'I never touched that woman.'
He looked mockingly. 'You don't say?'
'We sat in the kitchen and talked about the drugs they're experimenting with at I G Farben.'
He jerked his head across the table. 'Would she believe that? _Du lieber Gott!'_
'How about you and that tart in Berlin?'
'I keep telling you, Heike wasn't a professional.' He arrogantly stuck out his legs in their spotless white trousers. 'Anyway, women prefer a really experienced man of the world.'
Gerda was searching both our faces, puzzled and disconcerted by the tone of our exchanges. 'Genung!' Jeff exclaimed. He commanded the waiter, _'Bitte, bringe noch zwei Glases Cognac.'_ I noticed that he was beginning to use more German.
My tide of jealousy rose. My anchor was Gerda's personality. How could a level-headed schoolmistress with a mind and will of her own fall for the dash and extravagance of Jeff? What touching faith I had in the constancy of woman! The next Sunday afternoon Jeff appeared in beautifully cut plus fours with knitted brown socks and hand-made English brogues. He invited Gerda for another drive. This time I wasn't asked.
I decided to relinquish Gerda. In love affairs I withdraw at the gentlest rebuff, like a snail in a shower. I told myself sourly that a handsome young man with splendid clothes, a feeling for flattery and with the only Cord car in Germany was irresistible. I was not wholly fair. Jeff had charm and vigour, and he was American. He brought to old-fashioned, contorted, introspective, stiff-necked Germany the fresh wind of boundless prairies, endless highways, topless skyscrapers and unlimited money. To Gerda, he was _Blondie of the Follies._
'Herr Jim, you must have a poor opinion of me,' she confessed one evening when we found ourselves alone. I made some demurring remark. 'Jeff is very insistent. And I don't get many luxuries here in Wuppertal,' she said artlessly. 'But I feel very guilty, because you are so nice and quiet, and so much more intelligent than Jeff.'
My relations with Jeff remained amicable. They had to be. He seemed to regard his snatching Gerda only as a good joke at my expense. On May 10, Nazi students lit a bonfire from their libraries. Dr Goebbels benignly inspected the flames in the Franz-Josefplatz, while they shouted _Brenne Heinrich Heine! Brenne Karl Marx! Brenne Sigmund Freud! Brenne Heinrich Mann!'_ But both national and domestic disarray seemed trivial some six weeks later, when I thought I was about to lose my right hand.
10
On Friday morning I smashed a test-tube in the lab, and from a spot of blood saw with annoyance that I had pricked my right index finger. On Friday night it was tender, it throbbed when I woke on Saturday, and over the day grew ominously red and swollen.
I hesitated to consult Dr Dieffenbach. I had lived in a doctor's house-a King's doctor's house!-since I was fifteen, but my complaints had been always too trivial to provoke the cogitations of Sir Edward Tiplady. And by the nature of her profession, my mother had an intimacy with household remedies. Though I was never a sickly child, she would regularly apply them out of interest. I was dosed with garlic against worms, rubbed with hot roast turnip against chilblains, or with a steak to be promptly buried in the back garden against warts. My bowels never remained unmoved in the presence of senna infusions, rhubarb tea and boiled onions. I became a hypochondriac, which my life working closely with medical men has aggravated. They have an instinctive way of eyeing you for promising defects, as a knacker a passing horse. I have imagined picking up as many diseases as pieces of their jargon.
'You don't look well,' Gerda said as the maids were clearing away our evening meal. She showed increased solicitude for my welfare and comfort, I assumed through her guilt over Jeff. 'And you hardly ate a thing.'
'It's my finger.'
Her face grew concerned as I thrust the swollen tip towards her. 'You must be careful. Papa had a patient the other day whose finger started just like that. In the end he got blood poisoning, and they had to take him into the hospital and amputate his arm.'
I thanked her for the encouragement.
'You must show it to Papa once he gets back.' Dr Dieffenbach had missed his dinner through an urgent call. 'I'm sure he'll be able to stop it spreading with hot fomentations.'
I sat for a while over Hans Fallada's new novel _Kleiner Mann, was nun?_ while Gerda in her glasses corrected exercise-books. I knew that no infection was trivial. My father once caught his hand on a rusty nail rummaging in the dark of the wine cellar, and had been incapacitated for weeks.
We heard the doctor come home. I shut my book and followed him to his surgery at the back of the house. He was still in his Homburg, washing his hands.
'Come in, come in,' he invited in English. 'Have you ever had diphtheria, my dear chappie?'
'No, I haven't.'
He hung his hat on the stand with a weary gesture. 'I've just seen a bad case. Membrane right across the throat and the heart affected. Its twin attack, as garrotter and poisoner. Herr Petersen's little girl, on the other side of the Zoologischer Garten, I've known him since the War. Well, it's the disease which takes four or five thousand German children to Heaven every year.'
As he neatly folded the small starched towel which he had dried his hands on, I made the remark that a physician of his skill might save the child.
'Were I the reincarnation of Hippocrates I could battle no more successfully against the Klebs-Lцffler bacillus once it's on the rampage. There are but three things I can do.' He made a gesture of resignation. 'I can inject diphtheria antitoxin into the veins. I can administer strychnine to steady the heart. And I can hope for the best. If the child's breathing gets worse, I shall be called from my bed tonight to perform a tracheotomy.' He indicated with his forefinger a cut just below his voice-box. 'There're rumours going round this last year or so that they're developing the immunization against the disease, like your Edward Jenner discovered against smallpox a hundred years ago. Perhaps that will make a dent in the mortality.'
The room was small with white walls, lit by a strong electric bulb in a shade like a saucer and there was a reek of carbolic. One side was occupied by an uncomfortable-looking examination couch with a horsehair-stuffed top. Against the other stood a steel-and-glass case of instruments, on top a metal sterilizer like a chafing-dish over a spirit lamp. On the desk, a dish of instruments-scalpels, forceps, curved needles-lay marinating in reddish antiseptic. Dr Dieffenbach drew a box of cigars from the drawer and clipped one with a pocket guillotine. He smoked cigars unabashed while examining his patients, I suspected even intimately.
'Well, old chappie, you are looking at me like the unfortunate messenger from Birnam Wood in Macbeth.' He was fond of parading his involuntary intimacy with English literature.
I held out my finger with an apologetic air. He inspected it in silence, while the surgery filled with aromatic smoke. He pressed the pulp. I winced 'You have a cellulitis here,' he announced calmly. 'Our old friend the streptococcus has bitten you.'
'It won't spread, will it?' I asked, alarmed.
'Who can say? If the infection doesn't resolve in twenty-four hours, I can make a little cut or two and insert a rubber drain.' His unruffled professional manner at that moment struck me as incorporating the worst of British phlegm and German insensitivity. 'Sit down, and I'll take your temperature. Chin up, my dear chappie. I shall endeavour not to send you home looking like Admiral Nelson.'
It appeared that I had some fever. He prescribed kaolin poultices every four hours. All Sunday, Gerda made them in the kitchen, spreading the shiny white china clay on a square of pink lint with a spatula, then boiling it like a cabbage in a saucepan of water. With frowning seriousness she wrapped the poultice, tight and scalding, round my finger. I always winced and gasped, and she would say as she applied the layer of waterproof gauze and a bandage, 'Remember, Herr Elgar, it is for your own good.' I felt this unnecessarily schoolmistressy.