Georg Letham (49 page)

Superstition or not, the die was cast and would soon determine what was to become of us.

We went out into the hospital's service yard, passing the stable of the mules and the decrepit nag that had survived the injection we had given it, as it had survived all the bitternesses of its hardworking life, the life of an animal proletarian. It pawed the ground in its stall and rubbed its muzzle on the walls. It even whinnied softly. Perhaps it had cocked its ears, had heard us, and had thought it was time to go to work.

We went into the garden. The flowerbeds at the gate were full of bouquet-like arrangements of bright, luxuriant blooms, gleaming in the radiant starlight. There was no moon. Insects flitted around the white blossoms, mostly moths but also mosquitoes, which we kept at bay with the cigars that we were smoking. Phosphorescent honey mushrooms on
the ground glowed with a greenish-silvery light. The air was filled with a balmy fragrance that overpowered the smell of the cigars. Vanilla vines hung down from high branches like lianas. Other climbing plants, gold-green, strewn with cornflower blue and saffron yellow flowers, swayed in the night breeze; their tender, succulent, moist, light-green runners brushed our uncovered heads. Just a while ago, I thought, March had stroked my feet, and now the leaves of fragrant lianas were touching my brow. I wondered (all these thoughts that I never had ordinarily–was this already the beginning of the disease?) whether this might be my last day experiencing the natural world, by the side of someone who cared for me, whether I ought to say good-bye. How could I count on another such night? Should I wind things up? Should I dictate a will? A very last will, since I had already made one half a year earlier while I was in prison. On that occasion I had made my brother my sole heir. Should I now make dear March my heir in case, as a reward for his fearlessness, for bravely enduring the inoculation and the risk of Y.F., he was pardoned and returned home? He was not a real criminal, the big child with the cigar in his little mouth. But I might receive a pardon too. Walter had spoken of it. What I had taken upon myself today was certainly greater than the official punishment! We kept circling the trees. There were not many of them, but they were very tall. The soft green lights of the sickrooms shone up above, the moaning of the ill came indistinctly down to us. The footsteps of the patrols could be heard, regular and unhurried, with a metallic ringing when the guards marched over one of the iron plates set into the floors of the corridors. We said nothing. I laid my arm on March's bare neck. I remembered the kiss that my dead darling had not given me. I shrugged my shoulders, I shook my head. March, faithful March, did not ask. Above us a jungle tree, a jacaranda,
stretched into the purple, fathomless night sky teeming with stars. Beneath it, on the ground, were fallen violet leaves, an entire carpet of them, but there were others still growing and giving off fragrance on the countless branches of the tree that whispered softly in the night breeze. Just above us was the glow of a celestial object I had often seen on my father's star chart, never dreaming that one day I would be deported to C. and see the real thing in the garden of a Y.F. hospital there. A tangle of silvery spheres, a kind of magical, soulful, cohesive Milky Way called the Magellanic Cloud, a distant galaxy with as much internal structure as a house, truly supernal, carefully wrought from soft light and serene radiance. March sighed. I had to smile: Georg Letham the younger, starstruck. Was it fever already? Was it still my optimism? It had to be good to be alive. I smiled. I smiled with such force, such delight, that my smile became a laugh. March, who always liked to laugh, joined in. Thus on the day of the inoculation we went home laughing. I was in a daze, but happier than I had been in all this time.

Despite the consolations of this sublimely beautiful night, I did not sleep in the hours following our stroll, perhaps because I was trying desperately to, so as to have all my strength for what was coming.

The next day, Tuesday, I took my temperature two or three times, but I found nothing remarkable either then or on any of the first four days.

Walter was uneasy too. The first series of experiments had been done, without successful outcome so far. Had it all come to nothing once again? I could not believe it. I spoke encouragingly to Walter. We could not give up. Five failed experiments or fifty, still we would have to try again.

“But will it be possible?” he asked me, turning his large, serious gray eyes away.

“Why not,” I responded. “It will have to be.”

He was silent for a long time, pacing unsteadily back and forth in the room, and oddly enough–whether it was the influence of alcohol (he smelled subtly but unmistakably of whiskey) or the mood of the moment–he began to melt, and told me of his cares and his worries about his “loving hearts,” with which I was already more familiar than he knew. Later he also spoke of his fears for my future. He very much wanted to do something. Whether he believed I had been sentenced
unjustly
, this he did not say.

“So far the penal administration hasn't asked for you or your March. Your father's arm is long. If he becomes minister, he'll be practically omnipotent, but he isn't yet, and it might take too long for an SOS to reach him if it came to that. Don't let too much time go by. Ask him! Get hold of him! They know of C. only by hearsay. Write to him. Better yet, give me a letter for him. Give it to me unsealed . . . but if you're the man I think you are, I won't read it. Why shouldn't an appeal for clemency have some chance of success? At least as good a chance as our experiments here. I'll add a few words of my own, if you want. That might do a lot. And if fate wills it that I do as my family wishes and go back to Europe in the foreseeable future, maybe I'll take your letter personally.”

“What are you thinking?” I asked in horror. “To Europe? You? Do as your family wishes? Now?! Do you think it's possible that we're mistaken? That everything we're trying to do here is futile?”

“What I
think
is possible or impossible won't change the facts,” he said resignedly. He looked tired, old, exhausted. He reminded me of
my father, and yet he was younger than I was. He said, focusing his thoughts with effort:

“Fourteen days ago we began our experiments with bites from infected mosquitoes. So far we're all fine and in the best of health, to the extent that this hellish climate allows.” He was going to say something else, but March had come up, and he broke off.

I would have liked to hear what else he had to say (evidently it concerned his ruined finances, and perhaps he was thinking about some communication with my father, a very rich man and minister-to-be), but suddenly I was unable to keep my eyes open, although it was only noon. I blamed this peculiar, very severe fatigue on the fact that in the last few nights I had hardly gotten a wink of sleep. But as I lay on my bed, fully dressed and with my shoes on, a practice that was always very much frowned upon, I still found no rest.

March soon came down, saw me there, and took my shoes off, or rather he tried to, for I was seized by an abnormal irritability and abruptly pushed him away. He cried out in a high, soft voice. This foolish little-girl screech enraged me. I sat up and glared at him angrily. Then a pathological desire to laugh came over me and I burst out laughing, as though I were vomiting, with open mouth, trembling hands, starting eyes. I was frightened now. Even as I was laughing, I ordered him to go get my thermometer upstairs.

I always checked my temperature after I had washed and had breakfast, normally upstairs in the laboratory. He quickly ran up and very soon brought me the thermometer and my chart. This too, the fact that he had brought my chart without being asked, angered me. I wanted to shout at him, but controlled myself and silently put the thermometer in my mouth. I usually took my temperature this way after thoroughly
cleansing the thermometer with alcohol. The dark room smelled of oil, vinegar, dust, and–rats. The thermometer's column of mercury was difficult to make out. March lit a pocket lighter. I flinched from the harsh light. He stroked my forehead with his big, cool, dry hand as gently as he could. He still hurt me! He burst out laughing. I could have struck him for that!

My temperature was normal.

On the morning of the fifth day, Friday, I already felt so wretched that I would have preferred not to get up. March, with all his doggish love, looked at me doubtfully. This I could not bear, and, even though my feet would hardly support me, I got up and tried to do what little there still was for me to do in the laboratory at that time.

I did not take my temperature, for fear that it would be elevated. At noon I sat down to lunch with March. The old nurse who normally served us brought us our food. Nice, light, good food! But I was unable to force myself, even though I had no wish to worry March before I really had to.

It was an oppressively hot, humid day, but filled from morning till night with almost constant storms and cloudbursts of unimaginable ferocity. Water was pouring through one of the high basement windows into the oil storeroom that we lived in, and I asked March to go up and try to see from the courtyard whether it was open or whether a pane might even be broken. While he was investigating, I got up and tossed my food into a half-empty tub of soft soap. I still remember the gagging disgust I felt as the food sank with an unappetizing squelching sound into the slimy, alkaline-smelling mass. When March returned
and laughingly reported that the hospital courtyard was knee-deep in water, I wiped my mouth with a napkin as though I had finished eating and then dragged myself upstairs to see for myself. March had exaggerated, the water was no more than ankle-deep. A cloudburst had just subsided. The sun was pouring out again between poisonous, glittering, lilac-colored clouds, and it felt good to put my hands into the runoff still streaming down from the eaves and splash some cool rainwater onto my forehead, behind which there was beginning to be a terrible uproar.

I did not go back to March. An unfamiliar restlessness had come over me, but it was combined with a painful lassitude. I thought about writing to my father. It had been so long. I did not have the peace of mind for it. It was impossible. I wanted to wait until everything was settled–meaning what? “Settled”?

The small of my back was hurting, as though someone had kicked me hard. I could hardly stand up. But I wanted to stay on my feet until the last moment. More tottering than really walking, holding on to the cool, rain-damp walls, I wandered among some of the buildings of the hospital complex. The guards leaned on their bayonets (well trained to busily kill time like so many civil servants–devoted to the appearance of order, not order itself) and watched me smirkingly, brownish stumps of cigarettes dangling from the corners of their mouths. One of them called out something I did not catch and imitated my shaky shuffle along the wall as a grotesque gag. He soon tired of this and stretched out for a nap next to his comrades and let me go on. If I had tried to leave the hospital, the guards would not have stopped me.

Did they realize how things were with me? I still did not realize it myself.

I went into some of the large empty sickrooms, still smelling of disinfectant.
Huge areas, the ceilings supported by freshly whitewashed wooden posts, rows of fifty beds side by side along each of the two long walls, the bare rectangular rooms empty, clean, unused, just as though sick people, people who had suffered and died–people who had gotten better–had never been there. The facilities dated from the great epidemic periods and, thanks to the able matron's sense of order, had been maintained so that every square inch could be occupied immediately if the Y.F. should suddenly flare up again.

I heard March's voice in the courtyard, as though from a distance. Georg! Georg! Something seemed to be wrong with my hearing. My head pounded, I saw red. The posts in the room seemed to be flecked with blood. I crawled onto one of the hard beds (thanks to the efforts of March and Carolus, my bed in the oil storeroom was as soft as a doll's–March had just a few old blankets on the floor!). I put my fingers in my ears, actually my thumbs, while my other fingers lay over my eyes to shield them from the weak light that came in through the closed lids. Outside another violent cloudburst had begun. Lightning flashed from one horizon to the other. Thunder rolled. The racket was tremendous.

The onslaught of the storm shook the building to its foundations. From the underground corridor containing what remained of our animal material came the shrilling and screeching of the monkeys, the howling and yipping of the dogs. An entire concert of creatures kept in darkness under lock and key, giving vent to their feelings about nature unbound.

I would have given anything to be able to sleep soundly. But it was impossible. The voice of the only too faithful March kept waking me from a restless slumber. I was careful not to move, for any movement made the terrible lumbar pain–termed
coup de barre
by specialists–more excruciating.
I felt best lying quietly on my back and even tried to hold my breath as much as possible.

March finally stopped calling. Evidently he had gone back to the laboratory. I had to put in an appearance there too if I did not want to arouse suspicion. Suspicion? Oh, no! Joy and triumph for the others!

Rarely in my life has walking cost me as much effort as those few steps to the laboratory.

My strength of will had not yet suffered significantly. I was able to pull myself together enough that neither Carolus nor Walter noticed my abnormal condition. Fortunately my three collaborators, Carolus, Walter, and March, were busy with a new staining method that had to be tested very carefully, though, of course, in and of itself it could not deliver any results worth talking about. The uselessness of their feverish efforts angered me. What could be the point of all the huddled consultation? If there's nothing to find, even the best staining method won't find it. But they were entirely absorbed in their work, like children with a dish of soapy water and a nice straw. When March, sitting in a dark corner, threw me a worried glance from time to time, I did my best to give him a cheery grin.