The Prize Read Online Free PDF Page B

father and discovered the new pony shivering behind his father’s distillery shed. And he had been young, later, when the family had the house in the outskirts of Berlin, and one magical afternoon they all drove in the trap to a barn, with makeshift chairs inside, where jumpy images were thrown on a screen, and he heard everyone praise the new invention known as cinema. And he had been young that day on the Ku’damm, holding Walther’s hand, peeking between the rows of people ahead, when he had caught a glimpse of the resplendent Kaiser astride a white horse, followed by the goose-stepping, steel-helmeted troops.
     
    After that, it seemed, especially in the Gymnasium and at the University of Berlin , he had always been old, and he could never quite remember that he had ever appeared different than he appeared today, to himself, reclining on this table. He peered down his chest at the rest of his body and smiled privately: a bleached porpoise, having an EKG.
     
    The numerous photographs of him that appeared in the American newspapers and magazines did not upset him, despite the way they made obvious his ugliness. In fact, it seemed, the Americans rather cherished him this way. He was their image of a German Herr Professor—or Doctor, if you will—of the old school. Max Stratman was five feet seven, but seemed shorter, more diminutive, because he was hunched. His head was massive, too large for his body, and his forehead seemed to recede to infinity because he was bald except for a bristling hedge of grey hair surrounding the extremities of his head. His face was round, red, wrinkled, and his nose perfectly bulbous. He wore thick-steel-rimmed bifocals at his desk, and squinted myopically when he did not wear them. His face was not formidable, but wise and sympathetic, and he was quick to smile, to see the humour of almost anything, himself foremost. He was pudgy and rumpled—‘his clothes look like they have been borrowed from a scarecrow three sizes larger’, a news magazine had recently remarked.
     
    This was as he saw himself in the University days, and this was as he saw himself today. Apparently, nothing about him had grown older than old, through the decades, except maybe his heart. Maybe. Ach , we shall see, he thought.
     
    He heard the nurse’s voice behind him. ‘That’s it, Professor Stratman,’ she said, tearing the graph paper strip from the machine and placing the roll on a small desk.
     
    ‘Thank you,’ said Stratman politely.
     
    ‘It was an honour, Professor,’ she said, as she removed the electrodes from his chest, arms, legs, and wiped the paste from his body.
     
    He watched her curiously, She had said, so respectfully, that it was an honour. He had thought that he was old hat here. Squinting at her now, he realized that she had not been at Lawson General Hospital , or at least not with Dr. Ilman, when he had been here in the summer. She was new. He admired her tallness, short haircut, pert, intelligent face, trim white uniform. She was not Emily, of course, but still he admired the handsomeness of American young women, and especially the Southern ones.
     
    As she returned to the electrocardiograph machine, he nodded at the instrument. ‘An interesting and valuable toy, gn ن dige Fr ن ulein ,’ he said. ‘One day there will be better machines, deeper probing, more sure. But, for its limitations, it is good. It is a fact I knew quite well the man who invented the EKG.’
     
    ‘You actually knew him?’ She was as impressed as if he had said that he had known Pasteur.
     
    ‘Yes—yes. Willem Einthoven, a Hollander. I spent several weeks with him once in Rotterdam. He won many prizes for that gadget—even the Nobel money.’
     
    ‘I bet you’ve known everyone, Professor. Dr. Ilman says you knew Einstein.’
     
    ‘It is true. Albert, I knew well. I met him first in Berlin — ach , what times, what times we had—and then I would see him, occasionally, in Princeton. A terrible