Lucia

by Alex Pheby

  But perhaps a tablecloth is insufficient for this. The table is too small to support the weight not only of a horse, but also of a faithful wife who wishes only to preserve herself for a lover who is worthy of her. As the table leg wobbles in its poorly constructed jointing, the glass of milk topples and rolls, falling off the edge having wet the tablecloth enough at that spot to put out some of the fire. It falls to the ground where it shatters, and she falls with it, shoulder first, and lands so that she dislocates the joint and causes a tear in the rotator cuff and minor abrasions. She also sustains cuts to the skin of the face, which must all go in the report, I’m afraid, and yes, that does rather undermine the plans we had to give her a more relaxed regime, which, as you can see, she is ill-equipped to manage in her current state. The doctor will not take her in Geneva when he finds out about this. Yes, we must make the report. It would be negligent of us not to. We understand your reservations, but, for a few inches this way or that, you could be looking at a dead daughter and not one with a few minor cuts. The jugular vein is only a finger’s breadth away from where the glass penetrated the flesh. Well, it is your choice, clearly, but he will not take her. Our only solution would be to return her to you, and we know that is not a viable alternative at this stage in her cure. What cure? Well there is no need to be rude. We are doing our best, but she’s very difficult.

  Indeed, it was possible if one began on the north wall and followed the images across to the final image of her isolation in the chamber to track a rough progress through various failed treatments.

  And give you your head

  At the door to the tomb, the sem-priest performs the ritual of the opening of the mouth, by which the senses of the dead are returned to the mummified corpse.

  THE REPRESENTATIVE OF THE COMPANY CHARGED WITH EUTHANIZING

  INTRACTABLE CASES IN VICHY FRANCE, BRITTANY, NOVEMBER 1940

  They are hard to convince, these French. Whether it is his stuffy, Germaninflected accent, or the lingering smell of war that adheres to him, they do not take his words to heart.

  He removes his tie, and undoes the button. The sense of relief is so strong that he reaches for his medicine as if in pain, but leaves it on the dressing table once his body understands that he is not.

  Perhaps it is the burns.

  They are all so superficial in their attitudes: the way they dress, the attention they pay to their hair, the way they hold themselves (a kind of practised loucheness that speaks of hours in front of a mirror), even the manner in which they smoke their cigarettes, the arm held long and loose, drawing it up in a wide and lazy arch and then letting it fall back as if they lose interest in the whole limb once it’s done its work. He is tight with scar tissue on his left side, and needs to hold the cigarette between his teeth and drag hard to get anything out of it since he can’t make a seal with his damaged lips. He is probably ugly to these people, and they let this affect the way they understand what he is saying to them.

  Whatever it is, he is having no success.

  He leans on his elbows, head in his hands, but this does hurt and he sits back up. There is a half-finished bottle of wine on the bedside table, and he goes to it and runs his finger around the inside of the glass that originally held his toothbrush, but which now has only dry red grains of bitter tannin from the night before.

  One glass, no more.

  Perhaps they cannot get past the sense that it is he to whom mercy should be shown – that is a common idea, he imagines. He can see it operating in the backs of the minds of the sympathetic, even in his family. Wouldn’t it have been kinder if he had died? Unfair to make this brave man suffer, wincing as he takes a puff, always tugging his neck away to the right, as if he is trying to free himself from the constriction of the rippled, white skin. Unfair on them to have his wonderful bravery tempered by the requirement to look at him all day, and fight the revulsion that people naturally feel for the disfigured. Should they have to imagine what it is like to burn? Have the embodiment of it haunting their everyday, at breakfast, at lunch, at supper? Coming across him by accident with his shirt off as he shaves and the bedroom door is ajar?

  And the children. Is it easier to have a father who is a dead hero, or a living monster? Unfair questions, bitten back, but they play out behind the eyes of these sympathetic people. The unsympathetic? They spit and walk by.

  Or do the French secretly feel, as he does, that his work is unfinished on the battlefield? If there is life in him, even burdensome life such as he still possesses – his treatments must run into the thousands – wouldn’t a true man use that life to revenge himself and his country rather than haunt the corridors of places far from his home, trying to convince people of things they do not wish to be convinced of?

  He sits on the bed, arranges the pillow so that it bisects the headboard vertically, and shifts himself into a half-lying, half-seated position. His boots will smear polish on the quilt, but he does not remove them. They stand like two gravestones at the end of the bed, headstones at his feet. Is there a culture that buries its dead so that the stone is at the feet?

  Whatever they think, these doctors and nurses, they are enemies of the new state; this is what he determines to think. This route through the problems he faces is his strongest option, since it allows him to suggest, without saying as much, that they must adopt these new policies independently, as men of science, as rational people, since this is the way things must be now, regardless of any squeamishness. He has the authorities on his side in this line, whereas all the other moves put him on the defensive, some fatally so. This way of thinking makes it their lives that are at risk, their jobs, their statuses, and that is nearer the truth anyway. Who is most likely to suffer: the decorated war hero, or an intransigent French doctor in some clinic far from anywhere anyone cares about? This strategy returns some of the power to him, evens the field, and if pretty girls look down at their shoes when he enters the room, or frown, or put their hands involuntarily to their mouths, then pretty girls should also be in fear of their lives when they see him, and should consider what they are willing to do to save those lives, and the lives of their loved ones.

  Unworthy thoughts: he is not a monster, whatever they think.

  But he knows people who are, and the fact that he doesn’t have these nurses and secretaries on their knees in front of him doing precisely whatever he wishes them to do is something that should count in his favour. Do they not understand what goes on in wartime? He could tell them stories that would sicken them, but isn’t that the sad truth? If an ugly man wants his arsehole licked by pretty girls like this, or his balls sucked, then his best option is to have them do it at gunpoint, having executed their homely friend, since restraining himself from doing it would never induce them to do it out of gratitude. Or to bring their whole city to its knees and, when the only source of food is in his control, pay them with carrots to undress for him.

  More unworthy thoughts; he would like as not save these girls from such a fate, if it was within his power. If he came upon a soldier who was about to claim his spoils, wouldn’t he stand between them? That is the kind of man he is – not a homosexual, as the other men claim, but a man who feels things from the position of the person suffering, and for whom this stops him feeling any pleasure in it. He is not a saint, but he is not a devil. Having suffered himself, he has a keen sense of the suffering of others. When he sees it, he determines to end it. Why should people suffer if there is no need for it? Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease, but sometimes it is not.

  In Danzig he saw them pulled out into the garden and shot, and while some of them didn’t understand, and so could not properly feel fear, there were others who very much did fear it and who ran, or fought. That is no way to show mercy. If one has to chase a man down like game and shoot him four or five times as he struggles, that is not mercy; that is barbarism.

  Perhaps he will take his boots off after all.

  He finishes the wine in a gulp, puts down the glass and
bends his right leg at the knee. This is not painful, but when he reaches with his left arm, that hurts. He winces, then frowns, then grits his teeth, then grunts, one action after another as he stretches to reach the laces. It is this pain – very ordinary, very banal, on a scale small enough for the mind to encompass it without resorting to fantasy – that allows him to feel the pain of others, to understand that it cannot be caused indiscriminately, needlessly, by soldiers who do not understand pain in the way he does. They are only used to inflicting it, or ignoring it. Give a soldier a job and he does it in the most efficient way he can. He will take a gun and shoot a man through the back of the head – that is nothing for which he can be criticised, since it is what he is trained to do. So one should not give jobs of this sort to a soldier, which is the point he tries to impress on these people: do not give soldiers a job when doctors are better placed to carry it out. A doctor will know what to do to prevent suffering; that is his oath.

  He cannot move the left leg from this position, so he grabs the hem of his trouser and drags it up toward him. It is not that the leg is paralysed – it is not – it is just that the muscle tissue is not complete and some directions are impossible, so he has to move it like a puppeteer moves a puppet. He is used to it now, so it does not occupy his attention.

  In the corner of the room there is a medium-sized canister of pure carbon monoxide gas, and there are five more in a wooden box in the car. At the end of the week he’ll open up the box and replace this one in the space that it left, if precedent is anything to go by, and drive to the next clinic up the coast.

  He finds there is a surfeit of sea air in this work, and mountain air, and naturally occurring salt springs, as if any of these things could offer a solution. The food is excellent, though, as is the wine.

  His boots stand empty beside the bed as he undoes the belt at his waist. His trousers are tweed and while he doesn’t notice during the day, when the pressure the belt exerts is gone, the fabric no longer presses hard enough at the skin of his waist to stop the fibres from itching. He keeps his nails short, but unless he is careful he will draw blood as he scratches. This will leave open a locus for infection, so he pulls his good right hand away, places it under his buttock and itches with the ring finger of the left hand, the nail of which never grew back. This is not satisfactory, but it is safer. Better this way.

  What is the satisfaction one receives from scratching an itch anyway? There is a feverishness in it, it seems to him, a frantic animalistic quality, a masochism rewarded with a strange kind of pleasure that would allow you to stab down to the bone through your bandages with a knitting needle if you let it. Some things are so irritating that you can damage yourself in the punishing of them. Which is why you must resist.

  There is no doubting that revenge is enjoyable, or that righteousness lends itself to fervour, or that a lynch mob can become cruel, and if we know this, then why do we allow it to happen? It’s better that we find a way of becoming detached, and so do what needs to be done without resorting to self-defeating savagery. Revenge, once satisfied, leads to guilt; righteousness, taken to extremes, tends to mysticism; a lynch mob becomes indiscriminate.

  Not so the doctor. The doctor has diagnosis and cure in which no pleasure is evidenced. What doctor finds pleasure in the performance of his duties? Perhaps in the outcome, but never in the treatment. If there is pleasure it is in the satisfaction that comes from the cleverness with which his duties are executed, the precision.

  Eventually he takes off his trousers altogether, lifting himself off the bed and pulling, resettling and pulling again, twisting and pulling one more time and there are the two legs, one gnarled and shaved back like the first twig a boy whittles on a camping holiday with a knife his father has given him, and the other perfectly normal. Later, at dinner, if chicken is served, or a rack of lamb, he will see a drumstick, or the bone sticking from a chop, and be reminded of his ankle. He will pause, but otherwise conversation will continue as normal.

  Perhaps tonight will be different.

  There is no need for anybody to be shot – that was the trouble in Danzig. It is difficult to convince anyone that shooting is a just course of action, which is why it was a mistake to give the job to soldiers. An owner will wince at the shooting of a lame horse, at least the first time, and how much worse would that be for a mother re. their daughter, or a son re. their father, even if mother and son (possibly daughter and father) know that it is for the best? It is mercy to put an end to suffering, this much we all know, so it is only necessary to find a method that is acceptable to everybody. The application of gas is something we are all used to, from the dentist, for example, and recently for mothers in childbirth. Precedent is useful, too, in that the equipment already exists to deliver the procedure – it is a matter of attaching a face mask and turning the valve. Anyone who has seen it done could not object to it – the patient becomes drowsy very quickly and soon dies without any sense of suffocation or panic, or any ill effects at all. If the patient understands what is about to happen to her, a sedative can be given orally in advance of the procedure, or intravenously in extreme cases. He has the equipment in his bag, including the anaesthetics.

  It is only then a matter of determining for which of the inmates the procedure is useful. Talk of ballast on the state and lives unworthy of living is counterproductive, he has found. To people with a very strong sense of civic responsibility it plays well, as it would to the Spartans, no doubt, but to those of a more individualistic turn of mind, possibly like the Athenians (though he isn’t sure of this) it is better to talk of an end to personal suffering. If it comes to it, the state can be brought up, but it provokes in the French a wilful resistance to authority, and he wonders if they disagree just to spite him (and Germany by extension).

  Suffering is the way to go.

  Which doctor cannot have looked at his patients – the intractable ones who will never be cured – and wondered whether there is any point prolonging the farce of their treatment? The fees are important, of course, but eventually the clinic becomes full of intractable cases and there are many more people in the community that the doctor might usefully be able to treat if those who will never recover weren’t taking up the beds. No one is suggesting that people who can be cured should receive the treatment, it is only those who live out their lives in suffering that might benefit.

  This, it seems to him, is an argument that has no counter. Should people be made to suffer forever? Can a doctor allow patients under his charge to live long lives of pain on his watch? Of course not. If they do not agree at this point they will not agree. He will have to leave, replace the canister in the box with the others, and make his way up the coast. As he leaves he will point out that legislation will soon make this procedure compulsory, as it is in Germany, and he will leave them a leaflet and his card so that they might contact him then.

  His jacket is hanging where he left it on the back of the door. His habit is to put his clothing on a hanger as he removes it, and the jacket looks, from a distance, like a microcephalic, the hook of the hanger the pinhead. He picks up his trousers from the floor, folds them, and places them on the bed next to him.

  If he had a larger car, or a van, he could bring the projector with him. There is a film of the procedure being carried out on a number of patients, to show the potential use cases. There are no microcephalics in the film, but there are other incurables – syphilitics, schizophrenics, epileptics – and he would challenge any man of science to watch the entire film and not come away convinced of the efficacy of it, the kindness and mercy of the method, and the logic of the rationale. Should a child be left to live her life in absolute misery when there are alternatives?

  Roughly a third of the patients in any sanatorium can benefit. It is even possible to gather the patients together in a room and, while they sleep, administer the gas so that they do not even know the procedure has taken place. Very few alterations would have to be made to a standard hospital ward to make it
suitable – the blocking up of any ventilation shafts and the making of ingress for some piping. Absolute airtightness is desirable, but not necessary.

  In his bag he has some pro-forma that he will leave regardless of what they say at dinner tonight. They have a column for the insertion of the patient’s name, the length of stay at the clinic, the diagnosis (all of which can be filled in by clerical staff) and then two further columns ‘is this patient likely to be cured?’ and ‘recommendation for euthanasia’, both of which can be ticked or crossed by the doctor. This is all that needs to be done; the rest can be taken care of by specialist staff of his office in consultation with attendants and administrators. Removal of the patients post-treatment can either be arranged by the families at their expense, or by the authorities, but no expenses need be incurred by the facility in either case.