Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

Once again his voice failed. And what he next uttered was more of a sob than words.

“I… I groped my way in… And there… there on a dirty mat, doubled up with pain… a groaning piece of human flesh… there she lay…

I couldn’t see her face in the darkness. My eyes weren’t yet used to it… so I only groped about and found… found her hand, hot, burning hot… she had a temperature, a very high one, and I shuddered, for I instantly knew it all… how she had fled here from me, had let some dirty Chinese woman mutilate her, only because she hoped for more silence in that quarter… she had allowed some diabolical witch to murder her rather than trust me… because, deranged as I was, I hadn’t spared her pride, I hadn’t helped her at once… because she feared me more than she feared death.

I shouted for light. The boy ran off; the appalling Chinese woman, her hands trembling, brought a smoking oil lamp. I had to stop myself taking her by her filthy yellow throat as she put the lamp on the table. Its light fell bright and yellow on the tortured body. And suddenly… suddenly all my emotions were gone, all my apathy, my anger, all the impure filth of my accumulated passion… I was nothing but a doctor now, a human being who could understand and feel and help. I had forgotten myself, I was fighting the horror of it with my senses alert and clear… I felt the naked body I had desired in my dreams only as… how can I put it?… as matter, an organism. I did not see her any more, only life defending itself against death, a human being bent double in dreadful agony. Her blood, her hot, holy blood streamed over my hands, but I felt no desire and no horror, I was only a doctor. I saw only her suffering… and I saw…

And I saw at once that barring a miracle, all was lost… the woman’s criminally clumsy hand had injured her, and she had bled half to death… and I had nothing to stop the bleeding in that stinking den, not even clean water. Everything I touched was stiff with dirt…

‘We must go straight to the hospital,’ I said. But no sooner had I spoken than her tortured body reared convulsively.

‘No… no… would rather die… no one must know… no one… home… home…’

I understood. She was fighting now only to keep her secret, to preserve her honour… not to save her life. And—and I obeyed. The boy brought a litter, we placed her in it… and so we carried her home, already like a corpse, limp and feverish, through the night, fending off the frightened servants’ inquiries. Like thieves, we carried her into her own room and closed the doors. And then… then the battle began, the long battle with death…”

*

Suddenly a hand clutched my arm, and I almost cried out with the shock and pain of it. His face in the dark was suddenly hideously close to mine, I saw his white teeth gleam in his sudden outburst, saw his glasses shine like two huge cat’s eyes in the pale reflection of the moonlight. And now he was not talking any more but screaming, shaken by howling rage.

“Do you know, stranger, sitting here so casually in your deckchair, travelling at leisure around the world, do you know what it’s like to watch someone dying? Have you even been at a deathbed, have you seen the body contort, blue nails scrabbling at the empty air while breath rattles in the dying throat, every limb fights back, every finger is braced against the terror of it, and the eye stares into horror for which there are no words? Have you ever experienced that, idle tourist that you are, you who call it a duty to help? As a doctor I’ve often seen it, seen it as… as a clinical case, a fact… I have studied it, so to speak—but I experienced it only once, there with her, I died with her that night… that dreadful night when I sat there racking my brains to think of something, some way to staunch the blood that kept on flowing, soothe the fever consuming her before my eyes, ward off death as it came closer and closer, and I couldn’t keep it from her bed. Can you guess what it means to be a doctor, to know how to combat every illness—to feel the duty of helping, as you so sagely put it, and yet to sit helpless by a dying woman, knowing what is happening but powerless… just knowing the one terrible truth, that there is nothing you can do, although you would open every vein in your own body for her? Watching a beloved body bleed miserably to death in agonising pain, feeling a pulse that flutters and grows faint… ebbing away under your fingers. To be a doctor yet know of nothing, nothing, nothing you can do… just sitting there stammering out some kind of prayer like a little old lady in church, shaking your fist in the face of a merciful god who you know doesn’t exist… can you understand that? Can you understand it? There’s just one thing I don’t understand myself: how… how a man can manage not to die too at such moments, but wake from sleep the next morning, clean his teeth, put on a tie… go on living, when he has experienced what I felt as her breath failed, as the first human being for whom I was really wrestling, fighting, whom I wanted to keep alive with all the force of my being… as she slipped away from me to somewhere else, faster and faster, minute after minute, and my feverish brain could do nothing to keep that one woman alive…

And then, to add to my torment, there was something else too… as I sat at her bedside—I had given her morphine to relieve the pain—and I saw her lying there with burning cheeks, hot and ashen, as I sat there, I felt two eyes constantly fixed on me from behind, gazing at me with terrible expectation. The boy sat there on the floor, quietly murmuring some kind of prayer, and when my eyes met his I saw… oh, I cannot describe it… I saw something so pleading, so… so grateful in his doglike gaze! And at the same time he raised his hands to me as if urging me to save her… to me, you understand, he raised his hands to me as if to a god… to me, the helpless weakling who knew the battle was lost, that I was as useless here as an ant scuttling over the floor. How that gaze tormented me, that fanatical, animal hope of what my art could do… I could have shouted at him, kicked him, it hurt so much… and yet I felt that we were both linked by our love for her… by the secret. A waiting animal, an apathetic tangle of limbs, he sat hunched up just behind me. The moment I asked for anything he leaped to his bare, silent feet and handed it to me, trembling… expectantly, as if that might help, might save her. I know he would have cut his veins to help her… she was that kind of woman, she had such power over people… and I… I didn’t even have the power to save her from bleeding… oh, that night, that appalling night, an endless night spent between life and death!

Towards morning she woke again and opened her eyes… they were not cold and proud now… there was a moist gleam of fever in them as they looked around the room, as if it were strange… Then she looked at me. She seemed to be thinking, trying to remember my face… and suddenly, I saw, she did remember, because some kind of shock, rejection… a hostile, horrified expression came over her features. She flailed her arms as if to flee… far, far away from me… I saw she was thinking of that … of the time back at my house. But then she thought again and looked at me more calmly, breathing heavily… I felt that she wanted to speak, to say something. Again her hands began to flex… she tried to sit up, but she was too weak. I calmed her, leaned down to her… and she gave me a long and tormented look… her lips moved slightly in a last, failing sound as she said, ‘Will no one ever know? No one?’

‘No one,’ I said, with all the strength of my conviction. ‘I promise you.’

But her eyes were still restless. Her fevered lips managed, indistinctly, to get it out.