Beware of Pity (12 page)

And now he begins, in a whisper, “Lieutenant Hofmiller”—his husky voice will not obey him yet—“I want to ask you a great favour. I know very well that I have no right to trouble you; after all, you hardly know us … and you can always say no … of course you can say no. Perhaps it’s presumption on my part, and I am importuning you, but I have had confidence in you from the first. You are a good, a helpful person, one feels that straight away. Yes, yes, yes”—I must have been shaking my head—“you
are
a good person. There’s something about you that makes others trust you, and sometimes … sometimes I feel as if you were sent to us by … ” Here he hesitated, and I felt he was about to say “by God” but could not quite find the courage to do so. “Sent to us,” he continued, “as someone to whom I can speak honestly … and it’s not so very much that I want to ask you, but here I go talking on and on, and I haven’t even asked if you will listen to me.”

“But of course I will.”

“Thank you … you know, in old age one has only to set eyes on someone to know him inside out. I know what a good person is like, I know that from my wife, God rest her soul. That was the first tragedy, when she died and I lost her, and yet today I tell myself that perhaps it was better for her to know nothing about our child’s tragic misfortune. She could never have borne it. You know, when it happened five years ago … at first I couldn’t
believe
that it would last so long. How can you imagine a child running about and playing, active as a spinning top like all the other children … and suddenly that’s all over, all over for
ever
? And then we all grow up feeling such respect for doctors … you read in the papers about the miracles they can work, how they can sew up hearts and transplant eyes, so people say … we laymen are bound to feel sure, don’t you
agree, that in that case they can do what sounds so simple, they can make a child … a child born healthy, a child who’s always been healthy … they can soon make her better again. So at first I wasn’t so very much alarmed, because I never for a moment
believed
that God could do such a thing, that he would strike down a child, an innocent child, for ever … if he had struck
me
down, well, my legs have carried me around for long enough. Why would I need them any longer? And then I wasn’t a good person, I have done many bad things, I have … oh, what was I saying just now? Yes … yes, if I’d been struck down I would have understood it. But how can God miss his target so badly, how can he hit the wrong, the
innocent
person … and how can a man like me understand why a living creature, a child, is suddenly to have her legs
deadened
because of some tiny thing, nothing? A bacillus, the doctors said, thinking that meant something. But it’s only a word, an excuse, and the other side of the coin is real, a child lying there with her limbs suddenly paralysed so that she can’t even walk, she can’t move, and there was I standing helplessly watching … I
can’t
understand that.”

With a brusque movement, he wiped the sweat from his damp, untidy hair with the back of his hand. “Of course I asked all the doctors … and if I heard of any really famous doctor then we consulted him … I asked them all to come here to me, and they lectured me and talked Latin and discussed the case and gave advice, one tried this and the other that, and then they said they hoped, they thought, and they took their money and went away, and everything was still the same as before. Or rather, something was rather better, indeed considerably better. She had always had to lie flat on her back the whole time before, and her whole body was numbed … now at least her arms and
her upper body are normal, and she can walk alone using her crutches … so when I say rather better, no, I mustn’t be unjust, I should say it was much better then. But none of them could really help her, they all shrugged their shoulders and advised patience, patience, patience … Only one of them has persevered with her, and that’s Dr Condor … I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him. You’re from Vienna.”

I had to say no, I had never heard the name.

“Of course, how could you know him? You’re a healthy man, and he’s not one to go around all puffed up. He’s not a university professor, not even a lecturer. And I don’t think he has a very flourishing practice … that’s to say, he doesn’t
want
a large practice. He’s a very individual, unusual man … I don’t know that I can really explain it to you. He’s not interested in the ordinary cases that any run-of-the-mill physician can treat, he’s interested only in the difficult ones, the cases that the other doctors pass by with a shrug of their shoulders. Of course, uneducated as I am, I can’t claim that Dr Condor is a better doctor than all the others … I only know he’s a better
man
than the rest of them. I first met him when … when my wife … and I saw how he fought for her life. He was the only one who wouldn’t give up until the last minute, and that was when I realised how he lives and dies with every one of his patients. He has … I don’t know if I’m expressing it well … he has a kind of passion to be stronger than the illness. He’s not like the others, the doctors whose only ambition is to get their fees and be professors and get awarded distinctions. He doesn’t think of himself, he thinks of others, of those who are suffering … oh, he’s a wonderful man.”

The old man was in the grip of his enthusiasm; his eyes, weary only just now, were shining.

“A wonderful man, I assure you, and he never lets anyone down. To him, every case is a duty … I know I can’t put it very well, but it’s as if he feels guilty if he can’t help someone—
personally
guilty, I mean, and that’s why … You probably won’t believe this, but I swear it’s true—the one time he didn’t succeed in what he set out to do … he’d promised a woman who was going blind that he would cure her, and when she really did go blind he married her, imagine it, a young man marrying a blind woman seven years his senior, not beautiful and with no money, a hysterical creature who’s a burden on him now, and not at all grateful … Well, doesn’t that show what kind of man he is? So you’ll understand how glad I am to have found someone like him … a man who looks after my child as devotedly as I do. I’ve left him a legacy in my will. If anyone can help her, then he will. God grant he does, God grant he does!”

The old man had both hands clasped as if in prayer. Then he moved a little closer to me.

“So now please listen, Lieutenant Hofmiller. You remember I wanted to ask you something. I’ve told you already what a sympathetic man Dr Condor is … but you’ll see, you’ll
understand
… it’s
because
he is such a good man that I’m anxious, I’m always afraid, you see, that he may not be telling me the truth out of consideration for me, not the whole truth. He’s always consoling me, promising me that my child is sure to get better, she’ll be cured some day, but whenever I ask him more closely when, how much longer it will be, he avoids answering and just says: ‘Patience, patience!’ But I need to be certain … I’m an old man, a sick man, I have to know whether I shall live to see it and whether she will get well at all,
really
well. Believe me, Lieutenant Hofmiller, I can’t live like this any longer … I have to know if she is certain to get
better, and when it will be … I have to know, I can’t bear this uncertainty any more.”

He stood up, overwhelmed by his emotion, and took three firm and rapid steps over to the window. I knew him by now; whenever tears rose to his eyes, he resorted to that brusque turning away. He didn’t want pity either—he was very like her! At the same time, his right hand was feeling clumsily in the back pocket of his sombre black coat, crumpling up a handkerchief as he brought it out, and then pretending that he only wanted to mop the sweat from his brow with it. But in vain; I saw his reddened eyelids only too clearly. He paced up and down the room once, twice; the crumbling floorboards groaned under his tread, or was it he who was groaning, an old man also in decline? Then he took a deep breath, like a swimmer about to push off.

“Forgive me, I didn’t mean to speak about it … where was I? Oh yes … Dr Condor will be coming from Vienna again tomorrow, he telephoned to say so … he regularly comes to visit us every two or three weeks to examine her … if I had my way I wouldn’t let him leave us again at all … he could live in this house, I’d pay him anything he wanted. But he says he needs a certain distance to … now what was I going to say? I know … so anyway, he’s coming tomorrow, and he will examine Edith in the afternoon. He always stays for dinner in the evening, and goes back to Vienna on the night express. And so I was
thinking
, suppose someone happened to ask him entirely by chance, someone who’s a total stranger and has no personal interest in it, someone he doesn’t know at all, suppose that person were to ask him quite … quite by chance, as you might ask about a mere acquaintance … were to ask how bad her paralysis really is, does he think the child will ever be entirely cured …
entirely
cured, do you hear? And how long does he think it will
take … I have a feeling he won’t lie to you; he doesn’t have to spare you. He can tell you the truth with an easy mind … with me, perhaps something keeps him from it. I’m her father, I’m a sick old man, and he knows it would break my heart … But of course you mustn’t let him guess that you have been talking to me about it … you must mention it
entirely
by chance, as you might ask any doctor … will you … would you do that for me?”

How could I refuse? The old man was sitting in front of me, eyes swimming with tears, waiting for me to say yes as if waiting for the last trump to blow on Judgement Day. Of course I promised to do as he wanted. He impulsively reached both hands out to me.

“I knew it … I knew it when you came back, and were so good to the child, after … well, you know, then I knew at once—this is a man who will understand me … he and no one else will ask him for me and … I promise, I swear to you, no one will know about it before or afterwards, not Edith, not Condor, not Ilona … only I will know what a service, what a great service you have done me.”

“But Herr von Kekesfalva, it’s nothing … it’s only a small thing for me to do.”

“No, it’s not a small thing … it will be a great, a very great service that you do me. And if …”—he bowed his head slightly, and his voice too was lowered—“if there’s ever anything that I can do for you in return … perhaps you have …”

I must have made a startled movement (was he actually thinking of paying me?), for he was quick to add, in the disjointed manner typical of him in moments of strong emotion, “Oh, don’t misunderstand me … I only mean … I don’t mean anything material … just that … I think … well, I have good
connections
… I know a great many men in the ministries, including
the War Ministry … and these days it’s always good to have someone you can count on, that was all I meant, of course … A moment may come for everyone when … well, that was all … all I wanted to say.”

The shy awkwardness with which he offered me his hands put me to shame. All this time he had not once looked straight at me, but down at his own hands as if speaking to them. Only now did he look up uneasily, feel for the glasses he had placed on the desk and put them on with trembling fingers.

“Perhaps it would be better,” he murmured, “if we went over to the house now, or … or Edith will notice what a long time we’ve been away. I’m afraid we’ve had to be terribly careful with her since she’s been ill. She seems to have … to have sharper senses than other people, somehow. Even in her room she knows about everything going on in the house … she guesses everything almost before you’ve finished putting it into words, so she could end up … well, that’s why I suggest we go over before she suspects anything.”

We went over to the house, where Edith was already waiting in her wheelchair in the salon. When we came in she turned her keen grey gaze on us as if to read what the two of us had been talking about in our rather awkwardly lowered eyes. And as we did not give her any hint of it, she remained strikingly monosyllabic all evening, absorbed in her own thoughts.

I had told Kekesfalva that it was “only a small thing” to do as he wished and ask the doctor, whom I did not yet know at all, as unselfconsciously as possible about the lame girl’s prospects of a cure, and if you looked at it from the outside I really had
undertaken to make only a modest effort. But I can hardly describe how much this unexpected request meant to me personally. Nothing increases a young man’s self-assurance, nothing encourages the formation of his character so much as to find himself unexpectedly facing a task that he must perform entirely on his own initiative and by his own powers. Naturally I had already shouldered responsibility, but it had always been of a military nature, just something that I had to do as an officer on the orders of those who outranked me, and within a closely circumscribed sphere of influence, for instance commanding a squadron, taking charge of a transport of material, buying horses, settling quarrels between the men. All these orders, however, and the task of carrying them out were only what was usual. I had written or printed instructions, and if I was in any doubt I had only to ask an older and more experienced comrade for advice before doing exactly what I was expected to do. Kekesfalva’s request, on the other hand, was an appeal not to the soldier in me but to the essence of my character, of which I myself was still uncertain. I had not yet discovered my powers and their limitations. For Kekesfalva, a relative stranger, to appeal to me in his time of need, out of all his friends and acquaintances, was more gratifying than any praise I had yet received in my military career from any of my fellow soldiers.

But this sense of gratification went hand in hand with a certain dismay, for it showed me once again how shallow and casual my sympathy had been so far. How could I have visited this house for weeks on end without asking the most natural and obvious question of all—will that poor girl be crippled for life? Could the art of medicine not find a way to cure her disabled limbs? I felt dreadfully ashamed of myself; not once had I asked Ilona, Edith’s father, or our regimental doctor that
question. I had fatalistically accepted her paralysis as a fact, and the anxiety that had haunted her father for years now struck me with the force of a bullet. Suppose this doctor of his could really cure the child of her malady? Suppose those pathetic, helpless legs could stride out freely again, suppose that poor creature, abandoned by God, could run about easily once more, upstairs, downstairs, to the sound of her own happy laughter! The idea was intoxicating; it was delightful to imagine the two of us, or three of us, riding out together over the fields, to see her welcoming me at the door of the house instead of
waiting
for me in the room where she was a prisoner, to think of her going for walks with me. I was impatiently counting the hours until I could find out her chances from the doctor I had never met, counting them even more impatiently, perhaps, than Kekesfalva himself. Nothing in my own life had ever been so important to me.