Georg Letham by Ernst Weiß Read Free Book Online

recognized “loving heart,” was not reciprocated. When the four of us sat together, he and his wife, I and my wife, there was chilly silence after a few exchanges. He shrugged his shoulders at my experiments. I had not “cracked” the typhus pathogen, as he put it, or the scarlet-fever pathogen either.
    My wife, with her doglike affection, tried to see me through everything that had been going wrong for me lately. But I never even managed to be frank with her. Everything about her love was a misunderstanding–and, as grotesque as it may sound, here too she always miscalculated in her favor. She loved openly and honestly, but I had to be dishonest all the time, because she forced me to be. And this soon sickened me. I am not a liar. I had my fill of it.
    Lie after lie to do with the phone calls and with personal visits I had begun to receive from the impatient, extortionate moneylenders. But nothing about the failure of my experiments, which became all the more anguishing when I learned that my medical school classmate, the aforementioned Walter, had been dealing with the same topic as I and, at least in secondary experiments, had had far better luck. Was he beating me to it?
    The urge toward stupefaction, toward intoxication in any form, grew day by day. My mental breakdown must have been noticeable, but nobody wanted to know anything about my true torments–neither my father, who had been making a pest of himself lately with his tedious visits, nor my wife, who was annoying me with her insipid, driveling, grandmotherly love.
    Neither one of them could give me what I yearned for in the depths of my soul, but there was one medicine that they could have given me to ease my suffering: the original medicine, money.
    My father condescended to give me a birthday present of a couple of thousand cash, a drop in the bucket. My wife was even more cunning (she thought): she showed me the duplicate of her will, which she had made on the eve of my stepdaughter’s wedding and in which I was named sole heir. Her daughter was thus given a statutory portion,and it was I upon whom she doted. More than ever. Well, I knew that. But our relationship was shaping up as more and more repugnant just the same.
    I cannot even say whether it would have been more natural if we, that is, I, a man plagued by morbid urges and living without hope or belief, with no ground beneath my feet at all, and she, an aging, coquettish woman who felt alive only in suffering–I do not know, I say, whether there might have been another natural solution to these problems. Ultimately, perhaps, I might have found a way out if I had had a friend , another human soul who was intelligent yet had not succumbed to despair, who trusted me and was truly intimate with me, a man I could have looked up to–Walter, perhaps. But Walter, with all his brilliant accomplishments and outstanding qualities, was having his own difficulties at the Institute now and would be lucky even to finish his most recent work. Space at the Institute is always very limited, and, under orders from the Ministry, his seat, his workbench, were being assigned to a military physician, Major Carolus, a queer specimen about whom I will have much more to say.
    I was working at the Institute again, or rather still, and my dear spouse ventured no further objection. I was permitted to go on working there (and work was the only solace I had left) not because of anything to do with myself or my own achievements but only because of my father’s influence, which grew year by year, the clergy constantly by his side in a supporting role, as he by its. Not the first or the last anarchist and atheist to live in perfect harmony with the Church, at least outwardly.
    How then could I expect him to stand by me inwardly, whole-heartedly, when I, with a presentiment of what was coming, for the first timeconsidered a divorce? I do not remember how this idea entered our formal and excessively