Georg Letham (34 page)

We all went into a clean room, formerly a convent cell, where the two top men already were, surrounded by splendid, spanking new equipment. That is: Brig. Gen. Carolus, the mastermind, the state dignitary, human knowledge personified. Then Walter, my old comrade, the idol of my youth. He recognized me. I bowed, and he nodded. He was very worn, not unmarked by time, but still the same good fellow as before, a man with all sorts of degrees who was much more knowledgeable and capable than he let on. The pharmacist and retired municipal medical officer Dr. Felizian von F., the man behind the veil, shook their hands warmly after much ceremonious bowing and flowery language. He had brought them some mosquito eggs in a matchbox as a small token of his esteem. They looked like coffee grounds. He smiled quietly and proudly, as though this was something of the greatest interest. Then he extended his hand to March and to my humble self. The door was closed, the chapel bells tolled outside, we looked at each other. The commission had been convened, and the great sphinx known as Y.F. lay waiting for us to penetrate her secrets. I was tired and yawned discreetly.

The hospital director was at Mass. (A weekday!) His aide, a young resident, was away on vacation. But pharmacist von F. was in his element. The son and nephew of physicians, though his children had left the trade and gone into business, he had been begging the authorities, learned societies, patent offices, and physicians to take his theory seriously for years. But anyone who looked this comical fanatic in the eye could hardly help laughing. His bearing solemn, not really stooped but stiff as a poker despite his sagging, crepitating knees, the little box of mosquito eggs in his gloved hand, he led the way along the twisting corridors to the autopsy room. But could this be right? Stop, friend! Instead of telling us all about how you carefully culled
Stegomyia
mosquito eggs from marshy pools (painfully bending your bad back), watch where you're going, don't take us into the waste room, where there must be reeking offal in a state of the rankest decay. But he turned his wise face to us, holding his veils together, bowed, every inch the Spanish grandee, and ushered us into the dissecting room.

A stench for which there is no name, so nauseating and intolerable that the demonic imagination of a Dante could not have conceived it, assaulted us from the small, electrically lighted, relatively cool underground room. March clutched me with a low cry. Even the leathery, phlegmatic Carolus trembled all over. Only Walter and I did not lose our composure.

Lying in its perfume was a blond corpse, quince yellow, poison yellow, wearing white gloves and a shirtfront, a once white but now very unsightly dress shirt, on its concave chest. In its gloved, graceful, long hands a silver crucifix.

In this place, at that moment, I was encountering Y.F. in nature for the first time in my life, and I silently paid it due reverence.

In fact my life changed fundamentally that day. For the better? In any event it was different. And that was a great deal for a man so dissociated from himself and from the world as to be convinced that he–twisted man of the spirit and man of doubt–and it–the world of futility, of misleading appearance, and of undeniable tedium–would never be reunited, and that his existence would therefore go on being the most superfluous thing in this superfluous world . . . But why these thoughts and memories? Back to the present, that was exciting enough.

I would be lying if I said my dignified bearing was entirely genuine. The smell, an outrageous, abominable stench utterly beyond description, something purely sensory yet beyond what the nervous system could make sense of, made me, believe it or not, cry. Shed tears, to be more precise. I wanted to vomit but did not allow myself to. I had to manage that much self-control. I needed to live up to the upbringing my father had given me, and I did. And, as strange as it may sound, at precisely that critical moment I became aware in every nerve fiber of the mysterious spell of scientific investigation. A thousand reasons for controlling myself and doing my best to will the nausea away, even if tears were shed.

It was as though I had an inkling that I would soon need all my strength of will–that I would need it to master fate lest I be mastered myself. I overcame my revulsion. I pressed March's hand, which was trembling with horror (he had perhaps never seen a dead body before the death of his beloved Louis). A feeling of sympathy for him awakened in my heart. Reluctantly, but nevertheless. There is something to be said for having a living person by one's side at a moment of crisis.

And another odd thing happened in that instant. I saw not only that golden yellow corpse in its ugly, stained dress shirt, not only the heavy
silver crucifix in its gloved hands, the gloves just pulled on, not buttoned, but also, through a strange association of ideas, a scene from my childhood in which my father and three or four rats (as big and as distinct as he was) figured, and then a scene from the happy period with my wife of which I have not been able to give a report as yet. And what finally appeared in my overly scattered (or concentrated) thoughts was the grand, blazing night sky I had seen on the
Mimosa
before our landing, which had put me in mind of the illusory, all-too-beautifully painted mask of nature.

At that moment the pharmacist, who had let down his portable mosquito netting to chest height, dropped his little box of mosquito eggs. I, gentleman that I am, stooped at the same time as he did, we bumped heads, I found the box first, and, as the old grandee was excusing himself profusely with a thousand baroque old formulas, I put the little box in the breast pocket of my prison livery.

But enough of these trivialities. The work began.

Not for nothing had Walter gone through the Institute's rigorous methodological training. He had spared no effort in preparing the ground for our bacteriological research; there was a good microscope, there were incubators. But when Carolus mentioned that he owned an especially powerful instrument equipped with all the latest innovations (dark-field illumination!), even two eyepieces, whereas the microscope that belonged to the epidemic hospital was not a recent model, it was agreed that he would go get his own while we did the first culturing experiments.
We
, I say, for the second time. I used this wondrous word the first time to express my fellow feeling for the deportees, who, by virtue of their common suffering, their common ejection from civil society, had constituted a we of sorts. But a we full of boredom, full of
spitefulness, rancor, cynicism, piggishness, an appetite for brutal fisticuffs, full of unnatural love and unnatural hate, futile snarling at the authorities, though they frankly deserved no better. Here, on this first morning on C., as initial preparations were being made for a systematic and exacting epidemiological study amid the pestilential stench of the Y.F. corpse, there was also a we, but a different one. Neither on that day nor during the days to come did I hear among
us
a contentious word. Nor an overbearing one. Everything happened naturally, at an excellent pace. We were frankly not always of one mind, perhaps not ever. But we worked together nonetheless, and did our utmost.

I personally did not believe, could not believe it would be possible to get a grip on the Y.F. pathogen using ordinary methods. Too many investigators, ones who had been too good, had failed, Pasteur among them. Nevertheless, from the first moment, as soon as March and I had disposed of our highly disagreeable clothing, I was a zealous participant in the bacteriological investigation. For the first time in years, I was absorbed, knew no fatigue, I had a truly pervasive feeling that there was a constructive reason for me to exist, and the others too. If only fate willed it that this go on! That was all I wanted! Was it too much to ask?

So, down to business. There were two primitive incubators in the adjoining laboratory. More than a hundred cultures were started in short order.

The departed had been the director of the city of C.'s small power plant. He had passed away during the first stage of the disease, on the fourth day following initial symptoms. He had arrived three weeks previously on the packet steamer with a group of various administrative officials and the like, had paid his first visits to important personages
such as the governor, and was just beginning to get the rather shabby plant into some sort of shape when he became ill with Y.F. and died. To go by his fair hair and skin, he must have been a Scandinavian, perhaps a Swede. His name, Olaf Ericsson, suggested the same.

I return to the first morning. This must be an orderly and methodical report.

“Let's write, please–and clearly!” Walter said to the somewhat astonished Carolus when he returned with the microscope, expecting God knows what respectful thanks from us. But let it be said to his credit that Carolus neither sulked nor assigned this menial task to me, the convict, but sat down at the little table, took his black fountain pen out of the breast pocket of his uniform, and wrote: first the precise autopsy findings on the Swede, which were typical, and then the sequence of bacterial cultures to be produced from the blood, the devastated liver, the affected gastric and intestinal walls, the inflamed renal cortex, and so on.

Would luck favor us in this Y.F. problem where so many had failed, including none other than the great Louis Pasteur himself? Miracles may happen, but not in bacteriology. Over the following days, weeks, and months, not a single bacterium grew. The flasks containing liquid culture medium kept in the incubator at a constant thirty-seven degrees centigrade would remain abacterial. For us as for all researchers who had worked on this disease.

All four of us, Walter, March, Carolus, and I, had been busy with this one case until midnight, and the black nurses whose job it was to look after us came repeatedly to call us to eat something. Eat! Nothing
could have been further from our minds. Let the reader try working for an hour in the deadly, pestilential stench characteristic of Y.F. and then sit down to eat. Even with nectar and ambrosia on Limoges china in front of you, that hellish perfume will have taken up residence in your taste buds, in your oral mucosa. The choice was either to get used to it, by denying it, or to get out and stay out. For me, as for the others, the first alternative was the one that prevailed in the long run. I ate, I bathed, I changed my clothes, I slept, I began my work early every day and did not finish until late in the evening. The waning of the disease was short-lived, by the way. It was all gong and no dinner, as the saying goes. But the strange fact remained that not one case of Y.F. had yet been reported among (for example) the recently arrived criminals. What was one to make of that? The only thing to be made of it was the theoretical result that the wise Carolus had already obtained from his books–but all in due time!

However mysterious the pathogen and however puzzling the pernicious disease's mode of transmission, the clinical picture was classically beautiful in almost every case. High fever out of a clear blue sky (clear blue sky? downpours in incredible swarms, separated by radiant tropical sunshine and humid, leaden heat) with extraordinarily rapid onset, jaundice. Seeming recovery after the third or fourth day and then all hell would break loose, vomiting, dreadful abdominal pain in the region of the liver. Throat, gastric, intestinal symptoms. Headache. Lumbar pain. Overwhelming feeling of illness, blazing red eyes with vividly inflamed conjunctivae–everything was there, shall I say unfortunately, or shall I say
thank goodness
in the interests of our research? The contagion appeared as implacably as it had for centuries, then subsided again, war and peace, no end in sight.

The authorities had to add their two cents, of course. The wire chattered, Walter and Carolus put their heads together over brusque telegrams. “Give special attention to matters related to the cause of yellow fever and its prevention.” If only! Eventually we had examined eighteen cases, from head to toe, inside and out, we had scrutinized patients at all stages. For purposes of control we used the famous double microscope in pairs–Carolus and Walter, March and I. We stared until our eyes were sore, and at the end of those terribly hard days knew no more than we had on the very first day, the day of the yellow Swede who had long since been buried in his white gloves and dress shirt.

Walter and Carolus would not have been the classically trained doctors they were if they had not done animal experiments. Monkeys from the nearby jungle, guinea pigs (easily obtained at home but here a resource difficult to come by), rats, mice, parrots and other exotic creatures too, even a world-weary nag housed in a shed in the old ruin of a convent, all of them received injections of blood from patients, of blood from cadavers, of extracts prepared from dirty laundry. The four of us seemed to be equal participants in these vivisection experiments.

But our roles had changed, in a way that was quite perplexing and will undoubtedly appear very curious to the reader of these lines. Carolus, who had formerly always shunned living flesh, who had always avoided vivisection experiments, was now fired up about them–and I, I, Georg Letham the younger, was now unable to overcome my inner resistance to them. I did not directly refuse, but I was adroit enough to pass these distressing tasks on to my colleagues and contented myself with the other part of the work, the culturing experiments, the staining methods, the preparation of histological organ sections, their fixing, hardening, enhancement, and precise sampling.

I am unable to say why. But I did not touch an animal. Not even rats,
although this species stood on the debit side of the ledger in my life and I continued to find these creatures a bane of creation, a misbegotten horror that had unfortunately been allowed to exist, one of nature's mistakes. I preferred to have old Carolus do the guinea pig injections when necessary, and the result was not long in coming. One of the guinea pigs perished, the sole casualty among the animals in this series of experiments. But was it the unknown pathogen of Y.F., or simply the uncleanliness and poor technique of the brigadier general, whom the good Lord had wrathfully made a bacteriologist? Was this the way it had to be? Did I
have
to have this bias against him? I will speak more of this.