brother going to have to see this photo in the Sunday supplement?

What are external need, physical pain, moral abasement? Nothing to one who is hardened. This is what my father bequeathed to me, even while he was still alive. The last and most important freedom left to a man is the freedom to be his own master.

I have talked about myself for so long, I have told so much of my story, and yet I have left out the most important details. I am the son of well-to-do, unpunished parents (or is it a punishment for the old man to have a son like me?), I was educated in good schools–but life was my best teacher, as my father was the first to prove to me. Once he made me spend the night with rats in a locked, pitch-dark room, to teach me not to be afraid of animals. But of people? Should one be, or not?

Was that his entire curriculum? That is not for me to ask. But his calculation will turn out to be right. For good or ill, his calculations have proven themselves in the past, always and everywhere. One who takes for granted the basest motives in one's fellow men and in oneself, as he did, has never gone wrong, not in our time–and it is in our time that one must live, must prosper or perish.

Faith in God, which moves mountains? Goodness, which softens what is hard and sweetens what is bitter? Generosity, the noble heart of the crude clay figure of humanity? Three big Gs. Good! In our language, goodness, generosity, faith in God are untranslatable foreign terms. And knowing this as I do, why do I act as though I had something to complain about? No. I don't. Not anymore. I accept my punishment without illusion.

I have now been convicted for the murder of my wife. Given a commuted
sentence of lifelong hard labor in the colony. Child of my father, husband of my wife, brother of my brother–off those jobs. Man without a job.

The sun is beating down even more strongly than I had expected. Its rays are like so many arrows entering the brain through the skin and the dome of the cranium. Scientists are still uncertain whether the harmful component of sunlight is the chemically active shortwave ultraviolet rays or the longwave heat radiation. Splitting headache, cramps, mania to the point of delirium, an agonizing death in a black sweat can result–and yet I am more afraid of the indiscreet lens of the intrusive photographer.

Whatever else I may be, I still know how to be ashamed. It would be terrible to see me that way, terrible for
him
to see me. Despite the blazing sun, I tear the cap off my shaven head and hold it in front of my face. Better to let the ferocious heat burn down on my unprotected cranium, better to breathe in the stifling odor of sweat and felt that assaults me sickeningly from the brownish, greasy lining of the battered but reconditioned cap. Yes, the government has to economize, and we're the place to start. The cute little cap has served many men before me and will do the same for many more after me if the yellow-fever epidemic takes me before my time. No. If that happens, this old museum piece will finally be decommissioned and incinerated, it will go the way of the suits, dresses, chests, furniture, beds, blankets, and linens worth many millions, all destroyed to stop the spread of the yellow fever. All for nothing. Beds and blankets incinerated. The epidemic goes on.

What difference does it make whether I die of yellow fever or malaria there or the relentless heat here? Three cheers for shame, the last remnant of a once virile character, long live honor, even if the hero dies!
Stop it, calm down. Why this mad outburst of ethical scruple? First live. In spite of everything, I still hold my life too dear. I submit. I give in. After this experiment (on myself), I phlegmatically cover my pate, the best and only one I have, and openly show my charming face. Go on, do it! Click, camera shutter, let my face be memorialized if fate wills it. I could be buck-naked, doing anything whatever, if that was what amused the European public and it was worth a twelve-by-eighteen dry plate. To me it's not amusing to risk my health out of a feeling of shame. It's the only health I have.