I Have to Save Them by Ellie Midwood

Author:Ellie Midwood [Midwood, Ellie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

SEHNDE, GERMANY. DECEMBER 1961

One month before New Year’s Day

You’re losing the grip on her. You’re losing her and you know it deep inside and there’s nothing to be done about it. But, like the obstinate mule that you are, you refuse to give up. There’s new medicine in the US. It’s in its experimental phase, but the preliminary research has shown a lot of promise.

You rushed to Berlin to the medical conference and snatched the sample from the American psychiatrists’ team and raced back to Sehnde, doing over a hundred on the autobahn despite the sleet and warnings of black ice. Your life suddenly means so little when someone else’s is at stake.

Like a holy grail, you carry the new medicine in a small paper cup into her room. As always, she’s by the window, gazing out of it into somewhere you’ll never see, never understand no matter how much you try. She has already explained it to you in the mildest of manners, that one had to live through it to fully grasp the horror of it. On the sill before her, a book, forgotten. She has little concentration these days. Even less interest in doing… anything, really.

You approach her and ask her about her day and offer the small white pill that has cured so many in America. She looks at it apathetically but takes it all the same and swallows it dry and gives you a small, tragic smile. You realize she pities you. You and her husband and your joint woeful attempts to glue together the pieces of her that keep falling apart. She pities you but goes along with your charade and your promises of miraculous recovery because, some fifteen years ago, she, too, was an obstinate mule. She, too, refused to give up.

But she did save lives, you remind her. She saved so many lives, and particularly when she came up with that brilliant idea of the typhus infectious ward.

She considers it for some time, nods slowly, doesn’t argue, like she used to do, that half of them have killed themselves and the other half were mad like her and was it saving really or just prolonging their torture? Some of them didn’t want to live but she made them—out of vanity, out of a desire to spite the SS and show them that she was stronger than them, smarter than them.

To spite death itself, maybe.

When she succeeded, she felt like God. It’s only now she realizes that she was nothing but a fraud who talked people into living—living without their families, without a home to return to. She is a fraud and they must be cursing her still and the world will be better off without her.

She’s talking herself out of living before actually going through with it like she has already done so many times before.

You feel like you’re too late this time, but you ask her for one more chance, just another day to let the pill do its magic, just to give you a chance to see if it works.

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