Georg Letham (50 page)

Despite the awful feeling of bottomless misery, I was still in control of myself. Thus the stormy afternoon passed. I counted the minutes. At last the time came when, as was usual at the close of our work, the chaplain appeared and led Walter and Carolus away for their dinner together, which was generally followed by a game of chess (with three players–Walter and the chaplain against Carolus, who played a very strong game) or a game of puff-puff, a few glasses of whiskey, two or three phonograph records, and a little argument. This was their mental life outside of their work. Anyone familiar with conditions in tropical
lands will marvel that Carolus and Walter found any mental energy at all for anything other than card games and whiskey.

I usually had my evening meal alone in my room. March had to take care of the animals. I no longer had the strength to toss my food away.

I threw myself down on my doll's bed in the oil-and-vinegar storeroom, pulled the blanket over my face, and pretended to be asleep. March came in whistling, but he fell silent and quietly approached my bed.

I heard him take the thermometer out of its metal sheath (this always made a faint clicking sound).

I was supposed to take my temperature twice a day, like all the other experimental subjects. But he did not want to wake me.

Now and then I had a chill, a shudder that usually began on my left cheek and ran across my forehead, neck, and spine like a sharp, wintry gust of wind and then faded in my leaden lumbar region. My teeth wanted to chatter. But I did not want them to. I clenched them and was as quiet as a mouse. March was fooled and went to bed. Soon I heard him breathing deeply. He snored a little. He was asleep.

To be able to believe in God! To love someone from the bottom of your heart and be able to wish him all the luck in the world! And to be able to sleep deeply! Enviable man, that March!

For a few moments I dozed off too, but I was soon awakened by the violent chattering of my teeth.

I sat up. I had icy chills all over. Waves of heat and cold, very much alike, passed over me in rapid succession. I put my hand through my
shirt and felt my chest, my heart. It was thumping briskly, at a rate of 110 to 115 beats per minute in my professional estimation. The lumbago had worsened, if that was possible. My ears buzzed. I had a piercing pain behind my forehead. Without a doubt I was severely ill. Chills, elevated pulse, certainly elevated temperature too, lumbago, a sensation of terrible pressure in my head; anything missing? My throat hurt too, my tongue burned as though I had swallowed paprika.

The building was deathly still. March had stopped snoring. He lay quietly on his pile of rags on the floor. What should I do? Wake him up? How could he help me? What I needed was to try to gain some clarity.

What I had was not necessarily Y.F. True, all the symptoms were there. But the onset of paludism (malaria) is quite similar. I had gone for a walk with March in the hospital garden five days earlier. There had been mosquitoes there too, we had not been able to drive all of them off with cigar smoke. If I was lucky and it was only malaria, a couple of quinine powders would take care of it. And our Axiom I? I will confess frankly that, suffering as greatly as I now was, I was thinking only about saving my life. One would have to have gone through it to understand how a man feels on the brink of such an illness.

But was it not your own free will, Georg Letham? You did nobly put yourself at the disposal of science, did you not? You did
hope
that the experiment would be successful? Was it not a matter of the greatest importance?! The lives of countless people depended on it–the decontamination, the cleaning up of entire tracts of land.

Keep calm! Stay rational! Those are the thoughts of a person who is well. A sick, wretched, agonized fellow does not think.

I might have been able to think all sorts of great thoughts about the
betterment of mankind and the blessing of moral self-sacrifice, but my teeth were chattering. I clenched them, groaning with pain. Making a great effort to climb out of bed quietly so as not to awaken my March, I put one leg over the edge despite the lumbar pain. The calf muscle seized up in an abominably painful cramp, just so I wouldn't get too cocky. My bed creaked.

It was a wonder that March slept so well, so heavily. Even now he didn't wake up! Or was it that he didn't
want
to wake up, because he understood that I didn't want him to, for I wanted no witnesses, I had to be alone? I gathered the last of my strength. If one needs it, one has it.

I stood up, went one step at a time, holding on to the cool walls, through the corridor to the laboratory, turned on the light, and, before I did anything else, sat down, croaking with anguish, in the comfortable armchair that Carolus, keen on luxury in any situation, had had placed in front of the microscope. I closed my eyes. I could not bear the light. Yet I needed light to do the first test.

The first test to see whether I had Y.F.? On the contrary, to see whether I did
not
have Y.F. When I took the microscope out of its wooden case, it was not my intention to search for the unknown Y.F. microorganism, but rather for the long-known pathogen of ordinary tropical malaria.

Such is man. He sets himself a goal. He builds himself an altar. When it comes to praying, he prays. But as soon as it costs blood, he wants to be on his way. Why lie? What I write here would not have the least value for me, never mind for other people, if I consciously lied. Everyone does enough unconscious lying as it is.

With a blood lancet I pricked myself valiantly in the pad of my left
little finger. I dipped the edge of a paper-thin glass slide into the glistening ruby red drop. With trembling hands that knocked together like a jumping jack's, I smeared the drop of blood on a second, thicker slide. I had to dry it over a flame, so I passed it through a Bunsen burner and–burned my hand, so clumsy had I become. I saw the staining solutions neatly lined up on a shelf. But how to get them down? Stand up
again
? Impossible. Should I call March? Even more impossible. One wants to be undisturbed at such a moment. I desperately twisted my face into a grin. What better way to deal with any situation than with humor? I shook my head at my lethargy and gave myself an order, as though I were another person. Fortunately the brigadier general in his untidiness had left a small dish of the new staining compound on a corner of a little table that was easily reached from my armchair.

Could this be anything but a sign from fate? I had become superstitious. For the second time I was taking some silly little thing as an omen. And for the second time fate betrayed me. The first time with my beloved, the second time with myself.

At last I had stained the slide, rinsed it in water and alcohol, dried it, put it under the microscope. In a case of malaria, an investigator with some experience will see the familiar plasmodia characteristic of paludism on any well-stained slide of a blood smear. So I was eager to try. The micrometer screw, which raises and lowers the microscope's objective by a hundredth of a millimeter and thus establishes the precise distance from the slide, would not obey my twitching fingers. I pressed down with a bit too much force, and the slide of my blood cracked. What else could it do? It was not equal to the clumsy movements of a man trembling for his poor life.

I would be lucky if the expensive primary lens had not been permanently
damaged too. Now I sat there, covered with sweat, half paralyzed, and still did not know what was going on.

At this point a man turns to his fellow and calls him brother, bosom friend, and physician!

I began calling to March. But my voice was no longer strong enough. It did not carry. Time went by. I heard the bells ringing in the hospital's tower and continued to lie prostrate in the armchair, teeth chattering, before me the broken slide and the wrecked microscope.

But I held out. I took a second slide and in stages, making one movement at a time and then resting and recovering thoroughly, I repeated the blood drawing, the smearing in a thin even layer, the fixing in the flame of the Bunsen burner, the staining, the rinsing and drying. After about an hour I was ready to put it under the microscope. I was ready. “I,” I say, for I was still alone, I did not, could not, count on anyone but myself. This time I worked the micrometer screw with the utmost care. Luckily the primary lens was not damaged. The second slide was well stained, the round red corpuscles could be seen as little carmine disks, the white corpuscles with contrast staining were cornflower blue, and the nuclei of the leukocytes were splendidly granular, lobular, an ethereal sapphire green.

A wonderful slide–but no trace of malaria plasmodia. Everything “normal.” For Y.F. causes no change in blood microscopy.

Gasping, teeth chattering, I sat before the instrument. It was only with the greatest effort that I kept my eyes open, eyes whose conjunctivae were already inflamed, as befits Y.F. Good heavens, man, son of your father, what more do you want? Yet I still did not want to believe! Is it so hard to believe when what must be believed is something grim and awful? Is it so difficult to look existence in the eye, to see its true
face? Is it so difficult to read the newspaper instead of the Gospel? Will the conjunctivae always become inflamed? My father! Will one always become photophobic? Will one, painful throat or not, always call for one's bosom friend so loudly that he will
have
to hear no matter how soundly he is sleeping? And will one then, still trembling, take him by the shoulder and pull his head down to the eyepiece of the microscope: “March, look at this! Do you see anything?” Of course he saw something. He wasn't blind. But how would he, an untrained little official, a new boy in the bacteriology classroom–a boy who was grown up and already a little gray-haired, in fact, and who had gone to jail because of his excessive love for his cadet–how would he recognize malaria plasmodia? He had not been looking for “plasmodia” from childhood like mushrooms in the woods. He saw them or not, depending on what he thought I wanted to hear. Abruptly I collapsed. A blessed moment of unconsciousness. But it could only have lasted a second. When I came to my senses, I saw March running about the laboratory half-crazed and heard him shouting for doctors! But there were simply none there, though downstairs in the basement corridor the sleeping animals awoke and began to add their voices to the caterwauling of the loving and beloved March. And over the old hospital on the tree-covered hill above the city of C., a terrible storm erupted, booming and roaring with thunder and lightning.

I still remember March's dumbfounded, almost deranged air. His features were so contorted that his face, usually quite pleasant if somewhat vacant, was hardly recognizable. The “fierce” expression that I had seen on it just once before was there again.

He was shaking. I was shaking. He with agitation. I with a temperature of thirty-eight and a half degrees centigrade and the associated chills. My mind was no clearer than his. That goes without saying. And yet somewhere within me there was still a spark of unclouded consciousness, observing from its sheltered spot the ruckus on every side. With the predominant part of my self, the G. L. that was running a temperature of thirty-eight and a half, I felt the fear of the disease, I had in me the dread that such a fearsome condition must arouse. But with the part of G. L. that had remained lucid, I was astonished that he, March, and Walter, who had just come in, completely soaked from the rain, were so appalled by my condition. Why
appalled
? Was our experiment not to be regarded as a
success
, as far as could be judged? I was forced to the realization that none of them, least of all Carolus (the last to appear, in his crushed, baggy old pajamas, a nightcap on his bald head, worn-out slippers on his feet, and his horn-rimmed glasses on his bony nose), had believed that our experiments would succeed.

I was more dead than alive, someone suffering greatly, one who now (falsely) believed that he was already at the limit of his capacity for suffering. Yet there was something in me that rejoiced. I had been right after all. My simple theory, based on pharmacist von F.'s long experience and the laws of logic, which were the same in C. as they were back home, had apparently proven itself. As far as could be judged? Apparently? I let Walter perform a clinical examination. I thought the riddle would be solved if he found that I actually had Y.F. But this too was a fallacious conclusion. Y.F. would pose many more riddles.

Walter stared at me vacantly for a long time. His hands as they probed about did not have the firm, unbudgeable, yet gentle touch of the great physician. I saw that Walter was not at his best this evening. His hands
were trembling, and not with fever like mine, nor with human feeling like poor March's, but–from the effects of whiskey. He was fully clothed, just one little sartorial error was identifiable. Identifiable by me, over whom he was leaning and whose powers of observation were intact even now. Had Walter been wandering the empty streets of C. during the night? Had he been at the shore, his heart going out to his wife across the sea? Almost. He had been in the bar owner's docklands dive (in spite of the quarantine; that is, surreptitiously), where he had solaced himself with whiskey–I knew that whiskey of comparable quality was not easy to scare up elsewhere in C. Walter's beautiful gray eyes were somewhat glassy and he was belching the carbon dioxide from his whiskey-and-sodas. Could have been worse. His head cleared from one second to the next when he saw what I had. “We've taken a great step forward,” he said–and belched, taking a great step away from me. He whispered with Carolus, and I saw on the faces of my collaborators–not exactly glee and exultation, but a very peculiar companionable joyfulness. They were rejoicing that experiment number thus and such had been successful. Why not rejoice? Yet for the first time since the beginning of our experiments, a bitterness rose in me.