Death in Venice and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

you in pain? There, there, I know you are—how pitiful you look lying there! But I’ll, I’ll stay by your side! I’ll comfort you! I’ll take my best handkerchief . . .”
    But Esau just lay there and groaned his last. His dim searching eyes were directed at his master, all innocence and accusation, unable to comprehend—then he straightened his legs out slightly and died.
    Tobias, however, remained in his position, not moving. He had laid his face down upon Esau’s body and was crying bitterly.

Tristan
    1
    T his is “Einfried,” the sanitarium. The long main building with its straight white lines and side wing stands amidst the spacious garden, which is delightfully appointed with grottos, arbors and little tree-bark pavilions, while behind its slate-tiled roof, pine green mountains, massive and delicately fissured, tower toward the heavens.
    Now as always the director of the institution is Dr. Leander. With his double-pointed black beard, which is as hard and frizzy as upholstery horsehair, with his thick eyeglasses that shine with reflected light, and with the aspect of a man whom science has made cold and hard, this quiet, thoughtful pessimist holds sway over the patients. Yes, in his curt, close-to-the-vest manner, he holds absolute sway over all these individuals who, too weak to set and follow their own rules, relinquish their fortunes in return for permission to abandon themselves to his strict regimen.
    Miss von Osterloh, for her part, runs the household with tireless devotion. Lord, what a busy woman she is, hurrying up and down the stairs, from one end of the institution to the other. She lays down the law in the kitchen and the stock room, climbs around in the linen closets, issues orders to the servants and sets a house menu of economy, nutrition, taste and external elegance, managing everything with frantic conscientiousness. Concealed within this extreme efficiency is a standingreproach against men, against men everywhere, none of whom have succumbed to the idea of taking her for a wife. Nonetheless, in the two round, crimson spots on her cheeks, the inextinguishable hope still burns of someday becoming Mrs. Leander, the doctor’s wife . . .
    Ozone and calm, calm air . . . For sufferers of lung ailments, Einfried is, whatever Dr. Leander’s jealous colleagues and rivals might say, to be warmly recommended. Not that consumptives are the only ones who check themselves in here. All sorts of patients—gentlemen, ladies, and even children—check in as well, for Dr. Leander has triumphs to report in the widest of areas. There are stomach cases here—Mrs. Spatz, for example, the magistrate’s wife, who also has an ear problem—heart patients, paralytics, rheumatics and people with various nervous conditions. There’s a diabetic general, constantly grumbling as he uses up his pension. There are a number of gentlemen with emaciated faces whose legs twitch in that spastic way from which nothing good ever comes. There’s a fifty-year-old lady—Mrs. Höhlenrauch, the pastor’s wife—who lost her wits after bringing nineteen children into the world and yet is still unable to find any peace. For a year now she has been driven by some absurd restlessness to wander on the arm of her private nurse, staring and silent, aimless and uncanny, throughout the entire household.
    Now and then there is a death among the “serious cases,” who are confined to their beds and appear neither at meals nor in the sitting room, but no one, not even the patient in the next room, hears anything of it. In the still of night the waxlike guest is laid aside, and Einfried’s normal activities—the massages, shocks and shots, the showers, baths, exercise, steam cures and inhalations—continue on undisturbed in the various modern, technologically up-to-date treatment areas . . .
    Yes, things are lively in