Georg Letham (37 page)

At the beginning he had blustered, raving, spluttering, shaking off spittle, had balled his fists and gouged furrows in the soft wood of the night table with his long, cracked nails. But now, quickly soothed, he had silently guided my hand.

He was a criminal, a vicious parasite upon human society, but by no means stupid and, even with a temperature of more than forty degrees, he was in control of himself.

And he was right. What he had was anything but Y.F. In all likelihood it was a severe tropical malaria that had made him ill, and, as would emerge, neither his first nor his last bout of it. What to do? Honestly tell him that? For was
he
honest, did he even understand what the word
meant? He was not without experience of tropical diseases, as I said, for anyone who has lived (if you can call it living) for long years under the hellish sky of this jungle region, in an area where epidemics take turns with each other and have worked out a peaceful coexistence, is familiar with all the plagues of this blessed Eden. What he had had me feel with my hand was, he believed, an enlarged spleen due to severe malaria, and so it was.

Again, what to do? Could he be discharged? Rightly or wrongly, he was now within the Y.F. cordon. If he were allowed to go, who could assure the custodians of municipal health that he was not bringing the unknown microorganisms with him down into the city, perhaps in the black grime under the cracked nails that had dug into the wood of the night table? If they were bacteria, might they not lurk there and elude all attempts at disinfection? One question after another.

And keep him here? At his peril? Who could assure
him
, who was after all a human being, whose morality or immorality could never be permitted to have any bearing on his suffering or the decisions made about it, that he would not contract Y.F. here in earnest? Could one say: Look here, you old extortionist, you trafficker in human beings (retired), trafficker in animals, bloodsucker, you filthy brute, you criminal who may have been punished but are by no means reformed, you engorged tick on the poor, sick, afflicted body of civil society, listen, we who work here in the hospital are just as exposed to the danger of Y.F. as you are. The following have sacrificed themselves. Brig. Gen. Carolus, a high-ranking military dignitary, irreproachable, a man of the spirit and of science, has readily put himself forward for the sake of the commonweal, with no thought to his wife and child and grandchild at home. Likewise Walter, a man far above the common standard, a
scholar and humanitarian, also a husband and the father of no fewer than five children, a man of the highest worth, both as a human being and as a scientist. Quite apart from the director of the hospital, the chaplain, and the altruistic, entirely selfless nurses, everyone from the old mother superior down to the washerwomen who have to clean the dirty sheets and pajamas of the Y.F. patients, for someone has to, and down to us, March and me, we have all taken upon ourselves the risk of Y.F. Why don't you follow our example and do the same!

What to do, I repeat. Compliance could have been expected from a person with any philanthropic cast of mind, in his silly muddleheadedness (if I may be blunt). Not this man. He was in the right, that was certain. He had been done an injustice. For he should not have been brought here by force (and in the meantime have had his belongings rifled through) without a thorough examination.

But there, it had happened. I shrugged my shoulders, freed myself from his flattery, bald assurances, and crass attempts to creep into my good graces, and left. I asked the hospital director. He could not be induced to make a decision (although there must often have been such cases here), but referred the matter to Carolus. Carolus would not have been Carolus if he had been able to bring himself to a clear, resolute decision. So on to Walter. Walter had been my youthful ideal, I credited him with all that I myself lacked in unbroken will to live, positive attitude, and affirmative belief, but today my expectations of his high-mindedness were bitterly dashed. He said nothing, put the tips of his index fingers together, looked at us with his serious, masculine gray eyes, and then, still without having said a single word, went back to his specimens. He had equipped this laboratory with everything that was needed, and exemplary order prevailed. If the matter had had anything
to do with
him
, he might quickly have come to a decision, for he was one of those devout, heroic men who may be called upon to do great things and actually do them provided their own interests are involved. Not if those of others are.

But he withdrew into himself, shrugged his shoulders; he took off his wide gold wedding ring abstractedly, putting it between the pages of a notebook bound in red leather that he kept in the breast pocket of his white coat. This unconscious, mechanical movement of Walter's suddenly reminded me that I still had pharmacist von F.'s box of mosquitoes (
Stegomyias
). I interrupted the discussion and asked Walter for permission to breed the mosquitoes. He had nothing to say either for or against it, and, with the help of March, who had been listening silently, I readied a wide-necked stoneware vessel, closed at the top with thick gauze, for the pretty naiads. Then I went back to my three patients.

What a pleasure it had been in the old days to play the god of fortune! This had now palled a great deal. I humbly returned to the old tavern owner. He looked at me with a cocky but worried expression in his feverishly glittering rat's eyes. He should have become truly hardened to all the horrors of life on earth during his eighteen years on C., but he was frightened of nothing so much as of contracting Y.F. in the hospital. Did he want to live forever? As far as the welfare of the lovely city of C. was concerned, whether he was permitted to take off or had to stay came to exactly the same thing. Since no one had the remotest idea how Y.F. was transmitted, the cordon around our building could be freely lifted, the guards could be sent home, and, for his part, this
good man here with his pleading eyes fixed on me could be restored to his noble profession, his dear family, his “loving hearts” down in the old part of the city.

Until such time as he was released, he would give the poor nurses and me no rest. He would be a constant disruption; his angry, vengeful clamor would be worse than the delirious clamor of the Y.F. patients who were actually seriously ill. So off with him! If for no other reason than to let poor little Monica in the next room have some peace and quiet and get a little sleep.

I had another feeling, one new to me. No longer did I ask myself whether I was even capable of love. My life had changed. I even used a different tone of voice with him. Was it true? Could it be? Was it thinkable, had it ever occurred in the annals of the human heart, that someone far past midlife was still capable of so radical a change? Or was I deceiving myself again? That someone past forty might feel and suffer from and delight in something he has never known in his eventful life?

Responding to him just as if he were a human being, I asked the innkeeper if he felt strong enough to be taken home. For if he was without a doubt free of Y.F., well, he did have severe tropical malaria. His tobacco-stained, widely spaced but strong teeth were chattering with fever–but he did not hesitate. He wanted to be off no matter what, if only to die down there. If he had to die, he didn't want to die of a disease that had been imposed upon him here, even inflicted upon him, for the sake of human society at large.

So arise then, gird your fat loins, and clear out!

What happiness, what rejoicing!

If only fate willed it that the charming little creature in the next
room leave this accursed building alive, alive, alive! This was all I asked of fate, which had so far mercifully protected me from the worst! But could I believe in a reasonable fate? I, who had had to recognize the unreasoning, impassive horror of the way of the world from my first lucid moment? Had my father taught me what life was like for nothing? Had he dwelled among rats for nothing? With all his intelligence and energy, was he still wretchedly inferior to them after all, to this aspect of nature?

Suddenly the lights went out. This had been happening occasionally since the director of the municipal power plant, Ericsson the Swede, departed this life. The convicts who operated the machinery at the edge of the forest under the supervision of junior officers and kept the plant's boilers running with freshly felled timber did not always understand the voltages and control panels, and the lights often flickered, sometimes going out for minutes at a time.

I hurried to the young girl, but even at the door I saw the twisted filament in the little green hospital table lamp blaze up again with golden light and, after a bit of wavering, go on calmly burning.

May it be a good omen! And I, who had never been superstitious, grasped at this insignificant portent, I rejoiced that the child seemed to be sleeping quietly, while the old mulatto continued diligently working on her knitting without lifting her eyes. Occasionally she fluttered her needlework to shoo away the flies circling around the light and the little one's head.

Meanwhile the tavern owner had already set about getting dressed. He fumbled into his clothes, swayed on his short, bearishly clumsy legs, and attempted his first steps. Suddenly, cursing under his breath, he seized the beefy Bordeaux red roll of neck that bulged out of his narrow,
grimy collar. An insect seemed to have stung him, he had grabbed for it, and the little beast, besotted by so much fine blood, had chosen to be squashed rather than give up its prize.

He now held the mortal remains of the mosquito between his sausagelike fingers, muttering something about his sweet blood, whose allure neither the girls nor the mosquitoes could resist. But what did they mean to him, either of them? He had plenty of money and could buy himself the best quality love (by his lights), and as for the mosquito bite, otherwise so dangerous, the mosquitoes had already given him a token of their esteem, he already had severe malaria, which was known always to be spread from person to person by mosquitoes.

This last mosquito bite would not hold him up. He, who had vanquished, had given the knockout punch to so many episodes of malaria with plenty of quinine and whiskey, was hoping that this time too he would be back on his sturdy feet after a few days–or else in the grave.

A third patient had been brought in along with him. I had had the least to do with him so far. Firstly because the diagnosis of Y.F. was unmistakable, and secondly because he seemed beyond human help–beyond medical help, that is.

It had struck me when I first arrived at the Y.F. hospital that there were very few physicians, though there were many nurses. The old hospital director, who was swamped with administrative work, was supported by only one young resident, and he was on vacation.

For it was characteristic of this disease that the work of the nursing staff was often much more important and meaningful than that of the physician. I had not wanted to believe that human ingenuity and science could be so utterly powerless against Y.F. And yet they were.
There were a substantial number of nuns, older ones and the candidates known as postulants. And that was good. For the physician had to content himself with giving general instructions. The clever helping hands of the nurses, the efforts of the hospital kitchen, the provision of ice and so forth–these were the main things. Science had nothing to offer; everything came from the ministrations of the compassionate heart.

And spiritual comfort! In his first hours here each patient received spiritual comfort in the form of the sacrament, whether his condition was critical nor not. The tavern owner ran into the chaplain at the door. But imagine the smirk on the face of the man, full of merriment and insolence despite his fever, as he escaped the nonplussed white-haired father's clutches.

Two old nuns took the innkeeper to the hospital office; the discharge formalities took some time. Meanwhile his family had been informed and he was to be taken away. But how? Still gripped by terror of Y.F., he refused to get back into the hospital ambulance (drawn by a donkey and a mule), and so there was nothing for it but to bring two burly fellows up from the harbor, released criminals, to literally carry the idiot to his domicile. The next day, after taking three heavy doses of quinine, he would be back behind the zinc bar of his smoke-filled tavern.

I still had to finish with, I mean take care of, that man whom I had given up for lost and whom Walter too, after a summary examination, regarded as hopeless. This was a man of only thirty-four, but already aged in personality and appearance, white-haired, emaciated, skin and bones, homeless, unemployed, the bare ruin of a man who had worked for a time on building the Panama Canal. He was saffron yellow from
the roots of his hair to his deformed toes and was now in a delirious state.

When he was asked about the primary location of his pain (for one wished to and was required to provide palliative care even if any true curative treatment appeared hopeless), he pointed now to his low brow, now to the lumbar region; his scrawny, hirsute legs twitched, as though he had calf cramps. The conjunctivae were yellow, shot through with distended scarlet venules. He too gave off the foul, carrion-like stench that is characteristic of the disease. Every slurred word hurt the poor wretch, any intake of food or liquid was associated with raging pain. And no wonder. For when one opened the mouth beneath the wild, stringy, matted gray beard and found that the tongue and oral mucosa were unspeakably raw, as though the top dermal layers had been removed with a grater, taken down to the bare meat, then one understood the extent of his suffering.