Read Online Georg Letham by Ernst Weiß - Free Book Online

my wife had taken ill, she was having fainting symptoms. The girl, in short cotton pajamas, her black hair disheveled, half asleep, her face pale and pasty, carried out my instructions. The physician apparently did not come to the phoneimmediately. Then he had every word repeated three or four times, the girl had to spell everything out. Had he become hard of hearing overnight? Finally I lost patience and took the receiver myself. Did I have so little control of myself? Apparently so. The physician immediately understood what I had to say extremely well. I don’t know why, but this entirely insignificant circumstance, that the telephone connection between us two physicians now functioned perfectly, gave me a feeling of happiness, put me in a kind of high spirits.
    The physician recalled my name immediately as that of his colleague. But he seemed to have little desire to come now, at night, asked if I would not see to the patient again myself, take her pulse, check her breathing. The maid was looking strangely at the bed and the figure lying motionless on it. I gave no sign of noticing. I pretended to perform the examination as advised by the physician, then pulled the coverlet up over my wife’s open mouth and continued my conversation with him. He said with satisfaction that this was the normal course (of what?), that he would counsel me as a colleague, that I should quickly administer an injection of caffeine and let him know what happened. Of course he would be available if it was absolutely necessary (he carefully stressed the word “absolutely”). I gave my assent, hung up, turned out all the lights but one, and sent the maid out of the room with a feeling of relief. I walked through the adjoining rooms four or five times, sat down for a moment in the armchair, then tiptoed into my wife’s bathroom and dressing room and put the poison there for the time being. Then I called the physician again and informed him that my wife’s pulse had stopped while I was giving her the injection. The physician did not respond immediately. Then he took a deep breath–or he yawned–and finally, in a changed voice, meant to sound moved, asked me to try aninjection of camphor, so that everything conceivable would have been done. Directly into the heart?! Of course he meant the cardiac musculature. I said nothing. Then he asked whether I still insisted on an immediate visit. He himself had given up administering camphor injections to the dying, he said. They never saved anyone. Again I found no suitable response. Otherwise, he continued, he would appear the next morning at seven thirty in order to comply with the legal formalities and fill out the death certificate. I surely had blank forms in the house. And he did not need to tell me that he had the deepest sympathy for me in my loss. I thanked him briefly and hung up.
    The telephone then rang once more. I answered it. No one there. Wrong number? Ten minutes later the same thing. Yet a third time–now I felt I ought to call the operator and complain. I waited. My heart pounded. But there was silence. Good.
    I believed I had taken care of the aftermath of my actions in the most straightforward manner. I would have told my father everything only too gladly. But the absurdity of this notion became clear to me at once and I laughed out loud.
    I was happy. But not at ease. In the bedroom I turned on the light once more and got a clean hand towel from my wife’s small bathroom, which was charmingly done in almond green and pale pink. I spread it out over the still uncovered upper part of my dead wife’s face. Then I turned back the coverlet and spread the towel over her throat and chest as well. The window was still open; the hot, moist breeze caught in the dry, bright linen, lifting it where it swelled over the curves of the chest. Rhythmic rising and falling. But I knew what was what. I turned out the light. The wood in a built-in wardrobe suddenly