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
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.
My mind became increasingly occupied with the chances of earning a living as a one-armed chemist. I had every faith in Dr Dieffenbach. He was superior to a Krankenkasse doctor, one employed by the compulsory public sickness insurance which was established in Germany in 1883, anticipating our British National Health Service by sixty-five years. And like our British National Health Service, its doctors complained that they were underpaid and overworked, its patients complained that they could not always choose their doctor, though the Verbдnde der Artze Deutschlands did its best to provide a selection. Dr Dieffenbach looked down on the Krankenkasse severely.
I stayed on my feet that Sunday, my right arm in a sling. I clearly could not go to the brewery on Monday. Anyway, Jeff was in Berlin. I awoke feeling so ill, and my hand so pained, that I could not rouse myself from my bed.
Gerda brought me some barley-water, but I was too sick even to savour her concern. About noon, Dr Dieffenbach sent a maid to summon me to his surgery. As he took off the jacket of my pyjamas, I could see clearly red streaks now reaching from my hand and up my forearm towards my heart.
Dr Dieffenbach stood smoking his cigar for the best part of a minute, inspecting the unbandaged hand impassively.
'We'll try some new pills,' he decided.
I was then so frightened I would have swallowed arsenic had he suggested it. 'Perhaps I should send a letter home,' I said shakily. 'To break the news that I am ill-'
'You are hardly in top condition for correspondence. I'll send a line on your behalf to Sir Edward Tiplady. I owe him a note on other matters anyway. But if these pills do their job properly, by the time he receives it you will be cured.'
Dr Dieffenbach went to the glass cupboard. He reached inside for the
'I heard only today of these tablets being used on a professional brother, who pricked his finger doing a post mortem on a septic case,' he informed me unnervingly. 'That's often a death warrant, you know. Germs become more virulent, altogether more proud of themselves, after a triumphal passage through the human body.'
He tipped some tablets into his palm. They were an inch across, reddish yellow, about twenty of them in the
