Georg Letham (9 page)

But I didn't settle down, I couldn't. Bottled up within me were all sorts of things that are hard to put into words, I was driven to give vent to my hopelessness, impotently now, yes, I was a thousand times more impotent now than I had ever been! I shouted till I was hoarse and physically could not shout, only croak; only the truly raving mad had the hang of yelling all night without hoarseness. I, who had just confessed to having feigned madness, destroyed everything I could get my hands on. That was not much. Only my blankets, woolen, not too thin, had to go. I bit into them, tore off shreds with my teeth, at that time still in fine fettle, the primitive needs of the body made themselves felt–and I–I don't want to say it, any more than I have been able so far to describe specifically, in detail, the moment of my crime, I will only suggest that that morning I committed all the bestial depravities that I had heard described in paralytics as part of the lecture course on mental illnesses that I had taken as a young student. In others–and now I was seeing them, I was experiencing them in myself! My revulsion, in what lucid faculties I had left, against this animalistic raving, can scarcely be expressed, be communicated, in simple language. For one who has experienced this, the prospect of a quick punishment cutting things short, such as execution, will no longer seem so awful.

That terrible night and the next morning were a further step in the
toughening process that my father had begun more than twenty years before. And it was me giving myself the lesson! To the staff–as in all such institutions, the staff was vastly overworked and jaded, had become cynical and dehumanized (and very likely had to be)–to them my case was clear. I had after all previously reported that I was of sound mind! I was no longer of interest.

Worn down and broken down (like so many before me), I had given up my hunger strike. I was therefore taken off the list of those who had to be fed through a rubber stomach tube. I had talked reasonably, and I no longer had to be given a shot of scopolamine in the evening. If I raged now, it was for my own pleasure. I attracted not a smidgen more interest than a dog in my laboratory attracts when it spins in circles behind the iron bars of its cage, howls frenziedly, and (after the experiment is over) tears the dressing off its wound. Thus do all things return in this short life! What would not return given an eternity!

I had had my father notified. He had been the one to suggest to me–not personally, through my defense counsel–that I be portrayed as mentally ill. In the interim he had requested retirement. The request was still pending, but he was supposed to be indispensable, irreplaceable. Now he had withdrawn from the world (though he was still continuously, without respite, pestered by newspapers greedy for novelty and sensation). Perhaps, in his rooms stuffed with art treasures and precious natural history specimens, he spent nights as sleepless and anguished as my own. All that is as may be, it may be that, his health weakened, a broken old man, he no longer felt strong enough to see me. He did not come.

My elder brother did come (evidently my father had only now given
him permission, for what could have stood in the way of his visiting me long before?). He was frightened out of his wits when he saw me the morning after my “recovery,” almost completely naked, smeared with my own excrement, starved to the bone. He had me moved to another cell. He was extraordinarily energetic (energy, the only thing he inherited from our father–and yet it was not the same implacable force of will) in arranging to be left with me day and night until I had regained a semblance of human appearance and understanding.

We had never been close before. He was a normal sort, the kind that come a dime a dozen, but here he mattered more to me than all of human society.

For the first time in years, I spent hours in conversation–no, they were something other than “conversations,” they were meetings of minds, communions of souls, using the medium of words and simple human contact. If it can be said that I was in any way up to life again after that, I owe it to him. Let it be said to his credit, to the credit of mankind generally.

But I was far from being the person I had been before my crime.

I returned to prison from the observation unit.

During this entire period, that is, after I returned to prison and before my trial, I labored under a mental and spiritual paralysis. Past kept to a minimum, future to nothing, the main thing was the present, the moment. Possibly the life I was now compelled to lead was what caused this paralysis. Only things I could perceive directly concerned me–what I heard from adjoining cells, what filled the hours of the day for me and the others, what kind of food I was given, how I passed the
nights, what visits I was permitted to receive, what my brother brought me, etc., etc.

One day my brother gave me some flowers, highly cultivated sweet peas, if I remember correctly. Formerly any kind of aesthetic beauty had enchanted me, I was a slave to the beautiful, the perfect, the unspoiled, as though under a spell–which may not be believable in view of my marriage and my profession, but so it was. Now, although the pale red flowers with their silken or creamy sheen aroused my interest, it was in quite a different way. I began to lay them out flat, to mount them using the pins from the tissue-paper wrapping, then to carefully dissect them, anatomize them, employing, for lack of a knife, the long nail of my right little finger, for which purpose I had given it an edge and a point as sharp as possible by honing it on the wall during my conversation with my brother, as he looked on in astonishment.

The anatomy of the sweet-pea blossom and stalk, the remarkable arrangement of the plant's vessels (like an animal, a plant has vessels), with this I was able to occupy myself for hours. My attorney, who took turns with my brother in visiting me during these strange days, was farsighted, wore a monocle. I appropriated it and had in my possession a magnifying glass that was not half bad. Thus I spent an evening that was less dull and a night more tranquil than usual. This is just one example of the benefit my brother conferred upon me with his visits.

It was thus my brother, not my father, who succeeded in gradually ridding me of this derangement of sorts. It may be that immediately following my crime I needed a numbness of this kind in order to go on living at all.

But even now, in this less critical period, the idea of taking my life would not have appeared exactly absurd to me, and I believe there can
be few lawbreakers who would recoil categorically from such a thought. More than one murderer or burglar or sex criminal would voluntarily put a painless end to his life if it were made sufficiently easy for him to do so. If gas valves were left within reach in the cells, so-called justice would be spared a good deal of effort, effort that is often very unproductive. But there can be no hope of such a happy solution immediately following the sudden change of feeling at the peak moment of the act itself. Later comes that stage focused on the present moment–that horribly passive, neutered, emasculated existence in the cell, which I now had behind me. And then at last comes the period of reawakening, of putting on the new man. And this “new man” now understands the awful turn that fate has taken and would be only too glad to exempt himself from its inescapable dictates.

This is of interest from the standpoint of so-called justice. During the trial, all the delinquent moments in a life will dramatically unfold once again. The crime will be committed
again
in the mind's eye. It will not be buried, even if justice finds itself played for a fool when the prisoner hangs himself before he can be tried! The crime will be resurrected, by the perpetrator's confession, his identification of himself, even his lack of contrition. And then, only then, as consolation for everyone else, comes the expiation, the neutralization of the crime, the “practical repentance” that is thought to be the proper punishment of the broken sinner.

My brother (I cannot repeat it often enough, so that the illusions I had about him will be understood), it was my brother who brought me back to life. And, why should I deny it, he did me good. Too much good. I awaited his arrival with longing, I liked to hear his voice. It was late summer, still very warm, especially in the narrow cell, a small window
its only link to the outside world. He was perspiring, the philtrum in his upper lip, in the shadow of his somewhat stubby nose, filling up with crystalline beads of sweat that he wiped away with a self-conscious smile, stretching his broad shoulders and breathing deeply. On his brow, which was not exactly lofty, grew a great many tiny golden blond hairs (I had never noticed them before, and yet he had certainly had this peculiarity from childhood), coming to a little point at the bottom, a fairly dense down that, especially in a raking light, glinted metallically like mature crops in the distance. His teeth, which he revealed when he laughed (
he
still laughed, though now only rarely when he was with me!), were strong, with little gaps between them, yellowish white, short; the healthy bright red gums were broad. He wore his dark blond hair combed up
en brosse
.

But he already had lines on his forehead, quite deep ones, just below the downy little blond hairs. They were not worry lines, though. He said they came from spending every free moment outside with his wife and kids, preferably in the blazing sun. Knitting his eyebrows there had made the wrinkles carve themselves deeply between his eyes above the bridge of his nose, much too deeply for his age. I saw them when we sat together reading, bent over a book or a newspaper. Both of us silent and full of cares.

Was it any wonder? He must have known what it was to worry about putting food on the table, and not just by hearsay, given his low earnings and his rapidly growing family. My brother had as little money as I did. The fourth child was on the way. My father only laughed. No one would get any money from him before his death, he said. That way he could make his children do what he wanted.

My brother was often gloomy. The worry that his wife might work
herself into such a state over my trial that she “deteriorated,” that is, lost the child through miscarriage, preoccupied him more than he let on.

One day I had been discussing my case with my attorney for more than an hour. My attorney too lived in a present-tense delirium, if I may put it that way: neither past nor future events interested him except insofar as they bore on the present situation, on the pending trial in my case, and thus also on his reputation as a “legendary” criminal defender.

Thus he simply accepted the facts as the basis for his work, which very much facilitated our relations. He asked neither too much nor too little. He did not probe, nor provoke me. He was uninterested in my crime, did not pry into its psychological motives, but spoke only of the impression that the facts must make on the court and the jury–in a word, he was more a journalist concerned with current events than a philosopher concerned with the eternal, more a dispassionate natural scientist studying a pathological character than an interpreter and arbiter of a legal principle that had been violated. Unlike everyone else, he viewed my situation as by no means hopeless.

My brother often pestered me with stupid questions: For God's sake, how could you . . . someone like you! etc. All that was missing was for him to discover in me, as my feebleminded senile patient once had, a “loving heart.” Thus he was mistaken about me. But was I, neither feebleminded nor senile as I was, not equally mistaken about him?

Only the attorney was unsurprised by anyone or anything. Since the thing had happened, it had had to happen. Facts = law, reality = necessity. As he saw it, my wife's death could be presented to the jury, men of modest intellect, as due to gross negligence on my part. In an unaccountable oversight, I had–on this basis he constructed his
system, his plan–administered a second injection to my wife instead of the desired analgesic; in the dark, the excitement, I had made a mistake. Hence my panicky behavior afterward. As he would have it, I had always been a poor physician and had neglected my practice for good reason–the less I did as a physician, the more I was a benefactor of mankind. I had just made a tragic “mistake.”

He thought anything was possible. I thought that only what had actually occurred was possible. The facts
had
to have a meaning, if only a terrible one. Whatever had produced the consequences that had in turn become efficient causes. But he was counting on my instinct of self-preservation. Inserting his (my) monocle thoughtfully, he told me he had never been wrong. In order to save myself, I would play before the court the remorseful offender breaking down on the stand, the clumsy doctor whose dear wife had suffered from his blunder.

A man whose neck was on the line would take the initiative and do everything humanly possible to avoid the death sentence, would he not? What could be more natural? I owe the reader an explanation, but now I want to discuss some other debts–claims by my old creditors for comparatively large sums, but also comparatively small bills for the rent of our apartment, my poor wife's burial, the plot in the churchyard, other routine amounts for servants' wages, for electricity, telephone service, etc.

My father no longer wanted to be my father. Son-in-law and daughter-in-law did not come through with a penny. They could not be forced to.

The office of my Herr Attorney for the Defense received monthly bills from the Pathology Institute for the upkeep of experimental animals. One evening, when the attorney had gone and my brother appeared (thanks to my name and my former social position, I had far
more extensive visitation rights than most), I offered the good man my experimental animals–guinea pigs, puppy dogs, and some few goats and monkeys–as a small private menagerie for his boys. How his face lit up at my thoughtful gesture! Never before had I accorded my nephews the slightest thing in the way of a gift. But then he had concerns about the danger of infection and the maintenance costs. We gave the animals to the city zoo. He seemed happy to have snatched them from a death by vivisection. He had a good nature. How he could laugh now, sharing the optimism of the attorney, even here–even with me there! It was infectious and he made me happy for a moment. I imitated his laughter–and that made him laugh even more. That evening (autumn was already approaching) I did not dissect his flowers. Later the night was peaceful and my sleep deep.