Like thieves, we carried her into her own room and closed the doors. And then … then the battle began, the long battle with death …”

 

Suddenly a hand clutched my arm, and I almost cried out with the shock and pain of it. His face in the dark was suddenly hideously close to mine, I saw his white teeth gleam in his sudden outburst, saw his glasses shine like two huge cat’s eyes in the pale reflection of the moonlight. And now he was not talking any more but screaming, shaken by howling rage.

“Do you know, stranger, sitting here so casually in your deckchair, travelling at leisure around the world, do you know what it’s like to watch someone dying? Have you even been at a deathbed, have you seen the body contort, blue nails scrabbling at the empty air while breath rattles in the dying throat, every limb fights back, every finger is braced against the terror of it, and the eye stares into horror for which there are no words? Have you ever experienced that, idle tourist that you are, you who call it a duty to help? As a doctor I’ve often seen it, seen it as … as a clinical case, a fact … I have studied it, so to speak—but I experienced it only once, there with her, I died with her that night … that dreadful night when I sat there racking my brains to think of something, some way to staunch the blood that kept on flowing, soothe the fever consuming her before my eyes, ward off death as it came closer and closer, and I couldn’t keep it from her bed. Can you guess what it means to be a doctor, to know how to combat every illness—to feel the duty of helping, as you so sagely put it, and yet to sit helpless by a dying woman, knowing what is happening but powerless … just knowing the one terrible truth, that there is nothing you can do, although you would open every vein in your own body for her? Watching a beloved body bleed miserably to death in agonising pain, feeling a pulse that flutters and grows faint … ebbing away under your fingers. To be a doctor yet know of nothing, nothing, nothing you can do … just sitting there stammering out some kind of prayer like an little old lady in church, shaking your fist in the face of a merciful god who you know doesn’t exist … can you understand that? Can you understand it? There’s just one thing I don’t understand myself: how … how a man can manage not to die too at such moments, but wake from sleep the next morning, clean his teeth, put on a tie … go on living, when he has experienced what I felt as her breath failed, as the first human being for whom I was really wrestling, fighting, whom I wanted to keep alive with all the force of my being … as she slipped away from me to somewhere else, faster and faster, minute after minute, and my feverish brain could do nothing to keep that one woman alive …

And then, to add to my torment, there was something else too … as I sat at her bedside—I had given her morphine to relieve the pain—and I saw her lying there with burning cheeks, hot and ashen, as I sat there, I felt two eyes constantly fixed on me from behind, gazing at me with terrible expectation. The boy sat there on the floor, quietly murmuring some kind of prayer, and when my eyes met his I saw … oh, I cannot describe it … I saw something so pleading, so … so grateful in his doglike gaze! And at the same time he raised his hands to me as if urging me to save her … to me, you understand, he raised his hands to me as if to a god … to me, the helpless weakling who knew the battle was lost, that I was as useless here as an ant scuttling over the floor. How that gaze tormented me, that fanatical, animal hope of what my art could do … I could have shouted at him, kicked him, it hurt so much … and yet I felt that we were both linked by our love for her … by the secret. A waiting animal, an apathetic tangle of limbs, he sat hunched up just behind me. The moment I asked for anything he leaped to his bare, silent feet and handed it to me, trembling … expectantly, as if that might help, might save her. I know he would have cut his veins to help her … she was that kind of woman, she had such power over people … and I … I didn’t even have the power to save her from bleeding … oh, that night, that appalling night, an endless night spent between life and death!

Towards morning she woke again and opened her eyes … they were not cold and proud now … there was a moist gleam of fever in them as they looked around the room, as if it were strange … Then she looked at me. She seemed to be thinking, trying to remember my face … and suddenly, I saw, she did remember, because some kind of shock, rejection … a hostile, horrified expression came over her features. She flailed her arms as if to flee … far, far away from me … I saw she was thinking of that … of the time back at my house. But then she thought again and looked at me more calmly, breathing heavily … I felt that she wanted to speak, to say something. Again her hands began to flex … she tried to sit up, but she was too weak. I calmed her, leaned down to her … and she gave me a long and tormented look … her lips moved slightly in a last, failing sound as she said, ‘Will no one ever know? No one?’

‘No one,’ I said, with all the strength of my conviction. ‘I promise you.’

But her eyes were still restless. Her fevered lips managed, indistinctly, to get it out.

‘Swear to me … that no one will know … swear.’

I raised my hand as if taking an oath. She looked at me with … with an indescribable expression… it was soft, warm, grateful … yes, truly, truly grateful. She tried to say something else, but it was too difficult for her. She lay there for a long time, exhausted by the effort, with her eyes closed. Then the terrible part began … the terrible part … she fought for another entire and difficult hour. Not until morning was it all over …”

 

He was silent for some time. I did not notice until the bell struck from amidships, once, twice, three times—three o’clock. The moon was not shining so brightly now, but a different, faint yellow glow was already trembling in the air, and the wind blew light as a breeze from time to time. Half-an-hour more, an hour more, and it would be day, the grey around us would be extinguished by clear light. I saw his features more distinctly now that the shadows were not so dense and dark in the corner where we sat—he had taken off his cap, and now that his head was bared his tormented face looked even more terrible. But already the gleaming lenses of his glasses were turned to me again, he pulled himself together, and his voice took on a sharp and derisive tone.

“It was all over for her now—but not for me. I was alone with the body—but I was also alone in a strange house and in a city that would permit no secrets, and I … I had to keep hers.