Читать книгу The Queen's Physician - Edgar Maass - Страница 8

O N HOT SUMMER DAYS, under the white glow of midday, sometimes a puff of wind sweeps across the earth, the portent of storms to come. Suddenly the branches of the trees flatten and bend, and the tree-crowns twist and whiten. The bushes darken under the wind’s press, and over meadows and fields run great waves, pulsing through the silvery green grass and the golden grain. Hens flutter about wildly in the barnyard, sheep huddle together, horses lay back their cars. The folk at work in the fields pause in their labors, wipe hot sweat from their foreheads with swollen hands, and look up into the cloudless sky. An old man, a man of much experience, an old shepherd, perhaps, who knows the weather and its moods from an acquaintance of seventy years, shakes his gray head. Not yet, he mutters, not yet, but soon.

Then all is still again, indeed, more poised and quiet than before. The trees stand motionless, their leaves seemingly veined with lead. The impact of so much heat breeds a profound tension. Unwillingly, the hands in the fields bow their backs and resume their toil. But deep in their hearts, so deep they are scarcely conscious of it, lurks the consoling thought that soon the storm will come.

There are periods in history that are like the oppressive weather before a great storm. In the history of mankind, too, there come these sudden dry wind-squalls, these swift stirrings among all living things. There is the same tired hopelessness mingling with a presentiment of the end of drought and barrenness, a dumb sense that mighty storms of release are gathering just over the horizon.

Shortly after the middle of the eighteenth century, about the year 1765, such a vast tremor of foreboding coursed through the western world. In Portugal, Spain, Sweden, masses of common people collected before the white palaces of kings. The growling, ragged crowds had no clear idea why they were fusing together. They knew only that the times were bad, that something was critically wrong in the flow of their days. Within the palaces, amid the rooms hung with silken tapestries and fitted with elegantly curved and gilded furniture, the nobility were as ignorant as the crowds of impending change. As always they whispered among themselves, they smiled and coquetted. Ministers rose and fell, privy-councillors and court favorites grabbed for power and had it torn from their hands. Mistresses fled, carrying their pet toy spaniels under their arms, rustling with agitation, petticoats all entangled about their pretty legs. So they went and others came to replace them. Nothing changed. The kings became more stupid, lost and sick until in the main they were so many vicious idiots. Yet beneath the dusty level of everyday even the brittle people of the courts felt the coming storm, and consoled themselves with the thought that at least, as they said, it would never break in their day. In someone else’s time, next year, next week, tomorrow. But never in their time.

Sporadically, with no apparent connection, and yet subject to the inexorable logic of fate, came these ominous buffets of wind. They gave their warning and were gone.

It was an uneasy time.

In this epoch a certain doctor lived in the small provincial city of Altona on the southern boundary of the Danish kingdom. His name was Johann Friedrich Struensee. He was a very well-made man, a tall fellow with darkly blond hair and blue eyes that took on a deeper color in moments of excitement. His forehead was high and white, his bearing graceful, his body slightly inclined to fullness, though he was only thirty years old. In contrast to the majority of doctors in his period he did not powder his hair, seldom if ever talked in Latin and did not wear the black-rimmed spectacles that were practically a hallmark of his profession.

The city of Altona, which lay, then as now, on the northern bank of the Elbe in close proximity to the thriving harbor and commercial city of Hamburg, was an ugly nest of old gable-roofed houses and dirty, angular streets, these filled with a populace notorious for its bigotry. There was more than enough sickness to go round. The newly established Doctor could hardly complain of any lack of patients. However, the financial yield of his practice was another matter. From his ministrations he made a niggardly income all out of proportion to the long hours and the strain of his nightly excursions. And unfortunately the Doctor lacked the self-sacrificing, Hippocratic spirit, a cast of mind which, in truth, is as rare among men of medicine as in any other profession. By temperament he was much more a man of pleasure than a physician. An epicure, in sum, as he often called himself with a wry, prideful smile.

In Altona there was nothing to appeal to an epicure. The climate was damp and windy throughout most of the year. The Doctor’s dwelling was cramped, the rooms twilit the day through, and the stove smoky. At nights hordes of mice gnawed busily in the wainscoating, disturbing his much-needed rest. The meals prepared by his elderly servant consisted of mutton with cabbage, sowbelly with rutabagas and the like. These aliments were of powerful consistency, but desperately unpleasing to the palate, especially when repeated week in and week out, varying only with the seasons. Winter rutabagas gave way to spring carrots and white cabbage to green after the first fall frosts.

The Doctor sometimes took comfort in a bottle of Spanish wine. After his meal he would withdraw into his study with the half-filled bottle. His study was a sanctuary where his garrulous servant dared not intrude. He would throw himself into a chair, making it groan under his considerable weight, thrust out his legs and mull over the present and the future as he sipped the wine.

The first thoughts were invariably unpleasant ones, and concerned his patients. How he hated them. When they disrobed under his nose, how they stank, especially in the wintertime. How he hated all their miseries, their frostbites, their broken limbs, their sores, inflamed lungs and ailing hearts. He did not limit his hate, like any good physician, to the maladies themselves. Rather he hated the bearers of disease, the foolishly bereft faces of the suffering, their stupid and hesitant explanations, their helplessness, their timidity and the smell of pus about them, the tremblings of their fevered bodies, their aimless, fruitless groans of pain. Sitting in his study contemplating these horrors he would throw a despairing look about the room. Was it worthwhile coming into the world to wallow in filth and disease, to tend foul wounds, to comfort death’s candidates? And never once to have enough money in one’s pocket to buy a horse, not to mention a carriage?

Maddened by his frustrations he would spring out of the chair and open the closet door, revealing the man of bones he had brought along with him from Halle. It was this skeleton that kept his prying housekeeper in her place, far more effectively than any iron door. No mastiff could have kept more perfect watch over the Doctor’s loneliness and maunderings. It hung in the closet as fixed as a guard in a sentry-box, grinning broadly, showing large, naked yellow teeth, the arms loosely dangling, the femurs curving in lightly at the knees, the slender ribs springing neatly about the small chest hollow. The Doctor knew the history of his skeleton intimately.

Not too long ago the man of bones had been a skilled and successful Halle thief who, caught one day in the act, had been summarily hanged. He had swung on the scaffold in wind and rain until his bones came through and began to show signs of bleaching, whereupon he had been removed to the anatomy theater of the university, there stripped of his tatters of muscle and his dry sinews by the students. With the help of wire and pins they had put him together again as a first-class skeleton.

The man of bones was not only the Doctor’s tireless watchman, but his inspiration as well. Like the skeletons of the Egyptian feasts silently he preached the message that time flies and soon comes the night.

But the Doctor, good materialist that he was, drew no religious, no renunciatory conclusions from death’s quiet aspect. During his youth he had been incessantly tormented with Biblical quotations, with the Lutheran catechism and Count Zinssendorf’s pious writings. The Doctor’s father, a preacher in the Church of St. Moritz in Halle, had drummed so many discourses on original sin into his son’s head, apprised him of so many evil consequences and orthodox means of escaping them that the boy lost all taste for religion. He became exactly the opposite of what his good father had intended. As the common people say, ministers’ daughters make fine whores. The Doctor illustrated the masculine counterpart of this sentiment.

Whenever the Doctor mused over his skeleton in a winy mood of resignation he always fell into the same line of reasoning. The bony old man of bones, he would think, is nothing more than an automaton, a sort of machine. At present the automaton was useless because its mainspring, the heart, had run down and was broken. At an earlier date, when the man of bones was still clothed in flesh, the mainspring had kept the machine in motion. Being in motion it committed thieveries, ate food, slept with women and performed all the usual acts which, in sum total, pass for living.

Having already formed this opinion of mankind, the Doctor, to his secret surprise, chanced to discover this same mechanical notion of the human organism in a little French book by a certain M. de la Mettrie. This public affirmation greatly strengthened his creed. Still, the Doctor thought that between an automaton and a man there was some irreduceable difference. For the machine is designed and assembled by a mechanic and obviously has no nerves. So the Doctor was unable to decide whether God was a superior mechanic, as the Deists suggested, or whether the prime mover was Nature, so-called, an uncertain something beyond comprehension. Feeling might be the intangible product of the human machine, the Doctor would think, something analogous to the chimes played by a clock. In this regard he felt it significant that sensations, like the soft playing of the clock, were most desirable when soft and harmonious.

And always, when the Doctor came to this point in his dubious nocturnal cogitations, he would sigh in regret. He would think back on the years of his youth, when, Bible in hand, he had been taught so much more consequential notions of man’s nature. Endless lectures on the soul of man had been volleyed at him. In his father’s harsh Lutheran sermons the soul had not been described as a fleeting breath or evanescent melody, but as a bona fide substance from which developed all being in its infinite variety. The body was a subordinate entity, a wicked and inconstant thing. Yet, if the body really were the faulty thing it had been supposed in his youth, if it were subject to a thousand ills and to ultimate dissolution in death, unfortunately, the Doctor had come to believe, the case for the soul was little better. That, too, was seldom completely stable and healthy. There were illnesses, too, in this category, all the more serious since they struck not at transient corporeality, but at the very eternal substance. Should God will, it appeared, the soul itself succumbed to another, and far more disastrous, species of death.

The Doctor often ruminated on his childhood anxiety about life after death. As a boy he had been unable to sleep nights so troublesome was the obsession. Unsettled imaginings of God’s anger and revenge had harassed his tender years. The irreconcilable God of his father had sat beside him on the school bench whispering dreadful admonitions, addling his brains so badly that he could hardly grasp the simplest lessons. Sabaoth reached out to stay the child’s hand, and the flying ball fell uncaught to the ground. Even the landscape had ominous qualities for him as a child. The rustling of the trees betokened dissolution, likewise the brook’s mysterious murmurings. The last light of the setting sun symbolized the unchangeable fact of death eternal. God had surrounded the boy on all sides. It had been like being trapped, a squeaky mouse, by an omnipresent cat.

Of course there had been ways to escape the anger of the godly presence, for example, through enlightenment and grace. The boy had striven to find the path to grace, but wherever he turned, incomprehensibilities balked him. Boyish intelligence, it appeared, did not measure up to God’s inscrutable ways. Leaving aside such ticklish matters as the trinity and original sin, precisely what did Christ’s death mean? God’s sacrifice of His own Son to redeem mankind? Was not justice overdrawn? Did it not verge on barbaric cruelty? Or could it have been that God was not so potent after all? Perhaps, in the final analysis, He had let the great tragedy unfold while He sat by with folded hands. Or were there two powers, an evil one which had made the world and a good one productive of redemption? It was hard to know.

The boy had laid these questions before his father, Manichean heresies, had he but realized, over which no end of theologians had vainly wracked their brains. The pastor had been deeply shocked. Pride and boldness, the father had said, accounted for this regrettable display of forwardness. With tears in his eyes the Doctor’s father, who actually loved his child in his own austere way, had begged the boy to put aside such thoughts. Give up and believe, he had implored the distracted boy. To emphasize his warnings he had striped his son’s back with twenty lashes, using a leather strap.

This parental consultation had one definite result: the boy never again trusted his father, at least when it came to the human soul and its redemption. The youthful sinner slid deeper and deeper into a pit of defection. In Halle there was no lack of conventional believers. Their conduct confirmed the youth in his backsliding. The righteous ones acted very oddly for heirs to paradise. At the altar, the boy observed, they lowered their eyes, they adopted a sadly silly expression, they pretended to be fearful of allowing the consecrated wafer to dissolve on their tongues. They nipped at the sacramental wine with an air of supreme delicacy, as if to show that such precious stuff was virtually wasted on such rude creatures as themselves. Yet once outside the church and out of reach of the clerics, they behaved quite differently. Apparently thinking they held a mortgage on salvation, they did just as they pleased. They drank themselves drunk as a tick in the inns of the town, they rolled dice, cheated each other, cursed until the very beams sagged with shock. In the fields outside the city, should opportunity offer, they made no bones about reaching under the petticoats of willing peasant girls. Indeed, they dragged them all twittering into the bushes and amused themselves as naughtily as possible. Could it be that the Bookkeeper of Bookkeepers made mistakes?

The youth’s rebellion against a churchly God flowered still more when he entered the medical course at the University of Halle. Here God was never mentioned at all. To explain the ways of man it was enough to discuss bones, ligaments, muscles, nerves and blood vessels. However, enough pastoral influence lingered so that young Struensee was not really attracted by the cynic tone of the students. Like all medical students since time immemorial they tried deliberately to cultivate a rough manner, the better to look death and suffering straight in the face. When the prosector was out of the room, the students hurled bits of excised organs at each other. They stuck their pipes between the cadavers’ teeth, they laid their noonday sandwiches on dead and leathery chests. Death was no more a mystery than in a slaughterhouse. The prosector himself, a grizzled old fellow, had no philosophical gifts whatsoever. The Doctor never forgot how, removing a partially developed embryo from its dead mother’s womb, his hands smeared with cold and rotted tissue, he had looked up and remarked with a smile: “You see, gentlemen, inter faeces et urinas nascimur!” From this bare fact the prosecutor drew no metaphysical inferences, nor did his students.

Step by step the budding physician had become hardened to life’s shocks. He no longer doubted the existence of God; he simply ignored the issue altogether. The soul and its fate were not his concern. Religious preoccupations, he had come to believe, were so much weakness, a sure sign of being behind the times, like wearing armor, or the curly perukes affected by the learned.

How miserable, he would tell himself, that a man of the world and an epicure by temperament should be stranded in such a vile hole as Altona. Here he was, a pleasure craft tied up among dull work barges.

Having energy to spare, he would spring impatiently to his feet, slam the door on his skeleton and begin to plan moves to more promising scenes. The last glass of fiery Spanish wine would invariably give him a new grip on life and new hope.