Georg Letham Read Online Free PDF Page B

long, beautiful fingers played in the silkily gleaming, slightly wavy coat of the large-eyed little creature, sprightly unlike most of its breed. Suddenly it barked and snapped at my wife’s gloved fingers, which she had held out to it. It was summer, the car was open, the trees in front of the clinic swayed in the breeze. A fine day, very fine. Meanwhile the nurse had taken the patient’s temperature. It was 37.1. This is actually a fairly normal temperature, but I could not shake an uneasy feeling. And at the same time a sensation, an intuition (how shall I put it?) that only an experimenter will recognize. Could there be something amiss? Something that was not as it should be? Not from the experimental subject’s standpoint, perhaps–but surely everything was fine . . . I will not go on with this. I will merely state the patient’s course. The patient contracted an exanthem resembling scarlet fever. But the blood was persistently free of streptococci. Had I transferred not the streptococcus but the invisible scarlet-fever virus this time? My theory–was it correct? Had the unknown virus still clung loyally to the streptococcus cultures?
    Difficult to describe my state of mind during the period that followed.The animal experiments secretly resumed at full tilt, the microscopy and culturing throughout the day whenever I was not by the bed of the poor delirious patient, and at night, since I was unable to sleep and could not bear the presence of my all-too-tender wife, the visits to gambling clubs, where I was now dogged by misfortune, by bad luck.
    In addition the acquaintance made of a beautiful, very young, light blonde gambler, with whom I took up intending at first only to satisfy a momentary craving and whom I then installed in a first-class hotel and attempted to surround with great luxury.
    Finally the death of my patient, the “almost” airtight result of my final experiments, the tearfulness of my wife, who did not understand my elevated mood despite these events. Suddenly the reversal. I noticed a suspicious redness on my underarm. Had I myself been infected in my experiments? I almost confided in my wife. For until then I had remained silent. But everything passed off well. I remained healthy. A big question mark still hung over the experiments, but on the other hand I was fortunate elsewhere. The young person loved me. She proved this by demanding a lot from me: money, time, love.
    I did what I could. I was short of time most of all. Love can sometimes be a substitute for money. Money can sometimes substitute for love. There is no substitute for time.
VI
    As a result of my large expenditures on my work and on M. (the girl) as well as my gambling losses, I now ran into certain financial difficulties, which were not particularly pressing at first. The household cost money too, my income was not significant, my savings practically zero. But I was able to borrow money, the gentlemen at the gambling club knewquite a number of fairly respectable moneylenders, and for a time I paid my short-term debts to one lender with loans I obtained from a second or third.
    If I had at least had some peace! I needed every minute of my time. I pressed my wife to do some traveling. She resisted. Her tenderness began to take on a more desperate character from one day to the next; only seldom did her naturally happy, sunny nature come through. My stepdaughter insinuated herself into the foreground after a period of haughtily avoiding us. She would not leave her mother and persistently tried to alienate my wife from me. But that aging, love-addicted woman only became more attached to me, gazed at me with her shining, light gray eyes, did her best to be near me all day long.
    In the course of my scientific investigations I had neglected my practice almost entirely. I had forgotten important appointments–had, to give only one example of this kind, scheduled an elderly patient for surgery but was not at