Georg Letham (46 page)

Even such a phlegmatic person as Carolus, grown old and sallow at his desk and among his boxes of paper slips, was fired up now that he saw before him a promising series of experiments. So why not Walter, the born experimenter? Because he was weighed down by financial worries. Worries about his family. The “loving hearts” needed money, and it was short.

His earnings were limited. His expenses were not. He looked ahead. With a heavy heart. He considered the experiment on himself, and though he was not a trained statistician or a pessimist, he was able to say that the chances of death were greater than the chances of life. He believed in our Axiom I. He hoped, finally, as does everyone who is still alive and breathing and enjoying the sunshine. But in his eyes it would have been a crime to leave his family without bread.

Carolus was very rich, perhaps a millionaire. Personally he was without wants. His children were more than generously provided for, his relatives were entitled to the most sanguine expectations. His financial situation was truly excellent, to go by his bank statements. For he had still not spent a penny on himself here, and his stocks had been going up. He was in the chips.

Walter was anything but. His father, the discharged war hero and retired lieutenant general, lived on his high officer's pension, but spent half again as much as he took in annually and from one year to the next got involved in riskier business deals, racing bets, short selling with unpaid shares and other obscure financial affairs, which the son did not find out about until they had fallen through, as unfortunately they
usually did. Warnings by letter or telegram were no use. The father did not want advice, and it came much too late, anyway.

And Walter, if he should leave this house of Y.F. on the hill overlooking the harbor of C. feet first instead of alive, was going to be entrusting his widow and five (or six!) young children to the care of this father? No. Relations with his wife's family were no better, in fact were more uncertain still, since to the lack of money and property was joined the family's dislike of Frau Walter, who had married her husband against their wishes. They had even considered it a crime that she had followed him to the tropics with her children. And was her family not correct, from their standpoint? And then the child on the way, too! Was that all? No! On top of everything else the cancellation of the insurance, or rather the subagent's proposal that the agreement with the company be renewed only under quite different, more unfavorable terms: Walter's premium would be twice as much from now on, though he had been hard-pressed to squeeze the old one out of his earnings as it was, and to make matters worse, there was a very complicated determination of a “damage event” or whatever the insurance term is. Should he sign the new policy? Or let everything stay as in the old one? In that case the current situation would not be covered.

This
was the reason Walter looked so miserable, and not the moist, unhealthy swamp climate and the wretched living conditions that he and his family, as he reported, had encountered on the delightful mountain island, allegedly so hygienic. It was money worries and nothing else.

He had come to an understanding with his wife that, if the climate did not agree with her and the children, she would go farther south, to Rio de Janeiro, to a famous hotel at an altitude guaranteed safe
from mosquitoes. And he would follow her there. Yes, but when? How? Time! Time! Time! Rio de Janeiro was seven days away.

Money, money, money. Even before he left, Walter had gone to Carolus and asked for a loan. Carolus had hesitated, but had then come across without resistance. In the meantime the first of the month had arrived, their payday. Both Walter and Carolus drew their salaries at the same time. Carolus not only happily pocketed the large-denomination banknotes in which he received his high salary, but he also took the small-denomination banknotes of Walter's monthly earnings without much question. He had the nerve to accept repayment of a debt that Walter, like a gentleman, had decently offered him despite his family's distress. Making the offer was hardly the same as wanting it to be accepted! Didn't Carolus have eyes? Actually, he did. He was not the lummox I had taken him for.

He was a man like any other, to use that banal truism. Carolus wanted to risk his
life
for science, humanity, the glory of the fatherland. Not his ducats.

Such was our frame of mind as we embarked on our first experiments on the afternoon after Walter's arrival.

The first experiment was to begin in the late afternoon. Conveniently, a fresh case in the first stage of the disease had just been admitted. Our failure to settle all the details in our first meeting with Walter after his time away came home to roost.

Should the glass jar of young mosquitoes be taken up to the sick-rooms? Or should the patients be secretly brought down to the laboratory?

How would we manage to get the mosquitoes to feed properly to begin with? And how would we induce them to bite a second time immediately thereafter (or later)?

Would it be best to do the transmission experiment immediately on No. 1 (March) and No. 2 (me), or should we immediately differentiate? That is, should we keep the experimental design unchanged until the first positive result was achieved, or modify it at once? For example, not have me bitten until the second or third day? If we had had at our disposal hecatombs of experimental subjects, a few hundred rabbits, perhaps, or thousands of mice or rats, we would not have had to work out the experiments ahead of time to the last detail. As it was, however, we couldn't be too careful, and every contingency had to be thoroughly pondered before we dared to do even one experiment.

It seems only natural that everyone should have been uneasy. But I wonder if the feeling that filled us should be characterized as
anxiety
in the ordinary sense. We all wanted to do the experiment, after all, and as far as I myself am concerned, I must say that my first bright moments since the demise of the beloved M. came when I was climbing the stairs to the sickroom, the jars of young mosquitoes in my arms, followed by my friend. Were these moments “bright” because I was not No. 1 and still had a grace period ahead of me? At that time I was still as though in a delirium. Later on it was different.

Walter was not the Walter I had known. Any little thing could throw him off balance.

And was it more than a little thing, was it anything but a trifle as compared with our great plans, when there was conflict with the resident? The young physician had returned, had dutifully assumed responsibility for the patients. He worked hard and wanted his rest at night, his
comfortable mattress. But, as I said, the brigadier general and Walter were now living in his official apartment, which he had equipped as cozily as any petty bourgeois with covers, pillows, photos on the wall, a twee lamp with a silk shade on the night table, a fan, and even mosquito netting around his bed and over the window. Now he had returned to find his nest occupied by other guests. He had been given makeshift accommodations elsewhere. The matron, a sanctimonious, combative, but very capable person, had done all she could to satisfy the young, spoiled, handsome, and not even entirely incapable physician, whose work in the epidemic hospital was not the easiest. But could anything really be done? Everyone had to be patient, and a few polite words from Walter might perhaps have done wonders. But Walter, when the resident had visited his former abode and tried to take some articles for himself, books, the fan, the lamp, writing materials, and so forth, had abruptly lit into him. Yet it was
he
who was the guest, the other the one who really lived there! It had come to heated words, and perhaps we had one more adversary now. And this young physician, who had direct charge of the care and treatment of the Y.F. patients, he of all people would have been very useful. But we had underestimated him. He later proved to be closemouthed and decent, helped us and bore no grudges.

How much we needed every true helping hand would become clear the moment we entered the sickroom. The patient was a half-grown youth with very pronounced symptoms. Jaundice was still absent, but the eyes had the familiar inflamed, watery appearance. He was stupefied, almost somnolent, and it was not even easy to undress him properly without help. There was, of course, no question of explaining our intention to
him
. Finally we were ready. His slender upper arm
was bared, the veins stood out. The skin showed not only the slight bluish-tinged redness that is common in Y.F. but also the somewhat rarer urticaria-like weals that very severe cases have immediately, in the first stage.

We drew the curtains over the windows. The room, which faced west, remained bright.

Carolus had drawn up a chart for No. 1 and used his lovely fountain pen to record the first subject's name, age, and so forth. The pen would not glide over the rough paper. So Carolus, in all his naïveté, licked the iridium nib and–now the pen worked. He could not be broken of such habits, any more than he could be gotten used to closing the door properly behind him, for example. Whether it was the W.C. door on the ship or the sickroom door here, he left it open. This had been without consequences on the ship, for it was no secret what he was doing there. But here?! Unfortunately Dr. P., the young resident, was just then passing by and, through the crack in the door, caught sight of the sizable group of us, this foreign congregation of doctors and assistants with jars and so forth, in
his
area, with
his
patient, intent on God knows what meddling. What was he supposed to think, knowing nothing of our plans?

But Dr. P. had the gentlemanly tact not to concern himself with these imponderables, with whatever it was he had witnessed against the wishes of the participants. He looked at us candidly, even bowed slightly to all of us, but then closed the door gently from the outside and left us undisturbed. In the future we would have in him an ally who at first only helped discreetly but was later keenly engaged in our cause. Without him and without the hospital's old matron, to whom I will devote some words later, we would not have overcome even the
first, the most trivial difficulties. It will perhaps be thought that we had achieved a great deal merely by getting onto the right track. But this right track was so far nothing but an unproven theory. We would soon see how difficult it was to prove it rigorously.

It was a curious state of affairs in which we were virtually champing at the bit to deliver ourselves over to a disease whose dreadfulness had just been demonstrated to us
ad oculos
.
My
heart at least was now in my throat with anxiety, even though it was not I but only March who was at the head of the line, and the world might end or a miracle happen before the next experiment, mine. From the standpoint of experimental research, it was nothing out of the ordinary.

Finally all the preparations were complete. We found a female mosquito (again, it is allegedly only the females, which are very clearly distinguished from the males, that bite or sting) and placed it initially in a glass test tube of the kind used for urinalysis and chemistry experiments in universities everywhere. The mosquito hunkered down on the smooth wall of the cotton-wool-stoppered test tube and moved its last pair of legs rhythmically up and down. We had made sure it had been given no sugarcane or sugar, etc., in two days, and presumably it was very hungry. Then I removed the wad of cotton wool and held the test tube with the open end down on the skin of the patient, who was breathing rapidly and shallowly amid the characteristic carrion-like miasma of his terrible disease and barely noticed us. Carolus held his hands fast while Walter helped me. March, No. 1 in our series of experiments, stood by with his arm bared and smiled at me, as though to buck me up.

But I had no moral scruples. The technical difficulties absorbed me
totally. The insect now glided down to the patient's skin, as quickly as though it were falling; it maintained its equilibrium with even more rapid jiggling motions of its last pair of legs. It held its white-banded abdomen somewhat higher and lowered its tiny head. The little antennae, like branches with feathers, pressed onto the skin, the needle-shaped proboscis drilled into the tissue. The
Stegomyia
pierced it effortlessly, and while the only apparently unconscious patient jerked, so that we had to hold him down, the
Stegomyia fasciata
fed.

Stuffed to the gills. Excellent. It was five thirty on . . ., 192 . . ., a weekday: Tuesday, I believe. The room was the one in which my Portuguese girl had stayed, by the way.

The difficulties, soon to mount unexpectedly, began. Should we allow the mosquito to drink the blood of the youth, who was becoming impatient, until it was full to bursting, or should we immediately have a second, third, fourth, xth insect feed on him? I was in favor of not waiting long, Walter opposed. Perhaps he had an inkling of what was coming. He wanted to leave it at one mosquito and spare the sick lad, now restless and resisting clumsily, a second bite. Apparently Walter had never done experiments on human beings, or else the commotion the last time around had daunted him unduly. So I took the mosquito off after about three seconds, using a little scrap of paper to remove it gently from the skin, swollen with weal-like eruptions, of the young Y.F. patient. This piece of paper came from the English pocket edition of
Hamlet
, which I had happened to find among my possessions that morning and had brought along. They were the words at the beginning
of Act II . . . But why quote the thing, enough, it did the job, and the insect had to desist perforce. Its abdomen was now a rounded form through which the blood shone with a rubylike glow.