Doctors (29 page)

The doctors merely had to freeze the ball to ice the game. They had prepared for this happy eventuality, and though the lawyers threw a full-court press, the medics managed to set up a weaving pattern to kill time and avoid being killed themselves.

When the buzzer sounded, the Malpractice Cup had returned to its proper place—the School of Medicine!

The normally staid Dean Holmes leaped to his feet and cheered. And then, regaining his composure, he walked in dignified fashion to offer his hand to the dean of the Law School (and perhaps even collect the rumored thousand-buck wager).

Skip and Barney quickly helped Bennett to a car and headed for the Emergency Room at Mass General, where their arrival was expected.

As they drove, Bennett began to moan and twist, grimacing in acute pain.

“Ben, are you okay?” Barney asked.

“Hell, no,” he answered, grinding his teeth. “The goddamn Novocain is wearing off.”

“They gave you Novocain?” Barney asked in amazement.

Bennett nodded. “And some other shot, too. Don’t know what the hell that was.”

“Well,” Barney tried to quip, “just think what they might have injected you with if we had lost.”

Bennett did not laugh.

And Barney did not smile. For he was wondering, Did the doctors have to win
that
badly?

W
hen they arrived at the hospital, a nurse was already waiting with a wheelchair for Bennett to whisk him—without the usual tedious formalities and paperwork—directly up to Radiology for x-rays. And none other than Christopher Dowling, M.D., F.A.C.S., P.C., head orthopod, was there to check out the pictures. In a few minutes, Dean Holmes arrived. As Dowling gingerly felt his way around Bennett’s increasingly swollen lower leg, Dean Holmes said softly, “Good show, Landsmann, those lawyers never knew what hit them.”

“Frankly, sir, I’m not quite sure what hit me. What exactly was in those syringes?”

“Xenocaine, which is a state-of-the-art painkiller and—thank God for pharmacology—Ducozolidan, the very latest anti-inflammatory agent.”

Skip and Barney had been watching mutely from a corner. At this point the older student whispered, “I’ve read about ‘Duke.’ I think they’ve tried it on horses or something. But I didn’t know it was on the market.”

“Really?” Barney answered, in a mild tone that belied his mounting indignation. “Maybe if it has some really bad side effects, Dowling can write it up and have another entry for his bibliography.”

When the two senior physicians left the room, Skip and Barney approached their injured friend.

“How’s it going, old buddy?” Barney greeted him.

“Doesn’t hurt anymore,” he answered, dry-mouthed. “They gave me some sort of shot.…”

At this point Barney didn’t even have the courage to ask what further miracle drugs had been administered.

“What’s the diagnosis?” Skip inquired, making a vain attempt to sound unperturbed.

“Tear in my Achilles. From the sound of it, a pretty bad one. No bones broken, though.”

Barney knew a thing or two about athletic injuries. It was clear to him that Bennett’s Achilles could not have been completely torn when they gave him those injections. Their shots had obviously “healed” him enough to make it possible to aggravate the injury to the point where surgery was now required.

Barney could not suppress the angry thought that even had The Truck fractured every bone in Bennett’s leg, the standard-bearers of Modern Medicine would have found a way to keep him playing to the bitter end.

“Hey,” Bennett said, his voice husky and fatigued, “why don’t you guys take off? Especially you, Livingston. I’m gonna need you to take notes for me the next day or so. I may even miss the grand opening of the brain.”

“No fear of that,” Dean Holmes interjected, arriving on cue. “I’ll get our Number One Neurology resident up here first thing in the morning to keep you au fait, Landsmann. Just take it easy.”

“Will you be okay, Ben?” Barney asked, already feeling guilty at the prospect of abandoning his pal.

“No sweat—I’ll be sure to get all the cute nurses’ phone numbers.”

The neurologist split Barney’s skull down the middle. At least that was the way it felt as he watched Professor Francis James demonstrating how to saw a cadaver’s head in two.

What followed seemed an anticlimax. With the skull lying halved like a coconut, the sacred instrument known as the brain—that venerated organ that made man, in Hamlet’s words, “noble in reason, the paragon of animals”—looked like nothing more than a small, molding cauliflower.

James quickly outlined its basic structure. “We actually have two brains, or, to put it another way, the right and left hemispheres are mirror images of each other. And we still do not fully understand the reason for this or even the precise function of each side.”

He then pointed out the four lobes. “Note that the temporal sits above the hypothalamus, which, though weighing a mere
tenth of an ounce, is the control headquarters for appetite, gland secretions, sexuality, and a multitude of emotional states, including the so-called ‘rage center.’ ”

Barney wondered if he was the only one struck by the fact that although science could pinpoint the exact spot in the brain that ignites rage, they had yet to identify the location that produces love.

At lunch, though he tried to conceal himself in the remotest of corners, Laura tracked him down.

“What the hell happened last night?”

“We won,” he said dryly.

“You know what I mean. What happened to Bennett?”

“Please, Castellano, I’m not his consulting physician. Also, I’m personally bruised from head to toe—and my soul feels like it’s herniating.”

Laura sat down across from him. “Livingston, I think Med School is making you antisocial, paranoid, and weird.”

“That’s exactly what it’s supposed to do,” he replied. “At this rate I stand a chance of becoming the president of the AMA.”

“Please, Barney,
what
happened to Bennett?”

He looked at her with gray-ringed, bloodshot eyes and answered, “He got the best treatment money couldn’t buy.”

Laura folded her arms in a gesture that said she was determined to wait for an explanation till hell froze over.

“Okay, okay. They shot him up with a lot of newfangled gorp. They had him running around on a torn Achilles.”

“I’d say that was pretty stupid.”

“Laura, you don’t seem to understand. The point is we
won
the game.” He sighed and then added, “Now I see why they call it the Malpractice Cup. I wouldn’t be surprised if when Mack Wilkinson gets his degree he doesn’t help Bennett sue the Med School for a million bucks.”

“Why—he’s not crippled or anything, is he?”

“Not so far. If he’s lucky, in only a few months Ben’ll be able to walk without crutches.”

That evening Barney visited Landsmann in his room in the private wing of Mass General. As he opened the door he was startled to find two junior-looking men in white coats pointing to an unusual object on Bennett’s bed tray: the same replica of the human brain that James had used in his lecture.

When he noticed Barney, Bennett asked his visitors, “Is it okay if we knock off now, guys? All
my
lobes are starting to hurt.”

The two young doctors nodded and the one with the natty bow tie said, “We’re both on night duty tonight, Ben. If you get the urge, just have us paged. If not, we’ll see you in the morning. Ciao.”

Barney looked at Bennett’s room. In almost every corner there was a half-opened text, a notebook, or a section of the plastic model. Clearly his friend had not wanted for instruction that day.

“Holy shit, Ben. You can start your own medical school. I guess you won’t need these.”

He tossed onto the bed carbon copies of the notes he’d taken that afternoon. “I’m beginning to feel jealous.”

“Don’t, Barn, it sure as hell wasn’t worth it.”

“Are you in pain?”

“Not really. I’m just worried about sitting in the hospital so long.”

“You mean falling behind in your courses?”

“Hell, no.” He smiled. “With the kind of help I’ve been getting, I ought to be ready to practice medicine by the end of the week.”

Just then the phone rang. Barney picked it up.

“Good evening,” said a voice that seemed to belong to a man in his sixties. “Is this Mr. Bennett Landsmann’s extension?”

“Yes. Who’s calling, please?”

“This is his father in Cleveland.”

Barney handed the phone over. Why the hell does this guy’s father have a German accent?

In April 1945 a tornado of flame engulfed the wooden barracks of the Nordhausen concentration camp. The U.S. Army medical authorities had determined that only the complete evacuation and destruction of the infected structures would arrest the ever-widening spread of typhus.

That evening the last of the survivors boarded the Army trucks for transportation to one of the displaced-persons camps set up by the Allies.

Hannah Landsmann was well enough to be able to sit for the journey, although two GIs had to help her into the vehicle. Herschel was at her side.

Inside the truck there was a Babel of nervous murmuring.
Though the refugees had been told—each in his native language—that they were going to an establishment for rehabilitation and recuperation, they were still mistrustful. How many times during the previous years had they heard their Nazi captors say they were going to a “labor camp,” or a “hospital center”?

They had no common means of communication save the wordless language of suffering. Some of the Poles and Germans communicated in Yiddish. But how could Jewish dockworkers from Greece converse with former Viennese schoolmasters? Their equivalent of Yiddish was Ladino, the Spanish spoken by their ancestors who had been expelled from Spain in 1492 and had wandered eastward. A few, like Herschel Landsmann, could speak English.

And so, when the convoy had stopped along the route for a light meal to maintain their malnourished passengers, Herschel approached a young soldier and asked, “Excuse me, sir. Where exactly are we going?”

“Weren’t you folks told?” the corporal replied with a New England accent. “We’re taking you to a place where you can rest and get better and there’ll be people to help you find your relatives, that sort of thing. It’s a ‘DP camp.’ That means—”

“I
know
what it means, sir. Would you kindly tell me
where
it is.”

“Our lieutenant said it would be at Bergen-Belsen, sir.”

The words shook Herschel Landsmann’s frail body. For news of the sheer magnitude of the Nazi atrocities there—the hundreds of thousands lying dead and dying—was already known to all. Was this yet another cruel twist of Fate’s knife? Had they once again fallen into the hands of a nation of persecutors?

Herschel shuffled back toward the truck. As he climbed in, a GI offered him some chocolate, which he refused with a shake of his head.

“What’s the matter,
liebchen
?” Hannah asked anxiously.

“Nothing, nothing,” he replied, making a heroic effort to hide his desperation.

But of course he was wrong. For like Dachau to the south, Belsen was in the process of being transformed from a death camp into a “life camp.”

Food and medical care were in abundance and soon there were various relief organizations like the Hebrew International Aid Society, and the Organization for Rehabilitation and Training set up by international bodies to attempt the monumental task of identifying the living and the dead. And to try to reunite
families as well as help the refugees go “home”—whatever that word might mean to them. For who of them had the emotional strength to return to a place where their “countrymen” had in so many cases handed them over to the Nazis? In fact, the realistic options were only two: the English-speaking countries or Palestine.

Herschel had a brother who had emigrated to somewhere in Ohio in the early thirties, and this was enough to make him eligible for immigration to the United States. His greatest dream now was to belong to the generous nation whose ministering angels had liberated him. The moment the U.S. Camp Commission began its sessions, Herschel and Hannah made a formal application to live in America.

The interviewing officer asked them a few cursory questions—including whether Herschel was a Communist. He replied with a good humor that seemed to impress the official. “Sir, do you think it likely that someone who once owned the largest leather goods factory in Germany would be anything but a capitalist?”

Now all he and Hannah had to do was wait while they went through the process of finding Herschel’s brother and arranging for sponsorship.

And wait they did.

It was midsummer when the letter arrived from one Stephen Land of Cleveland, Ohio. The correspondent revealed that he was the same person with whom “Hershie” had grown up in Berlin. Only then his name was Stefan Landsmann: “I didn’t want
anything
about me to be German,” he explained. “I even bought a set of records to get rid of every trace of my accent.”

The letter expressed great joy that his brother and sister-in-law had survived the barbaric genocide, but the rest of the communication was somber.

“To the best of our knowledge you are the only ones of the family to escape the ovens. All the Katznelsons, the Spiegels, and the Wiener cousins were sent to Auschwitz.”

But for Herschel and Hannah, his concluding words were the worst of all.

“I weep with you for little Charlotte. But while I know she can never be replaced in your heart, you are at least both young enough to have more children. That is something of a blessing.”

Reading these words, Hannah began to sob so intensely that Herschel was unable to calm her. How could he, when he was also weeping?

*    *    *

The bureaucratic process dragged on and on. Autumn came and the residents of what was now the Bergen-Belsen
village
lived in subdued anticipation, sometimes punctuated by irritated impatience. They were all anxious to be dispersed, like seeds to be sown in new earth and, hopefully, to blossom.

By December there were still several thousand inhabitants, among them Herschel and Hannah Landsmann.