I would have repeated my infernal experiment under different test conditions if it had been in my power, but I still would have done away with that love-addicted old woman, that bottle blonde with shining, light gray eyes in her flat, enameled face and blue varicose veins on her legs, and if possible my good old hoary-headed father too. There are such people.

III

There is someone else I must mention, someone who may have been the most important person for me–perhaps. Who knows? Walter, a contemporary of mine in medical school. Once during a lecture we had a singular experience, whose details I thought I had forgotten. But while I was in custody, in the interval between crime and verdict–during those difficult hours of solitude when I was left to my own devices, brooding and analyzing in the extraordinary anguish to which isolation will drive anyone, particularly if he has led an intellectually vigorous life until then–this episode, insignificant in itself, came back to me.

It happened during a long lecture on the optical properties of the human eye. As the old physiology professor was speaking, a small door opened to one side of the large blackboard. Through this door the lecture hall communicated with the rest of the physiology department.

At first we paid no attention. We were focused on the difficult calculations and formulas that the professor was writing with squeaking chalk on the blackboard, now dazzlingly illuminated by the midday sun.

I can still see my comrade’s hand, shapely, slender, yet masculine in its strength and sinewiness, copying down the formulas in a somewhat disorderly notebook; while the dark gray, shining eyes with their expression of total, I might even call it joyful, intelligence were fixed on the blackboard, the hand transcribed the figures almost autonomously, the lines wandering up and down.

There was a sudden stir. The students near the lectern began to laugh, to stamp, to get up out of their seats. Something not even knee-high, shaggy, outlandish, reddish white, was wriggling and squirming among them. What was it? A dirty-white poodle with a bushy, frantically waving tail, its head covered with blood down to the bare light brown nose, a large, square wound on one side of its head, its tongue, bruised at the edges, hanging out, its eyes rolling, was weaving silently past the feet of the horrified–no, not horrified!–only astonished professor. Gnawed-through narrow leather straps dragged from the handsome pasterns of the thin legs. No barking or whining was heard. Only raspy breathing.

My father had inured me, I will tell the tale later in great detail, to the ghastliness of life as it really is. Otherwise I would never have chosen to study medicine, I would have resisted the temptation to learn the secrets of physical life. Would have had to resist! So I thought I was impervious to even the most dreadful sights. I wanted to be. That was how I wanted to be. I actually seemed to be. I had dissected cadavers with total composure like every other first-semester medico, even smoking a cigarette as I worked. I had also been present at vivisection experiments, which are performed for third-semester students for purely pedagogical purposes. In the interest of scientific inquiry for the betterment of mankind, I had always been mentally prepared for this dark side of life and had endured it, if not easily. But I was unprepared now and was horrified when the animal scrambled higher and higher up the steps of the amphitheater, its tail swishing, and looked up at us with terrified madness in its eye. Now the beast breathed deeply and noisily through its tow-colored, somewhat bloody nostrils, to let out its anguish finally in a howl. My neighbor quickly got to his feet. The animal was running up in a quick zigzag, possibly toward a door to the outside that had been left open in the summer heat, and was already up to our bench at the very top of the amphitheater. From this distance the wound on its skull was clearly visible. The skin had been neatly removed, the milk white cerebral membrane was incised in the shape of a rhombus, and two very small, silvery instruments, I no longer remember exactly what kind, perhaps hypodermic syringe tips, still hung in the open wound, which was pulsating plainly.

The tumult around us was very loud. But it was merry. The students took the thing as a lark and the professor followed suit.