The Glory of Life by Michael Kumpfmüller

Author:Michael Kumpfmüller [Kumpfmüller, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908323552
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

The story still has no ending; for the time being it ends in stalemate. There is the meat and the building, there is the sound of the enemy that will not be kept away by anyone or anything. If someone were to tell him, you will be really ill on such and such a day, and then he did become really ill, he would not be surprised. At the most, the opposite would be surprising, but then again the opposite has happened; people can survive tuberculosis, and in a few cases it has – how can one put it? – dissolved into thin air. At least, he has often heard of such things in the past, in sanatoriums when he was not yet a lung patient himself, strictly speaking not a patient at all.

In her arms, he sometimes believes it. Or rather, he forgets what at heart he does not believe, for in reality he is anxious all the time, listening to what is going on inside him, even in her arms, where fortunately there are still other sounds to be heard.

Overnight it has become real winter. Snow has fallen ankle-deep in the streets, it is cold and grey, and now of all times he has a high temperature again, his first in weeks. Not too high, but all the same. Dora sends him straight to bed. His energetic urge to write of the last few weeks is over, he feels dull and empty, leafs listlessly through a newspaper that Dora has brought, is discontented all day, which makes her anxious, but no, still no trace of coughing. He feels powerless, which somehow seems right now at the end of the year, when everything is beginning to lapse into rigidity resembling death.

The night passes without any particular incidents. The 24th begins just as the 23rd ended; he has a temperature but no cough, he lies on the sofa by the stove while Dora goes out to run her last errands for the holiday season. As soon as she has left the fever comes back. He begins to freeze, then he burns, at the same time he feels cold. When Dora returns she takes fright and telephones for a doctor, a locally well-known professor, who in turn sends his assistant, a man of around thirty who can find nothing wrong. We can only wait and see, he says. Stay in bed, is his advice, and at the same time he names his fee, a crazy sum of money.

As he is only feverish, Franz does not really want to lie down, but to please Dora he stays in bed, writing another letter to M., complaining of feeling rather worse than he does, but that is usual between them. Although nothing seems wrong with him just now, he writes about his old troubles, which he says have sought him out here in Berlin and overcome him, everything tires him, every stroke of the pen, so that is why he hasn’t written, he is waiting for better or worse times to come.

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