Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

by Highsmith, Patricia

  Marianne led the way back to the motorcycle. It seemed amazing to Oktavian that no doctor or nurse had looked out and seen what was going on in that field. Comical to think of doctors, interns, nurses all so busy at their appointed tasks that they hadn’t a few seconds to look out of a window or take a short walk!

  Half an hour later, when Marianne and Oktavian sat in a little inn eating hot and spicy goulash, while a cheerful fire crackled in a hearth not far from them, they did laugh, albeit in nervous spasms.

  “. . . got to tell Hans!” Oktavian said. “He’ll flip out!”

  “And Marie-Luise. And Jakob!” Marianne grinned like her Saturday evening self.

  “Better have a party. Soon. Because the time is short.” Oktavian spoke earnestly across the table.

  Marianne knew what he meant. They made plans, drew up a list of a select twelve or so. It should be next Tuesday night, they decided. Next Saturday might be too late, the hospital might have discovered the state of the cemetery and done something about it.

  “A ghost party,” said Marianne. “We’ll come in sheets—even if it’s raining.”

  Oktavian did not reply, as Marianne knew him well enough to know that he was in accord. He was thinking, could rainwater contribute to the growth of those insane tumors? Could the soil? After the supply of blood in the corpses had been exhausted, could the busy blood vessels that fed the cancers start capturing earth worms, maggots for their meager nutrients? Did the capillaries even reach out for adjacent corpses? Whatever the answers to those questions, the fact was plain that the death of the host did not mean the end of the cancer.

  There were some smirks, some cynical disbelief, when Oktavian and Marianne extended discreet verbal invitations to the Real Ghost Party Tuesday Night at the Cemetery of the National Hospital Number Thirty-six. Wear a sheet or bring one and turn up at a quarter to midnight were the instructions.

  Again it rained slightly on Tuesday evening, though there had been two or three days without rain, and Oktavian had hoped that the good weather would hold. However, the Schnürlregen did not dampen the spirits of the dozen or more medical students who arrived at the cemetery more or less punctually, some on bicycles, as they had been warned not to make any noise, because nobody wanted the hospital staff descending upon them.

  There were muted “Ooohs!” and other exclamations when the sheeted students investigated the burial ground, though Oktavian had admonished everyone to keep silent. “It’s phoney!—Plastic balls! You so-and-so!” one girl whispered loudly to Oktavian.

  “No!—No!” Oktavian whispered back.

  “Wheest! My God, look at this!” cried a young man, trying to keep his voice low.

  “Cancer patients? Holy Mother of God, Okky, what kind of experiments are going on here?” said an earnest fellow near Oktavian.

  Sheeted figures circled the cemetery, drifted among the tombstones in the moonless night, shining pocket torches carefully downward to avoid tripping and detection. Oktavian had imagined calling for a circular ballet-of-ghosts round the cemetery, but was afraid to use his voice for this, and there was no need. Out of nervous excitement, fear, collective puzzlement, the students began a dance not at first in the same direction, but a dance which soon organized itself into a counter-clockwise ring which stumbled, recovered, held hands, hummed, giggled softly, and wafted its pale and sodden sheets in the wind.

  The lights of the National Hospital glowed as ever, nearly half the windows bright rectangles of light, Oktavian noticed. He was holding Marianne’s hand and that of another fellow.

  “Look at this! Hey, look!” said a boy’s voice. The boy was focusing his torch on something as high as his hip. “Pink below! I swear!”

  “Shut your trap, for Chris’ sake!” Oktavian whispered back.

  At that moment, Oktavian saw a young man on the other side of the ring kick at a pale lump, and heard him laugh. “They’re fixed in the ground! They’re rubber!”

  Oktavian could have killed the fellow! He didn’t deserve to get his medical degree! “It’s real, you fool,” Oktavian said. “And shut up!”

  “Measles, magpies, maggots, mumps!” the students chanted, swinging their legs as in a conga line. The circle slowly rotated.

  A whistle blew.

  “Okay, run!” Oktavian shouted, realizing that a hospital guard had seen or heard them, maybe the old guy who was half the time asleep at midnight just inside the front doors. Oktavian ran with Marianne toward his motorcycle at the edge of the road.

  The others followed, laughing, falling, crying out. Some had cars, but the cars were a little distance away.

  “Hey!” Oktavian said to a boy and girl near him. “Keep this quiet! Pass the word!”

  They dispersed in surprisingly good silence, sheets folded, like a trained army. Oktavian rolled his motorcycle several meters before starting the motor. Behind them, slowly moving figures with torches, people from the hospital, were investigating the edges of the cemetery.

  Oktavian lay low in the next days. He had plenty of work to do at the university, and so had the others. But they looked at the G— Anzeiger, the town newspaper. There was not even the tiniest item about a “disturbance” or “vandals” in the National Hospital’s cemetery, and this silence Oktavian had foreseen: the authorities could not afford to report that anyone had trampled on the graves or upset a couple of flower pots, because then they would have some of the relatives of the deceased coming to rectify the damage and to complain about lack of care, and the hospital would not want the public to learn about the odd growths, numerous enough now to catch anyone’s eye. The hospital people must be thoroughly alarmed, Oktavian thought.

  On Thursday evening, Oktavian went to the National Hospital at 9 as usual to join the doctors on the top floor. He had glanced at the cemetery when he parked his motorcycle. The cemetery had been as dark as ever, but he had still seen pale balloon shapes in it, six or seven, maybe the same as before. Upstairs, the atmosphere was different. Dr Stefan Roeg, the youngest of the doctors and the one Oktavian had always got along best with, said hello and then good night in almost the same sentence. He had his overshoes and umbrella in his hands, though it wasn’t raining, and plainly he had turned up just to collect them. Old Professor Braun, whose head was in the clouds and whose head was bald except for the long wisps of grey hair above his ears, was the only person among the seven of them who acted the same as ever. He was ready to talk about the “progress” of little bits of tissue under glass bells since last week. Oktavian could see that the others had given it up. Their faces wore polite smiles as they bade Professor Braun good night.

  “It is dangerous,” one doctor said hastily to Professor Braun before he departed.

  Oktavian also managed to sneak out. Would old Professor Braun keep on working till after midnight, all alone? Oktavian and the doctors were silent as they tramped down the five flights of stairs. Oktavian thought it wise to ask no questions. They all knew an awful secret. The doctors were treating him, a mere student, as one of them. Had the doctors a plan of action? Or were they simply going to keep quiet?

  Word somehow leaked out. A few curious townspeople went to peer from a distance at the cemetery, Oktavian noticed when he paid a quick visit on his motorcycle. The three or four people were not venturing into the cemetery, just standing and staring from its edges at the growths which resembled tied-down balloons in the dusk. It was ghosts; evil spirits from the criminals and the horribly ill who had been buried there; it was an outlandish result of fall-out from atomic bomb testing; it was because of insanitary conditions at the National Hospital, which everyone knew was not the most modern of the nation. Marianne reported some of these explanations to Oktavian, having heard them from her dormitory housekeepers who hadn’t even seen the cemetery.

  The death of Andreas Silzer was announced in the G— Anzeiger in a small paragraph. “Faithful caretaker of the National Hospital grounds.” He had died of “metastatic tumors.” Poor old Andreas would have been expos
ed for months to the growths in the cemetery, Oktavian thought. Were the authorities ever going to clean the place up?

  Oktavian and Marianne rode up to the National Hospital one Saturday evening, and saw two large trucks in the parking area of the hospital. A couple of lanterns on the cemetery ground gave some illumination, and they saw figures moving about. On closer inspection, they could see that the figures wore surgical masks, grey uniforms, and wielded picks and shovels with gloved hands.

  “Garbagemen!” Marianne whispered. “Look! They’re sticking the things into big plastic sacks!”

  Oktavian saw. “Then what do they do with the sacks?” he said almost to himself. “Come on. Let’s leave.”

  Only two days later, a garbageman collapsed. His wife refused to let him be taken to the National Hospital, and said he had got sick from working in the cemetery. Her talking took the lid off, because her words were printed in the Anzeiger. At once the other “sanitation workers” began complaining of nausea and weakness. The cemetery and a few meters beyond it were cordoned off by a heavy wire fence with danger-of-death signs attached at intervals. A wide gate in the fence permitted the entry of a bulldozer which tore up the ground. Disinfectants of all kinds were poured on to the soil by workmen wearing coveralls and masks. Patients and staff were evacuated from the National Hospital, and the building itself was washed and disinfected. The Anzeiger said that a strange fungus had attacked the cemetery, and that until the medical authorities learned more about it, it was deemed wise to close the grounds to the public.

  But the growths kept coming, small low-lying curves at first, all over the cemetery’s churned surface, then came faster growth as if out of nowhere—one meter, two meters in a fortnight. Artists came to sketch, sitting on campstools. Other people took snapshots, and the more wary stood at a distance and looked through binoculars. There was talk of massive removal of the cemetery’s soil to a depth of two or even three meters. But where would the authorities dump it? The Preservation-of-the-Sea people had weeks ago pushed through legislation: the cemetery soil from National Hospital Thirty-six of G— was not to be dumped into ocean or sea. Farmers and ecologists of the country protested against the burial of the cemetery on their land or on public land at whatever depth. Border guards of adjacent countries were double-checking lorries going out of the country, lest they be concealing cemetery débris.

  Incineration was therefore decided on. Danger money reached absurd heights for the men who worked with derricks, getting the soil into containers which were wheeled to the hospital’s back door, through which so many corpses had moved in the opposite direction. The big old heating furnace and the waste furnace of the hospital were back in service, the only things in the building that were. The ashes came out to a smaller bulk than the soil, black and dark grey, but were handled by the workmen with similar caution. Were these to be dropped into the sea? No, that was forbidden too. There was really nothing to do with the ashes but store them in heavy plastic sacks in the basement morgue and on the ground floor of the building for the nonce.

  And still the growths came, as if hundreds of spores had been scattered by all the hacking and digging, but that was merely a poetic thought, Oktavian reflected, because tumors did not grow from spores. Still it was amazing how fertile that cemetery soil was! But he forgot the National Hospital while he took his final examinations. Marianne had another year to go. Then they were thinking of marrying.

  Despite some noisy official disapproval, but cheers from the radical-left-in-the-arts, sculptors began to include in their exhibitions works inspired by the forms they had seen and sketched in the National Hospital Thirty-six cemetery. These sculptures were not unpleasing, being composed of many curves like buttocks or breasts, depending on how one chose to interpret them. Some won prizes. One nearly-abstract resembled a plump woman holding a beach ball; another of a seated figure was called “Maternity.”

  The cemetery ground, though lower, continued to throw up its strange fruit. Masked and gloved workers—old pensioners mainly—hacked at their bases with hoes, as they might have hacked at stubborn weeds in their gardens at home. The roots of some growths were so deep that the workmen were inspired to suggest that the ground be excavated and burnt again. The town authorities were sick of it. They had already spent millions of schillings. They would simply keep the whole area fenced off and try to forget it. The road there didn’t go anywhere except past the empty hospital and up into the mountains where it became a lane used mostly by hikers. The cemetery would be forgotten. The press had already fallen silent on the subject. It was known that doctors had been conducting experiments relating to cancer in the National Hospital, but the blame for the cemetery’s condition was spread over so many, that no doctor or hospital administrator was charged with responsibility.

  The authorities were wrong in thinking that the cemetery would be forgotten. It became a tourist attraction, surpassing by far the popularity of the Geburtshaus in G— of a minor poet. Postcards of the cemetery sold fantastically well. Artists came from many lands, scientists too (though their tests on specimens taken from the cemetery yielded no further information on the causes and cures of cancer). Artists and art critics commented that nature’s designs, as manifested in the cemetery’s growths, surpassed those of crystals in ingenuity and were not to be despised aesthetically. Some philosophers and poets compared the grotesque shapes to a man-made wreckage of his own soul, to an insane tinkering with nature, such as that which had resulted in the accursed atomic bomb. Other philosophers countered: “Is cancer not natural to man?”

  Oktavian remarked to Marianne that they were safe in asking such a question, because the answer could be yes and no, or yes or no to various people, and the talk about it could go on forever.

  Moby Dick II; or the Missile Whale

  It was the middle of the warm season, when the sun lay bright on the blue water, and the little fish swam near the surface. He cruised along near his mate, basking in the warming waters as she did, sounding sometimes for pleasure, rising to leap like a dolphin in full sunshine before crashing back into the soft sea. His mate was soon to have her pup, and she swam more slowly, nudging curiously into coves of islands. Both knew islands were dangerous, men lived on islands, but a mother whale likes to give birth in shallow water.

  The South Pacific held not many ships where they were, and these few were long low things that kept a steady course. The little islands, so harmless looking, were more sinister, because of the catamarans and even canoes that sometimes set out after them, not to mention the occasional boat with a motor, sometimes equipped with a harpoon gun.

  The whale and his mate had been together all their adult lives. This would be her second pup. The first, a female, having swum with them a long while, got lost a few times and been found again, thanks to the voices of the anxious parents, had in due time swum away on her own.

  On one sunny afternoon, his mate turned toward a low-lying stretch of yellow land, and he followed at a distance. The water was not deep, and diving just a little way he could scrape the sand with his belly. Yellow-and-black-striped fish twitched and flitted out of his way with all the power in their tiny bodies. He might have captured several, strained the water out of his mouth, and enjoyed a titbit, but with a delicate wave of his tail he moved closer to the island and hung motionless in the water, listening for his mate. He heard a faint disturbance.

  She was going to produce the pup at last.

  A little column of water and air showed where she was, not far from the yellow beach with its palm trees tilting in the breeze.

  “Hee-yoo!” cried a human voice.

  Underwater he sounded a warning to her. He had heard human voices many times before, always different, yet always somehow the same. Under the water’s surface, he saw her twisting, the pup half out. Now the men were pushing a boat into the water, and they yelped. He lifted his head and saw the first spear hurled.

  She came floundering toward him, seeking deeper water. A spea
r projected from her back. He swam under and into the boat, catching it beneath its pointed front, and tossed it upside down. A spear struck him near his tail.

  Now the men were in the shallow water, stumbling and swimming, they all had spears, and his mate was surrounded. The whale went forward and pinched a pair of men between his lips.

  There were screams. Blood spread in the water.

  A spear pricked his front and stayed there. Men were tugging his mate toward the shore. Others now turned their attention to him.

  The whale flicked his tail with deliberate aim and a man flew into the air and burst, sending a shower of blood onto the sea’s surface. He lunged with his mouth open: one little man and the lower limbs of another struck his underlip and were crushed a moment later. With a lift of his tongue, the whale rid himself of the bleeding human flesh and the sea water that accompanied them. His body stung from spears, and he swerved toward deeper water, raising his head for all the air he could get in a gasp, then he dived.

  They were coming after him in a boat, not to be feared because it had no motor. He stung and hurt and he was furious. Far out from the island, he rose and spewed air and water, sighted the boat and dived again. When he saw the boat’s slender form above him, he circled, then aimed himself at its side just below the surface, so the boat was crushed by his impact and also tipped over. The three or four yelling men in the water he bumped senseless, and left them.

  Inspired by this, he headed again for the shore, where he knew his mate was dying or dead. Two more boats had put out, and he struck the nearer, rising under it, unseating the men and sending them into the water. The second boat hurled spears, one of which stuck in his side. He dived for safety, turned and sighted the boat which twisted above him, and rammed it. Then he moved on toward the shore, his belly near the sand. The shouts of the men grew sharper. Lifting his head, the whale saw with one eye the little brown men prancing around the half-beached form of his mate. The whale had an impulse to ram the lot of them, to swim right on to the beach, and just as suddenly the impulse was gone, he flicked his tail and swam away.