Georg Letham (33 page)

His face is unrecognizable. It has been leveled, so to speak. Where the bold hooked nose once was, the pride of its owner with his manly beauty, now there are only lumps of flesh and the two nostrils. A warm, sickening stream of blood, air, and discharge pushes out of the nostrils, jagged bones have broken through, white ruins of teeth guard the entrance to what was once the oral cavity, and there is a steady trickle of something flowing down through the wild beard. As strange as it may sound, this is tears! The nasolacrimal duct is torn. There is no way to stop this out-of-character stream of tears.

The rain pelts down with the force of a hailstorm. With his dirty fists, the injured man tries fruitlessly to lift his eyelids, swollen and bluish with bruises. Is he blind? he rasps out. He is fully conscious.

He was trampled in a brawl in Cargo Hold 3 during the night. He
may have lost his sight, or he may be lucky. His good friends were among those who stomped on his chest. Three ribs are broken on top of everything else, and he is coughing up frothy blood.

It is so dark now that the light has to be turned on in the sick bay. The man lies on the improvised operating table. He is in the hands of fate. Not much can be done. The bone splinters can be deftly removed with forceps, the wound can be dusted with iodoform. It is terrible to see the sausagelike fingers, covered with more bruises, clench during the painful procedure: the criminal who has been savaged by his fellows suddenly raises his hand in fury and shakes it at the physician. The physician notices now that the left thumb is broken too, dangling from the plump, blue-tattooed hand like a branch snapped by the wind and held on by a bit of inner bark.

As the wound is being carefully cleaned and the finger is being splinted, the rainy gloom outside the porthole suddenly lightens. In the distance the heavy, bluishly livid murk lifts like a curtain, and the vast sapphire blue surface of the sea can be seen again.

The overcast lifts, the sun shines.

The planking on deck steams with evaporation. An ox, the last of its tribe, lifts its glossy, heavy head, lows loudly, and clanks its rain-wet chains, the sheep shake the moisture out of their dense dirty-gray wool and bleat, and–March appears, to tend the animals as he does every day. He is sweaty and pale, and the sunshine only makes him look even more miserable and more grief-stricken in his lovesickness. Oh, those wistful glances!

A commission consisting of the brigadier general, the commander of the guards, and the captain conducts a hearing with the injured Sultan Suleiman. But he is uncooperative. He shakes his wild head, spits a
bone fragment out of his lacerated mouth now and then or shakes one inelegantly out of his ruined nasal structure, curses savagely, but he will not name names. Will not give his comrades away. He only wheezes, lisping with his swollen tongue, “Bathtards, bathtards! You wait till we meet again! You wait!” That sweet baby, the
s
is too hard for him to pronounce. Even this brute of a man has become an innocent child again. We all have.

March, who crept in after the officers abandoned the futile hearing, looks him over nervously. His tread is gingerly in his heavy, hobnailed shoes. The Sultan cannot see him. Whether he will ever see again at all is the question. The giant may be fallen, but he still terrifies March. Are we to believe that it was March (along with the others, but their true ringleader at bottom) who trampled on this no-longer-human face tonight when there was no other way to fend off the bestial assaults of a pathological criminal, a satyriasis case?

Dozens of small storms have appeared on the horizon and passed over within a short period. The air has become still more oppressive. After each cloudburst the heat seems to be worse.

The authorities are nervous now. With good reason? I don't know. The steam pipes running to the cargo holds are going to be tested. When the alarm is sounded, the convicts rush on deck. Scalding hot steam is diverted to the cargo holds below. The convicts are made to hear the hissing, it is impressed on their innocent young minds what awaits them if they revolt, if they kill where there can be no killing. Only fate can kill with impunity. The state: war. Nature: yellow fever, typhus, cancer, pulmonary tuberculosis, and other fine inventions of God. Hunger and the struggle for existence. All will continue as long as the world exists.

But the test of the steam jets has had one good effect. The steam, at a hundred degrees centigrade, has roasted a good two dozen plump rats. When, in the midst of another storm, the all-clear signal is sounded, the convicts toss them into the sea, holding them cautiously by the tails so that the cooked skin will not come off the bodies. The convicts laugh and go back to Cargo Hold 3 while 1 and 2 receive the same lesson.

Four days later we arrive safe and sound. You can come back now, March! Now I can come back to you. On solid ground I'm safe, and we'll be the best of friends as long as you stay sensible.

I will not describe the life of the deportees in the archipelago. Much as I would like to, others have already described it better and more movingly than I could.

Disembarking from the ship was less exciting than boarding it had been. Suleiman was still alive; he was half blind and unable to walk. He was carried down the gangplank on a stretcher, cursing a blue streak. March was pale with anxiety and clung closely to me.

When we arrived, the epidemic of yellow fever (which, for the sake of brevity, I will henceforth refer to simply as Y.F.) had evidently passed a peak. Among the convicts–who lived in large camps far from the city of C., as well as on the other small islands of the archipelago–it had not yet wreaked its havoc. The civilian residents of the city had been affected to a much greater degree. But a rainy period had recently begun–that is, one of the many rainy periods that took the form of titanic downpours of short duration, followed by torrid, insalubrious heat and malignantly luminous gloom–and the Y.F. had abated.

At the last census, five years earlier, the city had had a population
of about twelve thousand. Thirty years before that it had been forty thousand. Its fortunes were like those of a person of whom one says at age twenty: A genius! At thirty: A man to watch! And at forty he is simply a name.

Late in the evening we were led through the squalid streets, which were filled with almost blackish rain pouring down in torrents. It was evil-smelling, dark, dank, and almost deserted everywhere.

Conditions in the camp where I spent the first night, the faithful March at my side, were not much different from those on the ship. The convicts were awakened at four in the morning and they began their work at five, felling and trimming trees in the mangrove forest and removing the trunks, clearing land and putting down log courses for a road across the great woodlands (laid out many years before, it had never progressed very far), and so on and so forth.

But first a few men were taken out of the work gangs, either for office work in the very large administrative corps or, as in my case, for “special service” in a field hospital. Weak or strong was irrelevant. It was accident or caprice. March was also among those selected (because he had been an official?). No protest was possible. We were not asked about our wishes, talents, or capacities.

The most interesting diseases were rampant in the camps–skin conditions of all kinds, malaria in the most beautiful forms, tuberculosis, and the insidious condition of intestinal worms, whose victims wasted away, becoming true skeletons–but, by a happy twist of fate, not a single case of Y.F. had been found recently in any of the numerous convict camps.

March did not leave my side. He knew that Carolus had designated me for very hazardous work as a morgue attendant in the epidemic
hospital that stood on a rise in the center of the city. It was a large-scale catchment hospital primarily for Y.F., dating from the city's better days and run by nuns.

No doubt that good child March had no idea what this meant. Otherwise his handsome face would not have been shining with delight on the way. Or else he trusted in his star.

And why would he have left me? He had given himself. And whether I accepted him or not–he stayed. They would have had to shoot him, or cut his hand off, the hand that clutched my coat. But the administration did not consider such barbaric measures. Despite his childlike nature, March may have been able to look out for his own interests properly. He had not banked on his past as an official. God knows how he had obtained more money. But he had some. Those minor officials who kept the rolls also kept a sharp eye for the main chance, and were no doubt every bit as impressed by his generosity as they were by his devout wish never to leave me.

Thus we were brought arm in arm to the old convent, which, with its yellow patients, was at least as well guarded up on its hill as the camp with its convicts was down below. For everyone was terrified of the epidemic and helpless against it.

Now, during the day, the city almost looked bleaker than it had the night before. Dereliction and crumbling walls everywhere, many churches, few shops or restaurants, here and there a warehouse or shed by the shore, crates, barrels, and bags lying outside unguarded in the alternating rain and steamy heat. Hungry dogs, ravenlike vultures looking for food. Muck and refuse all around, wretched paving, ragged people hurrying along, heads down. Magnificent plantations, avenues of palms and breadfruit trees and so forth. But we ran into four funerals
on the short tramp that had taken no longer than forty-five minutes. What devastation the epidemic must have caused among these people in the worse times that had just passed! Suddenly the rain stopped and the sun burned down. The sea gleamed, the dogs scratched, the vultures soared, and the vegetation between the cobblestones gave off a scent that seemed ambrosial, or feral.

We passed a burnt-out area, deserted and still smoldering. I learned that the people there had tried to protect themselves from the epidemic by setting fire to some disease-ridden buildings after buying them from the owner for a high price in hard cash.

But the epidemic took no notice of this extravagant prophylaxis, it slipped nimbly around corners, a house here, a house there, three cases here, five there. And the entire city would have had to be burned down, from the harbor to the farthermost houses already sinking into the slopping, bile green swamp, from the barracks to the administration buildings, from the bank to the theological college, everything would have had to go up in flames like Sodom and Gomorrah in order to conquer the Y.F. The city? What am I saying? The entire coastline, as far as the eye could see, and much, much farther beyond that, to the Pearl Archipelago, the region of the Panama Canal to the north, and an equally vast distance to the south! And even that wouldn't have been enough!

As we panted up the hill, we saw hordes of ragged, hollow-eyed, deathly pale, half-starved men emerging from dark little side streets steaming after the downpour. These were freed convicts who had hidden from the epidemic in some corner of the jungle, living on raw fruit and orangutans that they had hunted, and who, now that the epidemic had apparently abated, were seeking the way to the imaginary fleshpots and shot glasses of the city. They envied the two of us as we climbed
up the narrow little zigzag road to the convent hospital side by side, preceded and followed by guards, or so it seemed as they twisted their scrawny, naked vultures' necks and watched us. One of them even began to run after us to beg, but the others held him back from this foolishness. Certainly they assumed that since we were wards of the state, that loving, faithful provider, we were being given the necessities of life. They did not know that something scarcely enviable was in store for us.

The bell at the hospital gate rang. Two old black women and a stern-faced white nurse in stiff blue cotton, all with large silver crosses on their breasts, came out tiredly with a stretcher. They were very surprised to find healthy people seeking admission. The guards on duty as a quarantine cordon could hardly get over their astonishment either, laughing so uproariously that the whitewashed, pungent-smelling passages and corridors of the old convent rang.

But it was not us they were laughing at. An old man had come with us and joined us on our walk to the examination rooms, a man wearing a costume more original than anything at a carnival. About seventy, tall but stooped, narrow-shouldered, olive-skinned, with a leathery face and dark, deep-set eyes of unbroken fire of which one never had a direct view. For this vigorous and characterful old face was hidden by a faded yellowish green nun's veil. A veil? What am I saying? Two of them, one behind the other, stiffened in front with semicircular wicker strips, so that no unchaste glance could offend this maidenly granddad. Ah, but it was not indiscreet glances that this elderly he-nun was afraid of, but, strange to say, mosquitoes! And perhaps not even that. It was morning, and mosquitoes never bite in broad daylight. So it was something else: a show.

For this striking aristocratic gentleman was none other than the
pharmacist and municipal medical officer von F., the renowned originator of the mosquito theory of Y.F. He was just now paying his first visit to our Herr Brigadier General, the head of the commission, and the army medical officer Walter, its scientific director. The news that Walter had arrived here astonished me greatly. This was the greatest coincidence, the most unfathomable of the many unfathomable things that had befallen me in my lifetime. And yet it was logical. Meeting this man here! But what role should I assume? Old comrade? Fallen man? Eternal sinner? Scientist with a thirst for knowledge? I was apprehensive. But everything seemed to happen naturally.