He erased the figures on the board with a large sponge as though trying to wipe away this little episode of the puppy dog on the run from the embrace of science. The students, men and women, surrounded him; he fended them off, sweating and gesticulating. I especially remember the laughing face and fine teeth of a female student who wore her blonde hair in the madonna style of the time. Hitching up her long skirt, she skipped lightly after the animal. She followed it up to where the two of us were, cajoling it as young girls do their lapdogs when they have escaped the leash and trying to coax it back with blandishments such as “precious,” “sweetie,” “baby,” “you bad boy,” and so on and so forth. The upper part of its body was pressed against our feet, its wounded head turned toward the pretty young woman. It was ghastly the way the howl died in the unfortunate animal’s throat at the sound of this deep, cooing, coaxing human voice, the way it suddenly deceived itself, eternally trusting in its god, man.

But it did not return to its tormentors. My friend crushed what was left of the animal’s cranium from behind with the silver handle of his walking stick. He had raised his left hand, had aimed, had struck. A thud–and that was that. The animal went over without a sound and was no more.

The student stood up, descended to the lectern holding the walking stick by its other end, washed the bloody handle there, dried it on the towel next to the blackboard. And returned to his seat. The most peculiar thing was that no one, neither the professor nor the female student, found anything remarkable in what he did. The professor rang for the lab attendant to remove the carcass, the female student, after fruitlessly fluttering her blue eyes in the direction of my neighbor, sat back down in her front-row seat, which, thanks to her punctuality, she had occupied from the first lecture on, my neighbor turned back to his disorderly notebook, instantly a jumble of writing, and that was the end of it. I found out later that the experimenter who was working with the dog had been called to the telephone. Then the lab attendant had slipped out of the hot experiment area for a cigarette, and the unusually strong, intelligent, unanesthetized animal had freed itself–no one knew how–and in its misery had trotted toward the lecture hall, for which it was not yet entirely ready. It should not have been brought out until some weeks later, when the paralytic effects of the partial lobotomy had developed properly.

In the strangest way, for which there are no words, I felt attracted toward this student Walter. As the patient beyond saving is to the doctor, perhaps. But what does one have to do with the other? Nothing. Beyond saving . . . doctor. God couldn’t make sense of it.

Walter passed his exams at about the same time as I did. He was hearty, strong, the picture of blooming health. Originally he had been bound for the service; his father was a high-ranking military officer. But he had preferred the university. And he had taken up experimental pathology and bacteriology–the same fields as mine. He was left-handed, and, like many left-handed people, unusually clumsy. Everything went wrong for him sometimes.