Georg Letham (56 page)

I did not give March an order, but I gave him permission to alert the doctor's wife at about noon the next day. I have forgotten what prevented her from appearing immediately. Relatives were normally strictly forbidden to enter the epidemic-ridden hospital, but the director of the hospital made an exception in her case as a tribute to her husband's heroism and permitted her to come at once at her own risk. But she did not come until two days later, in the late afternoon, unfortunately just when we were setting about having two dozen mosquitoes feed on Dr. Walter's blood for new experiments.

It was necessary. We wanted to find out whether the blood was still infectious after seventy hours, reckoned from the onset of Y.F. Thus we needed mosquitoes engorged with infected blood for more experiments. Who in our place would have called a halt at this point? I ask this in all confidence. I am quite sure of the answer. The experiment was unavoidable. We had to do
everything
to find out, or all our efforts would have been wasted. The doctor took no notice of the bites. He was no longer himself. He was thrashing about unconsciously. It took great effort to hold him down, but he did not feel the mosquito bites.

He lay there with a temperature of forty-one and a half degrees centigrade
and cold extremities. We had covered him with a camel-hair blanket that had accompanied him on all his campaigns in the army and all his travels. I felt his thin limbs trembling under the napped, already somewhat worn material that smelled of leather and tobacco.

I had by no means regained my strength and I sighed heavily; holding him down as he kept trying to lurch upward was very tiring.

He felt nothing, I repeat. And even if he did feel it, I also repeat, it had to be.

But how was his wife, storming in half mad with her aggrieved love and boundless despair, going to understand that! On top of everything else (pregnant women often seem to be out of their minds) she had brought along the little dog that Walter had taken her. Picture it, a distraught, heavily pregnant woman and an idiotically barking dog with hostile intentions toward all of us in the hot, cramped, cell-like sickroom.

The woman held her nose silently in horrified self-defense. The smell of the disease was indeed awful. She had a markedly swollen neck, as is frequent in mothers-to-be. A kind of goiter had formed, which heaved tempestuously. Even the dog was unhinged. The beast jumped on the sick man's stomach, out of joy or out of hatred going back to painful experiments done in the past or for some other reason–and this was the epigastric region, which seemed to be hurting the poor fellow the most just then. But dog and wife cared not a whit. She elbowed her way through and hurled herself on top of him, she wept and sobbed, bewailed his lot and hers. She “whispered” to him, so loudly that we all heard it, that she was worried about the pending delivery. The baby was in the wrong position, it was like a stone, it would surely kill her, he would come to regret his callousness, he should bethink himself, get up, chase us away, and come with her.

She pushed us, along with our mosquitoes and our test tubes, all the technically sophisticated paraphernalia we had laboriously contrived for a difficult experiment, away from her husband, or rather she tried to. The job of stopping her from interfering with our plan could only fall to me. I was the least involved elsewhere. Carolus was keeping the mosquitoes held down on the doctor's skin so that they would bite. March was helping him. If anyone was free, it was me. Off with the lady. For the good of the enterprise and her own.

She had to yield. Firmly but gently I drew her away. I challenged her: for the sake of her unborn child she should go easy on herself and avoid any excitement. She looked at me furiously–and suddenly fell silent. What could she do? She gave in.

The experiment could continue as it had to. Carolus did his job well.

But that ornery March, that sentimental fool, what did he do but suddenly draw himself up and resign his post. Was he going to run after the lady? From behind the door that we had quickly locked, she was again keening into our already tormented ears (I was hypersensitive) and souls (I was only human, after all). I controlled myself. No harsh words. No violence. I waved him away and took on his job in addition to my own. He shoved off. I heard him behind the door calming the lady at last and then leaving with her.

Our work took a long time. I have already described how the patient had to put up with the nuisance of the experimental mosquito bites over a period of hours. In itself this is nothing. During this long period Walter did have lucid moments of a kind more than once: “Where am I? Who are you?” he would wheeze hoarsely. “Water! Thirsty! Ice!”

The nurses, of course, hurried to get what he wanted. But before they could return to his bed, before they could bring the spoon to his
inflamed mouth, he was deeply unconscious again. His beautiful, strong, sinewy hands had slowly begun to “floccillate,” plucking threads from the camel-hair blanket. (Later, when I was back within the four walls of my basement room, I found the little tufts on my lab coat and removed them with a peculiar feeling that is better left undescribed.)

Finally the last insect seemed to be about to bite. The silvery little spots were visible on its dark abdomen as it sat hunched on Walter's skin.

The doctor groaned heartrendingly and pointed to his head with his free left hand. The ice bag seemed to be too heavy for him, and Carolus, forgetting that you can only do one thing at a time, took it off. As he did so he unfortunately let the mouth of the test tube come away from the skin. The rascally mosquito, already greatly engorged, escaped and could not be recaptured. It was evidently hiding in a dark corner.

The doctor was again murmuring all sorts of things. Apparently he was writing to his wife in his thoughts. He drew letters on the blanket and read the words out as he went along, putting them together with effort: “Be glad, dearest” (there seemed to be a benign smile on his face, an expression it seldom wore), “our achievement will be the greatest . . .” What our achievement would be never became known. He merely wheezed, gagged, coughed, breathed deeply, suddenly opened his eyes, looked at us each in turn, for a particularly long time at March, who was just then coming through the door. He faced him directly and asked, articulating the words laboriously: “Do you have good news from my wife? I'm a bit sick just now. She should stay where she is. Rio de Janeiro, Montebello Hotel. Tell her I'm sorry! The baby will be in the right position, because all her deliveries have been easy, thank God! And you must know, that's been my prayer for twenty years . . . But
please take the ice bag off my head!” (There was no ice bag.) “Hark, there go the twenty-four buglers in concert, all sounding ‘Taps' for the old year.” Again the sense of these words was not clear. Much as we loved him, how little we knew him!

“What are you trying to tell us, my dear Dr. Walter?” I asked, for I saw that his hours were numbered.

“You? Nothing. But do you know,” he said, turning again to March, weeping like a child, “I'm leaving my wife and children so little . . . If you knew how little. But it's all for the best. Ice, please, some ice! I'm thirsty.”

We gave him ice and left the room to put the mosquitoes in darkness.

Twenty-four hours later we were again gathered around Walter's bed. His temperature had fallen, so much so that it was below normal, 35.8°c; we could leave the thermometer as long as we wanted, Walter's temperature would never get up to the normal 36.9. Dr. Walter lay quietly in bed. His skin was the color of a faded beech leaf.

His gaze was lucid. He was conscious. The illness was in its deceptive remission period, but his eyes did not light up when we expressed our joy over his improvement. When I tried to take his pulse, he made a clearly perceptible effort to pull his ice-cold, already saffron yellow hand away. He was suffering greatly. Psychologically perhaps more than physically. He knew he was lost. His strength had dwindled away in the last four days. It could only be a matter of hours.

We spared him any tiring examinations.

Before leaving to speak to the governor by telephone, Carolus shook his hand. As he did so, he prudently felt for the artery that runs under
the skin at the wrist. But he found no pulse. He bit his lip. He stayed. The significant look he gave me told me to repeat this little maneuver. I felt the familiar slightly meandering blood vessel, as fat as a knitting needle, but I too was unable to feel a true pulse.

And yet our friend was still alive, he knew what was happening. But his deathly weakness did not permit him either to sit up properly or to utter a clearly articulated word.

His features showed disquiet. It was easy to guess that he wanted to see his wife once more. Under these circumstances I asked March to go at once to advise her of the state of things.

For the last few hours she had been in a guest room where a prior of the order sometimes stayed (despite the quarantine!). She had just gone to bed after a sleepless night and a hectic day. But there was nothing for it, she had to be awakened and brought to her husband's deathbed.

Should we leave the two of them alone? Carolus was in favor, I against. “Not yet!” I whispered. Why should we bring into the dying moments of a great man (and he was one) any more agitation and anguish than was necessary?

As I was waiting for March to return with her, the dying man's restless, harrowed gaze fell on me. Was he expecting final spiritual consolation? The chaplain appeared as though by chance. Not the expected wife. My impatience had become extreme. This time she could not delay. Fully dressed or not–there was no time to lose if she wanted to see her husband again while he was still alive. Walter's searching eyes moved from me to the night table, where there was an already disinfected Pravaz syringe of the digitalis solution, which was capable of spurring his heart, debilitated by the Y.F. toxins, to one last burst of
strength. I realized what the doctor was trying to tell me with his eyes. He wanted to live a while longer so that he could say good-bye to his wife. And so that she would not be shocked!

Next to the digitalis solution was a practically identical syringe of morphine. Should I switch the two drugs?

Poor Walter was suffering atrociously. He was in control of himself, a gentleman in death as in life.

It took a connoisseur of human nature to see the muscles around his mouth working, the agony and anguish behind the friendly, polite expression on his face, to notice the nose wrinkling slightly, the poor man's fingers involuntarily tightening with pain. His breathing became deep, slow, heavy, then stertorous. His throat inflated like the throat of a songbird. And still he did not have enough air. He was suffocating and he knew it.

The respiratory center must have rapidly become completely paralyzed, just as cardiac function had already stopped being effective enough to fill the peripheral arteries.

Nevertheless I did as he had asked me at the first onset of his illness four days before.

I did not make his excruciating death easier. It was neither my right nor my duty to do so. Reluctantly I left him to the (there is no other way to put it) inconsiderate outcries of his wife, who, in her current condition now twice as unrestrained, covered the distance from the door to the bed in a single bound, then shriekingly threw herself on him, on his still extremely tender hypogastrium, with the weight of her heavily pregnant body, squeezing out of the poor man what little wind he had left! I tried in vain to pull her off the dying man, I strove to calm her, to console her, to get her to go away again so that her husband could die
in peace. As though he had ever been able to live in peace during the difficult years of his marriage!

But her love asserted its prerogative, or the world's notion of what love's prerogative is. She bombarded him with voluptuous caresses as though he were her bridegroom, she talked and wept and howled and laughed hysterically all at once as he became increasingly still and wan. The pallor normally seen in people in their death agony was in his case obscured by his jaundice, but anyone seeing his eyes, already glassy and bright, in their yellow sockets, unmistakably touched by the finger of death, would not have begrudged him the last calm moment of his life. The chaplain stood by helplessly and tried in vain to administer the final consolations of faith. Walter only lifted his eyes to him and the crucifix in silence and (being left-handed) made a weak gesture with his left arm, a sort of sign of the cross.

I stood at the foot of Walter's bed. But not for long. His wife still did not understand the situation and sniffed at a little bottle of cologne. She wanted to be alone with Walter, wanted me to leave, but I did not. The dying Walter threw me glances, he was trying to tell me something–he formed words with his lips, without speaking them, a
p
for insurance policy or premium, perhaps. I couldn't leave him alone. She hissed furious words at me, things like “convict,” “murderer,” which may have corresponded to the facts but would have been better left unsaid under the circumstances. Or should I have thrown the word “murderess” back at her? For if she had stayed where she was on the distant island or in Rio de Janeiro, Walter would have been able to withstand all the infection experiments. What was the point of the theatrics? The pain may have been real, but what good did it do?

She was astonished that Walter made no effort to move or speak
despite the absence of fever. She clutched at his wasted body. And she blessed and cursed her beloved husband in the same breath, whipping herself up into a new fury at his polite, composed silence, then set upon his torso until there were damp blotches on the shawl over her breasts. She didn't know what she was doing, had forgotten where she was. Tears streamed down the still pretty cheeks into the gaping, shrieking mouth, and the little room reverberated with her lamentations like a lunatic's cell. We knew her harsh, screeching voice from the telephone booth, but now it was shrilling directly into our ears and his. March had come back with her, but, as kind and gentle as he tried to be, he too could not get her to exercise a self-control that simply was not in her nature. And she still had not even understood the true state of things.