Georg Letham (45 page)

We passed the time with these things. We had to wait for Walter. He was coming back. Of that we were all certain, without having said a word.

He needed us, we him.

Needless to say, I slept very little during this period. Our plans were on my mind constantly. If I dozed off now and then, I was awakened by ideas about the best design for our experiments. It was clear that the stakes were as high as they could be. A lot of things could go wrong. Everything might. But one thing was certain: nothing could be allowed to go wrong due to our own carelessness or absence of mind. Yet only someone who has carried through from start to finish an undertaking of this or a similar kind knows how difficult it is to guard against mistakes, how nearly hopeless it is to try to foresee all foreseeable problems while there is still time to prevent them.

So many ideas seem attractive at first! Here's the solution. Thus and such is the way to do it. This is how I'll set things up, there's no other way. A word to comrades and collaborators and my plan will seem plausible to them. But only a few minutes later doubts have appeared in my own mind. One has misgivings. One considers. Hesitates. Vacillates. Every thinking person is a bit of a Hamlet when it comes to action.

One is uncertain–and uncertainty is the only thing forbidden to a
man with a task he must carry out. And may one take counsel? Give someone else a word of advice? Of course! Share responsibility? Gladly! But only Walter would do for that. Herr Statistics could be counted on for nothing but passive industry. A hundred percent conscientiousness. Not even one percent initiative.

Was it possible that I thought far too highly of Walter? Not that I would have doubted his spirit of sacrifice, his heroism, whatever one wants to call it. We were in accord on that score. No one had doubts about anyone else. No one suspected anyone else of wanting to get a better deal, meaning a safe experiment. (There have been, there were, such experiments!) And what was better, when you came down to it? Was it worse to be the first subjects, or the last, who would have to witness the suffering and possible death of the earlier ones? The risk borne by a given individual depended on his physical condition, his resistance to the Y.F. virus, but who could calculate that in advance?

Details of much greater importance had to be worked out. The longer and more thoroughly I considered the business during those sleepless nights, examining it from every angle, the more complicated the edifice of our theory became. Here I was always alone. It was no easy matter, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I finally had a working plan that seemed practicable, with the advantage (or disadvantage, depending on one's point of view) that it started simple and moved toward complexity–that the problems still to be solved increased in number with each increase in certain knowledge. “There is a direct relationship between
Stegomyia
mosquitoes and the transmission of Y.F. from person to person”: this theory, which I will call Axiom I, was the beginning, the foundation, the first step.

But can we imperfect human beings accomplish anything of which
it can be said, “This is how it is. This is how it will remain. All questions have been answered. All mysteries revealed”–even if we have put our very lives into it?

We still had not lifted a finger.

We all needed a rest after the long series of experiments with negative results. When we (March and I) came into contact with deportees, as we occasionally did, and compared the state of our health with theirs, we had to say that one was as bad as the other. Whether one did horrible, grinding backwoods labor or soulless office work in the penal administration–or whether one spent one's time in the sultry laboratory areas and the underground autopsy room as we did, the result was much the same: sunken cheeks, severe weight loss, general physical deterioration, extreme irritability provoked by the most ridiculous things. Fortunately we needed only a word from Walter to soothe us. At the moment we were frankly very much in need of one.

We were tormented by thirst almost constantly and were never really hungry. We were tired when we woke up in the morning and exhausted, physically wretched, night after night. Often we were in a state of despair so great that sleep was impossible.

I had no clue how the other deportees were coping. What could I do? I could only be glad that I did not have to live and die with them.

Though it was not yet clear that in the end I would not be facing death among them after all. But the decision was not ours to make.

This could only be a matter of indifference to me. What mattered was that Walter return, that I and my mainstay, my assistant March, remain fit, and that Carolus, persevering in his very pedantry and as patient as an ox turning a mill wheel, fortify himself sufficiently that
he would be equal to the moral and physical demands of the coming time.

Walter had left on the
Mimosa
with his wife, to accompany her to a nearby island that was free of Y.F. In his absence Carolus had ordered that the laboratory areas be open for only one hour every day. That was enough to permit us to follow the biological and anatomical development of the
Stegomyia
mosquito, as we wished to do and were required to do.

We took specimens at various stages of larval development out of the jars, killed them with alcohol, cold, heat, steam, sulfur vapor, petroleum, or chloroform (testing all these methods systematically, in order to have guidelines for mosquito eradication in the future), dissected them, prepared slide after slide. We were not supposed to be spending more than a full hour a day on this preliminary work. We had set ourselves this rule, but we could not abide by it for even a single day.

Otherwise we spent all our time resting. We received permission to visit the nuns' little jewel box of a garden, which was kept locked, and we strolled in the shade of the trees there; in the late evening hours and very early in the morning, this was truly restorative. The hour was precisely specified so that we would have no contact with the nuns who might be there in their leisure time.

The exotic botanical luxuriance of this oasis is beyond description. But we were not in the mood for it. Certainly I was not, although formerly I had taken the greatest delight in the beauty and supreme power of nature. Just as little could one ask a passionate gambler, while the roulette ball was rolling, to appreciate the grandeur of
Hamlet
or the wisdom of the Gospel or even, to cite something closer to hand, the fragrance of the flower gardens of the Riviera. I had no eyes for it, and
when March effused like a poet, pointing out this flower, that star, these moths, or those clouds, I let him talk and listened to him with the same attention that I might have paid to the twittering of a little bird. In my mind I was composing a scientific description of the most important features of the
Stegomyia
mosquito. I arrived at the following picture.

As Carolus had determined from his books, the insect, whose scientific name is
Stegomyia calopus
or
Stegomyia fasciata
, belongs to a family of mosquitoes, the Culicidae. (They have families and clans, just as we do!) It is a graceful, lively insect of brown to blackish brown color punctuated by conspicuous white parts. Particularly characteristic are the vivid lyre-shaped markings on the thorax and the ribbonlike stripes on the long, thin, spidery, many-segmented legs. The first two segments next to the body are a uniform black, but the next segments have white stripes. This very important feature, both necessary and sufficient for the insect's identification, is clearest on the last of the three pairs of legs. And this remarkable last pair of legs vibrates continuously in the air while the mosquito is sitting. Thus the
Stegomyia
sits on only four of its six legs. The rings around the mosquito's abdomen have silvery bars and spots. The wings are folded one atop the other when the mosquito sits. They are somewhat shorter than the body. They iridesce in all the colors of the spectrum. The male is distinguished from the female by a kind of mustache. Allegedly (according to von F.) only the female animal bites, not the male. It can be somewhat over two millimeters long; counting the long legs, about five millimeters. When the insects pass from the pupa stage to the adult stage, they are immediately fertilized.

The geographic region inhabited by this family of mosquitoes lies principally between the tropics, but it extends farther. The mosquito is found in Japan and East Africa.

The studies that the good Carolus had undertaken on the
Mimosa
, with his little flags and pins, to establish the geographic extent of the epidemic proved not to be as entirely useless as I had assumed. But he was off the mark in one respect: the disease Y.F. did not appear wherever there were mosquitoes.

As against the converse: there were always mosquitoes where the disease appeared. These facts, of course, supported the theory of pharmacist von F., our Axiom I, but that in itself would never have sufficed even to achieve scientific probability.

Experiments were needed in order to get to the bottom of the matter. The initial difficulties were as follows. A fresh case of Y.F. had to be there when the insects hatched. That was the first thing. And Walter had to be back, for we could not carry out our plans without him.

He had intended to be back in four to eight days. He was not. The steamers operated according to demand. We had already calculated the most unfavorable schedule. And soon my nights were spent thinking about what would become of our hopes and plans without him.

No one could give me any help or advice. I was very surly toward March, who irritated me terribly with his silent tendernesses and ill-timed attempts to comfort me. Toward Carolus I behaved no differently than I had on the ship, which astonished him greatly. The chaplain kept me company, which, despite the boredom that the good father spread about him, I tolerated better than I had expected. Associating with him was like eating soup that has gotten cold. His best years were behind him. But that very fact made him more bearable than someone like March, who boiled and stewed as though over an open flame.

The chaplain had conceived a confidence in me. Evidently he wished to impart one to me. But if I had had the patience on the
Mimosa
to let the good March “sing his song,” I was not capable now of playing the father confessor to the father confessor. I did not say no straight out, but I put him off until quieter times. What a muddle! I, a murderer, a doubter, an atheist, and an anarchist, I was going to be the mainstay of a comparatively unsicklied-o'er man like March and the confessor of a morally elevated priest dedicatedly fulfilling his samaritanly offices in a Y.F. hospital! And was going to be sharing the intellectual stewardship of important experiments on human beings with a sentimentalist, a man who was high-minded but softhearted, with Walter. Walter finally returned, looking much more frail and miserable than when he had left. But you had to hand him one thing–and I realized that I had begun to hold him in awe because of it; I had not thought too highly of him. In four words: he was a man.

He kept his counsel. Only little signs betrayed the extent of his suffering and the reason for its persistence. The telephone had only to emit its first shrill rings and Walter would tremble like an aspen leaf. And yet his dear wife was many miles away on a “lonely island,” in the words of the song, an isle without a telephone connection. Only a telegraph line brought her to him.

He was wearing his wedding ring again. Presumably he had made up with his wife and gotten her to promise to believe him when, probably for the first time in his life, he lied. For she would never have let him go if she had suspected that he would return with the same resolve as when he had left our laboratory: not to budge from here until our protocol, which I systematically laid out for him within the first hour, had
been carried out from beginning to end, on human beings. On us. And on him. But there was no hint of anything personal from him; it was not until much later that I got a glimpse of his thoughts. How beautiful his marriage had been, how difficult. Walter was at the service of humanity. His wife and children were deprived of his all-embracing love–but he was giving his all!

He wanted to settle his financial affairs before the experiments began, that is, on the morning of his arrival. He sat down with Carolus at a laboratory table by the window that overlooked the harbor and the ship on which he had returned at daybreak. It was not the
Mimosa
, but some other tub. The
Mimosa
was en route to Europe to fetch another batch of deportees to these blissful shores.

Carolus showed Walter the slides of the anatomy of the mosquito, particularly some nicely stained tissue sections of the insect's biting apparatus, proboscis, and salivary glands, but Walter's mind was elsewhere. All things considered, how the lovely bug's mouth parts and biting apparatus were put together was somewhat beside the point at the moment. These were matters of secondary importance–we knew mosquitoes could bite! So down to business!

This time it was Carolus, animated by a lively intellectual curiosity, who urged haste, and Walter, the real scientist, who was still hesitating.

Scientific work is a joy the depth of which can be compared only to love (not to being loved!). I, Georg Letham, have known both in my life, and when I say this I am speaking the truth.

But why all the rigmarole about the delights of intellectual curiosity and its disappointments? I could more easily make this vivid with an illustration, by describing, say, what an isolated proboscis looks like under fifty times magnification, and the remarkable fluid that seeps
out of the insect's ruptured tissues instead of red blood. But no matter. Like the joy of love, the joy of research, whether primitive or brilliant, must be experienced to be understood.