Georg Letham (55 page)

His wife brushed them away with her gloves. She gazed at us all as though she were superior to us. Was she? Even now she did not take her gloves off. And as poor Walter, crimson with shame, tried to break free, she dragged him along. We looked away. Carolus left the room. When Walter managed to tear himself away, she ran after him impetuously, tripping over the drooping shawl. He vainly tried to free himself as his wife pulled him out of the laboratory. But no woman, however virile, was this man's equal. Carefully yet forcefully, he disengaged himself. He came back to us and bent over his microscope. He did not see his wife standing next to him, he did not hear her shout into his ear. He was at his microscope. It was merely a gesture, for at that moment there was no slide on the stage of the instrument. But what did the impassioned wife care about that? She wanted her husband back. And then she wanted to take him by the hand and leave, with the children on her lap and the fetus in her belly, leave the satanic, epidemic-plagued
island for London. Back, back! And when he resisted, she slapped him in the face with her gloved hands, once, twice. His spectacles clattered to the floor. He said nothing, merely ran his hands down his cheeks, which, ashen though he was, had an unnaturally flushed, bright brick red color. We were as though paralyzed. The woman left the laboratory unhindered. March, who had just come in, was thunderstruck. Walter had to ask him twice to bring a particular jar of mosquitoes.

I was the first to collect myself, and for the first time since my convalescence I assisted my comrades in our experiments. And the experiment on Walter was successful. A mosquito fastened itself to Dr. Walter, and four days
post infectionem
he became ill.

The doctor was strangely agitated even the day before the onset of fever. He worked with a haste that can only be called feverish, though his body temperature was at that time still precisely normal. He had not been the same since the scene with his wife. But his desperate composure and the strenuous effort he was making could not disguise the fact that something in him had broken. In contrast to the irascibility he had lately often shown with March and Carolus and the chaplain (though not with me when I was convalescing), he was very gentle. When we had finished our work in the evening (an occasional helping hand from me now being permitted once more), he insisted on thanking us before we separated. It was as though he were clinging to us, his comrades. He had heard nothing more from his wife. The coastal steamer was again under way; whether it was taking his wife and children away from C. once more he did not know.

But he heard from the intrusive subagent, who may have been animated
by true devotion too, who knows? I almost had that impression. Walter did not admit him. He would have nothing to do with him. When the subagent pushed himself forward nonetheless, Walter ignored him completely, closed his ears to what he said. Never have I seen someone cut so very dead. Yet this was not haughtiness. The only one of us who knew class distinctions was not the gentleman-physician Walter, nor the mysterious chaplain, a mute and impassive man of unknown origins, nor yet that honored high official of medicine Carolus, but March, who came from humble circumstances. I did not understand this trait of his. I was astonished by his patronizing manner toward all blacks, the self-sacrificing nurses as well as the prosperous subagent. But he made a point of it. Later I would see that my knowledge of human nature had often let me down in judging March's character.

Now I was preoccupied with Walter on the one hand, with March on the other. On the one hand the man from my own sphere of interests, the intellectual hub of the commission, my old school fellow, the man I looked up to. On the other the young, indefatigable, passionate March, flourishing once more, who mastered his sensual impulses as I never would have thought possible in such an uninhibited person, but who instead gave himself to me with all his heart and whose assistance (and good humor) I believed I could count on if I had any sort of problem, day or night. He was a great help to me here on C. I gave thanks to my Creator (if this phrase is allowed) often and thought that only death could end this first “true” friendship of mine.

Even though he was working very hard, Walter was unable to sleep at night during this period, whether because the disease was already smoldering in him or because he was wrought up to such a degree that even at night he was unable to compose himself, calm down, relax.

One night I awoke, as I often did. There was such a nice cool breeze blowing through one of the basement windows of our airless, rat-filled bedroom, a rarity in the washhouse steaminess of this sultry climate, that I slipped out as quietly as I could. I thought I would walk around outside a little until my sweat-soaked underwear had dried on my body and then go back to bed. I was no longer required to be the first one in the laboratory in the morning; as a convalescent I had the freedom to come and go as I pleased. Thus if I made use of the nighttime hours for a stroll, I could sleep for as long as I wanted afterward.

My steps echoed hollowly in the silence as I headed toward the main entrance. In the corridor I encountered, leaning on the ledge of an open window and gazing down on the dim lights of the city and the church and the sea, Walter. He was still dressed for the lab. Evidently he had never gone to bed. When he noticed me, he raised his heavy, swollen eyelids and looked glassily at me for a long time without a word. Then he joined me and we wandered in silence through the deserted hallways and empty rooms of the hospital. It was equipped for patients in much greater numbers than the four or five that currently happened to be there, all of them on the road to recovery. But just as many had lately perished of Y.F., whose mortality rate was now fifty to fifty-five percent. Abruptly he took my arm and linked elbows with me, as a father might do with his grown son. Still not a word. Only the night before, he had been telling highly amusing stories about his not very lengthy but eventful service as an army doctor. But this had been illusory. As I leaned against him I felt a half-empty liter bottle in the pocket of his lab coat. It must have been half empty, because it made a hollow gurgling sound. But when the poor man turned to me, opened his mouth wide,
and laboriously brought out words as halting as his steps, I noticed that his breath did not really smell of whiskey. It was much more strongly perfumed by something else, by something bizarre and abominable. The reader will have guessed what it was.

I gave a start and stopped in my tracks. The poor fellow noticed nothing. He was thinking about his wife, who had gotten the better of him, not about Y.F. He was no longer afraid of the disease, now that he had tried and failed umpteen times to infect himself in experiments. He did not know or had forgotten that a person who is weakened, who is broken in spirit, no longer has the same resistance to the Y.F. microorganism as an unbroken constitution. The blows he had received from his wife had affected him so deeply that he had become a lesser man. Thus the wife had aided our experiments. Unwittingly she had laid her husband open to the poison of Y.F.

The poison of alcohol he could deal with. He confided in me that he was driven to drink more than ever, that he felt terribly restless, he had to walk around, he had to have the whiskey on him, he even had to take a whiff of it every so often, but he had sworn “on the lives of his wife and children” that he wouldn't touch another drop of alcohol as long as he was on C. “That would be the beginning of the end,” he said. Then came long discussions of the progress of our experiments. Should we move quickly to make public what we now knew, the experiments we had done on ourselves and what we had learned? Would the two clear cases, March's and mine, and the one unclear case, Carolus's, suffice to demonstrate the momentous fact of yellow fever's way of propagating from person to person and surprise the scientific world–or were control experiments necessary too?

He agreed with me or came to agree with me that we had to wait. But in any event we would put everything to date in writing and deposit this documentation with the city notary in order to guarantee our priority. “My children,” he said with a vestige of his old radiant smile, “will benefit from what their father did for this part of the world.” He again went to a window and leaned far out. The guards, two of them as always, were just then passing on their morning patrol, unarmed and shoeless. A wave of fragrant air rose from the harbor below and from the trees on the small area of raised ground near an old church that dated from Spanish times. The stars, no longer at the height of their luminosity because of the approach of daybreak, stood in great profusion above the still hospital and the old trees of its garden. A very slight shudder went through Walter's greatly emaciated body–I felt it through the thin dress jacket that he always wore in the lab. It was like what happens when one casually brushes one of the bottom keys of a piano. There is a thrumming, a purring, but it subsides immediately. So too here.

As always the night was incomparably cooler than the day, but not so much so that a fully clothed man would have shivered. He understood this too, grasped his right carpus with his left hand to take his pulse, but then lost interest, laughed, and said, “I almost thought . . .” He left the sentence unfinished, pursuing a different train of thought entirely, and I knew that this was what had been on his mind, not the idea that he might be ill: “When women are expecting, you can't argue with them. It's a crisis. They're all pathological. When one of them is going through as much as my wife is, you turn the other cheek–you just have to make sure she isn't hurting herself and the baby.” Right! That was my response, of course, but I must admit that I hated the woman's guts, even if I did understand her in a way. Later I was too angry to sleep.

The next evening the doctor suddenly fell ill with chills. His noble, manly face swelled. The puffy cheeks, the pout, the piercing glitter of his eyes in their hollows gave him some resemblance to a drunk. But no one's mind could have been clearer. As though he were standing by someone else's bed, he dictated his own case report to my friend March. “C., date, year, and so forth, Dr. Walter, forty-two years old, army medical officer, medium build, malaria tropica four years ago, otherwise always healthy. Inoculated by
Stegomyia fasciata
b3 four days ago, sudden onset of illness with chill, temperature 39.9°c, pulse 120, very strong–heart sounds?” He had had his autostethoscope brought from his room. This is a listening device placed on the heart (or rather the chest wall, etc.) and connected to the ears by two rubber tubes, allowing one to listen to one's own heart and breath sounds as though they were someone else's. But who wants to eavesdrop on himself, except when he has to?

Walter listened to his heart beating, his lungs breathing, his bowels protesting. Then he placed the autostethoscope on his aching brow. He smiled; a forced smile, but still. Then, his teeth chattering feverishly and his limbs twitching like a galvanized frog's, he took the earpieces out of his ears and gave the stethoscope back to me. “The heart sounds are still very strong. If that changes, keep on top of it. Give me digitalis beginning tomorrow and try to get the heart rate down to ninety from 120. I know my heart, it's been through worse.”

He trusted in his constitution and in me, whom he regarded as his physician. We wanted to move him out of the laboratory where he had been overcome by chills and take him to a sickroom right away. He refused, insisting that we do another blood test first. He had had tropical
malaria in the army years before, and he wanted to rule out that possibility. But was he still
hoping
? Was it that he did not
want
to know? We did not ask. He did not say.

Carolus did this test. He had been schooled by Walter for months now and had become so accomplished that he was entrusted with the relatively simple blood test for malaria plasmodia.

As expected, the results were negative.

We arranged everything as quickly as possible. Walter deteriorated visibly as we were tending him, his consciousness faded, and March, who had remained largely unprofessionalized and must have conceived a kind of liking for Frau Walter (!), urged us to put off the tests and notify the patient's wife down in C. as quickly as possible. What we wanted at the moment was to bring our work as far along as we could. If at all possible we still wanted to keep the public out of it for the time being. A woman who could physically attack a man like Walter was obviously capable of doing all sorts of imprudent things. Not to mention that I wanted to do what I could to spare Walter's wife–she was about to give birth, after all. It was very likely, though not yet a hundred percent certain, that our last experiment (Walter) was a success. Perhaps we could spare her the excitement. To cut a long story short, Carolus, the chaplain, and I were opposed to informing her, the three of us against March.

Walter was the head man and it was his decision. He nodded mechanically in response to all questions. Should we notify his spouse? He nodded. Or should we wait? Again he nodded. Might it be better to spare your wife, in view of her condition? As so often in laboratory experiments, nothing is certain yet, and even if it were, your case may be no worse than those of March and Carolus, it might be and let's hope
will be a brief (!) episode that won't necessarily go beyond the second stage (!!). To this too he nodded, adding in a hoarse, failing voice, seemingly already much pained by every word, “Yes, that's the best thing.”

We, Carolus, March, and I, carried him to his room on the aforementioned stretcher, on which March and I and countless others had lain, then tiptoed out as the chaplain came in bringing him the sacrament. The doctor, no longer lucid, received it. The chills, which had gone on for an hour in March's case and for a bit more than four in mine, lasted for eight solid hours with him, poor fellow. This was an ominous sign.