Georg Letham (40 page)

If I had not murdered, I would never have come to this point.

I gave the world my consent. I had to. I kept to the straight and narrow, did not stray. It had to be.

By the time I had diluted the solution properly, the pulse had already become imperceptible. The injection was now evidently useless. And thus I let it pass. The child lived several hours more, for she was young, had never been seriously ill–she had come to her parents on C. unbroken in body and spirit. It took many hours for the Y.F. poison to break the little Portuguese girl's body and spirit. I sat and watched her. I stifled my wish to act, to do something. I put my hands in my lap. Not on the dying girl's brow, not on her morbidly bloated, bright yellow body. Had there really been no way for me to leave my late wife, even her, without doing what I had done?

Why give one more stab to someone in biological decline from the first day of her life, who from earliest youth, from the womb, was wilting and dying? Why murder, why make someone suffer? Leave it! Leave well enough alone! It wouldn't be worth all the treasures of Golconda.

Murder is for nature the merciless, or for God. Look on, you excellent physician Georg Letham, you winsome, well-loved son, husband, and lover, fold your hands and keep silent! Despair, be silent, and die! Things are the way they are. You no longer pray, because you can't, and no one helps you. And why beg for sympathy later? What good are these silly tears flowing from the mulatto's red-rimmed eyes and down her velvety brown old lady's cheeks?

I
am unable to weep. I had made fate an offer, I had been ready, provided the bargain was kept, to sacrifice myself for my beloved. Sacrifice, what a sentimental, pompous old notion! But all right! Was it not an experiment too to stay constantly by a patient who had a high fever and was passing contaminated blood and so forth, that is, was infectious? And not an unhazardous one? But fate had not favored me (as it had not favored my poor father). My offer to fate had been: Let me have her,
cure her, and give me hell–and it gave me hell. But it had not actually hurt me. For it had not accepted the object of exchange, Georg Letham the younger, as valid, and
I
stayed alive, I left the sickroom, broken, yes, in despair, yes, as though I had been hit on the head, weighed down by unspeakable fatigue. But fit as a fiddle.

What did she mean in the greater scheme of things, the little Portuguese girl? What did she mean to the progress of our noble scientific mission? No more and no less than Ruru did, the good dog that went with my father to the region of the North Pole.

I wanted to, I had to find meaning in my life, indeed I sensed it, I believed it was there to be found, was confident that it could be understood, and yet I went off mutely, head down, teeth gritted, yes, so help me, as I ducked out I ground my molars, as my father had always done at critical moments in his later life. The room was filled with the old nanny's primitive and uninhibited howling as I escaped from it, leaving her with the dead child. To clothe her in a dignified manner for her final repose.

Shortly thereafter I inevitably ran into the chaplain. He looked at me, and I nodded. I looked at him, and he shook his head and smiled.
He
had devoted himself with special love to the care of the old canal worker. Now it seemed the latter was on the road to recovery! Yes, the chaplain had a good line to the man upstairs, as was evident in his “blessed touch.” The laborer would live. What good fortune! Thus the childless prole, senile at thirty-four, would leave the hospital in one or two weeks, pale but cured, restricted to a light diet, and very much in need of rest and recuperation. Yes, a light diet. When the man didn't even have enough dry crusts of bread to keep his scrawny body from starvation, no roof over his shaggy head to protect it from the down-pours
of the coming rainy season–no matter, no matter! He had to be restored to humanity, and she . . . she!

. . . I said nothing. But the chaplain seemed to understand me. He drew me into a corner, one safe from spies and eavesdroppers (the building's regular guards were tramping up and down in the flagstone corridors nearby because it was cooler here than out in front, where they actually belonged), and there he revealed to me–his secret? No, not quite. He only batted open his no longer entirely clean, well-worn cassock, opened his rough shirt at the collar, and showed me the word tattooed in blue letters from left to right across the base of the throat:
Amen
.

Not a word was spoken. I could have said something, and what stopped me? Another word:
Omen
.

He quickly did up his clothes, eyes downcast, and climbed the stairs I had descended, to make arrangements for the child's consecration and burial.

Why hide it? I was ashamed of my misfortune. I holed up in my underground cell with the oil and vinegar bottles and left the treatment of new patients to the resident, who had just returned, and the head physician.

First I slept for nearly twenty hours straight, I believe. When I woke up and awareness of what had happened returned to me, I would just as soon have given up in despair. Would have?

Nothing on earth could have rid me of my mortal despair, I believe now. I ate nothing, drank nothing. I sweated, was silent, and suffered. The notion lives in many very unhappy people that, if they weaken
themselves to an extraordinary degree through fasting and deprivation, their mental suffering too will become much weaker, more moderate, easier to bear. But unfortunately there had long been no question of moderation. During the second, completely sleepless night (and why had I idiotically indulged my exhaustion so thoroughly on the first night?), I ground my teeth so much that the faithful March woke up and sat down next to me in his pajamas. How could I explain to him this desperate love for a totally unknown dead girl? I realized that, had I heard the whole story told about someone else, I myself would have listened in silence and never understood it. And why should someone like March understand me? And even if he did understand me, how could he console me? How could he take the place of the one upon whom I had inexplicably focused all the feeling I had in me?

There was no light burning in our cell. Not much illumination came down through the high basement window. He wanted to see me. So he lit his cigarette lighter and shone it in my face. His sleep too had no doubt not been the most restful, for he had had bad news from home about his youngest brother, the watchmaker's apprentice. And he had thought of him fondly so often, had soaked the stamps off all the foreign mail for him, had dried and pressed orchids between sheets of filter paper for the herbarium that his “bitty little brother” kept. Now the bitty little brother was sick or had debts or had stolen something or was out of work, who knows? Did his distress make me feel better? As cynical as it sounds (the cynicism of hopelessness), even his disconsolate manner was no help at all. It gnawed at me and plagued me cruelly to consider (my mind was working whether I wanted it to or not) that I lived in a room directly below the one in which she had died (not true, by the way, but I was connecting everything with her), or that my white
coat hanging on a rusty nail on the basement wall still bore traces of her terrible days of suffering. And yet I was silent and said not a word to March. He saw my brow knitted tensely, forming the usual two deep furrows above the root of my nose. So he patted down the skin there, or rather he tried to. No sooner had he, in his childlike, foolish goodness, smoothed my brow (as though that could wipe away the cause of my frightful pain!) than it automatically knitted again. What could I do? Did I want to do anything?

He had tact. What he had never shown in his relationship with his cadet, this he now showed toward
me
, who had not asked for it and to whom it meant precious little.

He asked no questions, for he knew I would speak if I had anything to say. His stupid lighter crackled and shot off sparks as he waved it about and read me something from a letter that had some importance to him. I understood nothing of his gabble, but simply nodded.

Why was it that I had no peace? I never had any.

Meanwhile daybreak came. I watched the demijohns of vinegar with their wickerwork wrapping and the fat, dust-covered little drums of oil take shape in the shadowy gray light.

He got up, dressed, got water in a tub, reached into a vat of green soft soap for two handfuls of the slippery stuff, dissolved it in the water, and was on the point of putting my coat in it, the doctor's white coat that I had worn at her deathbed. I gently took it from him. We stood there half-dressed like a couple of imbeciles, and suddenly
he
, who had understood none of it, began to weep. Perhaps at the thought of his foolish little brother, who could not help him and whom he could no longer help. Or was it on my account? A harsh contempt gripped me. I contorted my facial features as he did his.

Weeping, as is well-known, involves the same grotesque facial distortions as grinning, differing from it only in the shedding of tears. I mockingly imitated his blubbering, as, in better days that would never return, I had sometimes imitated the laugh of a happy person–I have already spoken of this. And, do you believe it, this grimace, the despairing grin of Georg Letham the younger, turned into a true weeping, a sobbing! The unending sobs of a heavy, half-insensible soul suffering unto death. It was like the weeping I have described in the throes of Y.F., representing the curious reflex of the vagus nerve under toxic stimulation. A moment of laughter for all of us now. After everything I had seen and experienced in my forty-one years, the only thing I could do was imitate the little Portuguese girl who had sobbed herself to death before my eyes two days before.

The good March had primly looked away from my outburst of excessive feeling (is there any other way to describe it?). Amid tears he had soaked the white shirtlike garment in the foaming, greenishly lustrous liquid. Bubbles boiled to the surface. He rubbed the sleeves of the coat together with the front so that the pearl buttons clacked, scoured the bottom parts with the top parts to get the dirt out. Suddenly he gave a yelp–he had cut his finger on something. It was the slide with my darling's blood on it. This little sheet of glass, wrapped in white blotting paper and labeled in blue pencil with the patient's name and the date the blood was drawn, had been in my breast pocket. The strangest memento that a lover had ever kept in remembrance of his departed fair Juliet, or rather would not keep.

My tears ebbed, I got up, dressed, went upstairs, bathed, had breakfast, and set to work in the laboratory as I had done before my vigil
at Monica's bed. In a corner I saw a preserving bottle of mosquitoes. March had taken the
Stegomyias
out of the stoneware vessel, perhaps at the request of Brig. Gen. Carolus, who had suddenly become orderly, or because the inquiring Walter wished to observe the cute, truly adorable insects, the object of such vile calumny, through the glass. But what was there to see? There seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary about them.

I note in passing that Walter's heart was in his work just as little as mine was, though he said nothing. For when scientific work has gone on beyond a certain point without yielding the slightest positive result, the researcher is gripped by a sort of paralysis, an intellectual despair, a stubborn apathy. One sits diligently and steadfastly over the microscope, assiduously checks the cultures, or, to be precise, the dishes of abacterial medium that one removes regularly every morning from the tightly sealed incubator kept at body temperature; only to find, again and again, that cipher, that nothing. The sterile internal organs, the untroubled expanse of broth, the smooth, virginal surface of the solid, gelatin-like culture medium still showing the slight scratches, like old ski tracks on a glacier snowfield, left by the platinum inoculation needle. A very pleasant sight, but eventually an infuriating one. Sterile work, literally.

No wonder the good Carolus's nose, long enough by nature, was becoming longer every day, though he personally had made the greatest use of this time. Under Walter's brilliant tutelage, he had absorbed exacting, scientifically rigorous bacteriological research methods from alpha to omega. Should he have to leave C., where the epidemic was again gaining strength, with empty hands, even if he had to leave that
instant, he might conceivably be able to use these skills in the future to achieve something fruitful in another, more easily accessible field.

But for now the mission's bad luck weighed so heavily upon us all (with the possible exception of the indomitable March) that a piece of news brought by the fateful pharmacist von F. came as a thunderbolt that left us practically devastated. For, as in the case of my father's expedition (all things return in this short life!), here too a competing commission was underway, provided with strong financial backing and a capable scientific team; it was in transit from the States to the American epidemic centers in order to get to the bottom of Y.F. once and for all. The epidemic was costing so many precious human lives in Havana that there was no way either to colonize additional areas or to build the all-important canals that would transform the continent until something definite was known about this enemy of the American people. Yes, the American people! The American nation, noble sister of those of Europe and their great competitor! What a feather in Uncle Sam's cap if the Y.F. pathogen were discovered under the glorious Stars and Stripes! And we–empty-handed! Ignorant we had come, ignorant we must go!

There was thus a great danger that our little commission, consisting only of Carolus, Walter, and us underlings, might be forced to regard its business as finished. There was laboratory work for another one or two weeks, why not? Another hundred or five hundred sections of diseased, inflamed livers, gastric walls, kidneys, and so forth, could be fastidiously preserved in formalin, tricked out with all sorts of sophisticated staining methods, labeled, and then scrutinized by the sweat
of our brows under the microscope at a thousand times magnification (never was the Biblical brow-sweat so literal as here in this continual steam bath, which was never less than thirty degrees centigrade but very often more than forty in the “shade”)–we could methodically do all that, record the negative results as systematically as we would have recorded positive ones. And if Walter was the great master of experiment, Carolus was nothing less in the systematic statistical integration of the results. But zero plus zero never makes one.