Shortly before Christmas, a few days after the encounter with the dead hunter, I succumbed to a grave illness which Dr Piazolo and a physician from the nearest town, whom he consulted, diagnosed as diphtheria. Confined to my bed, I lay there, my throat becoming increasingly sore until at length it felt raw and torn open inside and I was fearfully convulsed every few minutes by a cough that racked my chest and my whole body. My limbs, once the illness had me in its grip, seemed so heavy to me that I could no longer raise either my head or my legs or arms, indeed not even my hands. Deep within my body I felt an immense pressure, as if my organs were being put through a mangle.
Again and again I saw before me the village blacksmith with his tongs pulling my heart, licked by blue flames like St Elmo's fire, out of the glowing embers and plunging it into a bucket of ice-cold water. The headache alone forced me sometimes to the limits of consciousness, but it was not until the illness reached its climax, when my temperature had risen to a fraction below the critical point, that delirium saved me from the worst extremes of pain. As though in the middle of a desert I lay in a shimmer of heat, my lips cracked and grey and flaking and in my mouth the foul taste of the rotting skin in my throat. My grandfather dripped luke-warm water into my mouth, and I felt it slowly trickling down across the scorched patches inside my throat. Time and again, in my delirium, I saw myself gingerly stepping past Frau Sallaba, who sat weeping on the stairs that led down into the cellar, and there, in the furthermost, darkest corner, opening the door of the cupboard where preserved eggs were kept for winter months in a large earthenware crock. I put my hand and forearm through the chalky surface of the water almost to the bottom of the container, and to my horror I felt that what was stored in this pot was not eggs safely sequestered, each one of them, in its shell, but something soft, something that slipped through my fingers and which I instantly knew could only be eyeballs gouged from their sockets. Dr Piazolo, who at the onset of my illness had ordered my room to be turned into a quarantine ward which only my grandfather and mother were allowed to enter, had me swathed from head to toe in dampened warm sheets, which at first proved beneficial, but, because of the constriction, soon gave rise in me to panic and fear. Twice a day my mother had to wash the floor with vinegar water, and until dusk fell the windows of my sickward were kept wide open so that at times the snow drifted in almost as far as the middle of the room, and my grandfather would sit by my bed in his overcoat with his hat on his head. The illness ran its course over two weeks, until after Christmas, even when Epiphany had come round I could scarcely eat anything other than spoonfuls of bread and milk. The door to the quarantine ward was now left ajar, and some of those who lived and worked in our house took turns to put in an appearance at the threshold, including Romana a couple of times, gaping at this boy who, by dint of a miracle, had just escaped with his life. It was already Lent before I was allowed to go into the garden occasionally. For the time being, a return to school was ruled out. In the spring, for two hours a day, I was placed in the care of my teacher, Fràulein Rauch. Fràulein Rauch was the daughter of the chief forester, so every afternoon I went across to the shingled villa which stood in a small arboretum and was both the forestry commission's district office and the chief forester's home. There, when the weather was cold, I would sit with my teacher on the bench by the stove and on sunny days outside in the revolving summer-house under the trees, completely devoted to the tasks I was set, filling my exercise books with a web of lines and numbers in which I hoped to entangle Fràulein Rauch for ever.