Georg Letham (11 page)

There were frequent rumors about our departure date, circulated by knocking on the walls. Everyone prepared feverishly, but for administrative reasons nothing happened.

Now, when we were all under the authority of a state institution, we saw the injustice of every action taken by it, its mindless belief that it always did the right thing, its sluggish pace in getting anything done, its dreary self-importance, the sloppiness of its bureaucracy. Yet it was still a model facility, and commissions from foreign countries visited the building and observed the inmates, took notes, tried to learn things. To us such a visit was always a sort of change and thus always a pleasure.

We all yearned for pleasure, even if it was just malicious pleasure. I felt strangely gratified, if I can put it that way, when I realized that I had acquired a strong sense of schadenfreude. It was clear that misery loved company in my case just because at bottom I couldn't care less about the suffering of others and was if anything elated by it. It comforted me! I would never have believed it of myself before, but there it was. Perhaps my total isolation had had its effect.

I speak of total isolation, but I mean only being separated from my father and especially from my brother, my last and most unfortunate love. Most people start there, but that is where I ended, or thought I had ended. My brother's withdrawal, his lapse into silence. If only I had heard from him, even the tiniest sign of life! I knew that the prisoners around me received letters, ones that were permitted and ones that had been smuggled in. Now and then I heard my neighbors being taken to the visiting rooms for fifteen-minute visiting periods, particularly when a trial date had been set. I was never summoned.

Never? No, I exaggerate. My attorney looked in on me one more time, that was all.

On one occasion one of my neighbors returned sobbing to his cell. I heard him throw himself onto the floor, howling dismally. This was not permitted. He had to get up at once. The turnkey on his rounds showed military strictness in making sure the prisoners lay down neither on the floor nor on the bed that was supposed to be folded up into the wall during the day. But this man must have received bad news from home. Had his child, his sweetheart, his best friend kicked the bucket? I don't know. I knocked, I signaled to beat the band, but he did not answer. There was no distracting him from his animal howling and rolling about on the floor. It put me in good spirits.

So there were still people who were more miserable than I. People who were not as hardened as my father's son. Abruptly I thought of my brother. What could be the reason for his terrible silence? I evolved a lot of fanciful theories and yet never felt I had gotten to the bottom of it. Probably I understood him as poorly as he did me. Or was he dead? Dead? Of him I used the word “die,” of the others “kick the bucket.”
But the chaplain would not have withheld this news, though it would have been artfully put as always. Coming from him it would certainly have taken the form of a “lesson” for me!

I was sleeping less at night than had been usual for me. The fellow in the next cell moaned piteously and his bed creaked miserably. I heard everything clearly in the deathlike silence of the great building. Rats, those dear rodents, rustled and scurried as they had once in my parents' house. And on my dear father's ship, which I often thought of, stuck in the arctic ice during his voyage. I saw my father standing on deck, cradling two rats in his arms, his sons, my brother and me. I awoke in fright and lay there for a long time. At last I fell asleep again. I dreamed of an almond green, already somewhat wilted sweet pea, a flower similar to the one I had dissected and magnified using my attorney's monocle. The parts that had been cut to pieces reassembled themselves, sepals, nectaries, cellulose fibers, sap vessels, and respiratory organs, the male and female reproductive parts of the plant, and they turned into a living flower. It rose stiffly, oozing sap, from a piece of white blotting paper covered with black mirror writing, as though it were growing out of the ground. Unfortunately my wife appeared in the same dream.

Her image came into my mind for the first time since her death. I saw her, her face withered, wrapped in a crinkled, light pink crepe gown, looking out a window of my apartment. The window was framed by cream-colored, embroidered drapes. My wife was laughing with one half of her face, crying with the other, one corner of her large mouth turned up, the other drawn down as though squeezed inside. She was grinning, filled with pain and voluptuous feelings at once, as so often in life. Her teeth were falling out, she tried in vain to keep them in, push them back, with her long tongue. Then she sadly regarded the ruins of
former magnificence, she spoke, I nodded and did not understand her, she suddenly stepped back behind the curtains, spread them across her strong dark breast, which was markedly chilly, deathly cold to the touch. But now I was behind her, more or less at her feet. I came up to her knees. The varicose veins in her calves had shrunken so much that the heavy golden brown silk stockings bagged. Someone had to feel sorry for this creature, and yet I could not arrive at any
remorse
. My crime had therefore been necessary, had come from the heart. I thought of my father, as of a judge. But even then I was not sorry. What can you do! What must be must be.

An imprisoned criminal is a wretched thing. The crime that he attempted, using every means at his disposal, has failed. Yes, I had gotten rid of my wife, and that was worth something. But I was beginning to understand that my freedom from her had come at no small cost. I had carried my plan through to her detriment, no doubt, but not to my benefit. Before that decisive moment, my life had been a very dubious business. Now it might become a very miserable one. In fact it certainly would and I needed all the willpower I had to keep from breaking down, as I had that night in the mental ward when the ghastly conduct of those around me had disturbed me so much that I had pronounced myself sane. I was now beginning to doubt my sanity with some frequency. I was as insensible as a stone, I devoured whatever was put in front of me, I relieved myself in a tub holding a few liters because our institution, wildly praised by the experts as it had been, did not even possess the convenience of a W.C. In sane times I had always set great store by personal hygiene. Quite apart from bourgeois
decorum, a bacteriologist, a physician, cannot survive without the most meticulous personal hygiene. How low I had fallen! I was shaved once a week, got a haircut once a month. There was scant soap, a towel had to last longer than I preferred. I therefore took care not to get it dirty, that is, not to use it. And likewise with everything else! I began to suffer from dental calculus. One day a crumbly, foul-smelling crust fell from my teeth, calculus that had accreted due to poor nourishment. I felt with my tongue along the inside of my teeth. There seemed to be a decayed spot on the lower right premolar.

The prison doctor–not one of the worst, by the way, even if I received the same indifferent treatment that everyone else did–found no caries, though I tossed and turned almost all night with gnawing toothache. He had me brought in again the next day–and found nothing. The same story the day after that. Finally the overworked man, who was as pasty as his patients, directed the mirror to the place I described and found a decayed spot. I expected that he would treat the tooth, or rather the root. But without a word he showed me his primitive equipment, two pairs of forceps from the previous century. He gestured, again without explanation, toward the long line of emaciated, coughing, hollow-eyed prisoners with intestinal and skin disorders who all had to be dealt with in the next half hour. For this exemplary institution for the warehousing of human vermin had no paid full-time physician, but–aside from numerous higher officials inspecting and supervising–only this one frazzled, weary medical day laborer, who treated prisoners only as an extra job and received a pathetic starvation wage from the government.

He had me wait outside and when consulting hours were over again offered to pull the tooth. I recoiled. Was I so cowardly that I feared the
pain of a tooth extraction without cocaine? Was I so vain that I did not want to have a gap in my otherwise beautiful, closely spaced teeth? Formerly I had visited my dentist every three months, I had tended my teeth with the greatest care. I shook my head and left the doctor's office, a small, artificially lit, suffocatingly smelly room full of the effluvia of scruffy, ill-washed men.

Three adjoining cell-like rooms were set up as sick bays. Only the most serious patients, the hopeless ones, were sent to the prison hospital.

That day I finally received another visit from my attorney, in response to my repeated requests. He was in a hurry, did not take off his overcoat, confused my affairs with those of another of his clients, excused himself with the explanation that he was swamped with work but gave me to understand in passing that he had been unable to collect his fee; my father had refused to pay for anything unless he could be held liable for it. The old man may have rhetorically commiserated with me, but at the same time he had announced his decision to apply to the Ministry of the Interior for a legal name change. I was much too dulled, much too wrapped up in my own suffering, to be affected by this dramatic gesture. For the time of our departure was approaching, I needed gear, I needed money. The attorney was astonished that I was asking
him
for money! Had he not already done everything humanly possible for me and done it all for charity, a wage unpopular with busy lawyers?

I suggested to him that available assets of mine had to exist in such an amount that the small sums of money for him and for me were negligible by comparison. Suddenly recovered from his befuddlement, he fired off figure after figure. Bankruptcy proceedings had been instituted against my entire estate, the expensive furniture and genuine carpets
had been bought up from the bankrupt's assets for a minimal sum by my stepdaughter and her husband. My creditors had wanted to settle for an amount corresponding to fifteen percent, but it was doubtful whether this was attainable. My son-in-law and his lovely wife were too shrewd! And my insurance? The attorney, playing with his glinting monocle, smiled and shrugged his shoulders. (I was so unaccustomed to seeing a smile that I imitated it, much to his astonishment.) The insurance company had raised an objection that seemed to him, the attorney, very sophisticated: they had contested the policy–which the highly virtuous wife had taken out, not I!–as immoral. (I had expected this and still could not believe it!) He had lodged a protest, very much in his own interest. My brother had joined the proceedings. But the outraged public, in the figure of the press, had taken the insurance company's side against me. My brother had moved heaven and earth and made great personal sacrifices to at least bring the insurance company to a compromise settlement. But he had come up empty-handed, and his legal expenses had been greater than he would have liked. Fine. That was still not enough of a reason for his silence, but it would have to do. In all seriousness, was that all the attorney had to tell me?

He was the last link to my former life. In his beefy hand, covered with a great many blond hairs and brownish freckles, he worked the fluted rim of his monocle in a circle as though winding a watch. He was no longer really paying attention to me at all. He wagged his double chin, carefully closed (buttons and lock) his expensive briefcase smelling of morocco leather, glanced about to make sure he had not forgotten anything. When I tried to shake hands with him, he flinched, bowing so deeply that I could not pull my hand back quickly enough. I looked as though I was about to bless the bald-headed, pudgy, blond, elegant
man in the ecclesiastical manner. Need I say that this was far from my mind?

Until the last day, I waited longingly, I declare it openly, for a sign of life from my brother, whom I credited with a “loving heart.” Need I say that this sign of life from a loving heart never came?

The transports converged over the course of a day on a southern port that I knew from before (they came every few months from various cities). A hundred convicts or many times that–no one knew how many of us there would be–were going to be taken in iron pontoons to the battered but reconditioned transport steamer
Mimosa
. Where we were all going was, as I must have said, the penal colony C.

We had seen the low, beamy ship, with its small white protruding hump of a conning bridge and short, slanting funnel, lying at anchor offshore that morning as we were being unloaded from the barred cattle cars, each man shackled to another, and led up a ramp between two rows of bayonets to the freight depot.
We
, I say, as though I already felt like a seasoned member of our community.

For the moment this community was one more of bodies than of souls. I have said that before and after my crime I was in almost total isolation (my brother may have constituted an exception). It was an isolation so extreme that I unburdened myself to no one, indeed did not even believe any human soul capable of understanding me, my
motives, and my fate, as it is called. Now I was quite literally yoked to another person.

At first I was stupefied by the heavy, seemingly spice-laden air, by the direct, glaring sun, by the noise, by the sight of the open sky, the hissing locomotives, the rumbling trucks, the clanking chains of the cranes at work, and so on–dust, sun, and palms everywhere–I could hardly grasp what was happening to me. You would have to have spent weeks, months, living a strictly controlled life, monkishly shut off from the world, to be able to understand what it is to take a long train trip and suddenly go from a cool, airless, sunless, silent cell into the bustle of a modern port.