Beware of Pity (27 page)

“But … but you yourself think there could be a considerable improvement …”

“Certainly—at first we would get a good way forward. Women always react astonishingly well to feelings and illusions. All the same, think of the situation in a few months’ time when what we call her psychological forces are exhausted, the will she has wound up to such a high pitch is used up, her passion spent, and still after weeks and weeks of tiring effort there is no cure, not the complete cure on which she now counts as a certainty. Please think of the catastrophic effect of that on a sensitive creature already consumed with impatience! We are not talking about a small improvement in this case, we are talking about something fundamental, of changing from the slow but sure method of patience to the bold and dangerous course of impatience! How is she ever to trust me again, or any other doctor or any other human being, if she sees that she has been deliberately deceived? Better the truth, then, cruel as it may seem; in medicine the knife is always the more merciful approach. We must not put this off! I could not be responsible, with a clear conscience, for
such an underhand act. Think about it yourself! Would you have the courage to do that, in my place?”

“Yes,” I replied without thinking, and instantly took fright at my quick reply. “I mean …” I added cautiously, “I wouldn’t confess the whole thing to her until she has at least made
some
progress … forgive me, doctor, it sounds rather presumptuous of me, but you haven’t had a chance of seeing how much she needs something to help her, as I have recently … and yes, she must be told the truth … but only when she can bear it, not now, doctor, I beg you … not now, not at once.”

I hesitated, confused by the curiosity and astonishment in his eyes.

“Then when?” he asked. “And above all, who’s going to take the risk? An explanation will be necessary sometime, and disappointment will be a hundred times more dangerous then, indeed life-endangering. Would you really accept that responsibility?”

“Yes,” I said firmly (I think only the fear that otherwise I must go out to Kekesfalva with him at once gave me that sudden determination). “I’ll take the responsibility entirely on myself. I know for certain that it will help Edith enormously just now to be left for a while hoping for a full, final recovery. And then if it turns out necessary to explain that we … that I may have promised too much, I’ll admit it frankly, and I am sure she will understand everything.”

Condor was looking at me with a fixed stare. “Good
heavens
,” he finally murmured, “you expect a lot of yourself. And the odd thing about it is that you infect the rest of us with your belief in God’s goodness—first our friends out there, and now, I’m afraid, it’s affecting me too. Well, if you’re really ready to take the restoration of Edith’s mental equilibrium upon yourself should there be a crisis, then … then of course the whole
thing takes on a different complexion. Then perhaps we really might risk waiting a few days for her nerves to calm down … but when you give such pledges there’s no going back, Lieutenant. It’s my duty to warn you solemnly of that. We doctors are bound to point out all the possible dangers of any operation to those most closely concerned—and to promise a girl who’s been paralysed for so long that she will soon be entirely better is an operation to be undertaken as seriously as if you were performing it with a scalpel. So think hard about what you’re taking on yourself—it calls for enormous strength to restore the confidence of someone you have once deceived. I don’t like a lack of clarity. Before I abandon my original intention of telling the Kekesfalvas at once, and honestly, that Viennot’s method is impracticable in this case, and we must unfortunately ask them to show yet more patience, I have to know whether I can rely on you. Can I count on you absolutely not to let me down?”

“Absolutely!”

“Well and good, then.” Condor pushed his glass away from him abruptly. Neither of us had drunk a drop of the wine. “Or rather, I should say let’s hope it turns out well and good, because I’m not entirely happy about this procrastination. I’ll tell you here and now just how far I will go, and that’s not a step beyond the truth. I will suggest treatment at Engadine, but I will explain that the Viennot method has not been proven, and I will expressly emphasise that neither of them must expect miracles. If they cloud their minds with pointless hopes all the same, trusting you as they do, it will be up to you—I have your word—up to you to come clean in good time. It may be a bold venture on my part to trust you rather than my medical conscience—well, I will take that upon myself. After all, we both mean well by that poor sick girl.” Condor rose to his feet.
“As I said, I’m counting on you. If there should be some crisis arising from her disappointment, it’s to be hoped that your impatience will do more than my patience. So we will leave the poor child a few weeks of confidence! And if in that time we really do see some improvement in her, then it will be you and not I who helped her. There, that’s agreed. It’s high time to go; I’m expected out at the house.”

We left the inn. His carriage was standing ready for him outside. When he had climbed up, my lip trembled for a moment as if to call him back. But the horses were already setting off. The carriage, and with it something that could not be changed now, was set in motion.

Three hours later, I found a note on my table in the barracks, hastily written and brought by the Kekesfalvas’ chauffeur.

Odd for me to pick up that book on that particular night. I didn’t read much as a general rule, and the rickety bookshelf in my room in the barracks held only the six or eight military volumes of regimental rules and the army drill book—the alpha and omega of knowledge for us—along with some two dozen classic works that, without ever opening them, I had brought with me from military academy to every garrison where I was posted—perhaps just to give some look of containing personal possessions to the bleak, unfamiliar rooms where I was obliged to live. A few other books also lay around, poorly printed and badly bound volumes with half the pages still uncut, and I had come by these
books in a curious way. Sometimes a hunchbacked little hawker with deep-set, strangely melancholy eyes would come into our café, pressing his wares on us: notepaper, pencils and cheap, somewhat risqué books for which he hoped to find a market in our masculine, military circles: the amorous adventures of Casanova, the
Decameron
, the memoirs of a diva, or amusing tales of garrison life. Out of pity for him—and there I go, pity again!—and also, perhaps, in self-defence against his importunate sales talk, I had acquired three or four of these smutty, badly printed volumes, and then left them casually in my bookcase.

That evening, however, when I was both tired and overwrought, unable to sleep but also unable to think straight, and looking for reading matter to distract my mind and make me drowsy, I picked up the
Tales of a Thousand and One Nights
, hoping that those naive, vivid stories, which I vaguely remembered from childhood, would have the right narcotic effect on me. I lay down and began to read, in that state of near-somnolence when you feel almost too weary to turn the page, and if you come upon a couple of pages that happen to be still uncut you skip them for the sake of convenience. I read the opening story about Scheherazade and the Sultan with only part of my attention, then found myself reading on and on. And suddenly I was wide awake. I had come to the strange story of the young man who meets a lame old cripple on the road, and at that word “lame” I felt a sharp pang. Like a branding iron, the sudden association touched a nerve in me. In the story, the cripple calls out desperately to the youth, complaining that he can’t walk and asking if the young man will let him sit on his shoulders and carry him for a while. The young man is sorry for him—sorry, you fool, I wondered, why feel sorry for him? But sure enough, he helpfully bends down and takes the old man on his shoulders.

However, the apparently helpless old man is a djinn, a wicked magician, and as soon as he is on the young man’s shoulders he suddenly winds his bare, hairy legs firmly around his benefactor’s throat and cannot be thrown off. Mercilessly, he rides the helpful, sympathetic lad as if he were a horse, whipping him on without mercy or consideration, allowing him no rest. And the unfortunate youth has to carry him wherever he wants to go; he has no will of his own left. He is the slave of the evil enchanter, the steed that carries him, and although his knees are trembling and his lips dry, it is his fate to go on and on, the victim of his own pity, carrying the wicked, cunning old man on his back.

I stopped reading. My heart was thudding as if it would burst. For even as I read, I suddenly
saw
that strange, sly old man as if in a vision, at first lying on the ground and opening his tearful eyes to beg the sympathetic young man for help, and then I saw him riding on his victim’s back. The djinn had sparse white hair and wore gold-rimmed glasses. With the sudden lightning intuition that, in the normal way, can mingle and associate images and faces only in dreams, I had instinctively given the old man in the story Kekesfalva’s features, and suddenly I myself had become the djinn’s unhappy victim, whipped on and on. I even felt such physical pressure around my throat that my breath faltered. The book fell from my hands, I lay where I was, cold as ice, hearing my heart thud against my ribs as if they were made of hard wood. The grim huntsman chased me on and on in my sleep, going I didn’t know where. When I woke in the morning with my hair damp, I was as exhausted as if I had just been on a long journey.

Riding out with my comrades in the morning did me no good, although I carried out my military duties watchfully and meticulously. My usual walk up to the castle in the afternoon
did nothing to cheer me either—I still felt that sinister weight on my shoulders. Shaken as I was, I already realised that the responsibility now mine was not only new to me but impossibly difficult. On that night in front of the barracks when I had held out to the old man the prospect of a cure for his child in the near future, my exaggeration had been only a kindly meant white lie, uttered involuntarily and indeed reluctantly, not yet a conscious deception, not deliberately fraudulent. From now on, however, now that I knew no swift recovery was in fact to be expected, I had let myself in for cold, calculating, long-term dissembling. I must tell lies with an expression that gave nothing away, I must perjure myself like a hardened criminal who cleverly thinks out every detail of his crime in advance, weeks and months before committing it, as well as his defence against charges of guilt. For the first time I began to understand that you do not bring trouble on yourself so much through wickedness or brutality as—almost always—through sheer weakness.

Everything went just as I had feared at the Kekesfalvas’ villa. As soon as I stepped out on the terrace at the top of the tower I was enthusiastically welcomed. I had brought a few flowers, on purpose to divert attention from myself at first. But after Edith’s sudden cry of, “My goodness, why are you bringing me flowers? I’m not a prima donna!” I had to sit down beside the impatient girl, and she began to talk and talk, never stopping. She told her tale with a certain almost hallucinatory note in her voice. Dr Condor—“Oh, that extraordinary, that wonderful man!”—had given her new courage, she said. In ten days’ time they were going to a Swiss sanatorium in the Engadine valley—why delay another day, now that things were finally going to happen fast? She had always known that her malady had been attacked in the wrong way so far, that all those hydroelectric treatments and
massage and the stupid devices on her legs would never make her better on their own. Oh God, and it was high time for this, too, because twice, she said—adding that she had never told me this before—twice she had tried to put an end to her own life, but both times in vain. No one could live like this for ever, she said, never really alone for a single hour, always depending on others for everything she did and every move she made, with eyes always spying on her, always under supervision, and at the same time so oppressed by feeling that she was only a burden on everyone else, a nightmare, something not to be borne. Yes, it was time, high time, but I’d soon see what fast progress she made now that her disorder was going to be treated in the right way. What was the use of all those silly little improvements that never made her better in the end? If you weren’t perfectly healthy you weren’t healthy at all. Oh, how wonderful it was to look forward to that feeling, how wonderful …

This went on and on, a headlong, sparkling, ecstatic outpouring of words. I felt like a doctor listening to someone in fevered delirium and at the same time distrustfully feeling the patient’s racing pulse, that infallible metronome, because he knows that such feverish heat is the sure clinical evidence of mental disturbance. When high-spirited laughter broke like sea foam over the racing tide of her words, I shuddered, because I knew what she did not know—I knew that she was deceiving herself, I knew that we were deceiving her. When she stopped talking at last, I felt as if I were suddenly waking with a start in a night express train because the wheels had suddenly pulled up short. But she had only interrupted herself abruptly.

“So what do you say about that? Why do you just sit there looking so stupid—oh, I’m sorry, I mean so scared! Why don’t you say anything? Aren’t you pleased for me?”

I felt caught in a guilty act. Now or never I must strike the right, heartfelt note of enthusiasm. But I was only a novice liar, and a pitiful liar at that. I didn’t yet understand the art of deliberate deception. So I made an effort to cobble a few words together.

“How can you say such a thing? I’m just so surprised … surely you can understand that. Back at home in Vienna we always say that any delightful surprise leaves us speechless … and of course I’m very, very pleased for you.”