Doctor Faustus (76 page)

“Oh, yes,” was the reply. “It is a responsibility, doctor. The child was given in our charge here in the country to strengthen his health… “

“The clinical picture, in so far as one can speak of such a thing,” responded the doctor, “gives no warrant for a discouraging diagnosis. I will come again tomorrow.”

He did so, and now he could diagnose the case with all too much certainty. Nepomuk had had an abrupt vomiting-spell, like the outbreak of an illness; head pains set in accompanied by moderate fever and within a few hours had obviously become all but intolerable. When the doctor came the child had already been put to bed and was holding his head with both hands, uttering shrieks which went on as long as his breath held out, a martyrdom to all who heard them, and they could be heard throughout the house. At intervals he put out his little hands to those about him, crying: “Echo’s head, Echo’s head!” Then another violent spell of vomiting would fetch him upright, to sink back again in convulsions.

Kurbis tested the child’s eyes, the pupils of which were tiny and showed a tendency to squint. The pulse raced. Muscular contractions developed, and an incipient rigidity of the neck. It was cerebro-spinal meningitis, inflammation of the meninges. The good man pronounced the name with a deprecating movement of the head shoulderwards, probably in the hope that they might not know the almost complete powerlessness of medical science in the face of this fatal onslaught. A hint lay in his suggestion that they might telegraph and let the parents know. The presence of the mother, at least, would probably have a soothing effect on the little patient. He also asked for a consultation with a physician from the capital, as he wanted to share the responsibility of a case which was unfortunately not at all light. “I am a simple man,” he said. “This is a case for a higher authority.” A gloomy irony lay, I believe, in his words. In any case, he was quite competent to undertake the spinal puncture necessary to confirm the diagnosis as well as to afford the only possible relief from the pains. Frau Schweigestill, pale but capable, as ever loyal to the “human,” held the moaning child in bed, chin and knees almost touching, and between the separated vertebrse Kiirbis drove his needle into the spinal canal and drew out the fluid drop by drop. Almost at once the frantic headache yielded. If it returned, the doctor said—he knew that after a couple of hours it must return, for the relief from pressure given by drawing off the fluid from the brain cavity lasted only that long—then they must use, besides the indispensable ice-bag, the chloral which he prescribed and ordered from the county town.

After the puncture Nepomuk fell into a sleep of exhaustion. But then he was roused by fresh vomiting, skull-splitting headache, and convulsions that shook his small frame. The heartrending moans and yelling screams began again: the typical “hydrocephalic shriek,” against which only the physician, precisely because he knows it is typical, is tolerably armed. The typical leaves one calm, only what we think of as individual puts us beside ourselves. Science is calm. Science did not, however, prevent our good country doctor from going over quite soon from the bromide and chloral preparations to morphine, which was more efficacious. He may have decided as much for the sake of the family—I have in mind particularly one of its members—as out of pity for the martyred child. Only once in twenty-four hours might the fluid be drawn off, and for only two of these did the relief last. Twenty-two hours of shrieking, writhing torture, of a child, of this child, who folded his twitching little hands and stammered: “Echo will be good, Echo will be good!” Let me add that for those who saw him a minor symptom was perhaps the most dreadful of all: the squinting of the heaven’s—blue eyes, caused by the paralysis of the eye—muscles accompanying the rigidity of the neck. It changed the sweet face almost beyond recognition, horribly; and in combination with the gnashing of the teeth, which presently began, gave it a look as though he were possessed.

Next afternoon, fetched from Waldshut by Gereon Schweigestill, the consulting authority arrived from Munich. He was a Professor von Rothenbuch; Kurbis had suggested him among others and Adrian had chosen him on account of his great reputation. He was a tall man, with one eye half-closed as though from constant examination. He had a social presence and had been ennobled personally by the late King; was much sought after and high-priced. He vetoed the morphine, as its effect might obscure the appearance of a coma, “which has not yet supervened.” He permitted only codeine. Obviously he was primarily concerned with the typical progress of the case and a clear clinical picture in all its stages. After the examination he confirmed the dispositions of his obsequious rural colleague: avoidance of light, head kept cool and bedded high, very gentle handling, alcohol rubs, concentrated nourishment; it would probably become necessary to give it by a tube through the nose. Very likely because he was not in the home of the child’s parents his sympathy was candid and unequivocal. A clouding of the consciousness, legitimate and not prematurely induced by morphine, would not be long in appearing, and would grow progressively worse. The child would suffer less, and finally not at all. Even more unsightly symptoms, therefore, must not be taken too seriously. After he had had the goodness to carry out the second puncture with his own hands, he took a dignified leave and did not return.

For my part, I was kept posted daily on the dreadful situation by Mother Schweigestill on the telephone. Only on Saturday, the fourth day after the onslaught of the disease, could I get to Pfeiffering. By then, after furious spasms which seemed to stretch the little body on the rack and made his eyeballs roll up in his head, the coma had set in. The shrieking stopped; there remained only the gnashing of the teeth. Frau Schweigestill, worn with lack of sleep, her eyes swollen with weeping, met me at the door and urged me to go at once to Adrian. There was time enough to see the poor baby, whose parents had been with him since the night before. I would see soon enough. But the Herr Doctor, he needed me to talk to him, just between ourselves things weren’t right with him, sometimes it seemed to her he was talking crazy like.

In distress of mind I went to him. He sat at his desk and as I entered glanced up, almost with contempt. Shockingly pale, he had the same red eyes as the rest of the household; with his mouth firmly shut, he kept mechanically moving his tongue to and fro inside his lower lip.

“Is that you, good soul?” he said as I went to him and laid my hand on his shoulder. “What are you doing here? This is no place for you. Cross yourself, like this, forehead to shoulders, the way you learned as a child. That will keep you safe.”

And when I spoke a few words of consolation and hope: “Spare yourself,” he roughly interrupted; “spare yourself the humanistic quibbles. He is taking him. Just let him make it short. Perhaps he can’t make it any shorter, with his miserable means.”

And he sprang up, stood against the wall, and leaned the back of his head against the panelling.

“Take him, monster!” he cried, in a voice that pierced me to the marrow. “Take him, hell-hound, but make all the haste you can, if you won’t tolerate any of this either, cur, swine, viper! I thought,” he said in a low, confidential voice, and turned to me suddenly, taking a step forwards and looking at me with a lost, forlorn gaze I shall never forget, “I thought he would concede this much, after all, maybe just this; but no, where should he learn mercy, who is without any bowels of compassion? Probably it was just exactly this he had to crush in his beastly fury. Take him, scum, filth, excrement!” he shrieked, and stepped away from me again as though back to the Cross. “Take his body, you have power over that. But you’ll have to put up with leaving me his soul, his sweet and precious soul, that is where you lose out and make yourself a laughing-stock—and for that I will laugh you to scorn, aeons on end. Let there be eternities rolled between my place and his, yet I shall know that he is there whence you were thrown out, orts and draff that you are! The thought will be moisture on my tongue and a hosannah to mock you in my foulest cursings!”

He covered his face with his hands, turned round and leaned his forehead against the wall.

What could I say? Or do? How could I meet such words? “But my dear fellow, for heaven’s sake be calm! You are beside yourself, your sufferings make you imagine preposterous things.” That is the sort of thing one says, and out of reverence for the psyche, especially in the case of such a man, one does not think of the physical remedies, sedatives, bromide, and so on, even though we had them in the house.

To my imploring efforts at consolation he only responded: “Save yourself the trouble, just cross yourself, that’s what’s going on up there. Do it not only for yourself, but at the same time for me and my guilty soul. What a sin, what a crime”—he was sitting now at his desk, his temples between his fists—“that we let him come, that I let him be near me, that I feasted my eyes on him! You must know that children are tender stuff, they are receptive for poisonous influences—“

Now it was I, in very truth, who cried out and indignantly repudiated his words.

“Adrian, no!” I cried. “What are you doing, torturing yourself with absurd accusations, blaming yourself for a blind dispensation that could snatch away the dear child, perhaps too dear for this earth, wherever he chanced to be! It may rend our hearts but must not rob us of our reason. You have done nothing but loving-kindness to him… “

He only waved me aside. I sat perhaps an hour with him, speaking softly now and then, and he muttered answers that I scarcely understood. Then I said I would visit the patient.

“Yes, do that,” he retorted and added, hardly: “But don’t talk the way you did at first: ‘Well, my lad, that’s a good boy,’ and so on. In the first place he won’t hear you, and then it would most likely offend your humanistic taste.”

I was leaving when he stopped me, calling my name, my last name, Zeitblom, which sounded hard too. And when I turned round: “I find,” he said, “that it is not to be.”

“What, Adrian, is not to be?”

“The good and noble,” he answered me; “what we call the human, although it is good, and noble. What human beings have fought for and stormed citadels, what the ecstatics exultantly announced—that is not to be. It will be taken back. I will take it back.”

“I don’t quite understand, dear man. What will you take back?”

“The Ninth Symphony,” he replied. And then no more came, though I waited for it.

Dazed and grievously afflicted I went up into the fatal room. The atmosphere of the sick-chamber reigned there, clean and bare, heavy with the odours of drugs, though the windows were wide open. But the blinds were almost shut, only a crack showed. Several people were standing round Nepomuk’s bed. I put out my hand to them, my eyes already on the dying child. He lay on his side, his legs drawn up, elbows and knees together. The cheeks were very flushed; he drew a breath, then one waited long for the next. His eyes were not quite closed, but between the lashes no iris showed, only blackness, for the pupils had grown unevenly larger; they had almost swallowed up the colour. Yet it was good when one saw the mirroring black. For sometimes it was white in the crack, and then the little arms pressed closer to the sides, the grinding spasm, cruel to see but perhaps no longer felt, twisted the little limbs.

The mother was sobbing. I had squeezed her hand, I did so again. Yes, she was there, Ursel, the brown-eyed daughter of the Buchel farm, Adrian’s sister; and the woebegone face of the now thirty-nine-year-old woman moved me as I saw, stronger than ever, the paternal, the old-German features of Jonathan Lever-kiihn. With her was her husband, to whom the wire had been sent and he had fetched her from Suderode: Johannes Schneidewein, a tall, fine-looking, simple man with a blond beard, with Nepomuk’s blue eyes, with the honest and sober speech that Ursula had early caught from him, whose rhythm we had known in the timbre of Echo, our sprite.

With the others in the room, aside from Frau Schweigestill, who was moving to and fro, was the woolly-haired Kunigunde Rosenstiel. On a visit she had been allowed to make she had learned to know the little lad and treasured him passionately in her melancholy heart. She had at that time, on her typewriter with the ampersand and on the letter-paper of her inelegant firm, written a long letter to Adrian in model German describing her feelings. Now, driving Meta Nackedey from the field, she had succeeded in relieving the Schweigestills and then Ursel Schneidewein in the care of the child; changed his ice-bag, rubbed him with spirit, tried to give him food and medicine, and at night unwillingly and seldom yielded to another her place by his bed.

The Schweigestills, Adrian, his family, Kunigunde, and I ate an almost silent meal in the Nikesaal together, one of the women rising very often to look to the patient. On Sunday morning I should have, hard as it was, to leave Pf eiff ering. I still had a whole stack of Latin unseens to correct for Monday. I parted from Adrian with soothing hopes on my lips, and the way he left me was better than the way he had received me the day before. With a sort of smile he spoke, in English, the words*

” ‘Then to the elements. Be free, and fare thou well!’ “

He turned quickly away.

Nepomuk Schneidewein, Echo, the child, Adrian’s last love, fell on sleep twelve hours later. His parents took the little coffin with them, back to their home.

CHAPTER XLVI

F
or nearly four weeks now I have entered nothing in these records; deterred in the first place by a sort of mental exhaustion caused by reliving the scenes described in the last chapter, and secondly by the events of today, now rushing headlong on each other’s heels. Foreseen as a logical sequence, and in a way longed for, they now after all excite an incredulous horror. Our unhappy nation, undermined by fear and dread, incapable of understanding, in dazed fatalism lets them pass over its head, and my spirit too, worn with old sorrow, weary with old wrong, is helplessly exposed to them as well.

Since the end of March—it is now the 25th of April in this year of destiny 1945—our resistance in the west has been visibly disintegrating. The papers, already half-unmuzzled, register the truth. Rumour, fed by enemy announcements on the radio and stories told by fugitives, knows no censorship, but carries the individual details of swiftly spreading catastrophe about the land, into regions not yet swallowed, not yet liberated by it, and even hither into my retreat. No hold any more: everybody surrenders, everybody runs away. Our shattered, battered cities fall like ripe plums. Darmstadt, Wurzburg, Frankfurt are gone; Mannheim and Cassell, even Miinster and Leipzig are in foreign hands. One day the English reached Bremen, the Americans were at the gates of Upper Franconia; Nuremberg, city of the national celebrations so uplifting to unenlightened hearts, Nuremberg surrendered. The great ones of the regime, who wallowed in power, riches, and wrong, now rage and kill themselves: justice is done.