ABSTRACT
I was at my wit’s end: an urgent journey lay ahead of me; a seriously ill patient was expecting me in a village ten miles off; a dense snowstorm filled the wide space between him and me; I had a trap, a light trap with big wheels, just right for our country roads; muffled in furs, instrument bag in my hand, I stood ready and waiting in the courtyard; but not a horse was to be had, not a horse. My own horse had died in the night, worn out by the grind of this icy winter; my servant girl was now running round the village to get the loan of a horse; but it was hopeless, I knew it, and there I stood aimlessly, more and more snowed under, more and more unable to move. The girl appeared in the gateway, alone, and swung the lantern; but who lends his horse at a time like this for a journey like that? I strode across the courtyard again; I could think of no alternative; upset, I absent-mindedly gave a kick to the ramshackle door of the ancient unused pig-sty. It flew open and flapped to and fro on its hinges. A horselike warmth and stench came out to meet me. A dim stable lantern was swinging inside on a rope. A man, squatting down in that low hovel, showed his face, frank and blue-eyed. ‘Shall I yoke up?’ he asked, crawling out on all fours. I didn’t know what to say and merely bent down to see what else was in the shed. The servant girl was standing beside me. ‘You just don’t know what you’re going to stumble across in your own house’ she said, and we both laughed. ‘Hey Brother, hey Sister!’ the stable boy called, and two horses, huge beasts with strong flanks, legs flush against the torso, shapely heads bent like camels, only by powerful contortions of their hindquarters squeezed out one behind the other through the keyhole which they filled entirely. At once they stood there, long-legged, their bodies thick clouds of steam. ‘Give him a hand’, I said, and the girl promptly hurried over to help the stable boy with the harnessing. Hardly was she beside him when he grabbed hold of her and pressed his face against hers. She screamed and fled back to me; the imprint of two rows of teeth stood out red on her cheek. ‘You beast’, I yelled in fury, ‘do you want a whipping?’, but at the same time 29realised he was a stranger; that I didn’t know where he’d come from, and that he was volunteering to help me out when everyone else had turned a deaf ear. As if he’d read my mind, he took no offence at my threat, and instead simply turned towards me once more while he worked with the horses. ‘Get in’, he said, and sure enough: everything was ready. I’d never ridden, I thought, with such a splendid pair of horses, and I climbed in cheerfully. ‘But I’ll take the reins’, I said, ‘You don’t know the way.’ ‘Sure’, he said, ‘I’m not coming with you anyway, I’m staying with Rose.’ ‘No’, shrieked Rose and rushed into the house, knowing in her bones that her fate couldn’t be averted; I heard the door-chain clatter as she put it up; I heard the key scrape in the lock; I also saw how she put the lights out, first in the corridor and then from room to room, to prevent herself from being found. ‘You’re coming with me’, I said to the stable boy, ‘or I’m not going at all, urgent though the journey is. I wouldn’t even think of paying for it by handing you the girl.’ ‘Gee up!’, he said; clapped his hands; the trap sprang off like a log in a rapid; I could just hear the door of my house split and burst under the stable boy’s assault, and then I was blinded and deafened by a roaring noise that buffeted all my senses. But that too for only a moment, since already I was there as if my patient’s yard had opened out just in front of my own gate; the horses were standing quietly; it had stopped snowing; moonlight all around; my patient’s parents hurrying out of the house; his sister behind them; they almost lifted me out of the carriage; I couldn’t catch anything of their confused talking all at once; in the sick-room the air was hardly fit to breath; the stove was unattended and smoking away; I thought to heave open the window; but first I wanted to see my patient. Gaunt, no fever, not cold, not warm, his eyes vacant, the young man hauled himself up shirtless from under his eiderdown, clasped my neck, and whispered in my ear: ‘Doctor, let me die.’ I glanced around; nobody had heard it; the parents stood stooped and silent, awaiting my verdict; the sister had set a chair for my doctor’s bag. I opened the bag and rummaged through my instruments; the young man kept leaning out of bed to grasp me, and remind me of his plea; I picked up a pair of forceps, examined them in the candle light and put them down again. ‘Yes’, I thought blasphemously, ‘in cases like this the gods help out, send the missing horse, couple it with another because of the urgency, and then to crown it all donate a stable boy –’ And only then did I think of Rose again; what was I to do, how could I rescue her, how could I pull her out from under that stable boy, ten miles away from her, my carriage drawn by ungovernable horses? These horses, they’d somehow slipped loose of the reins; pushed open the windows, I don’t know how, from outside; each stuck a head in through a window and undeterred by the family’s commotion, ogled the patient. ‘I’ll go back straightaway’, I thought, as if the horses were summoning me for the trip, but I allowed the sister, who thought me dazed by the heat, to relieve me of my fur coat. A glass of rum was laid out for me, the old man clapped me on the shoulder, his familiarity justified by the offer of his prized rum. I shook my 30head; in the immediate confines of the old man’s thinking I felt ill; only for that reason did I decline the drink. The mother stood by the bed and enticed me towards it; I yielded and while one of the horses brayed loudly at the ceiling laid my head on the young man’s chest which trembled under my wet beard. It confirmed what I already knew: the young man was healthy, a few circulatory problems, saturated with coffee by the solicitous mother, but healthy and best bundled out of bed with a good shove. I’m no world reformer, so I let him lie. I’m the district doctor and do my duty as far as possible, to the brink of overdoing it. Badly paid, but I give what I have, ready to help the poor. I still have to look after Rose, and then the young man might be right and I too about to die. What was I doing here in this endless winter! My horse was dead, and nobody in the village would lend me another. I’d had to get my team out of the pig-sty; if they hadn’t happened to be horses, I would have been travelling with pigs. That’s how it was. And I nodded to the family. They knew nothing about it, and had they known, wouldn’t have believed it. Writing prescriptions is easy, but coming to an understanding with people is hard. So, that should have been that, my visit ended, called out unnecessarily once again: I was used to it, the whole district tortured me with my night-bell; but that I’d had to surrender Rose this time too, the lovely girl who’d lived in my house for years without my hardly noticing – this sacrifice was too much, and I somehow had to make sense of it in my head by splitting hairs, so as not to fly straight for this family which, with the best will in the world, couldn’t give Rose back to me. But when I shut my bag and beckoned for my fur coat, the family standing together, the father sniffing at the glass of rum in his hand, the mother in all likelihood disappointed by me – but what do people expect? – biting her lips, tears in her eyes, the sister brandishing a blood-drenched handkerchief, I was somehow ready to concede the young man might possibly be ill after all. I approached him, he greeted me with a smile as if I were bringing him the most nutritious broth – ah, now both the horses were neighing; the noise must surely have been ordered from above to facilitate my examination – and this time I discovered the young man was indeed ill. In his right side, near the hip, a wound had opened, as big as my palm. Rose-red, in variegated hues, dark at its base and lighter at the margins, slightly granulated, with irregular pockets of blood, open like a mine to the day above. So it looked from the distance. On closer inspection, there was an added complication. Who could look at that without whistling under his breath? Worms, as long and broad as my little finger, themselves rose-red and blood-spattered besides, squirmed up from their fastness within the wound towards the light, with small white heads and lots of tiny legs. Poor young man, there’s no helping you. I’ve discovered your great wound; this blossom in your flank is dragging you down. The family was pleased, watched me busying myself; sister told mother, mother father, father a few guests who were coming in on tiptoe through the moonlight from the open door, arms outstretched to hold their balance. ‘Will you save me?’ sobbed the young man 31in a whisper, quite dazzled by the life in his wound. That’s what people are like in this region. Always expecting the impossible from the doctor. They’ve lost their old beliefs; the cleric sits at home and unpicks his vestments, one after another; but the doctor is expected to be able to do everything with his gentle surgeon’s hand. Well, as they wish it: I didn’t thrust my services on them; should they misuse me for sacred purposes, I wouldn’t stand in their way with that either; how could I expect anything better, old country doctor that I am, robbed of my servant girl! And so they came, the family and the village elders, and stripped me of my clothes; a school choir with the teacher at its head stood in front of the house and sang these words to an extremely simple tune:
