Georg Letham (43 page)

Now too the tall, gangling, rawboned Carolus went to Walter, gently took him by the shoulder, and leaned against it so he could see the field of view. But Walter could not bear being touched, or he was too apathetic to work. He stood up and left the microscope with the double eyepiece to Carolus, though Carolus had no clue about how to use it. But Carolus was more tactful than I would have given that “lummox” credit for. He did not ask and also restrained March from asking any questions of the poor husband and father, who did not compose himself until late in the evening, after he had played a match of puff-puff with the Reverend Amen and had lost in style. For his thoughts were elsewhere.

That poor martyr was going to be roasted over a slow flame. His time spent in the accursed telephone booth was probably as harrowing as
March's in the notorious steam rooms on the
Mimosa
where he had been locked to stew in his own juices as his reward for his true love. For now there was another phone call, this one of laconic brevity. We heard only the doctor's startled exclamation, and thereupon his wife's two words: I know. The good Walter, thunderstruck, had the receiver in his left hand; he had opened the door to the booth with the other and was gazing at us all. I know? What
did
the wife know? We looked away. We were ashamed for her. There could be only
one
secret that a wife whispers so confidently into her husband's ear–we had guessed it long ago. A
sweet
secret.

Now it was all as plain as day. An ultimatum. Either abandon the experiments and the research immediately, depart the epidemic-swept island with its calamitous climate, particularly so for expectant mothers of the white race, and return to temperate zones–or the consequences were unforeseeable. Unforeseeable? Actually not. One could foresee exactly what happened.

To leave his theater of activity with only the entirely negative results to date, which would not have taken up even as much space in the learned journals of general pathology as the results of the remarkable expedition of Georg Letham the elder to the North Pole had taken up in the learned journals of descriptive geography–to exit and leave the field of research to the second commission–that was one alternative. And the other? Was there another? Was there anything left untried?

Walter wandered restlessly about among the microscopes, the two incubators, the bottles and dishes of experimental material. He threw into disorder the rows of books that the excellent Carolus had now learned to keep in splendid order (only a tiny ear curette made of cream yellow horn protruded from an encyclopedic handbook of bacteriology).
He, Walter, opened the lab book, cast his eyes upon it; in his loose, untidy, flapping, broad-sleeved coat, he roamed about like a soul-sick priest among the cages of living animal material (only too merry, and in unbroken health), and it was very affecting when one evening he let a dog, one that had been barking at him particularly piteously that morning, out of the kennel and took it for a walk in the hospital garden, still waving his hands and carrying on a silent dialogue with his wife, or with fate. The dog barked, leaped, and rejoiced.

Pharmacist von F. had not been around for a long time. I can still see the dismayed grimace on Walter's face when the telephone jangled once again. But it was a false alarm. Pharmacist von F. was promising to come with an important piece of news, that evening if possible, otherwise the next morning.

It would be the next morning, and that was perhaps for the best. For that evening Walter was completely worn out (there must have been another of those infernal telephone calls, I don't know), he was deaf to reason and logic. He probably would have decided to break off the investigation and return to his family and to a bourgeois, orderly life, leaving us. After all, his wife had reproached him especially for choosing, of his own free will, or rather out of callousness, the society of “avowed murderers and bandits” over the “devoted warmth” of his “loving hearts.” What won't people do for love?

The irrepressible doctor and pharmacist von F. (for whom the quarantine rules seemed not to exist) appeared this time without his famous mosquito veils. But he could have dressed as Salome and not gotten a rise out of us. Even Carolus turned away in boredom, Walter listened
with half an ear, and March only had eyes and ears for me. I alone, on my face the indulgent smile with which one submits to the harangue of a monomaniac, had time for the ancient gentleman's story. His report had chiefly to do with himself. Like many very old people, he assumed that everyone else was vastly interested in his private affairs. Walter was listening for the telephone, which today was noticeably quiet, Carolus was digging the remnants of some fruit from between his incisors with a toothpick whittled from a match and regarding the stuff he brought out with tender attention (which, God knows, would have been better applied elsewhere). The atmosphere was thus not promising for the old pharmacist. But there he sat, reciting his pensum.

If one had been able to muster a certain sympathy, it might even have been worth the quarter of an hour. For he was making his will before us, just as if we had been four witnesses. The last will and testament of a humanitarian medicine man grown old and yellow in the tropics who was, regrettably, a mediocrity, and had long since been overtaken by the modern era. He had seen much; his father and grandfather, long-dead doctors who had left various writings (as he told us), had seen still more.

Each son in this family of doctors had stood by his old and infirm father in his final illness, had prepared the author of his days for the coming end–only pharmacist von F., whose children had other worries, had had to make a self-diagnosis (chronic renal atrophy and arteriosclerosis). But he was fortunately free of sentimentality. His composure in the face of his demise, which he expected in about three or four months (he was not mistaken), won me over. I must admit that I (green-eyed as I am) envied the children of this comical old tropicalized humanitarian–they were lucky to have such a father. They did not understand
him. And did we? I took his mosquito eggs, which this time, to be on the safe side, he had packed on cotton in a pillbox edged in gold foil, and weighed the featherlight thing in my hand.

If only we had been able to understand each other! There was a clinical tradition in his family. His observations, at least those concerning the life history of different kinds of mosquitoes, had all the precision to be expected of a modern natural scientist. He carefully distinguished his mosquitoes, the Y.F. mosquitoes,
Stegomyia fasciata
, from the
Anopheles
mosquitoes, the well-known carriers of malaria. He knew how these sat, how those jiggled their hind legs, and so forth. The two subspecies also deposited their eggs in very different places. Such keenness, such minuteness of observation, brought to bear out of what must have been pure idealism, on top of the old man's professional activity, so difficult to carry on here in the tropics!

Touching in his senile naïveté, he inquired about the fate of the first mosquito eggs. At that time I knew only about the one insect that had escaped in Monica's room and had bitten her. Possibly it was the same one that had later attacked the tavern owner and drunk his sweet blood. If he had then fallen ill with Y.F., the pharmacist's absurd theory would have been proven. Yes, “if”! It would have been a giant step forward. But was not. Out of curiosity I asked him about it. He didn't know a thing. We even pursued the matter, thorough as we were, and telephoned down to the city. The tavern owner was healthy and fit, apart from some scratches and superficial wounds that he had received from his cronies in a scuffle three days before. So it was a dead end. The old fool's bleak face, with the stamp of death already upon it, was something to see.

All that was left of his first lot of mosquitoes was the mortal remains floating in an oily liquid in the gauze-covered glass vessel. Particles of
the powdered sugar that had served as food for them were still sticking to the walls–and at the bottom was the residue of the chloroform that fun-loving old Carolus had used to send them to the better Kingdom Come of God's dear creatures.

I must say that even the slightest reminder of the Portuguese girl (the bite from the mosquito and her sunny, mischievous, courageous nature) still upset me every time. I had not recovered from this love. I still felt it. And thus it was difficult for me to resist the pleading eyes of the old man, who wanted his fondest wish fulfilled before he died. “At least have the insects feed on the patients, and then put them under the microscope. Could it do any harm?” he asked. The memory of the Portuguese girl had put me in a tender frame of mind.

But my response was not what the expression on my face had led him to expect. “Why haven't you let yourself be bitten by the
Stegomyia
?”

“Haven't I tried often enough? Unfortunately I didn't think of it until I was already too old. What can I do, they don't like my blood, and I think such experiments are against our religion, too . . .”

As he uttered the word “experiments,” a strange association of ideas flashed through my mind. I had always told myself that he did not understand us. But then again we did not understand him, either. For us, what he said was nothing but unproven and unprovable twaddle, and he in turn, that old practitioner of direct observation, had no clue about our statistical findings on the transmission of the disease, those three peculiarities that old Carolus had worked out, the sparklike leaps . . . “Sparklike”? What does that mean? Get rid of it! And “leaps”? “Flights”? Can this metaphorical language capture the essence of a natural phenomenon? I am a man of reliable memory, and the ironic phrase I had used, “On the wings of an angel,” came back to me. What was that again? Yes, no, it was not on the wings of an angel, but very likely on
the wings of a mosquito that the disease might, come on now, “might”?–
must
be transmitted from a sufferer to a healthy person, and if the tavern owner had
not
been infected a thousand times by the bite of a mosquito, how many things might not explain a negative? Had the tavern owner had Y.F. before? Might he be immune? I asked pharmacist von F. But I did not wait for his answer. I did not want to know. I wanted to shed some light on the problem by doing experiments.

Stop dissecting! Start doing experiments! I pulled him by the sleeve of his thin, blue silk jacket, beneath which I felt the coarse weave of his net undershirt, to the worktable where Carolus and Walter were once more diligently but fruitlessly examining the same field of view together, each at one of the lenses, and said quietly to my comrades: What Herr von F. suggests might tally with our observations after all. The illness might be transmitted by something that flies through the air. Across a courtyard, perhaps even from the east coast of one continent to the west coast of another that has the same warm and humid tropical climate, twenty-five to thirty degrees centigrade, neither the north, nor the desert, nor Europe. That addresses point one.

And if nurses and washerwomen and so forth remain free of the disease despite the unappetizing things they handle–and that was your point two, Herr Brigadier General–that proves that the clothes and the excretions of the ill don't contain the invisible virus. Or if they do, then in an inactive form.

And if, point three, the cases come in waves, that might mean that the invisible virus matures in the body of a mosquito, as is known in other epidemic diseases, specifically malaria and hookworm.

This was very simple. Hence difficult to believe. The gentlemen would have laughed in someone else's face. Not in mine.

I have already related, have I not, how beneficent Mother Nature
gave me a healthy dose of logicality to make up for goodness, cheerfulness, and beauty, and for a good, warm heart with human feelings. But it would have done me no good had I not also received the gift of the ability to awaken trust. Among ill and healthy alike. As now.

The gentlemen, who had just been joined by the chaplain with his deck of cards for a very ill-timed session of games and chitchat, looked at me with surprise and said nothing. I continued: “What I have said is just theory. It needs to be proven.”

“What? Proven? How?” asked the foolish Carolus.

“What a question. With experiments, of course!”

“But haven't we already done enough experiments? Monkeys, rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs, rats, what else is there?”

“What else? People!”

“People?!”

Little March, who evidently took this remark for a joke, gave a silly laugh. I found this very unpleasant. The other gentlemen were on the point of going off to consider the matter by themselves. If that happened, I would have to drop my plan. This was impossible for me. I was, I felt at that moment with certainty (but not too much shock), just as fanatical, as blinkered, as credulous as old von F. was. I had gotten hold of something. I was not about to let it go of it: this clue was worth making an effort. It was mine, it was
my private war
, as they say, or, expressed less grandly, my job to do.

I found their weak spots. First Carolus. “Animals in nature are certainly immune to Y.F. But people aren't. So sooner or later, any commission, no matter what its nationality, is going to have to do human
experiments. As you know, Herr Brigadier General, the American mission is disembarking even now. It's government-supported, has unlimited funds. We have to expect that its members, imbued with true patriotism, are ready (not to put too fine a point on it) for anything!”