Georg Letham (57 page)

Thus it was that I never found out what my great friend wanted to tell me in his last hour. Was it something to do with the experiments? Was it something to do with his property, his provision for his wife and children, his payment of his insurance premium, his protection for his children–could one of these have been the word beginning with
p
that he seemed to be trying to form? I do not know, will never know.

Before I report on Walter's final breaths, I must make mention of a detail that will perhaps be difficult to understand. Be that as it may, I do not wish to make a secret of it, nor is it permitted for me to do so.

As the distraught wife was bending her bare neck over her husband, I saw on the right side of the nape, near where the hair began, half covered by freshly arranged (that was what had kept her!), glossy, auburn, now somewhat loosened hair, an insect. It was a mosquito of the genus
Culex
, one of ours, a typical
Stegomyia
. It squatted there, hunkered down. Jiggled its long hind legs. The silvery, lyre-shaped marking on the insect body sharply segmented by the constricted waist was clearly
distinguishable. The abdomen gleamed with a ruby red color. Engorged with blood? Human blood? Perhaps so. Perhaps not. I almost believe it was the same
Stegomyia
that had gotten away from us twenty-four hours before, after its ample meal of Walter's blood during the last experiment, having presumably lurked in a dark corner since then.

In my excitement I drew March's attention to it with a silent gesture. If only I had not done that! I thought he was me and I was him. But this decision, like so many before and after it, was one I could only make on my own. I could not share responsibility for the results with anyone else. What I wanted to do required responsibility. I was the one who bore it. Not him. I didn't want to chase the insect away. I didn't want to crush it. I wanted to let it bite. I wanted one more useful experiment. Yes, she was the wife, or soon to be the widow, of my esteemed friend. The reader has not often seen the word “esteemed” together with “friend” in these lines. I am writing it here. She was the mother of five young children. She was a pregnant woman near her time. But if I had known respect of person, if I had allowed a distinction to be made between one experimental subject and another, we would never have achieved what we had to achieve. That's the way it is.

March turned deathly pale. He trembled so much that the woman became aware of him. This was
not
what he wanted. For the first time he did not want what
I
wanted. But I dominated him. I looked at him. He chewed his lips, so uncontrollably that a drop of blood appeared. But he let me do as I wished. He had to. The poor doctor was breathing stertorously. His eyelids gradually sank, without entirely obscuring the glassy glint of his beautiful gray eyes surrounded by the yellow conjunctivae. I took out an ampule of camphor and filled the syringe, for it is considered a rule of medicine that no one should be allowed to die of
cardiac and respiratory paralysis without an injection of camphor as a last attempt to juice him up. But this was only a formality.

He had been given his digitalis and had to have his camphor. Neither could do any good.

But when the wife of the man now breathing his last gave a start and grabbed at her neck with her lovely, plump, pale hand and found the crushed insect engorged with her blood (all done unconsciously, for her mind was on her husband), I knew I would be able to add a new experimental subject to our protocols. If the infection experiment was successful, we would also see whether Y.F. in pregnant women was transmitted to the unborn child.

Walter's last moments had come. The woman saw this. “Save him! Help! Help! He's not breathing! Oh God, oh God, he's passing out!” And in her distress she mindlessly shook her cologne into his face, into the half-closed yellow eyes. But he was beyond noticing. I went out, leaving the last camphor injection to the resident, who was practiced in such things. Along with Carolus (he had put off his talk with the governor), I left the room that smelled of cologne and the rot of yellow fever. I wanted to take March, who was staring as though galvanized at Frau Walter as she wailed and flung herself about. I took his hand in mine. But he struck at it and stayed with her.

Was I so odious?

We were now deep into the most important phase of our experiments, and without a leader. I am unable to describe the despair in which the passing of this man Walter left us. All of us, March no less than Carolus, the hospital director as well as the chaplain, were in shock. Our team sat in the hush of the laboratory, heads sunken on breasts. The only sounds were the muffled stirrings of the animals in the basement and the patients in their rooms over our heads. He was dead, and there was nothing to be done about it.

Our friend lay downstairs in the small, electrically lit autopsy room. We found his instructions in his desk drawer. One of us was to go to the body and pin his war medals to his chest. No one dared to. His gold-rimmed spectacles (broken) were also found in the laboratory. They had been with him for so many years of his life–should he not have them to take along, too?

Finally we voted by matchstick again (it was March who thought of it), but the result meant quite a different thing this time. A match with its head snapped off was placed in a preserving bottle along with three
intact matches. Whoever drew the broken match would carry out the mission that no one would volunteer for.

It was not the same thing, of course. I, who thought logically even under these circumstances–because I couldn't help it–realized that it would be easy to tell which match was the broken one, even with eyes covered. You would only need to finger the matches one by one. But no one else thought of it.

The task fell finally to the chaplain, who not only honored the dead man but also took that opportunity to lay a silver crucifix on Walter's chest, the same one that Walter himself had taken from the chest of the waterworks director at his autopsy a few months earlier. We decided that it should be given to the doctor to take to his final resting place instead of being pressed into further service. We refrained from examining the body. No one would have been able to wield the autopsy knife.

The findings were clear in any case. The lab report that I now drafted with Carolus, to be deposited with the notary or the governor as agreed, described Dr. Walter's experiment along with our other experiments as successful and conclusive beyond all doubt.

I had assumed that I would be permitted to be one of the pallbearers at my late friend's funeral. We had been promised freedom, after all. But I had failed to take into consideration the legendary ponderousness of official process. Besides, our fate was still entirely uncertain. Walter had been the animating force behind the magnanimous administrative decision. He was no more.

The next day, late in the afternoon, the sisters carried the body from the hospital's chapel to the public hearse in a lovely hardwood casket (the work of convicts). The coachmen (more freed convicts) and the
marines provided as an escort were not permitted to come into contact, however fleeting, with any of the occupants of the Y.F. hospital.

Why was this? Nothing would have happened to the twenty-four splendid lads who served as sentries at the shore batteries even if they had shaken the corpse's bile yellow hands. It was not contact that spread the disease, but mosquitoes. It made no difference whether the body was interred between layers of quicklime or in plain soil. It was for
this
idea that Walter had died. This axiom was what he had suffered for–suffered more, that soft, sentimental, chaste man, than we could ever know.

But that did not matter. As far as the world was concerned, the old wisdom held true, and neither I nor Carolus nor the dead man's unfortunate wife was permitted to join her husband on his final journey.

From our window we watched the twenty-four marines form up in full regalia. The evening sun glinted on their weapons and their musical instruments–not only the “bugles” that poor Walter had raved about but also trombones, cornets, and so on, along with the percussion that is usual in military bands. I thought of the military band at the dock.

The top men in the colonial administration, the director of the prison camps, and so forth, strode on ahead. The music started up, the baleful funeral march from the familiar Chopin sonata. Thus they bore our teacher and master away to the lime pit, feet first, as in the old song.

I kept at my work, which had to be taken care of sooner or later. It did not have my full attention, as will be readily understood. I did not relax at the microscope. The lugubrious crashing of the march music had no sooner faded than Frau Walter's distraught wailing and shouting resounded from the room above us, where she was being held by force. The hospital matron was attending to her, Carolus offered his
services, even March came forward–hearing the shrill cries of the poor woman, he had become deathly pale, shooting me one dark look after another from his handsome, foolish boy's eyes. But all the carrying on was becoming actual fits of madness, she was screaming like a lunatic now, stamping, tromping on the floorboards. All attempts to soothe her, all well-intended words of sympathy, all helpful suggestions were in vain. She had acquired superhuman strength. No one dared to give her a tranquilizing injection for fear of harming the baby. Three nurses, the chaplain, and the entire physician staff were there, trying to subdue the frantic woman through friendly persuasion or gentle force. Meanwhile new patients were being admitted. Some of them were already at the dangerous stage, needed the doctors, the nurses, the chaplain; it was not clear what to do with Walter's widow, this now very inconvenient guest.

Finally, against my better judgment, I let March drag me up to see her.

I have already reported that I had the ability (possibly inherited from my father) to exert a calming influence on children, the insane, animals, and the ill.

I now calmly went to the raving woman. There were fat, distended violet veins in her neck area. At that moment she was on the point of throwing herself out the window, shrieking intolerably in her harsh peacocklike voice. She was unable to do this, of course, because her enormously protruding belly was too big for the relatively narrow opening. I made no effort to stop her. I asked the others to leave the room. They all seemed to be glad to, with the exception of March, who did as I asked with reluctance, devouring me and the poor woman with his eyes. I had not seen this expression on his face for a long time. But it
was too deliberate, this look could not be completely genuine. When everyone was gone, I approached her, took her as gently as I could by the sleeve of her dark dress without touching her, and carefully drew her away from the window. She cried out as she followed me but did not offer much resistance. I pushed her down onto the convalescent's reclining chair that stood in a corner, here as in every sickroom, and whispered to her a few meaningless words, accentuating the syllables as sharply as possible. Sometimes one must whisper with extreme clarity if one wants to make oneself understood to the hard of hearing. Not shout. She had not yet stopped her drawn-out, deafening cries when she noticed my mouth moving. She looked into my eyes, I into hers. Now she fell silent and read the simple words on my lips. “Your husband wanted me to tell you . . .” She opened her eyes wide and looked at me mutely. At this moment of complete silence came the thunderous shots of the marine honor guard rendering a final salute for her husband at his fresh grave. She heard three blasts spreading over the city's hilly terrain, amplified by the echo. Her face turned dark-red and white in alternation, the contorted features relaxed. And tears rolled down the unmoving face in total silence.

I must in all honesty confess that, watching her tears start and stop as the shots came and went, I did not have an entirely clean conscience toward Walter's wife, Alix, her name was. She had let her pretty, somewhat mannish head sink into the crook of an elbow, and the place where the mosquito had punctured her skin was still visible below the hair on the nape of her neck. It was encrusted with the tiny blackish
remnants of the insect's body. Evidently, in her mad anguish, she had not properly washed or brushed her hair since her husband's demise.

Must one not feel sympathy for a person reduced to such misery? But unfortunately there was more than just sympathy. The inner voice was there, the war was going on within me. One part of me was in revolt against another, and already I knew that good times were not on the way. But the poor creature had just lost her best, indeed her only friend. Was she not a thousand times worse off?

The woman was now complaining of spasmodic lower abdominal pain. Putting the matter as delicately as I could, I asked her if this could be the first labor pains, but she said no, and I presumed that she had enough experience from her previous deliveries to know what her condition was.

My only concern was that she leave the Y.F. hospital as quickly as possible. If she should suddenly give birth here, who would provide the necessary assistance? I did have some obstetric expertise, acquired at the request of my late wife before I opened my private clinic. But I had had enough of risky experiments. This will be readily understood by anyone.

The only one who did not understand it was the very person I had most looked to until then, March. “I guess you want to get rid of her, you don't want to take responsibility for your rottenness?” he hissed at me when I asked him to use his influence over our late friend's widow to get her to return to her lodgings in the city (in the hospitable subagent's house).