Steinunn Sigurðardóttir

Yo-yo

Translated from the Icelandic by Rory McTurk

World Editions

breda 2015

Published in Great Britain in 2015 by World Editions Ltd., London

Copyright © Steinunn Sigurðardóttir, 2011

English translation copyright © Rory McTurk and World Editions, 2015

Cover design Multitude

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published as jójó in Iceland in 2011 by Bjartur, Reykjavík

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

isbn 978-94-6238-054-7

This book has been translated with financial support from the Icelandic Literature Center

No part of this publication may be reproduced and/or published by means of printing, photocopying or by any means, without the permission of World Editions bv, Breda, the Netherlands. Phone: +31 (0)76 523 3533. Internet: www.worldeditions.org.

==

‘why me?’ he whimpers, from the other side of my desk: ‘Why should I, of all people, have to suffer this?’

I should have given him an appointment on Monday, as planned. Now I’m stuck with him at eighteen minutes past three with the end of the working day nowhere in sight. I long to be outside on this beautiful spring day with my beloved Petra, relaxing under a five-tiered canopy of chestnut blossom and having a beer—or perhaps some of that rosé wine from Provence that Martin gave me a taste for.

‘Why me in particular?’ he persists.

Just because, mate; it’s the statistics of ‘just because’. But I can’t say that out loud, so I trot out my doctor-to-patient speech:

‘One person in every three gets cancer at some stage of their lives. We can’t say for certain why a particular person gets a particular form of it. There are of course risk factors: smoking, obesity, heavy drinking, sedentary lifestyle…’

‘But none of those apply in my case. I lead a very healthy life, my food’s organic—eighty-five to ninety per cent organic—I watch my waist line’ (he rips off his black jacket and drums with his fingers on his stomach)—‘and I go for long walks around the town, six times a week at least, two to three hours at a time, and still this happens to me; why me?’

‘You should bear in mind that there are many kinds of cancer, of varying degrees of seriousness, and with varying prospects of recovery. Your case doesn’t look half bad; your chances are good, as we’ve told you.’

‘But in the oesophagus! That’s about as bad as it can get.’

‘We never know where it’s going to strike.’

‘I just don’t understand,’ he says, his voice breaking, ‘why it had to happen to me.’

‘Your chances are good,’ I repeat. I pass him a Kleenex and start explaining the treatment I’ve devised—perhaps not in strict accord with what the chemo quacks originally recommended, but I’ve reached the stage where I generally get my own way without too much opposition. I’m known for finding the best way forward when it comes to treatment.

It’s tempting to explain to a patient who reacts like this how much less fortunate he could be, and that there are much worse conditions than his particular one, but it’s a temptation one has to resist, in the interests of professionalism. The oesophagus is an awkward place, it’s true, but it’s only a small tumour and unlikely to hold out against my style of therapy. It hasn’t spread, and we’ve told the patient straight out that it’s curable (though one can’t of course sign a guarantee to that effect), and there he sits, whining, a neatly turned out, soft-spoken man of seventy-three.

I’ve had really young people in that chair to whom I’ve given the worst possible news, and they’ve accepted it like any other inescapable fact of life, without batting an eyelid, and asking practical questions about treatment and side effects: whether they would live for three months, six months or a year, and whether it would be better to die from the disease itself or from the treatment, if they had the choice. More than one of these dear patients of mine lived longer than expected, and two are still alive, both of them now two years past the date I gave them when they pressed me for an answer.

I don’t normally give patients a date, unless they press me. It seems cruel: as if I’m setting up as a prophet in possession of divine powers. Time prognosis is unscientific, imprecise, and can sometimes be harmful. It’s happened more than once that a patient has died before the date I gave him, and those were patients I thought could live for at least two or three months. One died within a week and the other in ten days, which meant that they didn’t have the time they thought they had, poor devils, to say their goodbyes and put their affairs in order.

This patient is still blubbering about how difficult the treatment’s going to be, how he may die in any case, and whether he can be sure of not losing his hair—and this from a man who’s half bald anyway! He raises his hands, the backs of which are hairy enough, to the crown of his head, where there’s not a hair to be seen.

My patience is running out. I count up to ten and point out that one thing he can be thankful for is not having an operation, and that patients respond to the treatment in different ways. The particular cocktail of drugs and rays he’s going to have is generally easy to tolerate. The likeliest side effects are tiredness and indigestion.

‘That’ll be hard to take; I have a weak stomach.’

‘It’ll sort itself out. You’re in good shape generally.’

‘Well, I do look after myself.’

‘That can only be a good thing.’

I had thought of giving him a quick once-over, as I usually do at the first consultation, checking the lymph nodes in the armpits, neck and groin, but there’s no need. It’s not as if my colleagues haven’t examined him already, from all angles.

And in any case our conversation has run well over time; my last patient of the day must have been waiting for at least three quarters of an hour.

‘I’m here in this building, where you’ll be coming for your radiotherapy, so I’m easy to get hold of.’

‘Thank God for that. I’m clearly in the hands of a first-rate doctor.’

‘Let’s hope so.’

He smiles unexpectedly. An unctuous smile, completely out of keeping with the clean-shaven, well-groomed man before me, in his funereally black jacket.

He shows no sign of going and is about to say something else.

I stand up, in the hope that he’ll leave.

The patient says goodbye, still lingering. Then he comes up and claps me on the shoulder, with an air of condescension. There’s something familiar about his back view as he walks towards the door, recalling someone from my far-distant past. A teacher at primary school, perhaps? Someone in a shop?

Curiosity compels me to open the door for him, and there in the corridor is a woman who’s been waiting for him. That’s unusual: the next-of-kin, if there is one, usually comes to see me with the patient, especially at the first consultation.

His wife, as I take her to be, stands up stiffly. She looks ten years older than he does. She’s a grey individual, from all points of view: hair, skin colour, clothes. Her shoes, too, are a dusty grey.

The woman looks down at the floor as if to make quite sure she’s standing on terra firma. The man strides past her. I’m astonished to see him moving so fast after the way he dragged his feet in the consulting room.

The woman totters after him to the end of the corridor like the fluttering shadow of a branch in the wind. ‘With a walk like the walk of the dead,’ as Martin once said of a Catalan he made friends with in the gutter, and now I see what that could have looked like. The back view of the man continues to nag at me: that walk, that military step. It annoys me that I can’t place him. What’s happened to Martin Montag’s marvellous memory?

the air’s heavy in my room even though the window is half open. I open it all the way and take a lungful of fresh air. Now I’ve just got to grit my teeth and finish the day’s tasks swiftly and surely, leaving till tomorrow the few things that can be left, so that I can get away with alacrity to join Petra under the canopy of chestnut blossom: out into the long-awaited spring, the spring which delayed its coming, but then came with such a vengeance that the chestnut blossoms were out earlier than anyone can remember.

The tumour in this patient’s oesophagus (the second-last patient of the day!) appears unexpectedly on the screen when I touch the mouse. It’s a round-shaped tumour and fiery-red, too, as it appears on the screen. Its location is fortunate: it’ll be relatively easy to attack it with radiation without doing too much harm to the healthy tissues. It’s a small tumour, just about a centimetre in diameter. It’s a fast-growing one, too, easier to deal with than one of those slow tumours, which sounds like a contradiction and often surprises patients. But there’s something about this round excrescence that suggests to me that it’s hiding something. The fact that the patient in question comes across as a whiner doesn’t help. Unless there’s more to him, too, than meets the eye, as one might think from that unexpected, unctuous smile, and from the way he strode to the end of the passage with that shadow of a wife behind him, having behaved with me like someone who could do little more than crawl on all fours.

A tumour sometimes has the same sort of personality as the person it attacks. And sometimes it has a totally different character from the person it seeks to destroy. You could find a small and especially malignant tumour hidden slyly away in the tallest and most affable of men.

A small, round, fast-growing tumour, looking like a bright red yo-yo: how does that square with such a prim and proper, self-pitying exterior? With someone whose greatest worry is that the treatment may make him bald, when he’s half bald already?

it’s no easy matter bringing the day to an end. My concentration has gone. I open all the windows as wide as I can, but the air is still as thick and claustrophobic as a brick wall. I open the door, but the through-draught makes no difference. I’m even breathing with difficulty, as though my heart’s playing up.

It would cause something of a sensation if a thirty-four-year-old runner-cum-doctor had a heart attack and died suddenly, though such cases are not unknown. If it’s going to happen to me now I’d rather do my dying out in the spring sunshine than in the consulting room, even if the sun is streaming in through the open windows and dancing on the walls.

I throw my white coat over the back of a chair, and find myself having to acknowledge a nagging pain of some sort in my left upper arm. Martin Montag, as I see him in the mirror, is pale-faced and sweating. It’s some time since I last looked in the mirror, and my beard now looks like that of a savage. What’s happening to the man in the mirror? Is he ageing extra-fast? The curve on that sweating, aquiline nose is now surely higher up than before, and there’s a film over those eyes which Petra says are usually green and clear. Eyes that shine in the dark, she says, like an animal’s!

I hurry down the stairs by the roundabout route and out through the back door, the doctor’s escape route when he needs to get away without encumbrance. But I’m not altogether unobserved even now: that big woman with cancer of the salivary gland is coming out of radiotherapy and has also chosen this little-used means of exit.

i really admire my patients: seeing them sitting there, uncomplaining, in that bleak, windowless waiting room, waiting for radiotherapy, day after day if they’re unlucky, for one hour, two hours, or longer. And some have to wait every bit as long after treatment if they’re dependent on hospital transport. Elderly, infirm, weighed down with exhaustion, and not showing the least sign of it: self-pity is not the order of the day here. So it’s all the more surprising to encounter it in such blatant form as in my second-last patient today. I don’t like that man, and for me this is unusual: normally I like my patients.

There’s always a particular one I regard as my favourite. This time it’s the big woman with cancer of the mouth: she had to have her teeth out. My heart bled for her, losing her teeth on top of everything else. It was a bit of nuisance, she said, but at least it gave scope for some leg-pulling about toothlessness with the man she lived with. You wouldn’t think there was anything special about this woman, one way or the other, but I’ve never seen anything quite like the way she copes with illness and therapy. You can’t even call it stoicism. She accepts things as a matter of course: too much so. She asks too few questions. It’s almost as if her problem doesn’t concern her. She’s one of those people who don’t want fuss, even in matters of life and death.

She’s embarrassed when I greet her with open arms in the waiting room. She didn’t know how to react when it was clear to her at the first consultation that her case was one of particular concern to me.

it’s a long way to go, given that I want to bring a speedy end to the day, but I hasten to the bench on which Martin and I used to sit by the summer house in the westernmost part of the hospital complex. I like being in a tucked-away corner like this, where the sun has limited access—as if its playground were no more than some tree-top or black cliff face. If I find a corner of a hotel room where I can get a sidelong glance of a bit of the sea, I’ll sit there for a good hour, with Petra laughing at the fact that ever-active Martin (she’s kind enough to avoid the fashionable word ‘hyperactive’) is sitting down.

There is still some magnolia blossom in my corner of the garden, adorning the earth with an ever-thickening carpet of pale-pink petals. It’s just like the day when Martin brought me the sensational news of what amounted to a miracle, and I reacted like a complete idiot, needing to come out to this bench to recover from my own bewilderment. I ran slap into a patient with an IV drip stand, and he was smoking, so that I all but set fire to my white coat, as well as nearly breaking his leg.

And here I sit, yes, here you sit, Martin Montag, and the spring has acquired a definite end-of-season feel, as on a certain day on this same bench three years ago, when you’d been behaving like a fool towards Martin, your favourite patient, in a shame-induced state of shock, while bowled over by your first sight of Jadwiga. And this is spring at its height, with not long to go before it makes way for summer, like a girl only in name who’s on her way to becoming a mature woman.

The shortness of breath is still there, and the pain in my upper arm has increased its nagging. But I yield to it. I’m resigned to this discomfort, whatever its cause. I’m resigned to being on this very bench if something’s going to happen to me, resigned to being out in the open air, and I even wonder if I could be bothered to call for help if what I call DP, the Dreaded Pain, should afflict me.

It’s some time since I heard from my friend Martin Martinetti and it would of course be nice for me and for both of us if I were to give him a ring before my heart gives up on me, if that’s what it’s going to do.

He answers at once, and pure joy surges through me, as always, when I hear my one true friend’s lyrical tenor and that French German of his, fleshed out with unadulterated French, altogether true to form: we haven’t spoken for a minute before he’s made me laugh. I feel a twinge in my heart as I laugh and continue to view myself from without, as if I were one of my patients.

I let Martin prattle on while I wonder what excuse I can find to cut him short if DP should strike while we’re talking.

He’s just finished his exams, which went well: from this summer on he’ll be better paid for his plumbing. Jadwiga’s in the thick of exam preparation, with only two years to go before she gets her permit. When she’s finished her exams they’re going on holiday to Kolberg. It’s a short drive to this Baltic paradise, they’ll be in the bosom of her large family, and Martin now speaks such excellent Polish that he’s showered with praise from all sides, and it’s such a relief, he says, to leave one’s native language behind. Come on, Martin, isn’t French the finest language in the world? You could say that, he says, but it’s a healthy thing to change from one mother tongue to another. (A thought which I’m in no state to follow up on, with my heart the way it is.) And such people! Jadwiga’s family are wonderful, wonderful, des gens extraordinaires, tellement spirituelles: our western culture simply can’t produce people like that: their souls are Slavic souls, on an unbelievably higher plane than ours. And their cooking, mamma mia! Their stews and their sour cream! And cakes of such quality that they’re flown to Queen Elizabeth of England from the Konditorei in Warsaw, the cake shop, my friend, where Jadwiga’s aunt worked before retiring to the delightful town on the Baltic where she now puts her culinary skills at the service of the family. As for the birthday cake for little Jadwiga’s second birthday, he’s never seen nor tasted one like it, and don’t the French say that nothing in the baking line surprises them? What about Babette’s Feast? I say, and Martin says oh yes, Babette, but Aunt Krystyna, too, is divinely gifted in the art of cake-making, and the difference between her and Babette is that she bakes for gourmets with such high standards that it takes at least seven generations to develop taste buds like those of Jadwiga’s family. Whereas Babette’s artistry expended itself on dimwits with the dullest of taste buds—which has a certain charm, it’s true, a certain charm. And I listen with pleasure to my dear friend Martin’s repetitions—they’re a little like politicians’ repetitions—while I continue to wonder what sort of family he’s really from, this mysterious friend of mine who’s so eloquent on every topic under the sun apart from himself at the pre-down-and-out stage. I teased him once about how he was surely a down-and-out by birth, and he looked at me as if inspired and said: ‘You’ve hit the nail on the head! A born down-and-out! You’re talking to him!’

And now he’s intent on coming to see me, and what would suit me best for that is first thing tomorrow, Friday, at my place: I’ll be whiling away the time, I say, Petra will be on duty, we’ll have a talk, just the two of us, I say, and Martin laughs, assuring me that he had not thought of bringing little Jadwiga to see such a champion child-frightener as myself. I reply that I’m not a child-frightener, as the evidence shows: children do unfortunately notice me when they run up against me, but that must be because I act as if I haven’t noticed them. I’m not a child-frightener but someone who’s frightened of children, and I remind him that I’ve had this diagnosed medically, with documentation to prove it. Dr Martin Montag, certified paedophobe! Martin laughs again and I join in with my own laughter as the twinge stabs again, worse this time.

Martin asks if I’m tired and I say yes, I am tired, as it happens, and he says he can hear it in my voice and he impresses upon me the need not to drive myself so hard: I have far too long a working day, he says, and must get out of the habit of going to the hospital on Saturdays. I tell him that all I’m doing is looking in, but he says it’s unhealthy to work like that. And I know it’s unhealthy but I’m still not going to change: I’ll maintain my unhealthy working habits to the very end. So I keep silent.

One can never teach one’s friends anything, says Martin, except by example, or by mentioning something to them en passant while barbecuing, there’s no other way. And I say I’m one of those unfortunates who don’t barbecue, as he knows, so that not even that approach is open to me: there’s no way at all that I can influence friends of mine. Martin then says I’m fortunate in my surname, how well it suits me. No-one but a Montag—German for Monday—could talk the way I do.

I know; I might as well be called Martin Hangover, the first thing that people think of when they talk to Montag, the Monday man. Fate even took the final, decisive step, seeing to it that it was on a Monday that I came into the world.

‘In your literal-minded Germany people have names that suit them’, says Martin Martinetti.

‘Does that mean that in your abstract-minded country names like Martinetti are purely a matter of chance?’

‘That’s the name I chose for myself. And it’s not French, I’m glad to say.’

‘You chose it yourself? Isn’t Martinetti your family name?’

‘No.’

‘Oh? Where does it come from, then?’

‘From an aunt in Antibes. She married a man of Swiss descent: it was his name.’

‘What’s your original surname, then?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘May I ask you why you changed your name?’

‘No, you may not.’

‘I know literally nothing about you from before you became a down-and-out.’

‘So we’re quits. I know nothing about you before you enrolled in the Medical Faculty.’

‘Listen, my dear,’ I say (yes, we call each other ‘my dear’), ‘I don’t have time now for this talk of the past.’

‘Me neither. It’s always best to look forward, that’s the important thing, and especially when walking on foot from Paris to Berlin.’

‘That was really something! To even think of doing such a thing! Let alone bring it off!’

‘You’re right. But it didn’t do me any harm, you know, all that walking in the past, when you look at how I am today.’

‘Let’s be thankful for that, my dear. It’ll be good to see you tomorrow.’

We say goodbye, one friend to another, and I add aloud when I’m certain we’ve both rung off: ‘That’s if I’m not dead and gone.’

yes indeed: if I’m not dead.

That phrase never passed Martin’s lips. He behaved always as if death could not touch him, even during those three days and nights of intensive care when I feared he wouldn’t stay the course. I was losing sleep over a patient, something I don’t normally allow to happen; if I did, there’d be no point in continuing in the job.

It was only during our first conversation that Martin showed the slightest recognition that he was a mortal being, or any sign that it mattered to him if he was.

he was in such a bad way that he looked as if he were fifty, even though he was only thirty-one. Like me; born in the same month, too: April (the cruellest month, as the poem has it): dirty, but not foul-smelling; black under the nails; and with clothes hardly of the cleanest. Yet behind the down-and-out you could sense the man of quality. The man of intellect as well: his swift flight of thought, his sparkling humour.

I changed tack, quick as anything, when I realised I had a complex case, a star of a patient, on my hands, and a Frenchman at that. I have to admit I’m a bit of a snob where anything French is concerned. So why not a French patient, even if he is a down-and-out?

‘It’ll have to be a combined effort if you’re going to get through this,’ I muttered, to give myself time to think afresh about how to handle the case.

‘Who says I want to get through it?’

‘None of that whining, thanks. We’re going to have to work on this together, with no holds barred, if we’re going to kill this tumour. If you have any doubts about that I’m not coming anywhere near you.’

The patient looked at me, amazed, and said: ‘It’s the hero Siegfried reborn!’

‘Who? What?’

‘Siegfried the Dragon-Slayer. You’re Siegfried the Tumour-Toppler.’

I laughed and said there’d be time for leg-pulling later on. ‘So what’s it going to be?’ I asked.

‘It’ll be as you say. For the moment.’

‘And your mind says so? Not just your mouth?’

‘I’ll see to it that it does. But the mind is its own place, remember: it’ll need to look before it leaps.’

The mind is its own place! Was this an impromptu poet on the other side of my desk, or was he off-loading a quotation on me? If it was Shakespeare I didn’t recognise it. It must be Dante.

‘We’ll start you off on four or five days in the detox clinic. You’ll be given withdrawal medication and you’ll have to stop smoking as soon as you can.’ (His notes say he smokes four packets a day, if he has the money for it. Four packets, eighty cigarettes, how in God’s name is it possible? There are only twenty-four hours in a day! Does the man smoke in his sleep?)

‘By the time you come out we’ll have found accommodation for you, and we’ll need to get you into the system double quick. You’ll have the help of a counsellor from the psychiatric ward and I’ll be happy to put in you in touch with charity workers from the church. May I do that?’

‘I’m not religious.’

‘Let’s not split hairs. Are you or are you not going to accept this help?’

‘Alright then. What chances have I of surviving?’

‘I could answer that more easily if you were in something like the normal condition for your age. But we’re dealing with chain-smoking here, and your liver has started deteriorating.’

A doctor, or at least this one, always tries to avoid a tone of outright accusation with a patient. I get angry if I hear of colleagues taking that line. I allowed myself to tear a strip off one such quack who said to a patient of ours, an old gentleman: ‘You’d find the medicine easier to take if you hadn’t drunk so much!’

What I try to do is get the message across indirectly, by avoiding the second person in talking to a patient about his smoking, even if it’s clear he’s been committing suicide by cigarette over an extended period, as this one had. And for goodness’ sake, bio-freaks get cancer, as do teetotallers and other self-deniers! You could say self-denial is a kind of attempt at suicide. Not to mention boredom, of which much the same could be said.

The patient raises his hand in the manner of an orator, and says: ‘If your liver is playing up, punish it!’

‘I’ve not heard that one before.’

‘I saw it hanging up in an Irish pub in Paris. But tell me, what would be the chances for a man of thirty-one in normal condition?’

‘They’d be pretty good.’

‘A seventy per cent chance of surviving? More? Less?’

‘It’s no use playing around with percentages. A patient has either a hundred per cent chance of living or a hundred per cent chance of dying.’

He laughed, only to have a pitiable fit of coughing. I mustn’t forget to prescribe a decongestant for him.

‘And we’re going to do our utmost to see to it that yours is a hundred per cent.’

‘In other words, if I’m going to get through this,’ he coughed, ‘I’ve got to get myself into better shape.’

‘I’ll give you three weeks to do just that.’

‘Well, it took me nine weeks to walk from Paris to Berlin. I’ll think of my rehabilitation course as if it were a third of that journey. I’ll have got to Belgium by the time I’ve finished the course.’

‘Sound scheme,’ I say, by way of saying something.

‘How tough is this treatment going to be?’

‘For testicular cancer the treatment is always tough: there’s no way of avoiding surgery. And it’s tough from the psychological angle too. You’ll be infertile.’

‘That in itself will be an advantage. Even if I were a conventional citizen I would never have children. Never.’

He could see my startled, tongue-tied reaction. He looked at me in such a way that I couldn’t return his gaze. I stood up and eased the window open.

Before I could sit down again he asked: ‘Impotent as well?’

‘Let’s hope not.’

‘That’s right, no point in worrying: I might well be dead before I find out.’

‘If I have anything to do with it you’ll win through.’ (The doctor’s tone is brusque here, there’s no denying it.)

He gave a spluttering, bronchial laugh, and I sensed, to my relief, that he was reasonably well-disposed towards me.

‘And what’s the procedure for getting me into shape for this treatment?’

‘We’ll start with the detox clinic. I’ll do what I can to get you admitted this week. Physical exercise is a key factor, no less than an hour a day, in whatever form you like, whether it’s going for walks, gym, or cycling. And you must force yourself to do it, whenever you possibly can, while the treatment’s in progress.’

‘I normally walk for much more than an hour a day. The life of a vagrant doesn’t offer much scope for lying around doing nothing. We need to be on our feet to find food and shelter, and to survive, just like wild animals.’

‘That’s never occurred to me,’ I said.

‘With my muscles and bones I could brave the heights of the Matterhorn; they’re as sturdy as anything. It’s my lungs that would let me down. On level ground I’m just great, as you can see. I walked from Paris to Berlin in nine weeks without even feeling I had feet. I was wearing good shoes, of course, proper walking shoes. One has to do things properly. There’s no point in charging off on a trek like that in bad shoes: that way you’ll soon have no stamina left and maybe an ingrowing toenail. Not to be recommended.’

‘You must tell me about this. All the details. Sometime when we can have a chance to talk properly. Look, can you come and see me at my home, tomorrow? At half-past six? We could have a proper talk then; here at the hospital one doesn’t get a moment’s peace.’

This new patient of mine seemed to think it quite natural that his doctor should invite him to visit him. But it seems there’s a hitch.

‘Sorry. Can’t do it. Not then,’ he said. ‘I’ll be plastered by then.’

‘But you’re supposed to be drying out.’

‘That’ll start when it starts, and not before. People at my end of the social scale take one day at a time and one thing at a time. If we didn’t we wouldn’t survive for even a week.’

‘Alright then. So where can I pick you up? Could we make it about half-past five?’

so i picked him up as agreed and took him back to my place. He was so drunk that I thought it best to hold on to him (a broken leg would hardly have helped his treatment), but he was clear in the head and certain of remembering tomorrow what passed between us today.

I had even thought of giving him something to eat, but when it came to it I couldn’t face having him hanging around. I find drunks tedious, even when they’re not talking nonsense, which this one wasn’t. Seeing them functioning in slow motion, with elbows falling off the edge of the table, and spilling cigarette ash on the floor, is more than enough to have to tolerate. And those repetitious mumblings, for God’s sake! For someone like me, who’s had to keep a rein on his impatience like a lion-tamer with the wildest of beasts, this is simply not on. I quietly thanked God that I’d mostly been spared the company of alcoholics in my life to date, as I have better things to do with that patience of mine, so dearly bought and carefully cultivated, than to squander it on dipsomaniacs.

Without preamble I took hold of my green overnight bag, opened it, and told him that I had put in it all the things needed by someone going on a short journey, plus two books about cancer for the layman, full of practical advice on diet, relaxation, exercise and so on.

Martin looked in astonishment at what was in the bag: shaving gear, toothbrush, shirt, dressing-gown…

‘And I’ll drive you to the hotel a bit later, it’s right next to the hospital. You can spruce yourself up there so you’ll look alright when you go into rehab tomorrow. They’re expecting you at nine o’clock.’

‘That’s impossible; can’t make it before ten. I’m as good as dead until nine at the earliest.’

‘Alright then, but not a second later than ten. I’ll come and look in on you tomorrow evening, on my way home.’

Martin peered into the bag, took out the folded dressing-gown, sat hunched over the bag with the dressing-gown in his hands and wept, bespattering with his tears the black underpants that I’d found in my wardrobe and never used.

‘The sum of human kindness is contained in this bag,’ he said, pointing to the pants.

‘I never thought you’d get sentimental with drink,’ I said.

‘Nor did I,’ he replied, and blew his nose. ‘Why are you doing this?’

‘It’s the competitive spirit. I want to win this battle.’

‘It’s single combat, then, between you and the man with the scythe. I’m just on the sidelines.’

‘That’s not quite true. I’m set on destroying an enemy in the form of a tumour. And the enemy’s in you.’

‘I think you’d better drive me to this hotel. This Hippocratic theorising just before the blow falls is a bit hard to take.’

Yet he did confide in me, once we were in the car, that he was almost certainly in love with one of the gatekeepers at the zoo. The first thing he was going to do when he was finished with the detox treatment was to tell the gatekeeper how he felt.

A gatekeeper! That was a turn-up for the books!

It’s true that he had told me with memorable emphasis that he would never have children, even if he were a respectable citizen. There was surely a conclusion to be drawn from that. Except that there was nothing the least bit camp about him. Oh well, some people show their colours and some don’t.

I wondered how it could have happened that the system failed to pick up this patient’s sexual orientation. It was an unfortunate oversight, too, as he hadn’t been screened for AIDS, and if by any unhappy chance he was positive my struggle with the man with the scythe would be much less certain of success.

i went to pick up Petra once I had got Martin into the hotel. She noticed that someone had been smoking in the car so I could hardly avoid telling her all about the man who had just got out of it.

Petra’s jaw dropped for a moment. Then she said:

‘There are clearly quite a few things I still don’t know about you.’

‘That’s as it should be,’ I said. ‘That’s how it always will be.’

‘I’d never have thought you’d take your acts of charity as far as this. What you’re doing is not the least bit professional.’

‘There’s imagination as well as professionalism, and the two should go hand in hand. And it is professional to do one’s utmost to ensure that a patient survives.’

‘If you were to apply that rule to all your patients you’d be paying them home visits and cooking macrobiotic food for them.’

‘I know, Petra, it’s never a simple matter knowing how far to go. But the doctor who thinks that a young French down-and-out and an old Bavarian pensioner are the same kind of case is deluding himself.’

‘The fact remains’ said Petra, ‘that there’s some kind of rapport between you and this Martin, or whatever his name is. You could easily have had another French down-and-out on your hands without giving him any kind of special treatment.’

‘You’re forgetting my snobbery about all things French.’

‘I’m most certainly not forgetting it.’

‘You may be right if you’re thinking in terms of the strictest rules of play, but that doesn’t mean that what I’m doing is wrong. One follows one’s nose in this job; otherwise there’s no point in doing it.’

‘I only hope there’s not another Effie on the horizon.’

‘I know, Petra, I know. I’m not ignoring that.’

‘I never want to hear of anything like the Effie business again. I thought I was going to lose you.’

‘I’m taking care, I’m taking care. But Martin’s case requires special handling.’

‘If I didn’t know any better I’d think you were in love with him.’

‘Then it would be unrequited love. He’s in love with one of the gatekeepers at the zoo. Mind you, his spoken German is pretty odd. Maybe it isn’t a gatekeeper. Or even a man. But there’s no doubt about the zoo.’

‘Can’t you get the gatekeeper to deal with him, then? If it is a gatekeeper? With his spiritual welfare, I mean?’

‘I’m not a spiritual counsellor. All I’m doing is giving him what most people would regard as practical help: supplying their basic needs: a toothbrush if a toothbrush is needed, or a dressing-gown, if that’s what’s required.’

‘You can be unbelievably square at times.’

‘Can you say that a doctor who drives his patient to a hotel and pays for his overnight accommodation is square?’

‘You may not be square as a doctor but as a man you’re dreadfully so.’

‘Alright then, Petra; round off my corners,’ I said, turning to look at her. We were home and just about to park.

And Petra clearly knew what I meant and began the process in the car.