Beware of Pity (13 page)

So I arrived next day earlier than usual, after specially
requesting
extra leave of absence. This time Ilona received me on her own. The doctor from Vienna had come, she told me, he was now with Edith, and today he seemed to be giving her a particularly thorough examination. He had already been here for two and a half hours, and afterwards Edith would probably be too tired to join us, so I would have to make do with only her, Ilona’s, company—that was to say, she added, if I had nothing better to do.

This remark told me, to my delight (for sharing a secret with only one other person always flatters one’s vanity) that Kekesfalva had not said anything about our agreement to Ilona. However, I did not let my gratification show. We passed the time playing chess until, after quite a long time, I heard the footsteps I had been impatiently awaiting in the next room.
At last Kekesfalva and Dr Condor came in. They were in the middle of animated conversation, and I had to exert great self-control not to show a certain consternation, for my first impression of this Dr Condor was a great disappointment. Whenever we meet someone after hearing many interesting things about him, the imagination goes to work conjuring up a visual image in advance, recklessly lavishing romantic notions culled from memory on the stranger. In imagining a brilliant doctor such as Kekesfalva had described, I had resorted to the usual physical features that an average theatrical director and make-up artiste would use to present such a physician on stage: an intellectual face, a sharp and penetrating eye, elegant
bearing,
sparkling and witty conversation—we always fall hopelessly prey to the delusion that nature endows the particularly gifted with a particularly striking appearance. I felt a painful jolt of surprise, then, when I found myself unexpectedly bowing to a stocky, rather stout gentleman, short-sighted and with a bald patch, wearing a crumpled grey suit dusted with cigarette ash and with his tie carelessly arranged. Instead of the keen
diagnostic
gaze I had expected, a casual and rather sleepy glance was turned on me from behind cheap, steel-rimmed pince-nez. Even before Kekesfalva had introduced me, Condor was
offering
me a small, moist hand, and then he turned straight to the table where all the equipment for smoking stood to light a cigarette. He stretched, almost lazily.

“Well, there we are. And I might as well confess at once, my dear friend, that I’m hungry as a hunter and would be glad if we could have something to eat soon. If it’s too early for dinner, maybe Josef could find me something to nibble—a sandwich, whatever’s available.” Then, sinking at his ease into an armchair, he added, “I always forget that there’s no dining
car on the afternoon express … yet another instance of typical Austrian inefficiency.” Then he interrupted himself with an “Ah, excellent!” as the manservant came through the double doors of the dining room. “And my regards to your cook as well. What with all the chasing around I never managed to snatch any lunch today.”

As he spoke he went over to the table, sat down without waiting for the rest of us, tucked his napkin into his neck and began drinking soup—rather too noisily for my liking. He did not say another word to either Kekesfalva or me during this urgent operation. There seemed to be nothing on his mind but the food, and at the same time his short-sighted eyes were turned to the wine bottle.

“Excellent—a fine Szamorodni Tokay, the ’ninety-seven
vintage
too! I remember that from last time. It’s worth rattling out here on the train for your Tokay alone! No, Josef, don’t pour it yet. I’ll take a glass of beer first … yes, thank you.”

Emptying the glass of beer at a single draught, he began helping himself lavishly from the dish quickly served up, and then slowly munched with relish. As he seemed to be
ignoring
the rest of us, I had plenty of time to observe him from one side as he feasted. Disappointed, I saw that this man, so enthusiastically praised to me, had the most ordinary, fleshy face imaginable, like a full moon pitted with little dimples and craters, a potato-shaped nose, a double chin, ruddy cheeks with a dark five o’clock shadow, a short, thick neck—exactly the sort of man known in Viennese dialect as a
Sumper,
a jovial, outspoken
bon viveur.
He sat there eating at his leisure in exactly the
Sumper
way, his waistcoat creased and half unbuttoned, and gradually the ponderous persistence of his munching came to irritate me—perhaps because I remembered how very civil to
me the Lieutenant Colonel and the sugar manufacturer had been at this same table, or perhaps because I rather doubted whether a man who ate and drank so copiously, holding his wine up to the light before gulping it and smacking his lips, would be able to give me a precise answer to such a discreet question as I had to ask.

“Well, and what’s the local news here? How does the harvest look? Not too dry these last few weeks, not too hot? I read something about that in the paper. And what about the
factory?
Are you members of the sugar cartel putting up the price again?” Condor sometimes interrupted his rapid chewing and munching with such casual and, I may say, nonchalant questions, queries that called for no real answer. He appeared to overlook my presence entirely. I had heard a good deal before about the typical offhand manner of medical men, but I began to feel a certain anger in the company of this coarse if well-meaning physician. In my annoyance, I said not a word.

However, he was not in the least disturbed by our presence, and when we finally moved into the salon, where black coffee was waiting ready for us, he sat down with a grunt of pleasure in, of all places, Edith’s armchair, which was fitted with all kinds of special comforts like a swivelling bookcase and ashtrays, and had adjustable arms. Annoyance makes one sharp-sighted as well as bad-tempered, and I could not help noticing with a
certain
satisfaction, as he lolled there at his ease, that his legs were short, with socks flopping around his ankles, and his paunch was flabby. To demonstrate how disinclined I was to get to know him any better, I moved my chair so that my back was turned to him. However, he seemed entirely indifferent to my ostentatious silence and the nervous way old Kekesfalva kept pacing around the room and plying him with cigars, matches
and cognac. Condor helped himself to no fewer than three expensive imported cigars from the box, placing two in reserve beside his coffee cup. Well as the deep chair fitted itself to his form, it still did not seem to be comfortable enough for him. He shifted and fidgeted about until he had found the best position in it. Only when he had drunk his second cup of coffee did he sigh with satisfaction, like an animal that has eaten its fill. Repellent, I told myself, repellent. Then he suddenly stretched out his legs and cast Kekesfalva an ironic glance.

“Well, St Laurence, on tenterhooks there on your gridiron? I suppose you won’t let me enjoy my good cigar because you can’t wait for me to deliver my report! But you know me by now, you know I don’t like to mix medicine and mealtimes—and I really was too hungry and too tired. I’ve been on my feet since seven-thirty this morning, and I felt as if my head and my stomach were both left drained dry. Well now”—here he drew slowly on his cigar, blowing rings of grey smoke—“well now, my dear friend, let’s get to the nub of it! Everything is going very well. Walking exercises, stretching exercises, she’s doing just as she should. Perhaps there’s a very, very slight improvement compared to last time. As I say, we can be satisfied. Only”—and he drew on the cigar again—“only in her general state of mind … in what you might call the psychological side of her … I thought that today … please don’t be alarmed, my dear friend … I thought she was rather different today.”

In spite of Condor’s warning Kekesfalva looked very alarmed indeed. The spoon he was holding in his hand began to tremble.

“Different? What do you mean? Different in what way?”

“Well, different means different … I didn’t say worse, my dear friend. Impute nothing to me and infer nothing from what I say, in the words of the great Goethe. Just now I don’t know
myself exactly what’s the matter with her, but … but there’s something wrong.”

The old man was still holding the spoon, and clearly didn’t have the strength to put it down.

“What …
what
is wrong?”

Dr Condor scratched his head. “I wish I knew! Anyway, don’t worry. We are speaking in purely academic terms, with no beating about the bush, so let me say again, straight out—it’s nothing in her illness that has changed, it’s something in herself. Something was the matter with her today, and I don’t know what. For the first time I had a feeling that she was somehow evading me.” He drew on the cigar again, and then glanced once more at Kekesfalva with his quick-moving little eyes. “You know it’s best for us to go about this perfectly honestly. We have no need to pretend to each other, we can show our cards. Well … my dear friend, please tell me clearly and honestly, have you, in your eternal impatience, consulted another doctor? Has someone else been examining or treating Edith since I last saw her?”

Kekesfalva reacted as if he had been accused of some
monstrous
crime. “For God’s sake, doctor, I swear on my child’s life—”

“Yes, well, never mind swearing,” Condor quickly interrupted him. “I believe you without that. So that was my question—peccavi! I was wide of the mark—a wrong diagnosis, anyone can make one, however academically distinguished. Stupid of me … and yet I could have sworn that … Well, then it must be something else. Strange, though, very strange. May I? … ” He poured himself a third cup of black coffee.

“Yes, but what is it about her? What’s different? What do you think it is?” the old man stammered. His lips were dry.

“My dear friend, you really do make it hard for me. There’s nothing for you to worry about, I give you my word on that again, my word of honour. If there were the prospect of
anything
serious, you surely don’t think I’d say so in front of a stranger … forgive me, Lieutenant Hofmiller, I don’t mean to be unfriendly, it’s just that … well, I wouldn’t talk about it from this chair while drinking your good cognac, my friend, and it really is excellent.”

He leant back again, and closed his eyes for a moment.

“Yes, it’s hard to say off the cuff just what’s different in her, because it lies at the upper or lower limit of what can be put into words. But if I suspected at first that some other doctor had been involved in treating her—and really I don’t think so now, Herr von Kekesfalva—then it was because for the first time communication between Edith and me wasn’t working properly today. We couldn’t make contact in the normal way … wait a minute, maybe I can put it more clearly. I mean, during treatment that lasts for any length of time a certain very distinct contact builds up inevitably between the doctor and his patient … it may even be going too far to call it a contact, a word that ultimately implies ‘touch’, and thus something physical. In that relationship confidence mingles in a curious way with distrust, working against each other, attraction and repulsion, and of course that mingling will be different from one occasion to the next—but we are used to that. Sometimes the patient seems different to the doctor, sometimes it’s the other way round. Sometimes the two of them can communicate with no more than a glance, sometimes they find themselves talking at cross purposes … yes, these oscillations are very strange; one can’t grasp them, let alone assess them. Perhaps a comparison will express it best, although there’s a risk that it will be only a rough
comparison. Well—let’s say that with a patient it’s as if, when you have been absent for a few days and you come back and go to your typewriter, it appears to work in exactly the same way as usual. But all the same, you feel, from a certain something you can’t quite pin down, that someone else has been using it while you were away. Or to take you as an example, Lieutenant Hofmiller, no doubt you can tell from the behaviour of your horse if another man has borrowed it for a couple of days. There’s something not quite right in the animal’s attitude, you have somehow lost perfect control over it, and probably you can’t say exactly why you notice that precisely because the
differences
are so infinitesimally small … I know these are very rough comparisons, for the relationship of a doctor to his patients is of course far more subtle. In fact, and I don’t mind telling you this, I would be in great difficulty if I were to try explaining exactly what has changed in Edith since the last time I saw her. But there’s something going on, something has changed in her, and it annoys me that I can’t work out what.”

“But how … how does this change show in her?” gasped Kekesfalva. I saw that none of what Condor said could reassure him, and there was a damp gleam on his forehead.

“How does it show? Well, in small things, in imponderables. I noticed as soon as we started the stretching exercises that she was resisting me. Before I could try really examining her she was in revolt. ‘Nonsense, it’s all just the same as usual,’ she said, but normally she would wait impatiently for me to say what I thought. And then, when I suggested certain exercises, she made stupid remarks such as, ‘Oh, that won’t do any good,’ or, ‘We won’t get anywhere like that.’ I’ll admit that such
comments
have no importance in themselves—they’re the result of petulance or nervous tension—but never before, my dear friend,
has Edith said anything like that to me. Well, perhaps it was just bad temper, the kind of thing that can happen to anyone.”

“But you didn’t find any change in her for the worse … did you?”

“How many times do I have to give you my word of honour? If the least little thing were wrong, I would be as anxious a physician as you are a father, and as you can see I am not in the least anxious. On the contrary, I’m not at all displeased to find her putting up resistance to me. Admittedly your little daughter is acting more irritably, with more recalcitrance and impatience than a few weeks ago—and she’s probably giving you a hard time of it as well. But on the other hand, such rebellion indicates a certain strengthening of her will to live and get better—the more strongly and normally an organism begins to function, the more determined it is, of course, to be finally done with its infirmity. Believe me, we doctors are by no means as happy with our ‘good’, docile patients as you may think. They’re the ones who do least to help themselves. We can only rejoice to find a patient putting up energetic, even angry resistance, because curiously enough this apparently senseless reaction sometimes has a more beneficial effect than any of the medicines we, in our wisdom, prescribe. So let me repeat, I am not at all worried. If we were to try a new course of treatment for her now, for instance, we could expect her to make every effort to co-operate. Indeed, perhaps this would be the right moment to call on the psychological forces that play such a large part in her case. I don’t know,” he added, raising his head and looking at us, “whether you entirely understand what I mean.”