Georg Letham (35 page)

But, by way of compensation, the entirely professional Walter received unexpected assistance from–March. No one who has not seen that brave, handsome little fellow at work can have any conception of that unbroken young person's cleverness, of his thirst for knowledge, of his manual skill, his tireless industry, indeed his passion for the work that surely must have repelled him, disgusted him.

Nor was he deterred by the negative result of his work. Every day he rose to do it knowing his appetite would not suffer because of the stench, whereas Walter and I both lost a great deal of weight during this period (it was July, always an abominable time in the equatorial region) and were often near tears from exhaustion. But we held up.

For all March's help, Walter had to wire the result to his higher-ups–the result that he had nothing positive to report.

Cases of the disease continued to vary in number and severity, but material was always there.

We worked. It was often enough to drive one to despair.

But, apart from Carolus's one casualty, the inoculated animals enjoyed the best of health.

From the beginning we had all thrown ourselves into our research with the greatest passion. The setback had to be correspondingly great, and so it was. I said before that all the inoculated animals (except for a single guinea pig) survived the introduction of infectious material without any perceptible deleterious effect attributable to Y.F.

The brigadier general was looking around for something else to do and remembered his statistical tabulations; with these–here as in Europe–he was in his element. He felt at home wherever there was a box of paper slips, a chart, little flags and pins, the old fool. But when I say “the old fool,” as earlier I called him a “lummox,” I must ask myself if this is not the voice of envy speaking. Envy not just of his military grandeur, his general's insignia, but envy of his sheer philistine certainty. Of the fact that he had borne life as it was. But the brave Walter had done the same, and I do not call him these things.

Here there may be an internal contradiction in my character, a self-destructive false foundation, which gave way when I committed my crime, assuming it would support me, and would probably give way when I came to make any important life decision. It was something unfathomable, but with the force of a natural law. That is to say, ultimately just as incomprehensible as any law. I would not speak of it at such length had my antipathy to such a person as Carolus not cost me a great success. But all in due time. Here I will restrict myself to our old medical statistician's conclusions, alluded to earlier.

He observed (always on the basis of his maps, charts, and statistical methods) that a case of true Y.F. occurred, let us say, in the third house from a certain corner in the city of C. (on the right side of the street coming from the harbor). The next (luckily it was possible to make
a precise observation of this now, when cases were relatively sparse)–the next case was found not in the house next door–that is, not in the second or fourth house from the corner–nor directly across the street, but around the corner on another street, perhaps, or even around the block, separated from the first epidemic center by a large vacant lot covered with piles of refuse, cisternlike pits full of water, pools and puddles, piles of rubbish and empty cans, bodies of animals and sawdust, hutches for small domestic animals, and relatively small rundown planted areas. It was determined that there had been no contact between the first case, that of the Swedish engineer, let us say, and the second, the wife of a senior administrative official; they had never seen each other. How had the contagion spread? On the wings of angels? I asked sardonically. At the time none of us was able to draw the correct conclusion. No doubt it was
too simple
.

Secondly, it was determined that people in the hospital became ill relatively rarely. The building was situated on a rise. At this time of year it was exposed to a particularly blistering sun–what idiot had decided to make the Jesuit convent a hospital? The sickrooms were thus true hellholes comparable to the “steam rooms” of blessed memory, the torture chambers on the
Mimosa
(do you remember, dear heart, fair, dear March, is that why you're smiling at me?), and some of the examination rooms had to be located in cooler basement areas, where it was necessary to work by artificial light, preferably in the evening hours or the first few hours of the night.

But who could always arrange this so conveniently? It was frightful in the sickrooms, especially the ones under the flat roof. And yet it was very seldom that transmission occurred within the building. The staff remained healthy, as did the black women who dealt with the
mostly dreadfully soiled clothing and so forth. So: why was it that the nightmarish contagion lost its infectious power here within these walls, where the chapel bells tolled death knells often enough? Crossword puzzles are easier. We had no answer.

The third observation was that the patients often came in waves. There happened to be a lull when we arrived. Then there were three or four cases; then there was a lull of about ten days; then the epidemic resumed with renewed virulence. Could it be some plant that took ten to fourteen days to bloom and then sprayed the poison of the yellow-fever plague from its resplendent, showy stamens? Carolus's statistical curve was very distinctive. But what did it distinguish from what? Connoisseurs of these things such as the good pharmacist von F., the old man with the portable mosquito netting around his patrician head, were consulted. He was questioned closely about these three matters. But all he had on his mind was his mosquitoes and their fine points. These he had observed and studied in minute detail, but he had neither made his own observations of the three particulars of interest to us nor had his attention drawn to them by others; nor yet was it possible to induce him to attach any special importance to them, no matter how hard we tried. Not that he really grasped our problem. The eye of an inspired statistician was needed in order to see these three points at all–and Carolus was one. And he was even more than that. By no means the lummox I had called him in a moment of abject envy, not in all situations. For, to my discredit, let the following be reported at last.

It will be recalled that the sole casualty of our many experiments was one of the three guinea pigs he had inoculated. I had gone through the corridor into the basement rooms where there were ranks and files of animal cages. All the animals alive and well, except for this one guinea
pig, a male with rust red and yellow-white spots, that would not eat, had yellow conjunctivae, and seemed to be feverish. I took its temperature: thirty-two degrees centigrade. Was it any wonder? The clumsy hand of a Carolus had wielded the inoculation needle; everyday contaminative microorganisms had evidently gotten into the bloodstream. The animal whined softly and piteously and shortly died. I told Walter, who nodded gloomily at my (false) report–general blood poisoning with hepatomegaly–and seemed very depressed by the negative result of all his (our) efforts.

“Is that all you've found?” he asked.

“See for yourself!” I replied, producing the specimens. And he, who had himself once determined or at least rendered it very probable that guinea pigs could be inoculated with Y.F. serum, was satisfied with my superficial finding. He put terrible trust in me, and I wanted to put my trust in my preconceived idea. But I could not. I was more conscientious than that. I stained the guinea pig's greatly softened, inflamed liver, placed the tissue sections under the microscope, and found, instead of the usual pyogenic organisms, suspicious microorganisms, pale objects more intuited than really precisely detected, with a spirochete-like form, that is, shaped like corkscrews–and this in one spot, in one section out of six. Now the most obvious thing to do would certainly have been to report this problematic finding to Carolus and Walter. To pursue it. To give the specimen special attention. To repeat the staining, try all known methods, from flagella staining and osmic acid mordanting to the familiar spirochete tests, as it is the duty and responsibility of every honest, respectable bacteriologist to do.

Did I? By no means. I was too ashamed to admit that my first report had been inaccurate. I also begrudged Carolus, whom I knew to be a
bungler, his success. So quickly was the team sundered. In dealing with a lummox, I thought, anything was permitted. I preferred to convince myself that what I had seen had been “shadows” of bacteria, remains of spirochetes from another case. For the administration was thrifty, and the glass plates on which we stained the smears had been used before; March was supposed to have washed them carefully in hot caustic soda liquor, but, pigheaded as I was, I had my doubts. So out of antipathy to him (a natural reaction to his unwanted, importunate love) and hatred for Carolus (a reaction to his indestructibly assured, parochial, stolidly happy nature), I neglected everything that should have been my duty. I was every bit as frivolous and small-minded as so many mediocre researchers, and hence what I was looking for eluded me just as it does them.

Had I done what I should have done, and had I not done what I did do, I would have been spared many hard lessons. I am not softhearted. Not even toward myself. But, after all that had happened, I had believed that my capacity for suffering was exhausted and that now I would–but let's not get carried away. The facts and nothing but the facts are going to have to go on doing the job of conveying my joys and sorrows.

So far I had dealt only with nonliving material–and with the animals. When (thanks to my failure) the futility of our efforts to date had become fairly clear, I had to expect that I would be put back in a camp with the other felons and from that point on do hard physical labor, such as road building. In the best case I might hope to be sent to one of the municipal offices as a clerk or bookkeeper. In the environs of the city and on the surrounding islands, there were rubber plantations of no
mean significance; there were deposits of gold-bearing quartz, which, though sizable, had not been adequately worked due to the climatic conditions; the precious woods in the immense and to some extent still virgin forests on the peninsula were traded internationally by a wood-utilization company. Even within the numerous convict colonies, which included a leprosery and a few more or less primitively equipped hospitals (also a modern one), there would have been plenty to do for a man with an academic education who was willing to work. And yet it was decided that I would remain in the old convent hospital, the collection point for Y.F.–and why? I had said not a word, I had made no requests, but my highly placed father had brought it about that when deported I “be employed in my profession where practicable.” My profession was primarily experimental bacteriology. Experiments were being done here in C. They had to do with bacillus X. Would that do? Of course it would. And when there was no longer enough for me to do in the laboratory, idleness being the very worst punishment for a man like me, I was put to work, as I had been aboard the
Mimosa
, caring for some severely ill patients.

I had always had the ill-fated ability to awaken trust in people. And now the hospital director, who was old and not overly bright, but capable and experienced in his specialty, had me brought to him, looked at me for a long time without saying a word, and then assigned me to take charge of medical care in one of the many sections of the hospital that stood empty these days more often than not. It was understood that this would be a test. And so it was, though not at all in the way he and I expected. He trusted me. I saw that.

To approach the disease from a clinical perspective, that is, from the standpoint of bedside observation, I was to study fresh, recent cases
especially. Smiling politely, I bowed deeply before the old gentleman (sunburned, with snow-white hair and beard), while he sat smoking his good cigar. As I did so I brought my chin down onto the neck of my lab coat, and in the breast pocket I felt a rectangular object. In the sickroom where I was taken, I realized what this was–it was pharmacist von F.'s matchbox of mosquito eggs, some of which had now hatched into little mosquito young. Later I will describe these curious insects in the depth these strange children of promiscuous Mother Nature deserve. Here I note only that one of them had inquisitively forced its way out of the box through a tiny crack and was producing its peculiarly high, piping, piercing sound, like the buzzing of a string, as it sought to make good its escape. Which it did not succeed in doing. The room, the sickroom I mean, was in semidarkness. Not only had the green wooden shutters been lowered, but the windows were also hung with red woolen or silk fabric. At a minimum I would have to remove it in order to perform the initial examination of the sick child. For it was a child, as the hospital director had intimated. There was one more person in the little room (its construction, the high Gothic vaulting and so forth, indicated that it must once have been a residential cell for inhabitants of the convent).

Before I laid eyes on the partly hidden, fearful patient, the chaperone, her ayah or nanny, came to my attention. This was a woman in her midsixties, in claret-colored Sunday best, with freshly starched white cotton petticoats, broad white gauntlet cuffs around the worn, gnarled, coffee brown hands. The close-fitting bodice was buttoned to the throat; around the shoulders, hunched with age, was a small, triangular fringed shawl. Long earrings made of green paste in gold filigree settings hung from the earlobes, which were greatly stretched out. The
wide, rubbery mouth was tightly set with emotion. The bony fingers moved agitatedly, a strange rosary made of large silver spheres rattling between them. Her eyebrows were shaggy like an old man's, as gray and coarse as grit. The animated, sparkling black eyes moved restlessly from the director and me to her charge, of whom only the neck could be seen at first, as the child had buried her head in her sky blue satin coverlet out of fear of me, or perhaps to avoid the strong light. As one neared the bed, by which the old woman was standing, one noticed first the rather sharp odor characteristic of the mulatto's black race, somewhat reminiscent of the perspiration of animals, but then one noticed another smell, stronger every moment, like that of the old Swede and the other corpses that had come to our basement table, only not so penetrating. Y.F. There could be no doubt after all.