Authors: Stefan Zweig
“It’s getting late, so I won’t tell you in detail about his
adoration
of his child; After all, it was understandable, for the little girl grew to be enchanting, a truly elfin creature in those years, slender, light-footed, with a bright, friendly smile for everyone in her grey eyes. She had inherited her mother’s shy and gentle nature, her father’s keen intellect. She blossomed, she was
clearminded
and lovable, and wonderfully natural in her manner, as only children are who have never known the harsh, hostile side of life. And only if you understand the spell she cast on her father, who had never dared to hope that such a merry, friendly being could spring from his own dark and melancholy blood, can you really assess his desperation when the second disaster happened. He could not, would not grasp the fact—and indeed, he still can’t—that his daughter, of all children, was to remain afflicted and crippled. I really shrink from telling you all the foolish things he did in his wild desperation. He drives all the doctors in the world to despair with his insistence, he
tries, as it were, to force us to cure her at once by naming sums beyond all reason. I’ll say no more about his telephone calls to me every other day for no reason at all except to give vent to his headlong impatience, but recently a colleague told me in confidence that the old man sits among the students in the University Library every week, clumsily copying out all the
difficult
technical terms from the encyclopaedia, and then he goes through medical textbooks in the confused hope that he himself might discover something that we doctors have overlooked or forgotten. I’ve had it reported to me by other people—you may smile, but this lunacy allows us to guess at the strength of his passion—that he has promised both the synagogue and the pastor of the local church large sums as donations, not being sure himself which God he should turn to—the God of his fathers whom he abandoned, or his new God, and tormented by the terrible fear that he has spoilt his chances with one or the other of them he has sworn to worship both.
“However, I’m sure you can see that I’m not telling you these details, verging as they do on the ridiculous, out of a liking for gossip. I just want you to understand what someone who
listens
to him means to that afflicted, desperate, annihilated man, someone who makes him feel that he understands his pain, or at least
wants
to understand it. I know how difficult he makes it with his obstinacy, his egocentric obsession, as if nothing in this world, which is full to the brim with unhappiness anyway, exists but his own and his child’s misfortune. But now of all times he needs a friend who won’t let him down, now that his utter helplessness is beginning to make him ill himself, and you are
really
—I mean it, Lieutenant, really—doing a good deed by taking a little of your youth, your vitality, your easy manner into that tragic house. That is the only reason, my one concern
in case others might lead you astray, why I have perhaps told you more about his private life than I can really answer for. But I think I can count on you to keep everything I have told you strictly private between the two of us.’
“Of course,” I said automatically. Those were the first words to pass my lips during his entire account. I was feeling numbed—not just by the surprising revelations that turned my ideas of Kekesfalva inside out like a glove; at the same time I was also dismayed by my own short-sighted folly. Had I still been going through the world with such a superficial view of it in my twenty-fifth year? As a daily guest in that house for weeks, and bemused by my own sense of sympathy, had I never ventured, out of some stupid notion of discretion, to ask either about Edith’s disorder itself or about her mother, who was obviously sorely missed in that household? Had I never asked where that strange man Kekesfalva’s wealth came from? How could I have missed seeing that those hooded, almond-shaped, melancholy eyes were not the eyes of a Hungarian aristocrat, but of a member of the Jewish race, made keener and at the same time weary by a thousand years of tragic struggle? How had I failed to see that very different elements mingled in Edith, how had I not recognised that something in that house must be under the spell of past events? Like lightning, a whole series of details now belatedly occurred to me—the coldness with which our colonel had once responded to Kekesfalva’s greeting when they met, a mere two fingers half lifted to his cap? Or how my comrades at the table in the café had spoken of him as “that old Manichaean”? It was like having a curtain suddenly drawn back in a dark room, when the sun shines in your eyes so suddenly that they see a crimson blur, and your senses reel in that excess of unbearable radiance.
As if he had guessed what was going on in my mind, Condor leant towards me. Very much the doctor now, he laid his small, soft hand reassuringly on mine.
“Of course you weren’t to know about that, Lieutenant Hofmiller, how could you? You’ve grown up in a self-enclosed, secluded world, and what’s more you are at that happy age when you haven’t yet learnt to regard anything unusual with initial suspicion. Believe me when I say, as an older man, that there is nothing to feel ashamed of in being deceived from time to time in your life. Indeed, it’s a mercy not to have developed the sharp, diagnostic eye that suspects ulterior motives, and to begin by approaching everyone and everything with goodwill. Otherwise you would never have been able to help that old man and his poor sick child so much! No, don’t wonder at yourself and above all don’t feel ashamed—your good instincts led you to do exactly the right thing!”
He tossed the butt of his cigar into a corner, stretched, and pushed his chair back. “And now, I think, it’s time I was on my way.”
I stood up too when he did, although I still felt rather unsteady on my legs. For something strange was happening to me. I was extremely agitated, and indeed my perception was more alert than usual after hearing so much that was surprising, but at the same time I had a dull, sinking feeling in some part of myself. I clearly remembered that in the middle of his story I had wanted to ask Condor something, but I had not had the presence of mind to interrupt him. Yes, there was some detail that I wanted to ask at a particular point, and now that I had the opportunity to put questions I couldn’t remember what it was. It must have been swept away by my emotions as I listened. In vain I groped my way back through the intricate course of
Condor’s narrative—it was like feeling a very distinct pain in some part of the body without being able to pinpoint its exact location. As we walked out of the now half-empty wine bar, I was concentrating entirely on my efforts to remember.
We stepped outside the door, and Condor looked up. “Aha,” he said, with a certain satisfaction, “I thought so all along. That moonlight was too bright for my liking. There’s a storm about to break, and a violent one. We’d better hurry up.”
He was right. The air among the sleeping houses was very close and sultry; but dark clouds, heavy with rain, were chasing over the sky from the east, from time to time partly covering the now dull, yellowish moon. Half of the firmament overhead was already entirely dark, its black, compact, metallic mass moving on like a giant tortoise, with flashes of distant lightning darting over it now and then, and at each lighting bolt something growled almost reluctantly in the background, like an animal provoked.
“It’ll break in half-an-hour’s time,” was Condor’s diagnosis. “I for one shall get to the station in the dry, but you’d better turn back, Lieutenant, or you’ll be drenched to the skin.”
But I vaguely knew that I still had something to ask him, although I couldn’t say what it was; my memory of it was submerged in sombre black like the moon overhead in the storm clouds. I still felt that indistinct idea throbbing in my brain, like a persistent and restless pain.
“No, I’ll risk it,” I replied.
“Then let’s hurry! The faster we walk the better—my legs are stiff from sitting so long.”
His legs were stiff—that was the reminder I needed! Bright light immediately flooded my mind. All at once I knew what I had wanted to ask him earlier, what I
had
to ask him. It was my
mission, or rather the mission that Kekesfalva had given me. All this time my unconscious mind had probably been
brooding
on his question—could Edith recover from her paralysis or not? And now I must ask it. So as we walked along the deserted streets I began, rather tentatively.
“Forgive me, doctor … of course everything you told me was very interesting … I mean very important to me … But I’m sure you will understand that there’s something else I want to ask you, something that has been troubling me for a long time and … and well, you’re her doctor. You know her case better than anyone else … I’m a layman, I have no real idea about it … and I would very much like to know what you really think of it. I mean, is Edith’s paralysis just a passing phase, or is it incurable?”
Condor looked up sharply, with a single abrupt movement. His pince-nez were glittering, and I instinctively shrank from his keen gaze. It went through me like a knife. Did he somehow suspect that Kekesfalva had put me up to asking? Had he worked out what had happened? But then he lowered his head again, and without interrupting his swift pace, in fact even quickening it, he growled, “Of course! I ought to have been prepared for this. That’s what it always comes down to. Curable or incurable, black or white. As if it were so simple! Even ‘healthy’ and ‘sick’ are two words that a good doctor can’t really use with a clear conscience, because where does sickness begin and where does health end? As for ‘curable’ and ‘incurable’ … well, of course those two expressions are extremely common, and medical practice can’t do without them. But you will never get me to say that something is incurable. Never! I know that the cleverest man of the last century, Nietzsche, came up with the terrible maxim that a
doctor should never attempt to treat the incurable, but that is probably the most misleading of all the paradoxical and dangerous precepts that he left us to unravel. Precisely the opposite is true—the incurable, above all, are the patients whom a doctor ought to treat. What’s more, it’s in his treatment of the incurable that a doctor shows what he is really worth. It’s a dereliction of duty for him to accept the term ‘incurable’ from the start. He’s surrendering before the battle has even begun. Of course I know that it is simpler, a useful shorthand, to say that certain cases are downright ‘incurable’, turning away with an expression of resignation after pocketing your fee for the consultation—yes, it’s very comfortable and lucrative to concentrate entirely on the cases that are known to be curable, where you can look up the therapy on page such-and-such of a medical manual. I’ll leave that to the quacks who enjoy it. Personally, I consider it as pitiful an achievement as for a poet just to want to repeat what’s been well said already, instead of trying to find words for what is still unsaid, or indeed is beyond normal verbal expression. Or for a philosopher to explain, for the ninety-ninth time, some recognised truth known for years, rather than looking for ways to express what isn’t known or is unknowable. ‘Incurable’ is only a relative term, not absolute; incurable cases in medicine, a field where progress is always being made, occur only in the present moment, in the context of our own time, of what we know so far—I mean within our limited, opinionated worm’s-eye view. But our own view is not all that matters. In a hundred cases where we see no
possibility
of a cure today—even though our knowledge is making huge strides—one may be discovered tomorrow or the next day, discovered or devised. So kindly take note”—he said this angrily, as if I had offended him—“as I see it, there are no
incurable illnesses. On principle I will never give up hope for a patient, and no one will ever get me to say a case is incurable. The most I would ever say, even in the most desperate cases, is that an illness cannot
yet
be cured—cannot be cured, I mean, by medicine in its present state.”
Condor was striding along so vigorously that I had difficulty in keeping up with him. But suddenly he slowed down.
“Perhaps I’m putting this in too complex and abstract a way. These things are hard to explain between a drink in the bar and the railway station. But maybe an example will illustrate what I mean better—incidentally, it is a very personal and a very painful example. Twenty-two years ago I was a young medical student, about the age you are today, and I had just started my second year. Then my father, until then a strong, perfectly healthy and tirelessly active man whom I loved and honoured enormously, fell ill. The doctors diagnosed diabetes. You probably know that diabetes is one of the most cruel and insidious diseases that a man can contract. For no apparent reason the organism stops processing nourishment, it no longer conveys fat and sugar to the body, and the victim in effect starves—it’s a living death. I will spare you the details; they wrecked three years of my own youth.
“Now, listen—at the time medical science had no cure at all for diabetes. Patients were put on a strict diet, every gram was weighed, every sip of liquid measured, but the doctors knew—and of course as a medical student I knew too—that they were only postponing the inevitable end, that those two or three years meant terrible decline, starvation in the middle of a world full of food and drink. You can imagine how I, as a student and a future doctor, went from one authority to another at the time, how I studied the textbooks and specialist
works. But wherever I went the reply, spoken or written, was that the disease was incurable—a word that I will not tolerate today. And I have hated that word ever since, because I had to stand by and watch the man I loved more than any other on earth die miserably, like a dumb animal, and there was nothing I could do about it. He died, in fact, three months before I qualified.
“And now, pay attention—a few days ago we members of the Medical Society heard a lecture by one of our leading biochemists, who told us that in America and the laboratories of several other countries, experiments have gone a long way towards finding a glandular extract to treat diabetes. He said it was certain that the disease would be defeated within a decade. Well, you can imagine how moved I was by the thought that at the time of my father’s illness a few hundred grams of that substance might have kept the man I loved more than anyone in the world from the torment of his death, or we could at least have
hoped
to save and cure him. You must understand how the verdict ‘incurable’ embittered me at the time—I had dreamt day and night that some treatment for it could, should be found, that someone would succeed in finding it, maybe I myself. At the time when I was at university, we students were expressly warned in a printed leaflet against syphilis, which was described as incurable. And now it can be cured. So Nietzsche, Schumann and Schubert and who knows how many more of its tragic victims did not die of an ‘incurable’ illness, they died of an illness that was
not yet curable
at the time. They died prematurely in both senses, if you like to put it that way. And look at all the new, unhoped-for, fantastic developments we doctors hear about daily—developments that were unthinkable yesterday! So every time I am faced with a case that has made
others turn away, shrugging their shoulders, I feel anger in my heart because I do not yet know the treatment for it that may come tomorrow or the next day, something still unknown—and I also feel hope—perhaps you will find it, I tell myself, perhaps someone will find it just in time for this patient, at the very last moment. Everything is possible, even the impossible—because where in our present state of knowledge we find ourselves facing barred doors, another door has often unexpectedly opened behind us. Where our methods fail, we must just try to find a new method, and where medical science won’t help us there’s always the possibility of a miracle—and yes, genuine miracles do still happen today in medicine. Miracles in the glare of bright electric light, in defiance of all logic and experience, and sometimes you can even prod them into happening. Do you think I’d be pestering that girl and letting her pester me if I didn’t hope for a considerable improvement in her in the end? Hers is a difficult case, I admit, full of setbacks. For years I’ve been unable to make as much progress as I would like. And yet, and yet, I am not giving her up.”