Georg Letham (68 page)

The authorities of the convict camp had furnished us with guards, just as they had assigned us construction workers and other tradesmen. We also needed a large staff, for there was not a drop of water in our camp. The healthy test subjects had to have food, their clothes had to be washed, their meals had to be brought to them, their personal hygiene had to be scrupulously maintained. The sick test subjects had to be cared for, and their care could not be one iota worse in our primitive
cottage lacking all medical facilities than it would have been up in the well-appointed convent hospital above the city of C. The truly incalculable labor that Carolus and I had taken on may be imagined when I say that the two of us had to get by on five hours of sleep, and even that was interrupted often enough by the medical care required by the sick men. Carolus had never come down with Y.F. But when the old man, afflicted by rheumatism, constipation, and the circulatory complaints of his years, voluntarily exposed himself to such strain, when he declined before my eyes and lost the little bit of color he had gained in the interval between the experiments–then I had to ask his pardon for all the derogatory things I had said about him. You were wrong, I had to tell myself. Forget what you know, Georg Letham, and change your ways in your later years.

During these critical days I began to see a father in him. He saw in me a son, he began to call me by my first name, and he spontaneously changed his unappetizing habits, much to my delight, for we lived together in one tent. If I had been able to get him used to handling his cigarette by the business end instead of the other one, to holding his teacup by the handle, taking the spoon out, washing his hands a bit more often, and brushing his beard, then everything would have been joy and glory. But if only that had been all I had to worry about!

Let us not talk about me now, but about the test subjects. X became severely ill, but passed the crisis after almost three solid weeks of terrible fever and recovered.

But now the most important thing. To infect a man, but use serum to protect him from becoming ill.

For this experiment we had to use the recalcitrant man Z. He had watched the terrible suffering of his comrades. He had seen for himself
that the mosquito-proof walls between him and the bloodsucking insects had been the only thing preventing him from getting the disease. And there we were with the same insects, expecting him to hold out his upper arm. Carolus doubled his bonus. This man Z, though capable of noble impulses at bottom, irately rejected Carolus's proposal. But this experiment was as essential as the rest of them. They were all fundamental.

I, the social outcast, did my best to efface myself as usual. But when I saw Carolus, who was now dear to me, going away with a literally long face, I resolved on a step that may appear strange to some. I sat down with the unruly, exceedingly rancorous young man, told him candidly who I was, explained to him what we wanted, and promised him that he would absolutely not become ill. And this man Z did not ask whether I would be able to keep this promise even if I wanted to. He trusted me, like so many before him (and fortunately after him).

Trust is the foundation of the world, is it not? He spat furiously, jabbed me with his knees, and called me a cunning criminal and a brutal slave driver; but all the while he was putting out his upper arm and holding on to it with the other hand to keep it from jerking and getting in the way of the experiment. And when the first mosquito had bitten (we had three, to be on the safe side), he began to laugh, and from that moment he was his old self. He calmly let himself be injected with the blood of X, who was pale as a corpse and almost wailing with enervation–and remained healthy.

Toxin against toxin makes antitoxin. Hosanna! This was the best thing that could happen.

During this period Carolus received many letters and telegrams from his family. They had expected him to be gone for three months, but
it was more than twice that now, with no end in sight. He was an old man, sixty-seven. He was attached to his daughter, to his son-in-law, to his only grandchild. He was attached to his beautiful big house, to his friends back home, to his chess game and his bank account, to his cactus collection, to his honor and dignity. Every day here–but why speak of it, when he himself never did? We were completely taken up with our XYZ. But one day he violated our unwritten compact to keep anything of a personal nature to ourselves and told me, so happy that his head bobbed like a hen's, that we had been pardoned. We, meaning March and I, Suleiman (†), and the fourth man. As a reward for our spirit of sacrifice (and thanks to the efforts of my influential father?), we were being pardoned. March, whose crime had been one of passion, could return home; I, who had committed a worse offense, would remain in exile, as would the fourth man. But I was exempted from forced labor, and steps were being taken to make it possible for me to practice my profession in C. I did not ask about March.–“Don't you want to thank your father? Won't you” (Carolus amended) “write to him?” “My dear Carolus,” I said, “what can I do? I've forgotten what my father looks like.”

During this period there were two pieces of news. One came as no surprise to us. The old pharmacist von F. lay dying. What he had prophesied four months earlier had come to pass almost to the day. He had preferred a death in his comfortable bed to one on the lab table. Could he be faulted for that?

He left no great riches. The city was impoverished. The environs were almost entirely depopulated, apart from the masses of deportees.
The city was so down-at-heels that no doctor could prosper there even if he devoted himself to the well-being of the populace for almost fifty years, as the old pharmacist had. The brigadier general hinted that
I
might take over that post. I shrugged my shoulders and said nothing. I had no interest in a job like that. And yet it would soon emerge that fate had nothing better in store for me. The second piece of news was more important. It concerned the commission mentioned earlier, the one that had been studying Y.F. in Havana. One day Carolus appeared, pale with shock, and murmured that he had something of grave import to tell me.

I thought of March, who had still not left the soil of C., though his commutation allowed him to and he was fully restored to health (an indestructible man!). Carolus, in a gallant gesture, had given him some money to permit him to travel home on a small packet steamer. March had taken the money but had been seen not long before in the old part of the city. I did not want to believe it, but he had been drunk and in the company of some clapped-out old thieves and vagrants whom earthly justice had given up all its efforts to reform. I did not exist for March. He would have had plenty of opportunities to approach me, if only just to pay me a visit at Camp Walter, which was now deserted–but he did no such thing. And I could hardly have needed him more. I considered our problem solved. There had been a time when this outcome would have made me proud, vain. I would have announced the results at a medical congress and would have accepted the congratulations, the honors, the appointments to professorships of pathological anatomy and experimental bacteriology as a fairly earned reward, too skimpy if anything. Now, here, it was something else again. My personal life meant nothing to me now unless I had work, this kind of work. For me
work was truly forced labor, though not as most people understand that. And now I would soon find my work completed and my existence futile, superfluous, and absurd.

But it was nothing of the kind. This was only the slump experienced by every working person at the end of a working day, soon vigorously overcome and gone without a trace. And I soon had to put my strength of will to the test. This was made necessary by the second piece of news that Carolus whispered so discreetly into my ear.

The commission had been successful in its work in Havana. My face lit up. Carolus did not understand. “Don't you see, they didn't find what we found.”

“Impossible,” I said calmly. “They found the pathogen–and we didn't,” he said. “So much the better,” I responded, “we're now far enough along that we can pool our results, and the best thing that can happen to us is to have the opportunity to compare our results with those of the American commission.” “Whatever you think,” he said worriedly. “You'll see, we'll have them here today or tomorrow.” “The sooner the better,” I said. We sat all night in Hut B, which, well disinfected and thoroughly aired out, was quite tolerable now. We formulated our experiences as is done in scientific reports. As old Carolus was leafing through our records, he was strangely overcome. He cried like a child. A crying child is poignant to see, but that is something natural. Tears being shed by a man successful in life and (ultimately) in science, rich, well regarded, general, grandfather, recipient of high honors–is this not a grotesque sight, one that might provoke laughter as much as pity? But I had understood what this only outwardly ossified man was. I stroked the smooth, velvety skin on the top of his bald head (he did not notice this). He instinctively put his thin arm around me and with
his somewhat unclean fingers gestured at our dead friend's chart. But I quickly drew his head away so that his tears (and the ash from his big cigar) would not dirty Log W. and smear the writing and the diagrams. The old boy soon got a grip on himself. We sat together until morning by the light of a petroleum lamp.

Camp would be struck before long. Where would we live then? Should we go back to the Y.F. hospital? What was there for us to do there? The epidemic was on the rise again in C., and there was little room for us up in the hospital. Where should I go? The new governor was still awaited. No one wanted to take any steps without him. Everything was still entirely up in the air when the aforementioned commission arrived.

We, Carolus and I, were compelled to take up quarters in the Y.F. hospital, and the next day we were visited there by three gentlemen from the commission. They drew blood from a severely febrile patient and were able to show us the Y.F. pathogen in dark field. Not immediately. We sat at the microscopes from morning until night. Finally a specimen of
Leptospira
(its scientific name) was gracious enough to show itself to us. And even this one
Leptospira
was a fluke. The tiny thing was that much of a rarity. I recognized it. I had seen it before the Japanese who discovered it. But this is a frequent occurrence in the history of discoveries and inventions.

The gentlemen had brought some excellent slides, and we were able to examine the pathogen closely. It is an extremely delicate, supple entity about 4 to 9 microns long and 0.2 microns wide. In dark field it is active, exhibiting lashing lateral movements as well as rotational and very rapid retrograde motion, the latter clearly produced by the propeller-like torsional action of the ends, the “whips.” The international
(“American”) commission was also able to culture the microorganism, which stains with difficulty and is found only very sporadically in the blood of the sufferer, playing hard to get, but all the more dangerous for that. The artificial culture, the bacillus patch, was invisible to the naked eye. A misty opacity was all there was to see on the culture medium, even when growth was the most abundant. But the microorganisms were there. They were infectious to guinea pigs. It was possible to use them to infect guinea pigs artificially and follow the phases of the infection in animal experiments. Walter's experiments at the Institute however many years ago were thus confirmed in their entirety. This did not surprise me.

What the commission showed us was impeccable and we happily recognized the correctness of the research that we had failed in (that I had failed in, thanks to my mistake, as I have related). Their discovery and ours complemented each other ideally, like the two halves of a letter torn in the middle. They had the pathogen; we had the means of transmission and the prophylaxis, the method of epidemic control. The only problem was that the commission (headed by a man with whom I had had a scientific feud–this had been years before but was still vivid in my mind) regarded
our
results with the greatest skepticism. It was unwilling to believe us.

We had just come from the funeral of our colleague von F. “Why are you bothering with his old theory? That was rigorously disproven decades ago.” They would not acknowledge the
Stegomyia
. So were we supposed to start the experiments all over again? We could never have convinced these men. They held their ground: breathing the air or (or!) drinking infected water was the cause of Y.F. One member of the commission favored the air. Another member the water. A third
left the question open. Three heads. They could not agree. Meanwhile everything was going on as before, and the patients were getting to know element number three, the cold, cold ground.

They were dropping like flies.

But I was a criminal sentenced without possibility of appeal and a former convict, and the gentlemen did not think me worthy of another glance. They looked down on old Carolus, and Walter's death wrung from them no more than a regretful shrug. It was not
their
theory that his passing had corroborated.

We collapsed when they left.

Carolus had completely lost his equilibrium. He cried on my shoulder. Good.

After the setback delivered by the American commission, there had to be a windfall, and it came from the least likely quarter, the new governor. He was none other than my father's one-time assistant at the Ministry, La Forest, some of whose career I have recounted earlier in this report. I do not maintain that he was more benevolent than his predecessor toward me, the son of his former mortal enemy, possibly out of some antagonism toward my father, who had turned his back on me. The motives are irrelevant. The facts speak for themselves.