Georg Letham by Ernst Weiss

Author:Ernst Weiss [Weiss, Ernst]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780982624654
Publisher: Archipelago
Published: 1931-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

V

Had I done what I should have done, and had I not done what I did do, I would have been spared many hard lessons. I am not softhearted. Not even toward myself. But, after all that had happened, I had believed that my capacity for suffering was exhausted and that now I would–but let’s not get carried away. The facts and nothing but the facts are going to have to go on doing the job of conveying my joys and sorrows.

So far I had dealt only with nonliving material–and with the animals. When (thanks to my failure) the futility of our efforts to date had become fairly clear, I had to expect that I would be put back in a camp with the other felons and from that point on do hard physical labor, such as road building. In the best case I might hope to be sent to one of the municipal offices as a clerk or bookkeeper. In the environs of the city and on the surrounding islands, there were rubber plantations of no mean significance; there were deposits of gold-bearing quartz, which, though sizable, had not been adequately worked due to the climatic conditions; the precious woods in the immense and to some extent still virgin forests on the peninsula were traded internationally by a wood-utilization company. Even within the numerous convict colonies, which included a leprosery and a few more or less primitively equipped hospitals (also a modern one), there would have been plenty to do for a man with an academic education who was willing to work. And yet it was decided that I would remain in the old convent hospital, the collection point for Y.F.–and why? I had said not a word, I had made no requests, but my highly placed father had brought it about that when deported I “be employed in my profession where practicable.” My profession was primarily experimental bacteriology. Experiments were being done here in C. They had to do with bacillus X. Would that do? Of course it would. And when there was no longer enough for me to do in the laboratory, idleness being the very worst punishment for a man like me, I was put to work, as I had been aboard the Mimosa, caring for some severely ill patients.

I had always had the ill-fated ability to awaken trust in people. And now the hospital director, who was old and not overly bright, but capable and experienced in his specialty, had me brought to him, looked at me for a long time without saying a word, and then assigned me to take charge of medical care in one of the many sections of the hospital that stood empty these days more often than not. It was understood that this would be a test. And so it was, though not at all in the way he and I expected. He trusted me. I saw that.

To approach the disease from a clinical perspective, that is, from the standpoint of bedside observation, I was to study fresh, recent cases especially.

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