Georg Letham (51 page)

March had laid me on the large table in the laboratory. The light over the examination table that Walter had turned on for the purposes of a careful examination was blinding even for a healthy person, never mind for me, whose conjunctivae were already inflamed. So I turned my head to one side and saw March standing by the table, breathing heavily. March was not happy. He cared nothing about science. Only about me. He wanted to take me away, put me to bed, nurse me to health! That boy! The doctors did not allow it. Another blood test! The result was inevitably the same as I had seen with my own eyes. No
trace of malaria plasmodia. I wanted to explain it to the gentlemen. But there was a bit of a difference between wanting to speak and being able to, because the mucosa of the fauces and pharynx were inflamed and swollen and because my oversized tongue lay like a caterpillar in my mouth. And when at last, gripped by a new chill, I laboriously choked a few words out of my craw, the two doctors did not deign to look at me, but sat at the microscope, Walter at the left eyepiece, Carolus at the right, to examine my blood again with professional thoroughness, although there was nothing to see, in my opinion. But I (what was left in me of the levelheaded and serene Georg Letham of old) recalled the working plan that I had established in advance for the eventuality that I was the first to fall ill. They were only following what I had specified orally and in writing as the only proper procedure for the experiment. So I had to submit.

In my life I have hungered many a time: for food, drink, money, honor, women, freedom. For faith and for God. Sometimes voluntarily, sometimes because I was compelled to. But I believe I have never hungered for anything with all my body and soul as I now did for peace, quiet, darkness, and solitude, for a mattress under me and a good light blanket over me, for a cool pillow in a clean pillowcase under my heavy, dreadfully pounding head.

Instead I was lying like a corpse on the hard operating or examination table and waiting to see what would be done with me. They did not let March near me, though he was trying to help me, insofar as his agitated state of mind permitted. They needed him for all sorts of jobs, as befitted the laboratory assistant that he in fact was. What had he expected? He had not been taken out of the bagnio to have fun.

Sour and bilious vomiting had, to my horror, begun. What had
I
expected?
Burning thirst tormented me. My tongue seemed to be covered with paprika. But why go through all this? Just one more tiny detail from the first hours of my illness. I mention only in passing that from now on, for a period of four weeks, I believed at every moment that it could get no worse. I had already suffered enough. Enough! Enough! This became the only idea I had. People who are feverish are always somewhat lacking in ideas. The few superficial ones they do have spin madly in their overheated and weakened brains. I just groaned “enough” all the time. Or at least I produced the
f
. To pronounce the
f
, one of course does not need the pressure of the tongue against the teeth, nor much wind. An
f
comes straight from the lips. The protesting tongue can relax in the anterior trough of the oral cavity. But one whistles out an
f
. The toneless, inarticulate utterance of the animal as it does not
want
to be, but
is
. But the gentlemen who were gathered around me and studying me were not interested in this “enough” or the
f
that was as much as I could manage, but in obtaining a bodily secretion of great importance for scientific study. The reader will know what I mean. But, God knows why, I could not produce it now. I struggled. My head roared with the effort, my belly strained, my hands shook so much that I dropped the empty cup, which broke. But that nectar did not come from my body, any more than hosannas from my mouth. A small misery, certainly! But, amid the hellish wretchedness of the raging fever, it was very distressing to be exposed by Walter and Carolus in front of little March so that they could remove what they needed with a catheter.

When this comical and yet, for me, abominable procedure–I had always performed it on others but had never gone through it myself–was
over, I was going to be placed on the usual stretcher and carried to one of the sickrooms. I did not want to be. I rebelled. Even in my first days in this accursed building, I had shuddered at the sight of the old-fashioned, brown-spotted stretcher. I would be brave, like a knight of old, and walk upstairs to the sickroom. I had overestimated my strength. Even the faithful March's help was not enough. Two nurses had to be summoned with the stretcher, for me as for any other patient. I was moved from the laboratory table to the stretcher. We negotiated the familiar staircases and corridors to the sickroom. There nurses carried me to the bed and quickly but gently undressed me, which was very easy, as I was wearing almost nothing underneath my lab coat. I had done the stretcher an injustice, by the way. The canvas upon which the patients lay was removed after each use and sterilized in a boiling soda solution. It was always somewhat damp. The spots never came out, every wash only seared them in and made them tougher. It would have been unreasonable to require a brand-new canvas for each new entry in the casebook (I was number 328–the worthy stretcher had borne that many patients so far that year).

But what did it matter now? I would learn that beyond a certain degree of physical suffering, reached unfortunately all too quickly, the soul deflates; it gasps for air and then abandons itself to a numb, completely bottomless despair, of which the physically healthy can have no conception.

Thus it was that I too did not resist the chaplain's attempts to administer the last rites come hell or high water, as he would for any patient. There was no way to resist it. I was fully occupied with meeting my quota of suffering. I passively submitted to his talk and quotations from Scripture and the ceremony. What belief or unbelief did I have left in
me now, with every part of my body burning hot and in unspeakable torment? What did the afterlife mean to me? I didn't grasp these ideas properly, I was hanging on to
this
world with grim desperation. I held frantically to the chaplain's hand, and when he drew it away for the ritual laying on of hands, I clutched at his flimsy cassock, to which more than one patient suffering “unspeakably” in his hellfire must already have clung. The chaplain understood something of what was happening in me, or rather to me. He was the best psychologist around, he had a feeling for people. And an invincible liking for this wretched product of the sloppy experiments of fate. He had demonstrated this to me before at the passing of dear little M.

How very indifferent to everything I had become may be shown by the following. My bed might have been the very same one in which the sweet body of the young Portuguese girl had rested, or had not rested, a few days previously. Or was I in the adjoining room that had served as a refuge for the unemployed but vigorous dockworker? I didn't know. It didn't interest me. It didn't matter at all. A bed was a bed. Portuguese girl, my father, March, Walter–it was all light-years away from me. In my baggage, which the good March had swiftly brought, the chaplain had discovered the two little books that I had rescued from the ruin of my old life: the Gospel and
Hamlet
. He assumed that I would still take an interest in the Gospel now, on the threshold of death. I only wanted to sleep. I only wanted the pain to go away. I wanted to get up. Be able to leave. I yearned for home, because there I had always been healthy!

I couldn't speak. I couldn't lie down. I couldn't stand. I couldn't drink. I couldn't even whimper. Only suffer. And yet this was just the
beginning, this was the easiest period of the disease. It was only the first day.

The good man made his nice, energetic sign of the cross over me and left. March looked in on me for a moment. He could not stay. The gentlemen needed him. New experiments were being prepared. And following whose plan? What method? Why, mine, the one I myself had drawn up in case I should be bedridden and the others be carrying on the work we had begun. He was needed first as an assistant in the laboratory and then as a subject in a second series of experiments, for which he was going to be used as planned. As No. 1-b. We had designated the first victims with Arabic numerals; thus I was No. 5. Now Roman letters were being added to keep the series straight. This was the way we had set it all up.

I was gradually losing my normal sense of time. When a healthy person wakes up during the night, he has a feeling for approximately how much of it has gone by. At least I had had such a feeling before, even when it was dark and I couldn't see the clock on the night table. But someone with a fever of thirty-nine and a half loses his ability to estimate time. Thus it was in my case. I was living through different hours and seconds now. They passed one by one, no skipping allowed.

The old matron honored me with a visit. As when she had paid her visit to the poor little one, she took a particular interest in cleanliness. She glanced into the corners, ran her hand over the rail of the bed to see whether it had been dusted, she lifted the bedclothes to see if my feet were clean. Luckily they were. Even in the worst of times I had always set great store by hygiene. Even in recent days, when I had been feeling so wretched that bathing, washing, and shaving were difficult for me.
Now, as though to reward me, this old soldier of Y.F. planted herself by my bed and told me in her droll accent that I would not go back to the camps if Dr. Walter had anything to say about it, I would be spared the penal colony. Did this mean she was expecting my speedy demise? I laughed feverishly and did not understand. Other than that
f
, still the only sound I could get out without great pain to my tongue, oral cavity, and pharynx, I was unable to speak to her. And what would we have talked about, anyway? She assumed I had understood her and laughed back gamely, showing a row of fine teeth and splendidly rosy red gums. As with many persons of an ecclesiastical calling, her laugh was somewhat unnatural. But it was a laugh, and it made her feel good. Mine made me feel bad and I did not repeat it for the time being. My gums were so swollen that they stood out over my teeth like a coxcomb. My skin, from my forehead down to about my waist, was as though sunburned, stretched tight. When, in my agonized restlessness, I touched myself, it was like touching a boiling or roasting body that belonged to someone else. But this was only one of the horrors of the first day. Very soon I had a second attack of chills. And off into night and darkness and killing frost! I must have fallen out of bed when the nurse was out of the room, for March, who came in with a sheet of paper in his hand, found me on the floor. At that moment I must have taken leave of my senses. I tore the paper out of his hand and started chewing on it. But I must suddenly have understood, perhaps when he had taken me back to bed, the natural home, the cradle and casket of man, that it was a letter. A letter at last! News from home! I lifted my chin, I pursed my lips, I looked at him imploringly with my inflamed eyes, I formed an
r
, I made a snarling sound, meaning that March was to read to me–I myself was unable to read because of the conjunctivitis that was making
my eyes burn. But how could my dear friend read me anything if I wouldn't let the precious letter out of my hand! Great dumb show, understood, too–but no good! What was left of my idiotic energy went toward not letting go of something I had taken hold of. Let go! he cried. Read! I snarled and whispered. We did not come to an understanding. I kept the paper in my hand, I tore it apart with twitching movements, I didn't know what I was doing. Why had he given it to me? He had carefully hidden the enclosure, the money. Why not the letter too? He just had no notion what I was going through. He overestimated me. Now he was urgently called away by Walter. I must have gone on making my
f
of lamentation and my
r
of supplication for a long time yet. I was still making them when he appeared again in the late afternoon.

What could he do? He saw a little book on the night table amid the dishes of fruit, ice chips, and the other items helpfully provided by a helpless medical science. He did what I would have done in his place. With his back to me he opened the little book, quietly tore out a much-read page, page forty-three of the British Bible Society's small octavo edition: the Sermon on the Mount. I will not quote the words of Scripture that have had such an impact on world history. The interested reader can look them up at the place I have mentioned. He wanted me to think he was reading me the letter. His eyes scanned the page. He read it out loud.

The third day of my illness was a Sunday. In my feverish fantasies I kept hearing voices: “Dr. Georg Letham is dead.” “The younger?” “Both.” Then back to the beginning: “Dr. Georg Letham is dead.”

On the Lord's day, March had a bit more freedom. He came to visit
me, and once more I held his soft, seemingly boneless hands, on whose account I had given him the nickname Gummi Bear, in my own. The silly “voices” stopped then. I have completely forgotten the rest of what happened that day. I awoke on Monday evening at a somewhat lighter moment. I must have been vomiting a great deal all this time; there was a bilious taste in my mouth, the bitterest taste you could imagine. A kind of gutta-percha bib had been tied around my neck and my upper chest so that I would not unconsciously make a mess of myself. No sooner had I touched the unpleasantly smooth and cold material than my innards rebelled violently once more. I gave in. I had no choice. And the faithful March clasped my brow and held my head. Meanwhile the old nurse who had the difficult job of caring for me was cleaning the room with broom, dustpan, and cloth.

In March's good-natured, mournful, haunted face there was a flicker, a flash of something. He probably wanted to bring me an important piece of news, had perhaps spoken it directly into my ear ten or twenty times without my understanding it. Now he let go of my head, levered my arm to clamp a thermometer in my armpit (he could not put it in my mouth because of the terrible pain in my mouth and pharynx), and took my temperature. I glanced at it out of the corner of my eye. Even in my current, how shall I say, barely human condition, the clinical course of my illness interested me. My temperature must have been above the critical mark (forty). When he looked at the thermometer, he turned away, awkwardly shrugging his shoulders, and I heard him, as though from afar, as though through two doors, emitting a kind of wooden sob. He was just as brave as the rest of us. He came back, coughed, and put on a desperately jolly face. I wasn't able to thank him. The moment he
had dried my face with a fresh, snowy napkin, the nausea and retching began again, and as I groaned and tears flowed from my eyes, the sluices opened all over his soft hand. But that was the easiest test his friendship and love had to undergo that day, or rather that evening. The facts posed greater challenges, purely impersonal ones. Without regard to who was involved.