Georg Letham (19 page)

More hesitation. He pulls on the gloves, but the sublimate solution is too weak for him. He has another sublimate tablet brought and dissolved in the liquid.
This
is how much he loves
his
life! If only I had taken mine a thousandth as seriously! Then I never would have fallen so far as to become his object of study. This fellow with the face like a wrinkly, jaundiced baby's bottom has no idea what it is to spend all
day and all night on the hard floor of a cattle car, to sweat through an entire hot day out in the open under a blazing sun, nostrils full of one's comrades' filth and one's own. Does someone living in freedom ever know what it is to yearn for the bare necessities, the things one provides to animals, to dumb brutes?
Does
one provide them with those things, though? Did I? What were any of those brutes to me? Just what I am now to him, to Brig. Gen. Carolus, who raises his extraordinarily long eyelids and focuses his icy, impersonal gaze on me, who can't bear it.

Now one convict after another is being summoned. Those who are called are happy, thinking that as soon as the examination is over they will go down below, where warm food and a cot await them. No chance of that! They'll have to step back in line and wait until
everyone
has been dealt with. Carolus has given an order to this effect. “Order”? Where is order? How foolish it all is, how absurd. The mere appearance of order without order itself–this is the plague of mankind, enshrined in administration and government. And the mindlessness of the incompetent top medic! He clumsily everts the eyelids of one dark-skinned convict to look for trachoma follicles, but, as any blind man could tell by using his cane, the man's eyes are healthy, whereas his skin is diseased, covered with a pustular rash and crying out for a blood test, a “Wassermann.” A second convict, the lively little fellow of a moment ago, aged somewhere between twenty-five and fifty, the old boy's immense, feverish, black, blue-rimmed eyes bursting with jailhouse tuberculosis in all its dreary misery, this man's skin he prods with particular care, though there's not a thing wrong with it. Then he taps the little man's kneecaps to test his reflexes, and all the time he's about to drop from
coughing and hunger. And so it goes, for hours. Carolus is answerable to no one. No one is checking up on him.

No superior officer is present. Three junior officers are standing idly by. One of them, playing with his revolver, amuses himself by drawing a bead on an overfed ship's rat poking its head out from behind a coil of rope. I mentioned it before, didn't I? Rats, those disgusting, highly dangerous beasts, here too! Why doesn't Carolus think about ridding the ship of rats? He could get a few tips on that from my humble self. But what am I to the big man?

It would be the big man's job to see to the greatest possible cleanliness here on this run-down ship. But cleanliness! How would he know the meaning of the word, this man who hasn't once washed his hands in the sublimate solution, even after a good dozen examinations. For him the founder of the Pathology Institute where he did his studies, Louis Pasteur, the man with the mind of genius–and the affirmative faith–never lived. The man with little lines at the root of his nose from concentration and an unlined, massively domed brow.

Before
that pathbreaking scientist's time, people were about as advanced as this miserable bungler Carolus still is. It was known that the dreaded condition of gas gangrene was infectious, but all suppurating wounds were uselessly and unthinkingly washed with the same sponge. As far as anyone knew, this was a prophylactic measure suitable for the poorest of the poor, though it was nothing of the kind. There was only
one
thing the physician did not wash at that time, and that was: himself. And when such a master of the healing arts climbed into bed beside his wife at night after a day's work, he folded his hands to say a little prayer, went to sleep, and snored, in the belief that he had accomplished something good and pleasing in the sight of God that
day and done a vital job for suffering humanity. How fortunate his patients would have been if he had never lived! A terrible thing to say, but it could be said about me, too. And yet I hardly know which is the greater bane of society, the lawbreaker and renegade or a very different type, the character who is pleasant under all circumstances, free of conflict, and, of course, socially respected and guilty of no crimes, the good man of Carolus's sort. A man who takes hold of the world's horrors with clumsy hands. A man whose only response to the bleeding wounds of this most unfortunate of all worlds is to stamp bureaucratic file numbers on them.

What he is, his station in society,
I
could have had that. I would have!

But even now I don't envy him. If I did feel a twinge of envy toward this doddering idiot, it would never be for his gold braid, his “loving hearts” at home, his grandchild back on the beach, his high salary, or his pretty decorations–I could only envy Brig. Gen. Carolus his job, the job of investigating the infectious agent and transmission of yellow fever over in the tropics.

Is
he
really going to be the one, is Carolus destined for that?

Certainly he is, I'd bet my life on it if it were worth anything. Him and nobody else. Not someone like Walter. Carolus, so moronically stupid about the simplest hygienic procedures, was surely selected by those in the upper levels of the administration to head the yellow-fever research team because of his rank, his astounding knowledge of the scientific literature, and his shallow respectability. He is the right man for the job.

But am I so much smarter? I may seem bright, but I am even stupider than he is. A scientific undertaking of this kind was once among my
aims in life, yet I deliberately and studiedly set about it in such a way that I would never get what I wanted. Everything had to happen the way it did, or am I wrong? I'm here, am I not? What doomed me was just that I was toying with myself along with everything else, that I did not value my own life and my future highly enough. Thus I squandered not only my considerable fortune but also my very self, completely and utterly. I was hardened, fine. But hardened even against compassion for myself. I myself was the vivisected animal, the bright, so very docile dog that willingly jumps up onto the vivisection table and holds out its paws to be clamped, stretching out on its back, between its clenched teeth the nickel bit and its slowly dehydrating tongue, and then opens its intelligent eyes, waiting to see what its masters the humans are going to do with it.

I have to accept everything now. I have to content myself with a bare minimum of possessions, I have to give up my name, have to jump when I hear the number 46984, I have to sink to the level of a dumb animal, yes, I am like a head of livestock to this wrinkly old fellow pawing me with his greasy hands, which even at the Institute were notorious for their filthiness and never served him for even the simplest experiment–this gray-haired, gold-braided oaf is prodding at my face, my ocular conjunctivae, with his dirty, sticky, rubber-gloved paws as though I were a low-grade steer. And if the old scoundrel touched a trachomatous conjunctiva a moment before, which is only too likely, or if Professor Hansen's leprosy bacterium is still clinging to his rubber gloves, endangering not his but
my
epidermis, there's not a thing I can do about it.

I'm nearly weeping with rage, and my neighbor commiserates with
me. But the tears might wash the infectious matter out of my eyes. You're the beast, the monumental lummox! Georg Letham, in spite of all your ideas, your experiments, and your worldly sophistication, you're powerless now, the subject of someone else's experiment. You'll never get what you want, no matter how badly you want it. And what you want is to step on Carolus's long, silly face with the heel of your prison shoe encrusted with human shit, three times for each of the three syllables in his accursed name!

To be delivered into the hands of a physician, a man whose profession leads you to expect the best, the highest–recovery, solace, healing–and to see him as your
enemy
! An even more terrible thing to say, and again it could just as well be said about me, me, Dr. Georg Letham the younger, the physician, son of his father. Is
this
what they call remorse? Then the hell with it all.

Another rat has just scurried between my feet. Come closer, you dear little creature, I'm not afraid of you, and don't you be afraid of me, either.

I have known these animals from an early age, and, though I loathe them terribly, we have been on intimate terms. But this one is mistrustful and disappears underneath the ropes.

For my father they were fateful animals. No one made him live in a house where rats felt at home. But he wanted to show, to prove, that he was stronger.

They put in an appearance sporadically. There were hot, dry summers during which not one exemplar of the genus was observed. Then they would emerge in great numbers. In my early childhood they were
the somewhat tamer kind with uniform blue-gray coloration on their backs; it was not until later years, after an especially rainy, autumnal summer, that rats of the other variety appeared, somewhat larger and stronger, with a dark stripe along the spine. The gentler kind were house rats; the other kind, the conquerors wiping out the weaker ones, were brown rats. Life-and-death struggle? War of all against all, family against family, like against like? What better way of demonstrating to me the laws of life as
he
saw it could my wise old father have found, that clever, cunning bastard, than to use these animals as an example?

July was stormy and blustery that year, like a November by the sea. Usually there were no rats in the yard while it was raining. But then they roamed the house instead. They raided the pantry, trolled through the cellar rooms despite the oak doors, they pitched camp in the servants' beds (empty because my father had let some of the staff go to save money) and staged races and athletic contests in the attics while the rains pelted down on the slate roof. Then when the rainy spell was over, every corner of the grounds was teeming with them, the valuable poultry were destroyed overnight, everything in the greenhouse was gnawed to pieces and pulled apart. My father was unwilling to use dogs to go after the rodents (later I found out why). Exterminators did their best but were no match for the beasts. As a horde they withstood anything. It was known that the previous owners of the property had moved out and let my father have the house for a song because they had been unable to beat the rats. At that time my dear mother was no longer alive. She was the sister of an important scholar who had accompanied my father on his expedition to the northern lands. But the geographer had not stayed in his native country, he had headed out a second time, had gone missing, and was never heard from again.

Now and then an animal was caught in a wire-mesh trap. I remember one such event. My father, looking down from his window with his eagle eyes, spotted something moving in a trap at the foot of the plane tree in the courtyard. It must have been late in the evening. He took me down with him. He gave me his silk-lined smoking jacket to protect me from the cool and damp of the night. I was still so small that it came down to my knees.

Under the rainspout was a large barrel for collecting the water. Back then rainwater was thought to be especially pure and especially suitable for washing one's hair. We went down, and he had me pick up the trap. It seemed so light that the little animal (evidently an inexperienced pup) might have been made of papier-mâché. The rat ran in rapid circles behind the mesh, looked worriedly about, did its business as it ran, gnawed with its sharp, protruding teeth at the wire, which was fairly stout and very rusty from the rain. Being an intelligent animal, it even jiggled the little door it had come through, shrilling now and then. It sniffed at the hook that had held a piece of bacon as bait, and then began running around again. Suddenly it made a great leap, clung to the roof of the trap with all four feet like a monkey, and looked up at us with its reddish black eyes, blinking now and then. Its long, dust-colored tail curled around the wires. I was weakening.

“Toss it in,” said my father. “What else is there to do with it? Then I'll tell you the story of my voyage again.” I could not hear this story often enough.

As much as I loathed the animal, killing it was not something that came easily to me. The windows behind which my brother and sister were already sleeping were dark. The moon shone brightly but was
obscured by the edge of a mussel-shaped cloud moving eastward. More dark blue clouds were rolling by higher up.

There was a light on in the open window of my father's library. I saw the gilt-lettered spines of the books.

Grappling with its claws, the animal had let itself down onto the floor of the trap. It was not running now. It sat with its annulated, naked, ugly, very long tail coiled around it, swiveling its head about with great urgency and unease.

The wood of the trap floor was resting on the palm of my hand. I felt a vibration, rhythmic but very subtle. Was it the rat's heartbeat? The clouds had passed behind the treetops and nearby chimneys. “Now show what you can do, Georg Letham,” my father said, with cool but tender mockery.

I lifted the wire trap in my right hand and, closing my eyes desperately, tossed it into the tub.

The water splashed into our faces.

“Good,” my father said. He put his head back and laughed. He wiped the foul water first from my face, then from his, with a fine handkerchief that he took from the breast pocket of his smoking jacket, which I was wearing over my undershirt. I felt his long, thin hands.