Georg Letham (38 page)

And if only he had at least been able to suffer and make an end in peace! But the heaving in his belly was unremitting, the abdominal musculature, pressed against the backbone, underwent paroxysm after paroxysm, and the stomach, tortured by constant vomiting, retained nothing, not even the ice chips that the hospital aide offered him. The vomitus was initially watery, later tinged with thin threads of blood, and finally brownish like coffee substitute, dark and granular.

He was allowed not an instant of peace. The chaplain came in and, wishing to administer the last rites, spoke of the gravity of his religious mission.

The canal worker was not listening. His exhausted features, altered beyond recognition by the disease, showed only complete cachexia, if anything at all.

With the greatest effort he raised himself from his bed, lifted himself up, his joints crepitating, as though he might have an easier time of it in a sitting position. He even tried to stand, clutching the night table with both hands, a yellow skeleton, bloody mouth beneath bloody beard, staring out of red eyes, retaining of the nobility of the human spirit only the ability to suffer. A grim, no longer manlike thing.

He was tormented by intense thirst, and it was poignant to see him vacillate between the desire to drink and the fear that he would have to vomit everything again amid the most wretched paroxysms.

The chaplain, filled with divine patience, a man well acquainted with sickness (also a man with a peculiar past, by the way), held out a crucifix for him to kiss. The poor devil put his bare lips on the silvery metal and cooled his raw tongue, stripped of the top dermal layers, on that emblem of human suffering.

I could no longer bear this sight. Honestly, did I want to? My presence was unfortunately superfluous for the time being. I repaired to my bedroom, expecting to be called during the night for the poor fellow's last moments.

The little Portuguese girl's room was quiet. Only the soft rattling of rosary beads could be heard. I did not go in.

Carolus and Walter, who were still absorbed in their investigation, working with undiminished interest though entirely without results, also retired late that night.

The two of them occupied the room of the vacationing resident, while March and I were housed in a basement room that was also used for the storage of wood, coal, vinegar, oil, and the like.

March was touchingly tender toward me. Why speak of the many kindnesses he did me just when I really needed them, the silent services
of his hand and heart! I would have to enumerate every detail of our daily life in order to convey how he took care of me. I had never known anything like it. And I will say frankly: I could never have done anything like it!

And nevertheless I did not love him. I was fond of him, I thought highly of him, I needed him. I took his hand in mine and stroked it–but my gaze and my thoughts were elsewhere, they went right past him. Before I could doze off, I got up to check on my patient again.

She was not asleep. The black governess nodded in her corner, dozing in a sitting position; her sweat-bathed, copper-colored face shone among the many fanciful lace pillows and doilies. I woke her and barked at her impatiently. If she was going to take it upon herself to look after her precious one, then she couldn't sleep. She murmured something in her lingo and began rattling her silver rosary beads with her hard fingers. I took them away from her. Didn't she understand anything? From the adjoining room I heard the muffled clamoring and restlessness of the laborer and the ministrations of the nurse and the urgings of the old chaplain, who had not yet retired.

My patient's appearance was fortunately somewhat better than it had been late that afternoon. It was now getting on toward eleven at night. The fever had fallen, the pulse was full and regular, the pain bearable. She smiled at me, as though she had awakened cured. On her lovely brow–no, I do not wish to speak of her beauty. There is no way to do justice to the essence of beauty, just as it is impossible to put into words the essence of music. What is more, even if I could convey this moving beauty here, I still would not be able to put into words what went on
within me
.

The most profound despair: my bleak situation, that of one deported
for life, my entire frightful past, the impossibility that my feeling could ever be understood by this child in her purity, never mind requited, I a relic of more than forty, she a spoiled, charming mama's girl of little more than fourteen. Enough said. End of story.

But everything would still have been wonderful had a severe disease state not existed. Or was it severe? Was she not lying there like a little nun in a casket, the ice bag made of white rubberized material spread across her lovely, velvety, cream-colored brow? Was it sleep, was it fainting, was it the marvelous calm of the beginning of convalescence? Against all reason, my life and hers seemed to join together and I felt a sense of happiness.

I was happy at that one instant when, for the second time that evening, the lights went out. I had leaned over the child to change the ice bag. I was still standing there, my head bent over hers, when I felt her outstretched arms reach around my bare neck in the darkness–I had stopped getting fully dressed in the evening because of the heat and was wearing only my white coat over my undershirt–the sleeves of her chiffon pajamas slid back to the elbows with a swishing sound, and her face, the somewhat pouty lips half-parted, slowly but distinctly came up toward mine. But long before her lips could touch my forehead or my throat, her head sank back onto the pillows, the thick, silky, loose hair unfurling, and at that same instant the lights flashed back on, brassy and steady as ever after a few current fluctuations.

We had not said a word to each other. To this day I do not know whether she did not kiss me because she was afraid of giving me her disease or because her strength failed her. For only too soon I would see to my horror that I had underestimated the seriousness of her condition.

Her improvement was only apparent. Was mine real? I still did not know.

I now did everything that lay within my power. This was, of course, not much. Then, with the heavy heart that can be produced by great joy just as much as by great, inconceivable suffering, I went back to March.

I did not weep. I did not say what had happened. I only took March's hand from the coarse pillowcases as he was attempting to smooth them, and I said to him: “Stand by me, March. I'll stand by you.”

They woke me that same night, and I had to go, making my way through silent corridors and stairways–not to the canal worker, but to her, who had called for help and asked for me.

Will I be believed when I say that I set out slowly and with hesitation? I had a bad feeling about it. But I should have hurried. I did not.

To get to the sickroom on the third floor, I had to go through the basement corridor containing the animal material. It was getting on toward morning, the electric light was burning, most of the animals lay sleeping quietly. The monkeys, in adjoining cages, had lain down in such a way that their heads on both sides rested on the bars between the cages, and some had even put their long fingernails through, into the next cell. The dogs too (some very handsome ones among them), which were housed individually, slept pressed against adjacent walls. The smaller animals were kept in common cages. They were identified by small rectangular metal tags tacked through the cartilage of their ears. The guinea pigs, now only two of them left in a very spacious cage, had been awakened, they nibbled on what remained of their food,
glanced curiously at me with their glistening little eyes, then silently went back to their slumber. They rarely made their whistling noises in captivity. A dog howled with a hollow, infernal sound, but this was not an expression of suffering; the animal was in a deep sleep and was vocalizing as dogs do when they dream. A rhesus monkey craned its neck, turning its flat, naked, brown nose and conspicuous wide black nostrils toward me. It lifted its left leg and briskly scratched off a bug. As it did so it brought its round, clear, amber eyes up to look at me, its strange gaze so remarkably like a human being's. Some time earlier we had given it a painful injection (which had not had any consequences). But it seemed to have forgotten this, or it did not recognize me as one of its tormentors. (I had only been an onlooker–but does that distinction matter to an animal?) As the long bare toes with their horny oval nails felt for and crushed another bothersome insect, the monkey's circular eyes, standing out brightly against its dark brown face, closed sleepily. It twisted and turned its neck with supple movements so that its head was again by the wall of the cage. And with a languorous sigh indistinguishable from the sigh of a weary schoolchild, it prepared to go back to sleep. It breathed slowly and deeply, bringing the hot, heavy air of the basement corridor in through its nostrils. Thus I left the animals all sleeping peacefully. Only a couple of rats, restless as they are known to be, were nervously active in their wire cage and suddenly began to run about in circles behind me in their prison, scratching and biting furiously at the wire.

The windows of the sickroom corridor looked out over the old part of the city far below, the fringe of palms and plantain trees at the edge of the restlessly heaving sea, the buildings with their flat red roofs, separated from one another by more allées of trees. All in the pearly,
opalescent gloaming that is usual in the tropics just before sunrise. For the transition from night to day is very rapid here. Farther away from the city, army regiments could be seen on the beach, around them the security forces' barracks covered with glinting sheet metal. And now, when the light from the east was suddenly reddening more and more, one could see in the lifting mist, within the territory at the edge of the vast woodlands, the huge colonies, the hutments of the camps in which hundreds and thousands of convicts dwelled more or less peaceably under the shadow of loaded weapons. Off the coast a craggy island of black rock gleamed faintly.

It had not been long from the time I left March's side until I reached the patients' corridor, yet I had seen all this, the repose of the animals and that of the archipelago and the slate blue ocean gently surging to the shore, the buildings on the harbor, the chain of islands in the misty distance–did I have some suspicion that I needed to prepare myself for a terrible sight?

Monica's appearance this morning was no more dreadful than that of the canal worker with Y.F. had been the evening before. But what can I say? It was more ghastly than death.

The girl's condition had worsened dramatically. She had Y.F.'s well-known brief intermezzo behind her: in almost all cases the fever abates for what is unfortunately only a short time, the pain eases deceptively, lucidity returns as though in mockery, and the temperature falls. The heavens are thanked. For the patient believes he is saved.

That was the moment when she reached out her arms to me. She had thought she was cured, was with her mother in her heart, with her boarding-school friends, with her dolls, I don't know. Who can interpret an impulsive gesture? Was she thinking of her foolish, doting mother,
from whose arms she had had to be wrested by force a few days before? Or did she want to cling to me, trusting in my help? For the sudden turn for the better had come when I appeared.

Only too sudden, too brief. The course of nature was only too diabolical. The fever was invincibly on the rise once more, over forty now. The suffering began again.

When I saw the column of mercury above the red line indicating forty degrees, I knew that all was lost–short of a miracle.

But to believe in miracles now, when I had never been able to? I had, needless to say, known the typical course of Y.F., had learned and had not forgotten how one dies of it. And yet I did not want to believe that now. I took refuge in childlike faith instead of science, neither the first nor the last to do so. But the first vomiting bringing up only water had already begun. The child was astonished. She had just taken peppermint tablets for ozostomia, and now her gorge rose with a clear fluid smelling strongly of peppermint. She was unwilling to vomit, she fought it, she was ashamed, well-bred as she was, in front of her nanny and–in front of me. She had hardly a minute of rest. The old ayah had been using a silk handkerchief to dry the now markedly pale lips, which stood out against the canary yellow face, but had not yet finished when the nausea began again. No! No! No! She wanted to take a deep breath and recover from an agonizing exhaustion that must have been new to her experience. But it didn't let her. Before long thin filaments of blood appeared in the vomitus, soon mixed with black granules, and in a very short time I saw that she was already vomiting almost exclusively blood.

She was unable to complain, could only whimper–without forming real words. And who could form words with a bleeding, swollen tongue?

I provided the assistance, the treatment, that the head physician of the hospital had suggested to me the day before. But this treatment was palliative only, it could not really help. I would have been delighted to be able to ease her symptoms at least. But even this was too much to hope for.

Any heart, any heart that was not yet completely dehumanized, would have ached to see even a low fiend like Suleiman suffer as this blooming, enchanting, innocent, childlike creature was doing now. I gritted my teeth. I answered the fearful, imploring, desperate expression of the doomed creature with a hideously grinning grimace that I meant to be a consoling smile.