Georg Letham (58 page)

“Rottenness?” I repeated the word quietly and held March's gaze
until he looked down. I still dominated him, and he knew it. Something else would have to happen to tear us apart.

But he too could compose himself. He answered me, falteringly, but with irrefutable logic. In this regard he had been schooled by me, just as Carolus had been schooled by Walter in regard of medical and bacteriologic technique. “Don't you see, Louis” (this was the first time he had confused my name with that of his deceased friend, the “cadet”), “don't you understand, Georg, that the woman can't leave this building now? She absolutely can't go back to her children, we can't put them in danger too.”

I thanked him silently for that “we,” thrown in so casually. I drew closer to him and asked him never to judge me before he had spoken to me. He promised, just like that. This did not make the problem go away.

I would have been only too glad to be deceived, I trusted him as I had never trusted anyone apart from my father and my brother. It was unfair, for human nature cannot tolerate unconditional trust, absolute surrender of the soul. One must deal with facts only.

Fortunately the delivery did not seem to be imminent. We, Carolus and I, worked out the month of the pregnancy and came to the conclusion that there were at least four more weeks to go. Somewhat reassured, we parted.

As soon as I was alone, I heard the voice of my conscience once again. Was March right? Was it “rottenness”? When I had allowed the mosquito to bite the woman's neck, I had not only been without “respect of person,” as I called it a moment ago. Up to that limit, everything would indeed have been permitted. But it was not permitted, and, even to me now that I was able to think about it more calmly, it
was unjustifiable to intentionally enlist, against her will, a woman so sorely tried by fate in an experiment that, as the example of her husband showed, could very easily end in death. And what then? The vain and superficial subagent was still letting the five children stay with him, out of a kind of sympathy, but this could not continue in the event of a longer illness. And what would happen to the poor tots then? The pension to which the widow was entitled was small. But the amounts allowed for orphans were even smaller. And even if they had had millions, who would take the place of their mother? I knew from my own experience what it was to lose one's mother early.

I understood now why poor Walter had suffered so much. He had felt regret. He should never have brought his wife, still less his children, into this hellish climate. On his own account he might make sacrifice after sacrifice as long as there was breath left in his body. But that did not entitle him to expect such sacrifices of his family too. When I had allowed myself to be bitten by the
Stegomyia
and thereby knowingly, with eyes wide open, taken upon myself the entire ordeal, I had made a sacrifice less easily asked of a person of my cold-blooded nature than of someone else. But I was my own master. I had no right to impose that degree of suffering on another person. If the woman now actually became critically ill following the incubation period, then I had intentionally inflicted a severe physical injury. March had not been wrong when he knocked my hand away.

But if she died and made the poor little ones orphans, I would have a second true murder on my conscience, in addition to the murder of my wife, the crime for which I had been deported. Granted, I had not committed this second murder for selfish reasons. But did that give the
victim her life back? Did I have to have a conscience? Unfortunately I had one just as I had eyes in my head and fingers on my hand.

My bit of peace and inner equilibrium (all ethics is equilibrium of inner moral forces), it was all gone. I did not love myself. I cut myself loose and was thus entirely isolated. The night that now awaited me was no less harrowing than the nights of suffering with Y.F. during which I had lain in despair and cursed my life.

March was not sleeping now, either. In former times I had often reached over the edge of my bed and gently tugged on my March's tousled hair as he slept on the floor beside me. If he was awake, he would answer me with his silly but pleasant laugh, and we would spend part of the night talking. But if he was asleep, this gentle touch would not disturb him. I did this now. My hand reached for his head, with its luxuriant new growth of downy hair, like that of a young animal, a week-old lamb, perhaps. But he, awake now, or awake all along, jerked his head away. He did not reply to my whispering. And I would have heard what he said no matter how softly he said it, for my ears had become so sensitive since my recovery that they picked up the scurrying of the rats in the cellar, the marching of the guards in the corridors there and on the ground floor, the light footsteps of the nurses on the upper stories, indeed even the lamentations of the patients in their rooms all over the building, the ticking of March's watch (a present from Walter), I heard everything in turns, one sound confusedly giving way to another.

I now saw in my mind's eye, with a clarity impossible in the light of day, what the ill-fated mother and wife was going through and would go through.

I did not want to see it, I did not want to imagine it. I stood up and paced in the cramped basement room as dawn began to break. I ignored
March and tossed my boots at the rats, accurately enough to make them squeak but not accurately enough to bring one down. Even this silly hunt could not take my mind off Walter's widow. Would I repeat my last crime if I now had the opportunity before me, instead of the accomplished fact behind me? The question tormented me, I could not shake it off. Fixed on this one obsessive idea wrenched entirely out of its context, I threw myself back onto the creaking bed and fell into a restless and sweaty sleep over this problem that was not a problem, dreamed about it. I could not make up my mind either way.

It would perhaps do me credit if now I had at least been able to repent my crime properly and done everything to make amends. But I did not have what it takes for that.

When I awoke late in the morning, I was a wreck, more tired than when I had gone to sleep and more despondent than ever before. March had long since gone to the laboratory. He had not touched my clothes, though he generally cleaned them punctiliously and enthusiastically. All my things were in the same disorder, had not moved from where I had thrown them in my despair toward daybreak. One sleeve of my lab coat had fallen into the tub of soft soap, and I cleaned everything with difficulty.

In the meantime shrill cries had begun to echo throughout the building: Walter's wife, Alix, was howling with pain, wailing as I had never heard a living creature wail. Was the world nothing but a hell?

I immediately suspected that the woman would want me there. In vain did I try to get myself off the hook by telling the matron, who had come for me, that I was not a specialist in obstetrics and had not delivered
a baby in ages. In vain did I advise bringing in one of the doctors from the city of C. No sooner was this suggestion out of my mouth than I myself realized its absurdity. We were under quarantine. No doctor from the city could officially come here if he did not want to run the risk of spreading the Y.F. microorganism among his patients. (In reality the prohibition was often circumvented; von F., for example, had come on many occasions. But in view of Walter's death, it had to be formally complied with.) The matron saw this almost as quickly as I did and said that I should go to the bed of Walter's widow merely to “quiet her mind.” The woman's mental state had become unsettled as a result of the recent upset, she said; I, whom she trusted, had it within my power to get her to take heart. In the matron's view, which followed that of the old hospital director, labor had begun somewhat prematurely but still normally; the vocal expressions of pain, currently a renewed nerve-racking screeching, were surely much exaggerated. Carolus came in, put his (never entirely clean) hand on my shoulder, something very unlike him, and he too reasoned with me. To win a temporary reprieve, I promised to come if the pain did not ease within an hour. During that hour the woman's bladder and bowel were to be evacuated and she was to be placed in a bath of thirty-six to thirty-eight degrees centigrade–an analgesic method that had often proven itself at the clinic.

I huddled in a corner of the laboratory, lost in thought. March circled me, looking daggers at me, but he did not speak, nor did I speak to him. The hour passed quickly. At most fifteen minutes seemed to have gone by when, as though on cue, the unfortunate woman's piercing shrieks came once again from the sickroom above the laboratory. Was the sound different–I do not know, I knew only that it was time. It was serious. I understood that I had to go. I had to meet my fate.

I dashed past the dumbfounded March, then went back, grabbed his hand, and dragged him down to our room. I laid out clean clothes for myself, including a white coat that had not yet been used and that I should have worn the day the governor visited our laboratory. March would sprinkle sterile water on it and then iron it with a very hot flatiron. This will sterilize a piece of linen to all intents and purposes. I did not know whether there would be enough disinfected surgical linen in the building. If necessary, our little disinfecting chamber could be used to sterilize gowns, drapes, and some bandaging material. Improvisation has always interested me, and March was clever enough to grasp my hasty instructions and carry them out to the letter. While he heated the disinfection apparatus, I bathed.

Finally we were ready. Carolus and the young resident had knocked on the bathroom door more than once. I had not opened it. It would not have been responsible to appear unwashed at the bedside of a woman in labor. All the laws of morality may not always have been holy to me. But the laws of asepsis were.

I opened the chamber containing the disinfected articles. The gowns and drapes were still hot and steaming. I put on a fresh white coat (not the ironed one) and directed March to disinfect a second white coat and more bandaging material.

Anyone watching me ready myself would have believed that I was confident and self-assured to the point of imperturbability and that I knew exactly what I was doing and what I was going to do. Unfortunately this was not the case. I did things that did not matter, neglected what did. I was racked by doubts: I was simply the creature of my surgical training with all its arrogance and ingrained ways of doing things, of the old school through which I had gone. Just how gladly I would have
avoided this task may be seen in the fact that now, at the last minute, outside Frau Walter's room, I proposed to the young resident that
he
perform the delivery, that he take charge. He looked at me in surprise, but he accepted. When I asked him if he had ever performed a delivery on his own, he shrugged his shoulders and smiled faintly. There was nothing for it. I had to go, I had to step in, I had to do the experiment, although nothing could have been of less interest to me than doing a second experiment on this incessantly, heartrendingly wailing woman. It was an irony of fate that she was asking for
me
, that she had beseeched the heavens for
me
to come, and that she expected a miracle from me. And she knew who I was. Murderer, convict. She knew my past as well as she did my face. But she had faith, and her faith yearned for me!

I composed myself as best I could. First of all I needed assistants. March would have been a good one. A good one? What am I saying? He would have been the
best
assistant. But could I trust him now? Had he not become half an enemy–twice as dangerous as an unambiguous one? Aside from March, there was only the matron. An old, very sanctimonious, but competent, practical, always firm female who had never seen a delivery in this yellow-fever hospital, let alone assisted at one, but who had nerves of steel and who, buttressed by her rock-solid Catholic faith, was able to face any situation with courage and submission to the will of God.

I wanted to have her by my side, to look to her, not to March, and least of all to Carolus. Carolus's goodwill was not in doubt, but he had fallen back into all his uncleanly habits since the decease of our great friend. It took no more than a glance at his neglected hands to see that he was not the proper assistant. It would have been irresponsible to let
him participate. Nor did he push himself forward. And he, the brigadier general, gave me, the criminal sentenced without possibility of appeal to exile on the island of deportees C., free rein, even where the widow of his friend and collaborator Walter was concerned.

In my heart of hearts I still nourished the hope that the diagnostic findings would be normal and there would be no need for me to perform an intervention of any kind. It was her sixth delivery, after all, and the earlier ones (I remembered what Walter had said before his death) had gone normally without exception.

When I went to her bedside, I was met by a joyful expression in her tearstained eyes.

Joy, in someone who must have gone through truly frightful things in the past forty-eight hours!

A to-the-point (external) examination was enough to convince me that her complaints and fears were only too justified. Her uneasy feeling, expressed at her husband's bedside, that the baby was “in the wrong position” had a cogent basis. Unfortunately this was not the hysterical moaning and squawking of a querulous female. It was the sound of someone reduced by pain to the level of an animal.

I will try to suggest the medical facts, although I do not know how comprehensible they will be to the lay reader. The baby was in the wrong position. The normal position is cephalic, whereby the head of the baby, the largest and heaviest part of it, is oriented so as to occupy the lowest area of the uterus. The baby was very far from this normal cephalic lie. It was in the wrong position, its lie was transverse.