Fifteen Words

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  ‘Hippocrates himself states that: With regard to healing the sick, I will devise and order for them the best diet, according to my judgment and means; and I will take care that they suffer no hurt or damage. Nor shall any man’s entreaty prevail upon me to administer poison to anyone. And that, ladies and gentlemen,’ the professor wagged a baton-like finger at his audience, ‘as far as I am concerned anyway, includes administering poison to the man who himself entreaties me to do so. Neither the father of modern medicine, which we are all here to practise, are we not, continues, neither will I counsel any man to do so. Moreover, I will give no sort of medicine to any pregnant woman, with a view to destroying the child. Because no human has the right to say which life is worth living and which is not. No human has that right. None. Even though there are some who wield power in certain political circles today who indulge in the misguided belief that they also wield the power of God.’

  Hass raised his frosty eyebrows and twisted his lips comically as a cue for the audience to snigger knowingly before they broke out in applause which ricocheted off the timber belly of the hall in a way which moved Erika.

  But she hadn’t chuckled when everyone else around her did; when she felt Max’s abdominal oblique muscles gently punch her own, as if they were trying to fuse with hers and carry the neurological charge that signalled laughter to another body. Even Edgar’s cartoon guffaw designed to tell the entire hall how in tune he was with the professor, couldn’t get her giggling. Erika applauded politely as she would a pianist having played Stravinsky – appreciating the technical skill involved in producing such sounds, but not sure she liked what she heard. She looked down at the floor in case Professor Hass could somehow pick out her doubt in the sea of fans before him. The pretty cakes of snow were gone. Only grey puddles lingered, hazardous now to her footing.

  The ‘certain circles’ of politics Hass had mocked were obviously the National Socialists. The party that had raised her country from its knees. The party that had shown her that science was the path which led to her country’s prosperity, not religion. It was a simple matter of genetics and economics. But the more she studied and the older she got, the more complicated it all seemed. Her stomach growled, but not all the pangs there were for food. One was of longing for her school days, brightly coloured posters on the classroom wall helped it all seem so clear to her. She could still see one now. Two frames below the title:

  Costs for the genetically ill – Social consequences

  In the left hand frame the greens and ochre of farmland had been painted with two imposing buildings drawn to loom over the tops of the pear-shaped trees. The right hand frame was printed in equally idyllic colours, but the two unfriendly buildings were gone and now the fields were studded with perfect little houses, lots and lots of houses stretching off into the distance. The words under the left frame read:

  An institution that houses 130 feeble minded costs about 104,000 Reichsmarks a year.

  The words under the right frame read:

  The same amount of money is enough to build 17 houses for healthy working class families.

  The sentence at the bottom of the poster in bold red typeface concluded:

  The genetically ill are a burden for the people.

  She shivered.

  Max felt her shiver and put his arm around her shoulders. She was happy they walked this way down the rakes which seemed precipitous to her now.

  Professor Hass would be, no doubt, having a post-lecture drink in the café, so Edgar encouraged his friends to follow him there and linger, as so many other students intended to do, in the hope of engaging their professor in further discussion on the subjects he had dazzled them with so far this afternoon.

  The café was as packed as the lecture theatre had been, but they managed to buy a glass of wine each and gradually shuffle their way across the crowded floor. Each of them filled the gap left by the other as they moved forward led by Edgar, who, being taller than most, kept his features fully trained on Hass, barely registering the irritation with which his body nudged its way past shoulders and his large feet trod on the shoes of others who dared to stand between him and the Maestro.

  Hass was already engaged in lively debate with some third-year biochemists and Professor Stöhr, who was draping one of his nail-varnished hands over Hass’s shoulder and caressing his glass of port seductively with one finger of the other.

  ‘Well,’ squeaked Stöhr, ‘I am but a lowly lecturer of physiology.’

  Hass, who didn’t look too comfortable with Stöhr’s proximity, made a vocal attempt to reject Stöhr’s modesty and tried to accompany it with a move that would unhook Stöhr’s hand from his shoulder, but Stöhr clung on limpet-like, saying:

  ‘No, Friedrich, it’s true. Only physiology is my thing, but in that, at least, I can claim to be…’ the stroking of the port glass was becoming obscene, ‘… expert.’

  There were a few chuckles and whoops from the rowdy company who comprehended the full intent of Stöhr’s unceasing innuendoes. Edgar looked over his shoulder, found Erika, shook his head and raised his eyes to the heavens to show her his impatience with the flippancy of Stöhr at a time like this, though Erika couldn’t help feeling Edgar was just feeling a little upstaged by the outrageous professor.

  ‘And so,’ Stöhr continued, ‘not even daring to add my insignificant little opinions to the debate, all I can do is encourage us all to raise a glass, which is incidentally the other field in which my talents lie’. Stöhr, like a seasoned cabaret performer of the Nollendorfplatz, left the appropriate pause so the audience could pour their heckles and hoots into it, then went on, ‘No, seriously, we must raise a glass to the bold, challenging, stimulating,’ this word was laced with enough sauce to make Hass visibly redden against his white outfit, ‘and brave ideas we’ve been treated to this afternoon’.

  That final adjective of Stöhr’s, however, was stripped of all excess, flamboyance and flippancy, and in doing so it stuck out more than the rest.

  Brave, repeated Erika to herself. Brave.

  Stöhr finished his speech by holding his port aloft and crying:

  ‘To Professor Hass!’

  ‘Professor Hass!’ Half the students toasted their idol, the other half frowned at this threat to the political stability and future glory of their homeland, but either way everyone was united in taking another warming draught of their booze.

  ‘Well,’ Hass cleared his throat. ‘Well, well. What can I say? I am sure we’ll all remember,’ he cleared his throat again, ‘I’m sure we’ll all remember Professor’s Stöhr words today, long after my lecture has faded from all memory’.

  Stöhr clapped his hand to his chest with utter delight at what he took to be the highest flattery. Now free of the hand, Erika thought Hass would make a break from Stöhr’s clutches, but surprisingly, clearing his throat yet again, he put his own free hand out to grab at Stöhr’s knitted waistcoat. Stöhr was both at once excited and shocked by the gesture, but he soon realised, as the rest of the budding medics surrounding him did, that Hass was not well.

  In fact Hass was more than not well. His ruddy skin, intensified by wine and Stöhr’s innuendos, was now rapidly becoming as pale as his suit and he sank to the floor gasping for breath.

  Stöhr transformed in that moment from a cabaret master of ceremonies into the distinguished doctor that he was and immediately went about trying to diagnose the problem.

  He ripped at Hass’s collar to loosen it and put his ear to his colleague’s mouth to listen for breath.

  ‘Dyspnoea,’ he announced, ‘pallor,’ he grabbed the patient’s wrist, ‘very slow pulse’.

  ‘Hypoxia?’ an eager student offered.

  ‘Ha! Look what all that research on hypoxia did for him?’ one of Hass’s young detractors sniggered from somewhere behind Erika. She felt sick and moved away from him towards the edge of the circle that now surrounded Stöhr and Hass.

  ‘Friedrich! Friedrich!’ Stöhr rubbed his knuckles into Has
s’s sternum, trying to get a response.

  Erika thought Hass was bleeding until she realised it was his dropped red wine spreading out around his head. She grabbed for Max’s hand, but he was already pushing away through the crowd and out of the café. Her instinct was quickly becoming to follow Max wherever he went, but he was so fast now that she grabbed out for an alternative hitching post in this unexpected storm and found Horst.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ she whispered trying to cling to her boulder-like friend’s tight sleeve.

  ‘Is it a heart attack?’ Horst answered out loud in order to answer Erika and attempt to assist his teacher all at once.

  Stöhr had no doubt considered this himself many long seconds ago, but as Hass began convulsing he said through gritted teeth:

  ‘Most definitely not, it seems.’

  Stöhr held his colleague’s head steady and took a long hard sniff at Hass’s mouth, much to Erika’s surprise.

  ‘Almonds,’ he announced to his students, ‘I smell almonds.’

  ‘Then it’s cyanide,’ Edgar piped up. ‘Someone’s bloody well poisoned him.’

  ‘Get out of the way. Get out of the way!’

  Erika and the rest of her peers turned at the rare sound of Max Portner raising his voice. He was dragging a cylinder of oxygen with one hand and a stretcher with the other. The crowd parted obediently and rather ashamedly that they had not done anything more than simply guess at diagnoses for the last few minutes.

  ‘Come on, you,’ Stöhr jabbed a painted nail at Babyface. ‘Help Portner get him onto the stretcher, for God’s sake. Unfortunately, Herr Portner,’ Stöhr gave Max an appreciative pat on the shoulder, ‘his cells cannot do anything with this oxygen right now. It’s cyanide. So what does he need?’ Stöhr asked, delving into one of the many pockets in his waistcoat.

  ‘Amyl nitrate?’ Max answered tentatively lowering the Professor onto the stretcher.

  ‘Correct,’ said Stöhr producing a little bottle of the same and holding it under Hass’s nose. ‘Now let’s go!’

  Max and Babyface carried Hass, now limp again, out to the Medical Centre with Stöhr scampering alongside the stretcher all the time waving his bottle of amyl nitrate in Hass’s face.

  ‘Dear Lord,’ Edgar sat on the edge of a table in the fast emptying café and looked at Erika and Horst. ‘He was poisoned. Someone poisoned him.’

  ‘It might have been an accident,’ Erika offered rather lamely.

  ‘An accident?’ Edgar snapped. ‘How does a man accidentally ingest enough cyanide to do that?’ he gestured to the puddle of wine on the floor as if Hass was still there re-enacting his symptoms for the benefit of their education.

  ‘The Gestapo warned him not to speak out against their euthanasia program,’ Horst stated quietly from behind his hand.

  ‘Warned! They threatened him. And he wasn’t intimidated. So they’ve tried to bump him off. These are the kind of people that are running our country,’ Edgar looked from Horst to Erika.

  Erika dropped her eyes to the floor and watched as one of the café staff mopped the red wine from it. Her head burned as an Alpine wind of doubt roared through her ears.

  The door of the café opened.

  ‘How is he?’ Edgar asked.

  Erika was saved for now by the return of Max. As he answered Edgar he gravitated towards Erika and she felt her uncertainty ebb away again.

  ‘It’s difficult to say. It was obviously a large dose of cyanide to produce such acute symptoms, but they’re treating him with methylene blue right now. It was lucky that Stöhr had that amyl nitrate on him.’

  ‘Yeah! Who carries around amyl nitrate anyway? What was Stöhr doing with that in his pocket?’ Horst asked looking mischievously at Edgar.

  Edgar squinted at Horst – unamused at his reference to the amyl nitrate that Edgar owned and, like Stöhr, used as a drug during sex – and deftly changed the subject. ‘Where’s Babyface?’

  ‘He’s hanging around in the Medical Centre in case he can help more.’

  ‘To get Brownie points from Stöhr, you mean,’ Edgar sneered, but he didn’t have a problem with Babyface’s diligence. He was still reacting to Horst’s gibe.

  ‘Brownie points?’ Max asked.

  ‘He’s saying,’ Horst was happy to answer, ‘that Babyface is brown-nosing Stöhr.’

  ‘Brown-nosing?’

  ‘It’s more of that US slang Edgar likes to assimilate, isn’t it. It means to be a sycophant. To kiss someone’s arse, you see?’

  Max’s eyes widened as the full force of the imagery dawned on him.

  ‘Yes, well,’ Edgar mumbled, ‘I wish I lived in the US. They don’t stop you from listening to whatever music you like, they don’t make Jewish professionals disappear and they don’t try and bump off academics that speak out against government policy. Did I say government? Sorry, I meant the dictatorship.’

  Max was standing close to Erika now and a question from her physiology exam came rumbling through her head:

  What is the process by which neutrophils and other white blood cells are attracted to an inflammatory site?

  Phagocytosis? No, she often made that mistake, but Max had reminded her, phagocytosis is the process by which a cell engulfs a solid particle, the process by which neutrophils ingest bacteria. But in order to find the bacteria in the first place they rely on the process of chemotaxis, using the chemicals released by the bacteria and damaged tissue to attract them to the site. Max gravitated towards her, she felt, like a white blood cell to an inflammatory site.

  ‘Well, I’m going to Mass this evening,’ Max announced, ‘to say a prayer for Professor Hass.’

  ‘I’ll be there. I’m on the organ tonight,’ Edgar said looking at Horst, daring him to have other plans.

  ‘I’ll be there, of course,’ Horst punctuated his statement with a tut.

  Erika felt Max’s fingers on her palm, feeling for hers.

  She couldn’t shake the image. Max had gravitated towards her, she felt, like a white blood cell to a site of infection. He was the white cell. She was the infection. Everyone else around her seemed so sure of their convictions: that the National Socialists were unhealthy for Germany. As sure as she was, most of the time, that they were the cure.

  The friends dispersed.

  Are you coming tonight? said the hand in hers all the way back to their digs.

  Erika collected the coffee cups. Someone had used her copy of Dubliners as a coaster. It must have been Horst, she thought. Edgar reveres art too much to disrespect a book in this way. Babyface was sitting on the bed, she recalled, and would have used the nightstand. Horst always had more time for the factual. He would devour volumes of medical history, but a few short stories? He didn’t have the concentration for it, he said. She washed up the cups, wiped the ring from the cover of the book and made a fresh pot of coffee. Then she and Max wedged themselves back into the armchair together under his blanket.

  ‘Shall I make us some dinner soon?’ she asked.

  ‘Mmm.’

  Are you coming tonight?

  ‘You were so brilliant today, racing off like that to get the equipment when the rest of us were standing around like idiots.’ Palms together she pushed her hands between his leg and hers to warm them.

  ‘Mmm.’

  Are you coming tonight?

  ‘I know he’s a doctor, of course, but he’s such a clown that I never really thought of Stöhr as being an actual doctor until I saw him work on Hass today.’ She tucked the blanket maternally around his neck and made a pillow for herself with the end on his shoulder.

  ‘Mmm.’

  Are you coming tonight?

  She couldn’t ignore the question any longer. Its tacit roar made her ears ache.

  She took as deep a breath as her ribcage would allow her to, squeezed there between him and the fraying upholstery, and said, ‘Your faith is so important to you, Max, I know that. But so is my belief that there is no need for religion in the new Germany.’ />
  They both stared across the room to the gap under the door as Erika had done with Hans across the Alps from their perch on the edge of Walmendinger Horn.

  ‘We are students of medicine,’ she continued, ‘students of science. We already know that physics and chemistry is what makes the world go round, not superstition’.

  She felt him twitch beneath the blanket and wished she had used a slightly less abrasive word, yet in the same moment she wanted to slap him for putting his life in the hands of those who believed a work of fiction, which described simply impossible events, to be true. That was simply stupid!

  ‘Hitler’s minister for church affairs says there is a place for religion,’ Max mumbled sarcastically. ‘A true Christianity represented by the Nazis with Hitler as the herald of a new revelation.’

  He snorted knowing as well as Erika did that there was no place for Catholics in this new religion. Hitler despised them as much as her Protestant family had when she was growing up, which made her rejection of the church twice as appealing. She had already been brought up to hate Catholics. To hate the code she’d been brought up to adhere to was and is the rite of passage of every teenager, and the Hitler Youth had been there to provide her with the alternative.

  And yet still the question hung in the little mists that formed when his warm breath met the cold without.

  Are you coming tonight?

  Candlelight made the surface of the great gothic arches, which yawned all about the cathedral, ripple impossibly. The stained glass rose window was as far away from Erika as it was possible to be since she sat on the end of the pew closest to the entrance and the window hovered high above the golden altar. But despite this, or perhaps because of it, to Erika it had all the allure of a precious piece of jewellery set with the rarest sapphires.

  Sat right beside Max, she had never felt so far away from him in all the months they had been together. Thick clouds of incense filled the piece of sky the cathedral had swallowed, and they billowed about Erika’s head making her feel faint. She sat near the entrance so that she could feel the air coming in through the open door, so it could revive her. She suffered from low blood pressure and the incense never helped. At least, that was the scientific explanation of events she gave herself.