Julia Franck - The Blind Side of the Heart

She signed it just Leo, like a man’s name, with a long inky curve hinting at the rest of the name, but it was certainly Leontine’s handwriting. Helene did not show that she had read Leontine’s letter to Martha, but now, days later, when the girls sat face to face over Aunt Fanny’s invitation, with Martha crying over it and laughing for joy the next moment, Helene was sure there was nothing Martha would rather do than pack a suitcase at once and leave for Berlin, to stay there for ever. In fact, Bautzen had a large railway station of its own, but what did that matter? Helene often went to meet her professor’s colleagues there on his behalf, other doctors and professors from all over Germany, and Bautzen station couldn’t properly be called provincial. Railway carriages built in the carriage factory here were sent halfway round the world, and some of them must certainly go to Berlin. However, Aunt Fanny couldn’t be blamed for thinking of Bautzen as a village and she showed extraordinary generosity with those first-class tickets. To think that neither Martha nor Helene had even been on a train at all!

One afternoon in January, when darkness had already fallen, the professor of surgery asked young Nurse Helene to come to his consulting room. He told her he intended to go to Dresden for a week in March. He was meeting colleagues at the university there, he said, they were planning a jointly written book on the latest developments in medicine. He asked Helene if she would go with him. It would be to her advantage, he said. He didn’t want to hold out too many hopes, he added to the fifteen-year-old, but he could imagine her as his assistant some day. Her nimble fingers on the typewriter and her knowledge of shorthand impressed him. She was clever and gifted, he would feel it an honour to take her to his meeting with his academic colleagues. He expected she’d never been in a motor car, had she? His grave gaze made Helene shy; she felt her throat tighten. There was nothing to be afraid of, said the professor, smiling now, she would only have to take the minutes of a meeting now and then, his old secretary couldn’t travel any more because of water on her legs and he couldn’t ask too much of her. Helene felt herself blushing. Only a little while ago this offer would have seemed a wonderful opportunity. But today she had other plans, not, of course, that the professor could have known anything about them.

We’re going to leave Bautzen in March. It burst out of Helene. Both of us, Martha and me. And when the professor looked at her in silence, as if he didn’t understand what she had said, she sought for more words. We’re going to Berlin; we have an aunt there who’s asked us to stay.

Now the professor stood up, and with his monocle in his eye turned to the large Pharus map on the wall. Berlin? He sounded as if he didn’t know the city and had to look for it on the map.

Helene nodded. Their aunt had sent tickets for the train from Dresden to Berlin, she said, they just had to find the money for the railway journey to Dresden. If the professor would be so very kind as to, well, to take them to Dresden in his car, she would happily take minutes for him during his meetings with his colleagues and wait until those meetings were over before travelling on by train to Berlin. Could I ask when your meetings there are to take place?

The professor of surgery could not share Helene’s pleasure. He did not answer her question about the date, but instead warned her against acting thoughtlessly. And when Helene assured him that they weren’t acting thoughtlessly, on the contrary, she and Martha had thought of nothing else for a long time, he became brusque.

Young ladies ought not to overestimate themselves, he warned her. She and her sister were the daughters of a Protestant family of good standing, after all, and their father had been a well-regarded citizen of Bautzen. Their poor mother, so far as he knew, was on her own and in need of care. What could induce them to turn their backs so irresponsibly on the mother who had borne them?

Helene swayed back and forth on her heels. She reminded the professor that Nurse Leontine was living in Berlin too and studying medicine there, largely thanks to his recommendation. That was probably the wrong thing to say, for now the professor lost his temper. Thanks to my recommendation? he cried. You’re an ungrateful rabble; you don’t know how to behave. Let alone show gratitude. It was more than obvious, he said, that Leontine had not married for love. He had heard every word when she told another nurse that it was a clever idea. Not a good idea, no, a clever idea, she had said! Just imagine that! Was she trying to make him, her professor, look ridiculous, even make him jealous? Perhaps her veneration of him had gone slightly to little Leontine’s head! A clever idea? It would have been a cleverer idea for Leontine to stay at his side. What useless trouble we go to when we let women study! Women, he said, have no business to set their sights on a career calling for stamina, strength and concentration, indeed for putting mental and physical pressure on other human beings. Women would always rank second, simply because in his profession only the best could do research and practise medicine. The professor was getting out of breath. A keen mind, it all depends on that, he gasped out rather than stating it. So why would a woman study? Leontine had been an outstanding nurse, really excellent. It was a shame; who could have guessed what she’d do? It seemed as if she had actually betrayed him, he said, putting his recommendation in her pocket, just like that, and going off to get married in Berlin!

Helene buried her face in her hands. She would never have expected the professor to harbour such a grudge against Leontine. Whenever he referred to her in front of the other nurses and the doctors he spoke with great respect, paying tribute to Nurse Leontine’s abilities. Helene had thought she heard pride in his voice when he said that his little nurse, as he affectionately called her, was now studying in Berlin.

Take your hands away, Helene, he cried, reaching out his own hands to remove hers from her face so that she must look him in the eye. As he did so, the backs of his hands brushed against her breasts so roughly that Helene found it hard to assume he didn’t notice. Now he pulled her up from her chair, his hands either side of her head, pressing so firmly against her ears that it hurt. What are you thinking of, Nurse? Do you suppose you could ever be better off than here at my side, in my ward? You’re allowed to hold my instruments when I make incisions in my patients; I even let you stitch up the wound when my own wife had her operation. What more do you want?

Helene would have liked to answer his question, but she felt numb and still inside.

Now the professor let go of her and started pacing rapidly up and down. Helene could feel how her ears hurt, how they were burning. She had admired him ever since she had first been present at an operation and had seen his hands moving calmly, surely, almost gently, as if he were playing a musical instrument rather than handling bones and sinews, growths and arteries, ever since that first sight of his hands when she observed the fine, precise movements of the individual fingers. At first she had been afraid of him, because of her admiration and his abilities; later she learned to value him, because he never misused those abilities to humiliate a colleague, because he was always at the service of his patients and the art of medicine. Helene had never heard an angry word from him, let alone seen him make a rough gesture. Even when they had been working for ten hours without a break — once it was fifteen hours, through half the night, after the accident at the railway carriage factory — even then the professor had seemed to preserve a godlike calm that made her think of his kindness as well as his self-confidence. Now the professor turned the light on his desk so that it shone into Helene’s eyes, dazzling her.