Georg Letham (41 page)

Everyone but me was in communication with the outside world by mail, Walter by telephone too.

Not a single sign of life reached me during this period. Not so much as a picture postcard in kitschy colors from my brother, on some steamship tour with his wife and children! Whenever a mail boat was spotted from the elevated vantage of the hospital, tacking carefully through the archipelago and steering among the buoys in C.'s marshy harbor, the faithful March looked every bit as glad as the two top men, and even if the mail that March waited for with such longing (thoroughly censored, by the way) contained almost nothing but the joyless news that his family thought it should not keep from him (the breakup of his mother's marriage because of the scandal about
him
, the ominous illness of the youngest child, the “bitty little brother,” the money problems of the other siblings, and so on)–he was at least not as completely cut off from the living as I was.

I made no attempt to break through these walls. I could certainly have begun a correspondence. Yes, mail was screened and had to be cleared by the director's office; but, like every deportee, I was permitted to send one letter per month at the expense of the penal administration. Not once did I exercise this right. I had even given away most of my
stationery, to March, whose joy at this proof of my sympathy is beyond description. Never was a gift easier for me–and never had anyone thanked me more.

At that time I was lulled by the belief that the slow-witted youth's affection for me, which, though it got on my nerves, was profoundly comforting in its persistence, would go on forever and that I could toss him a crust of bread from time to time like a pasha. He was so very grateful for everything. When, for example, I advised him about how to advise his
mother
to help out his unemployed brother-in-law, an insurance agent–yes, this big fat zero's worth of love, was this not something for which
I
should have thanked
him
? For it represented a connection, however crude, with the world beyond our four well-guarded walls. It kept me from complete inner numbness.

As incomprehensible as it may sound, so it was: my present condition, down to almost the last particular, resembled the mental lethargy, the psychic paralysis, that had enveloped me immediately after my crime. But that was a crime with serious consequences, taking from me at a stroke my position in society, my scientific reputation, my respectable calling, my financial means, my erotic relationships, and very nearly bringing me to the scaffold, to use that sententious expression–whereas this was nothing but the commonplace death of a velvet-skinned fourteen-and-a-half-year-old Portuguese girl with whom I had never exchanged a single word other than strictly medical vocabulary. I was as innocent of her demise as I would have been of her providential recovery.

What had I meant to her? What could she mean to me?

And yet when I watched the canal worker, the convalescing Y.F. patient, hobbling along in the hospital courtyard, or sadly regarding his
greatly emaciated, bony, myasthenic arms, which were tattooed with blue and red anchors and naked women and over which a conspicuous bile yellow shadow still lay–then my gorge rose. It took all my not inconsiderable strength of will not to imitate the Y.F. patient's retching and vomiting out of spite just as I had imitated the poor little one's weeping some days earlier in distress.

If only it had been possible to at least seek distraction in
work
! But this was beyond me. I was not permitted (the deportation authorities demurred!) and frankly did not want to return to the sickrooms. And so I stood around half or entirely inertly. Despite all my friend's love and tenderness, I floundered more and more in the atrocious heat.

I need not detail what has been noted by all observers with regard to the opium-like effect of time spent in the humid and perpetually overheated regions and climatic zones of the tropics. For many constitutions (and whether ours might not be among them, particularly Walter's and my own, was not yet certain), the equatorial regions are felt simply as an illness, and a deadly one in the long run. An illness even when those affected remain free of tropical diseases, that is, ague, dysentery, malaria, and on through the entire alphabet of ailments to
Zuckerkrankheit
or diabetes mellitus.

This was known not only to me, but also to Walter's wife, whose acquaintance I would soon make in an indirect fashion, that is, by telephone.

There was a telephone booth in a corridor adjoining our large common workroom (formerly the refectory of the nuns in the convent). The lady was, as I heard, a woman of over forty (that is, the same age as our good Walter), the happy mother of five. She lived in the old city, or
rather she was penned there like an animal, for what problems did that quarter not have? The absence of laundry facilities! The filth that lay on the crumbling brick stairways! The repulsive bare-necked vultures that boldly patrolled the streets, cleaning them as no one else would! Nowhere to buy quality linen goods, stockings, dresses, stationery, cologne, insecticide! The criminal riffraff, turned into beasts by their lives of poverty and vice, that prowled about just outside the door, begging, mooching, and threatening! I heard it all thanks to Frau Walter's powerful, sonorous voice and the good acoustics of the imperfectly soundproofed telephone booth, whose doors had warped from the damp and did not close completely. Her husband too–otherwise moderation and calm incarnate, patience itself, the very model of a high-minded gentleman–often raised his beautiful voice to an unbecoming volume in order to make himself understood to the mother of his children, who was unfortunately deaf.

Because she was hard of hearing, she screamed her head off into the receiver. As if volume mattered! But he caught the bug too. As paradoxical as it sounds, when he spoke slowly and accentuated the final syllables, while keeping his voice down, we would hear only his wife's voice from the telephone booth. Then we did not understand him, but his wife evidently did, and that was what counted. But if he began to shout, the wife's “What? What? Sorry?” would come out of the hallowed chamber, far away but distinctly shrilled in the highest piping tones. Muffled by the walls but still understandable or easily guessed. Walter, resourceful as always, would occasionally hang up and sit down to put the substance of the thing in black and white for his wife in his clear but somewhat careless handwriting. Gently but resolutely he would push his colleagues' voluminous papers to one side of the desk
and neatly stack up the medical books into which the incorrigible slob Carolus habitually and obstinately stuck his used toothpicks as bookmarks. And if only unappetizing toothpicks had been as far as it went! But Carolus even put culture tubes there, and if these had not been as chaste and untouched as a fourteen-year-old virgin, then the greatest disaster could easily have resulted.

But no matter, the good Walter would hardly have sat down to write than the telephone would ring again with brazen insistence and Walter would have to go.

The good wife and devoted mother left no stone unturned in trying to induce her husband to break off his fruitless work. She knew there was still no result up here. That gave her words such weight that Walter would emerge from the little cubbyhole cowed and perplexed, and would seem to be wordlessly asking us what he ought to do. Another call! Not enough housekeeping money. Threats of divorce. Bulletins on his daughter's bad complexion, the poor progress being made by his son, once so promising, in his private lessons. And the horrendous prices of groceries and clothing. The “horrible people” she had to live among–criminals and their overseers. The miserable apartment. The wife's yearning for her husband. What was he to do?

And what about us? What did our mission mean? Our duty?

Mission and duty were not necessarily the same thing in Dr. Walter's case. As far as the mission was concerned, to him, as to all of us, though we had not discussed it lately, it appeared to be probably infeasible by the available means, that is, those of bacteriological science as currently constituted. As far as duty went, however, that big word necessarily
meant something quite different to us, I mean March and me, than it did to those two men of spotless reputation Walter and Carolus. And even between them the roles were not evenly divided.

Carolus could go on doing what he had been doing until his dying day. He had earned the right to leave wife, child, grandchild, the fine library he had begun building, and the superb cactus collection he had tirelessly, patiently nurtured to obey the beloved fatherland's glorious call. He had taken on the cause with all the commendable application and enthusiasm of which a man of his stripe is capable. Whether he was successful or not, he could be sure of a respectful reception when he returned home.

He carried on a lively correspondence with all the learned societies of general pathology, bacteriology, and biology, both domestic and foreign (March collected the stamps for his “bitty” brother); upon his return he could expect to be made an honorary member of those august organizations. This courageous citizen could also be certain that the top public-health authority, the Ministry of the Interior, would be among those bestowing such honors. He could even expect citations and decorations without so much as lifting a finger. And in the end he deserved these signs of favor from a magnanimous nation (happily generous as long as it costs nothing) just as much as any office poobah who spends thirty years sitting on the round leather cushion of his rotating desk chair until it's as flat as a pancake, but not as fragrant. Not that rank acquired through long service and devoted administrative work means anything. I knew how my father had disdained such men. He called these people turtles and said there was no way to get rid of them. You had to sit on them and ride them.

Walter's situation was quite different. For him there was much more
at stake. But he–and, curiously enough, cute little March–kept at it, almost pigheadedly, no matter how unproductive their efforts were.

Walter's life was not easy. With a good head like his, he of course had more doubts, less confidence, than some full-of-himself nitwit would have had. No doubt he told himself that he might be wasting his time, and certainly he was often short of money. The excellent Carolus worked full-time; his salary, augmented by the “tropical bonus,” kept coming in. But Dr. Walter's official position was not entirely clear–I never really understood his actual administrative grade (“attached” but not “assigned” to the shore batteries, or the other way around). Our commission was a voluntary one. There were, of course, allowances for expenses. But Walter was not financially minded enough and was too wrapped up in his work to apply himself to carrying out the tricky calculations of hours lost, increased outlays for the family, and so forth, in such a way that they came out to his advantage.

Yet the value of ready money was not unknown to him. He was perfectly aware of his responsibility toward his wife, who, after ten years of untroubled marital bliss, was becoming excessively hard-headed. Thus he found himself in conflicts of all kinds, and this was only the beginning of his difficulties. The “loving hearts,” if that fine phrase is permitted here, both made his day-to-day life difficult and took from him the drive and great intellectual persistence that he needed in his work.

But what a lucky dog I was! I was so constituted that nothing took from me the drive and great intellectual persistence that I needed in my work.

Yes, I saw that now. And I saw something else. I saw the last moments, what am I saying, the last hours, of my departed sweetheart,
lying in excrement, soddenness, and filth. And I had stood before this still living and sobbing corpse. And had stopped any man or woman from disturbing it.

No flights of feeling! Let us come back to reality! Walter's wife desired only that her husband finally discontinue his futile efforts. That he return as quickly as possible to the fleshpots of the civilized world along with her and the children, who could not be given a proper education at this remove from any sort of culture, indeed could barely be provided for decently. As a good, much-sought-after practitioner, he would always find opportunities for scientific work at home, would be able to relax at his microscope after his day of toil and trouble if he preferred that to playing bridge or having family members over or chatting with his wife about household matters or about how to find apparel that is both cheap and attractive. Intelligent, mature woman and faithful helpmeet that she was, she allowed him every freedom except that which he was now exercising, as she believed, to his family's undoing. But Walter, with all the love and tenderness he had toward his Alix, was not a man who gave in.

He turned a deaf ear. His wife's were deaf already. Thus it got to the point that the woman screamed raucously on the telephone and we all became unwilling witnesses to these petty squabbles.

Walter made it through his ten or twelve working hours day after day. Anyone who has spent a few months in C., whose climate is a sweaty, suffocating steam bath from which one never emerges and where dry laundry, a good night's sleep, adequate digestion, and a cool hour of leisure are things one knows only by hearsay, will understand what that means. Not without reason was it a penal colony.

I was glad I had already made the acquaintance of “red dog” on the
Mimosa
. I took precautions now, I did whatever was necessary to take care of myself. But what could be achieved in the end? Anyone can guard against cold, with fur-lined coats and boots and hats (I am thinking of my father's stories). And if it becomes impossible to continue on the ice, one can crawl underneath, where the stinging snowstorms cannot reach. One digs tunnels beneath the surface and waits them out.