The Opal, and Other Stories Read online

  The Ardent Soldier

  It had been no small task for the army doctors to treat all the wounded Foreign Legionaries. The Annamites had poor weapons, and the gun pellets almost always stayed lodged in the soldiers’ bodies.

  Medical science had recently made great strides – a fact known even to those who could neither read nor write, who willingly submitted to all sorts of operations, especially since they had no other choice.

  Most of them died, to be sure, but only after their operation, and even then only because the Annamite ammunition had clearly not been sterilised before it was fired, or because it had picked up dangerous bacteria on its flight through the air.

  Professor Mostschadel’s reports left us in no doubt about that. He had attached himself to the Legion (with official permission) for scientific reasons, and it was thanks to his vigorous measures that the soldiers as well as the natives in the village were now constrained to speak of the magical cures of the pious Indian holy man Mukhopa-daya in nothing louder than a whisper.

  A final casualty who was brought to the field hospital by two Annamite women long after the skirmish was over was Private Wenzel Zavadil, a Bohemian by birth. When asked where they came from, that they were so late arriving, they explained that they had found Zavadil lying unconscious outside Mukhopadaya’s hut, and had then tried to resuscitate him by administering some opalescent liquid which was the only thing they could find in the fakir’s abandoned residence.

  The doctor could find no injury, and his questioning of the patient only produced a wild growl which he took to be the sound of some Slav dialect. As a cure-all he prescribed a clyster, and strode off to the Officers Mess.

  Doctors and Officers got on well together. The short but bloody skirmish had brought a bit of life to the usual tedium.

  Mostschadel had just said a few kind words about Professor Charcot (in order not to emphasis too painfully his superiority, as a German, over his French colleagues), when the Indian Red Cross nurse appeared in the entrance to the tent and reported in her broken French: ‘Sergeant Henry Serpollet dead, Trumpeter Wenzel Zavadil 41.2° fever.’ ‘Intriguing people, these Slavs,’ murmured the M.O. ‘The fellow has a fever, and yet no wounds!’

  The nurse was given an order to stop the soldier’s mouth (the one who was still alive, of course) with three grammes of quinine.

  Professor Mostschadel had caught the last few words, and used them as the starting-point for a lengthy disquisition in which he celebrated the triumphs of science, which had succeeded in discovering this fine substance quinine in the hands of the ignorant, who had, like a blind chicken, come across the remedy in nature.

  He had moved on from this theme to talk about spastic spinal paralysis, and the eyes of his listeners were beginning to glaze over when the nurse reappeared to report:

  Trumpeter Wenzel Zavadil 49 degrees of fever – permission to request a longer thermometer ‘By that reckoning long since dead,’ smiled the Professor.

  The staff surgeon slowly stood up, and with a severe gesture strode over to the nurse, who took a step backwards. ‘You see, gentlemen,’ he said observing this, ‘the woman is hysterical, just like the soldier Zavadil; a double case!’ And they all relaxed again.

  ‘The Medical Officer requests your presence at once,’ rasped the adjutant, waking the academic (who was still very much asleep) as the first rays of the sun lit up the edge of the nearby hills.

  Everyone turned to look expectantly at the Professor, who at once made his way to Zavadil’s bed.

  ‘54 degrees Reaumur blood-heat. Unbelievable,’ groaned the doctor.

  Mostschadel smiled in disbelief, but pulled his hand away in astonishment when he actually felt himself burning as he touched the invalid’s forehead.

  ‘Give me the history;’ he eventually said to the Medical Officer with some hesitation, and after a long and embarrassing silence.

  ‘Give me the history, and don’t loiter about so aimlessly!’ roared the M.O. at the youngest doctor present. ‘Bhagavan Sri Mukhopadaya might know ...’ the Indian nurse dared to begin.

  ‘Speak when you are spoken to!’ interrupted the Medical Officer.

  ‘Always the same old superstition,’ he went on, turning to Mostschadel.

  ‘The layman always thinks of the inessentials,’ agreed the Professor soothingly. ‘Send me the report, I have urgent matters to attend to now.’

  ‘Now, my young friend, what have you established?’ asked the great expert of the young subaltern, who was followed into the room by a crowd of curious officers and doctors.

  The temperature has reached 80 degrees now

  The Professor waved his hand impatiently. ‘And?’

  ‘Patient survived Typhus ten years ago, mild diphtheria twelve years ago. Father died of a fractured skull, mother of concussion; Grandfather skull fracture, grandmother concussion! - The patient and his family come from Bohemia,’ explained the subaltern. ‘Condition, apart from the temperature, normal. Abdominal functions all sluggish. Wounds, apart from slight contusions to back of head, not apparent. Patient is said to have been treated with an opalescent liquid in the hut of the fakir...’

  ‘Stick to the point, young friend. No irrelevancies,’ warned the professor good-naturedly, as with a gesture of invitation he indicated the various bamboo chairs and baskets standing in the room to his guests for them to seat themselves. He continued:

  ‘This, gentlemen, as I recognised at once early this morning, but only hinted at to you, so that you might yourselves have the opportunity to find your way to the correct diagnosis, is a not altogether common case of spontaneous thermo-incrementation in consequence of trauma to the calorific node (here his expression facing the officers and the civilians, took on a quality of slight disdain) – of that centre in the brain that controls variations in the temperature of the body – on the basis of inherited and acquired factors. If, further, we consider the subject’s cranial structure ...’

  At this point the speaker was interrupted by the repeated notes of a horn advertising the arrival of the local fire brigade (consisting of a few invalid soldiers and Chinese coolies) and presaging horror in the direction of the Mission Building.

  Everyone rushed outside, the colonel leading the way.

  Trumpeter Wenzel Zavadil was running down the hill from the hospital towards the Lake dedicated to the goddess Parvati. Followed by a shrieking and gesticulating crowd and clothed in blazing rags, he bore a strong resemblance to a human torch.

  The poor fellow was met just in front of the Mission by the Chinese fire-brigade in command of a stout jet of water, which admittedly knocked him to the ground, but which almost immediately evaporated in a cloud of steam. -The trumpeter’s temperature had at last risen so far as to begin to carbonise all the objects around him in the hospital, and the nurses were eventually obliged to chase him out of the building with iron staves. The floors and stairs showed evidence of his burning tread, as if the very devil had passed by.

  And now, the last rags having been torn away by the water-jet, Zavadil lay naked in the courtyard in front of the Mission, steaming like a smoothing-iron and ashamed of his nakedness. From the balcony above a Jesuit father of some resourcefulness threw down an old asbestos suit which had once been the property of a worker in the lava fields, and Zavadil gratefully put it on.

  *

  ‘But how in Heaven do you explain how the fellow isn’t just a heap of ashes?’ the Colonel asked Professor Mostschadel.

  ‘I have always admired your strategic talents, Colonel,’ replied the scholar indignantly, ‘but as far as medical science is concerned, you must leave matters to us doctors. We must adhere to the facts as they are given to us, and there is for us here no contra-indication that we should ignore them.’

  The doctors were highly pleased at this lucid diagnosis, and subsequent evenings were spent in the Captain’s tent, where there was always a jovial atmosphere.

  Only the Annamites spoke of Wenzel Zavadil any more. From time
to time he might be seen on the other side of the lake sitting near the stone temple of the goddesss Parvati, the buttons on his asbestos suit glowing red.

  The priests of the temple were rumoured to roast their chickens at his fire; others were of the opinion that he was already cooling down, and was intending to go home to his own country, just as soon as his temperature had got down to 50 degrees.

  The Brain

  The vicar had been looking forward so much to the return of his brother from southern climes, yet when at last he arrived an hour earlier than expected, and walked into the familiar old parlour at home, all his joy vanished.

  What the reason for this might have been he had no idea; he just felt it, as you would feel a November day when the whole world seems to be about to collapse into ashes.

  Even the old housekeeper Ursula was lost for words. Martin was as sunburned as an Egyptian, and smiled affably as he shook hands.

  He would certainly stay for dinner, he said, and was not at all tired. He would have to go up to town for a few days, that was true, but then he would be able to spend the whole summer at home.

  They talked of their younger days, when their father was still alive: and the vicar saw how the oddly melancholy cast of Martin’s features became more pronounced.

  ‘Don’t you think that certain kinds of startling or decisive events become just bound to happen precisely because the fear of their happening can’t be suppressed?’ These were Martin’s final words before going to bed: ‘And can you remember my awful terror as a child when I once saw a bleeding calf’s head in the kitchen ...?’

  The vicar couldn’t sleep: it was as if his room, where the atmosphere was usually so pleasant and comfortable, was filled with some kind of eerie, suffocating fog.

  ‘It’s only because there’s something new here, something unfamiliar,’ he thought.

  But it wasn’t the new or the unfamiliar – it was something else his brother had brought with him.

  The furniture had taken on a different aspect from usual, and the old pictures looked as if an invisible force was pinning them to the walls. A nervous foreboding permeated the air, as if merely thinking an outlandish or mysterious thought might precipitate a sudden and unpremeditated change. Just don’t think of anything new – stick with the old and comfortably familiar, comes the warning from inside. Thoughts are as dangerous as a bolt of lightning!

  The vicar found it impossible to get Martin’s adventure after the battle of Omdurman out of his mind: how he had fallen into the hands of the obi-men, who had tied him to a tree ... then he sees the witch-doctor who comes out of his hut, kneels in front of him, and places a human brain, still covered in blood, on a drum held in front of him by a female slave.

  Then he takes a long needle and stabs it into the brain in various places, and each time Martin cries out in pain, because he can feel the pricking inside his own head.

  What does it all mean?

  The Lord have mercy on him!

  On that occasion Martin had been rescued by English soldiers, who brought him back to the field hospital in a state of total paralysis.

  One day the vicar found his brother lying unconscious at home.

  The butcher had just arrived with his meat-grinder, reported old Ursula, and Mr Martin had inexplicably passed out.

  This can’t go on: you will have to go to Professor Diocletian Crammer’s Nervous Clinic – he has a world reputation,’ the vicar had said when his brother regained consciousness. Martin agreed.

  ‘Mr Schleiden? Your brother, the vicar, has already told me something about you. Please take a seat and tell me briefly what the problem is,’ said Professor Crammer, welcoming him to the consulting room.

  Martin sat down, and began: Three months after the affair at Omdurman – as you know – the last signs of paralysis—’

  ‘Show me your tongue,’ interrupted the Professor - ‘Hm: no abnormality; slight tremor. Go on then?’ The last signs of paralysis —’ Martin repeated.

  ‘Cross your legs. Good. More. Good’ ordered the specialist, producing a little steel hammer, and tapping the patient smartly just below the kneecap. The leg jerked upwards.

  ‘Heightened reflexes,’ said the Professor. ‘Have you always had heightened reflexes?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Martin apologised. ‘I’ve never hit myself on the knee.’ ‘Shut this eye. Now the other one. Open the left... yes, now the right – good. Light reflexes normal. Has the light reflex always been normal, Mr Schleiden, especially recently?’ Martin gave up and stayed silent.

  ‘You really should have taken notice of these signs,’ remarked the Professor a little reproachfully, and then ordered his patient to get undressed.

  A long and exhaustive examination now took place, during which the doctor displayed every sign of deep ratiocination, accompanied by the expression of Latin words sotto voce.

  ‘You said earlier something about symptoms of paralysis. I cannot find any,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘No, I meant to say that they had disappeared after three months,’ Martin Schleiden replied.

  ‘You have been ill for so long, Sir?’

  Martin looked nonplussed.

  ‘It is a remarkable phenomenon that almost all German patients are incapable of expressing themselves clearly,’ opined the Professor, smiling kindly. ‘You should go to a French clinic one of these days. How succinctly even the simple man can express himself. There is not much to say about your malady, by the way. Neurasthenia, that is all.

  I am sure that even you will be interested to learn that we doctors have succeeded, especially recently, in getting to the bottom of these nervous problems. Yes, that is the blessing of our modern investigative methods, that we can know quite precisely when it is appropriate to use no physical means – such as medicines. Keep the whole syndrome emphatically in view! Day by day! You would be surprised at what we can achieve by these methods. You understand me? And then the important thing is, to avoid all excitement – that is poison to you. And make an appointment to see me every other day. Remember: No Excitement1.’

  The Professor shook the invalid by the hand. He seemed visibly exhausted by his intellectual effort.

  The sanatorium was a massive building on the corner of a neat street bisecting the quietest part of town.

  On the opposite side there extended the old palace of Countess Zahradka, curtains hanging permanently across the windows reinforcing the morbidly quiet impression conveyed by the empty street.

  Almost nobody went past, for the entrance to the busy clinic was on the other side facing the park, by the two old chestnut trees.

  Martin Schleiden liked the solitude, and the garden with its carpets of flowers, its bath-chairs and its capricious invalids. He did not like the boring fountains and the stupid ornamental glass balls.

  He was drawn to the quiet street and the old palace with its barred and gloomy windows. What might the place look like inside?

  Old, faded tapestries, worn furniture, muffled chandeliers; an ancient dame with bushy white eyebrows and hard, austere features, who had forgotten both life and death.

  Day after day Martin Schleiden walked past the walls of the old building.

  In such desolate streets you have to keep close in to the walls.

  He had the characteristic easy stride of a man who has lived long in the tropics. He did not disturb the impression of the street at all: they fitted neatly together, these two unworldly existences.

  Three hot days arrived, and on each one of them, in the course of his solitary walk, he encountered an old man carrying a plaster bust. A plaster bust with an ordinary, quite unremarkable physiognomy.

  On the third occasion they walked straight into one another – the old man was so clumsy.

  The plaster figure slipped out of his grasp and fell slowly to the ground – everything falls in slow motion: it is only those people who have no time to stand back and watch things who are unaware of that fact.

  As it struck the ground the plaster split ope
n, and a human brain, all bloody, spilled out.

  Martin Schleiden stared at it with a glazed expression, stiffened and went pale. He spread his arms and then buried his face in his hands, before collapsing with a sigh on to the pavement.

  Quite by chance the Professor and his two assistants had witnessed everything from a window, and now the victim lay unconscious in the examining room, totally immobile. Half an hour later death supervened.

  A telegram had brought the man of the cloth hurrying to the sanatorium, and now here he stood in tears before the man of science.

  ‘How did it all happen so suddenly, Professor?’

  ‘It was to be predicted, my dear Vicar,’ replied the great man. ‘We adhered strictly to the methods of treatment we doctors have developed over many years of experience, but if the patient himself does not follow what is prescribed for him then all our medical skills are bound to be applied in vain.’

  ‘But who was the man carrying the plaster bust?’ broke in the vicar.

  There you are asking me about irrelevancies which I have neither the time nor the leisure to pursue. Allow me to continue. Here in this very room I have in the most explicit terms prescribed to your brother a total abstention from any kind of excitement. This was a Medical Prescription! Your brother was the one who chose not to follow that advice. It pains me a great deal to say so, my dear friend, but you will agree that strict compliance with medical advice is and remains the principal necessity.

  I myself was a witness to this unfortunate event: the man claps his hands to his head in a state of great excitement, falters, staggers and collapses to the ground. Of course assistance naturally came too late. I can already predict what the autopsy will establish: Cerebral Hyperanaemia in consequence of diffuse sclerosis of the cerebral cortex.

  Now, calm yourself, my dear fellow, and take the proverb to heart: those who make their beds must perforce lie in them.

  It sounds hard, but you know, the truth is a cruel task-master.’

  Izzi Pizzi

  My last port of call on a holiday tour of the sights was the Goldenes Dachl in Innsbruck.