Georg Letham (7 page)

The domestics had not been paid and the landlord had not received the rent. I had to get away from these disagreeable confrontations with my wife. My clinic was almost entirely empty. I had no patients and the son-in-law who had been sharing the costs had made excuses and put his patients in another private clinic. For an instant I considered seeking out my father. His signature on a check was worth just as much as that of a physician on my wife's death certificate putting me in possession of the money. But I did not dare to go see my father.

I betook myself to the laboratory. Some letters of a professional nature lay on my desk. I took from the locked cabinet a small test tube containing about four centigrams of Toxin Y. Whether I had already conceived a definite plan of my crime or was only testing myself, asking, “What if . . .”–this I am no longer able to say today, any more than I can say what drew me to the vicinity of the house in which I was born and spent my youth with my parents and siblings, the “Rat Palace” as it was called, a rambling and rodent-plagued old villa on a river. To toughen me, my father once made me spend three nights in a room with rats (which he hated). The house had now been free of rats for a long time. It had been broken up into apartments for laborers and office workers. Rats hardly cared to live there anymore. Instead there were a great many children, the place was teeming with them. Bratty, undernourished, but full of glee and noise. I envied them their youth.

The garden no longer existed. On the same plot of ground rose a tenement, its walls covered with damp spots. I was flooded with memories of my childhood as I passed by. Bitternesses, inconclusive broodings.
Feelings of hatred toward my father, feelings of envy toward my brother and sister. Pity for my wife and for myself.

I returned late. I had had dinner in town and assumed that my wife, exhausted from her journey, would have long since gone to bed. In such cases I sometimes spent the night on a comfortable leather sofa-bed in my study, so as not to disturb her light sleep. I too was extraordinarily tired. The barometer was unusually low for this time of year, mid-August, the air suffocatingly close. Humid, but with no tendency toward rain. Before going to bed, I took the little glass vial containing the toxin out of my pocket and put it aside, on the mirrored top of a cabinet. But I could not sleep. Suddenly I heard my wife walking back and forth in her room directly above my study. She was awake now, or had not yet gone to bed. She was talking in a loud voice. To herself?

No sleep. I had gone quietly into the bathroom, where there were always pajamas in a closet. But the closet was locked, and I had given the key to my wife. So I did not undress. The footsteps in my wife's room had stopped now, as had the sound of her voice. I was just about to settle down when she appeared on the landing, wrapped in a sumptuous salmon-colored nightgown heavily embroidered with glass beads. In her eyes was an expression that in the most unfathomable fashion always both attracted and repelled me, a doglike tenderness, a lust to be beaten. I drew my shoulders together, I bowed my head. Rage against this woman, who could still
smile
, even now, welled up in me. I let her know that all I wanted was to be left alone. She turned on the lights in the study and saw the glint of the glass vial that held the toxin. She thought it was morphine. First she started reproaching me for a thousand petty things, then she cried, and without so much as a pause,
smiling foolishly, she asked me to give her the same injection that I had given her before her trip.

I felt the deadly irony of fate so strongly that I could not help smiling too. Or was I just imitating her awkward, glassy grimace? No matter, it put her in a better mood immediately. She embraced me with her short, rosily powdered little arms. Conquered once more by her voluptuous urges, she dragged me upstairs to our bedroom, drew the curtains, and enfolded me. I pushed her away firmly, and that was the beginning. She wanted what she had always gotten. I could not fight her off. The more terrible the things I did, the more obstinately happy she looked! I was in a state of dreadful agitation. In her masochistic rapture, would she forget what she had asked me for? The injection? I wanted her to, and I didn't want her to. Never had one part of me been so much at war with another. For, as of a short time ago, a violent solution was no longer so urgently needed. I could accept the position in the distant city and begin a new, respectable life without her.

The telephone rang. I thought–why now?–of my father. It rang again. In a particularly shrill, maddening manner, it seemed to me. But neither I nor my wife went to the phone. The ringing must have soon stopped.

Immediately following my wife's death, which I ascertained conclusively, I opened the two windows and woke the housemaid. I told her to telephone a physician who lived nearby: my wife had taken ill, she was having fainting symptoms. The girl, in short cotton pajamas, her black hair disheveled, half asleep, her face pale and pasty, carried out my instructions. The physician apparently did not come to the phone
immediately. Then he had every word repeated three or four times, the girl had to spell everything out. Had he become hard of hearing overnight? Finally I lost patience and took the receiver myself. Did I have so little control of myself? Apparently so. The physician immediately understood what I had to say extremely well. I don't know why, but this entirely insignificant circumstance, that the telephone connection between us two physicians now functioned perfectly, gave me a feeling of happiness, put me in a kind of high spirits.

The physician recalled my name immediately as that of his colleague. But he seemed to have little desire to come now, at night, asked if I would not see to the patient again myself, take her pulse, check her breathing. The maid was looking strangely at the bed and the figure lying motionless on it. I gave no sign of noticing. I pretended to perform the examination as advised by the physician, then pulled the coverlet up over my wife's open mouth and continued my conversation with him. He said with satisfaction that this was the normal course (of what?), that he would counsel me as a colleague, that I should quickly administer an injection of caffeine and let him know what happened. Of course he would be available if it was absolutely necessary (he carefully stressed the word “absolutely”). I gave my assent, hung up, turned out all the lights but one, and sent the maid out of the room with a feeling of relief. I walked through the adjoining rooms four or five times, sat down for a moment in the armchair, then tiptoed into my wife's bathroom and dressing room and put the poison there for the time being. Then I called the physician again and informed him that my wife's pulse had stopped while I was giving her the injection. The physician did not respond immediately. Then he took a deep breath–or he yawned–and finally, in a changed voice, meant to sound moved, asked me to try an
injection of camphor, so that everything conceivable would have been done. Directly into the heart?! Of course he meant the cardiac musculature. I said nothing. Then he asked whether I still insisted on an immediate visit. He himself had given up administering camphor injections to the dying, he said. They never saved anyone. Again I found no suitable response. Otherwise, he continued, he would appear the next morning at seven thirty in order to comply with the legal formalities and fill out the death certificate. I surely had blank forms in the house. And he did not need to tell me that he had the deepest sympathy for me in my loss. I thanked him briefly and hung up.

The telephone then rang once more. I answered it. No one there. Wrong number? Ten minutes later the same thing. Yet a third time–now I felt I ought to call the operator and complain. I waited. My heart pounded. But there was silence. Good.

I believed I had taken care of the aftermath of my actions in the most straightforward manner. I would have told my father everything only too gladly. But the absurdity of this notion became clear to me at once and I laughed out loud.

I was happy. But not at ease. In the bedroom I turned on the light once more and got a clean hand towel from my wife's small bathroom, which was charmingly done in almond green and pale pink. I spread it out over the still uncovered upper part of my dead wife's face. Then I turned back the coverlet and spread the towel over her throat and chest as well. The window was still open; the hot, moist breeze caught in the dry, bright linen, lifting it where it swelled over the curves of the chest. Rhythmic rising and falling. But I knew what was what. I turned out the light. The wood in a built-in wardrobe suddenly contracted with a sharp crack.

I returned to the bed once again. The towel felt warmish and soft as silk. I touched the sides of the neck underneath. Warmth and silky softness here too. But there was no trace of a pulse at the carotid artery. The blood vessels were all clearly palpable, like thick knitting needles. Evidently there were masses of coagulated blood here as in the other blood vessels. Thus the old miracle test would fail. Come who might to the bed of the deceased, the coagulated blood would never liquefy.

Toxin Y, whose composition was known to no one but me, could not have been identified by a forensic chemist. Besides, it would have broken down into entirely innocuous constituents within the body in less than four hours, as I knew from animal experiments. Solid proof of organic toxins is in any case one of the most problematic chapters of forensic chemistry, though science has made great strides in this area in the past thirty years. It has been possible to determine toxicity limits by experimenting on living organisms, human or animal. But only when known toxins are involved. Mine was unknown. Once four hours had elapsed, there could be no result incriminating me, no matter what methods were used to examine the blood. And who would come here in the next four hours?

I locked the door and put the key on the small corner table in the hall. From the hall I went back into the bathroom, reluctantly and with great unease; the adorable pale pink and almond green walls, the white tile, the effete mirrors, the gleaming nickel-plated taps nauseated me. Hurrying to be finished there, I hastily dumped the vial of Toxin Y into the toilet bowl and switched off the light.

I seemed to have a hunger. I had, much more even than that afternoon, a need to see someone and to talk. I left the building. I went out onto the street. In front of the building, I met a young couple who
lived on our (my) floor. I said hello first. They gave me a friendly glance in the strong glow of the street lamps and both returned my greeting politely. Evidently they were on their way home from a party. I walked to a post office that was open at night in order to wire my stepdaughter, who I assumed was still at the spa with her husband. I handed in the message marked urgent but then noticed that I had no cash on me. In view of the content of the message, the clerk was kind enough to send the telegram for me on credit. I wanted to leave my watch with him as a deposit, but he refused this with a smile. Perhaps, too, my father's name was not unknown to him.

It occurred to me that I might tell my father what had happened before doing anything else, or rather it did not “occur” to me, I was simply unable to resist the mad urge. I had to do it. I called a cab and went to his house. His servant of many years opened the door. He reluctantly agreed to wake the old man. I followed him into my father's bedroom.

Once again I heard him, as I had in my childhood, grinding his teeth fiercely in his sleep. The room, crowded with elegant furniture and antiquities, was dark and gloomy. He had become a collector in his latter days.

I had difficulty waking him. He fell asleep with difficulty, he awoke with difficulty. He threw himself furiously about, croaked and beat with both fists on the blue silk quilt. At last he opened his eyes. Why did he resist awakening so much? He stared at the light of the lamp I had turned on, like a hen at the butcher knife. From below came the honking of the cabdriver, whom I had asked to wait without paying him. I stared too, gazing at my father, at this white-haired, blue-eyed old man. He was the one I hated, not my wife. I asked my father for money. A lot of money. He should have asked why, but he did not give me that. He
did not ask, Why do you come in the middle of the night, wake me up, and demand money? He bit his lip, turned his face to the wall, and did not reply. The servant, who had retreated as far as the door, was silent too. He yawned discreetly. My father yawned openly.

At last he was sufficiently lucid. He turned to me, eyeing me as though I were an adolescent son asking him for money to meet paltry obligations. With his scrawny hand he fumbled on the night table, where loose change lay next to an old pocket watch. Finally I lost patience. I ordered the servant to run down and pay the cabdriver, thus leaving me alone with my father. I sat on the edge of his bed. My father ran his fingers through his snow-white, still thick hair, then wrapped his long, gaunt body more tightly in the bedclothes, rolled over again, a little closer to the wall, as though avoiding contact with my coat. And yet he knew nothing! Had he always been so observant, such a good judge of character? I took a carafe of water from the night table, poured out a glass. I put it in front of me without drinking from it. My father looked surprised, but still said nothing. Was he half asleep even now? How was it that an old man slept as soundly as a child? But he had to wake up eventually. I gave him the full glass. I made him drink it, and only now did he come to full awareness and take fright.

I will never forget what happened then.

But just the fact of it. My motive, what drove me to do it, that had become inexplicable to me even five minutes later, and five minutes earlier I had had no premonition.

It arrived like a shot from a pistol, or, to use a more topical expression, from a Pravaz syringe, or like a torpedo from a submarine, or like a poison gas bomb out of a clear sky. I torpedoed the old man with a brief report of the incident. This “torpedo,” the response to another
that had been launched fifteen years earlier, had an incredible effect. As an experimental dog, unprepared by anesthesia, howls when its peritoneum is opened with a neat incision, so my father began to howl. Only not so loudly. But so horribly that I immediately held his lips shut. At first he bit into the ball of my thumb, but then he understood the necessity of his silence and frantically held my hand more tightly against his flaccid lips and his silky, warm mustache.