Читать книгу Garden of Venus - Eva Stachniak - Страница 8

Berlin, Doctor Thomas Lafleur thought, was a grim city, in spite of the profusion of oil lamps swinging on chains, illuminating small circles of the street below. The aftermath of the armies treading through these lands might account for some of this grimness, but Thomas liked to reflect on the universal human capacity for creating misery. He did not assume America would free him from the disgust he felt with the human race, but at least it would give him a chance.

‘Please hurry,’ Ignacy’s letter said, ‘my dear Thomas. The Art as we have learnt it serving the Great Man is unsurpassed here. I need you badly, and so does my new patient. America can wait. I cannot agree it will be such a Great Deliverance as you are trying to convince me, for Human Nature is the same everywhere. To me it looks more like a Great Escape. Graf von Haefen is sending his fastest carriage, so you can judge for yourself how much you are needed here.’

The mention of the fee he could charge for the operation, 50 louis d’or (and more if what I see is any indication Ignacy wrote), has been enough to make Dr Thomas Lafleur subject his body to the torture of travel. Like his colleagues, he may have saved thousands of lives on the battlefields of Europe, but his rewards had been meagre. A small pension of three thousand francs, a position at la Charité, a few anatomical demonstrations, a few lectures at the Val de Grace.

‘Sometimes I think I have dreamt all this,’ he had often told Ignacy. ‘Borodino, Berezina, Kowno, Waterloo. As if it were nothing but a mirage.’

Anticipating Thomas’s wishes, Ignacy had found him simple lodgings in Old Berlin, on Rosenstrasse, two rooms: a bedroom and a small parlour that could easily serve as his study. Frau Schmidt offered services of a maid, breakfast in the morning, and swore that the room would be kept warm if the French doctor were kept longer with his patient. ‘Another of your hiding holes,’ Ignacy had called it, this friend whose relentless lupine energy in the months of the Russian campaign Thomas had envied.

That the rooms looked poor and bare, with their simple poplar furniture and narrow bed, did not bother Thomas. After being tossed around and jolted in the black box of Graf von Haefen’s carriage, he was ready to welcome any place that did not move. Besides he had been an army surgeon long enough not to mind.