“And this,” Jeannette continued, “this one is a list of symptoms she seems to have written herself, in her own handwriting. I’ll read it to you—she says: ‘The walls of my father’s house were totally transformed. I was woken up by the sensation of weight on my leg, my bed being beside the window, the man had stepped onto it. I screamed and quickly he climbed back out again. It took a while to settle as my sleeping mind woke fully, and when it did, I saw the walls had vanished. Or rather, they had become simply walls, plaster and wood and brick, just a structure with no inside or outside. Inside and outside were an illusion.’ That’s that one, and here, another, she says: ‘There is little keeping me alive. When I am well I cannot be from too high a height or I will make myself fall on purpose.’ Let me know if there’s any word you don’t understand, by the way.”
“What does that mean, do you think? I understood it, I mean, but generally, what is she saying.”
“What she means … I don’t know if it’s something we can necessarily …” She left off.
Midhat loved that we. “It sounds,” he said, “as though she was in pain all the time, most of the time. Physical pain. Even when she was healthy. Don’t you think?”
She turned over the page and read from the bottom. “Listen: ‘I feel sometimes as though my head were being stirred with a stick, and at other times as though my head were being alternately opened and closed. Nausea, almost daily. Sometimes it feels like motion sickness, as if I were going somewhere. Often it is in the nose again, and I have the old dreams.’”
“She is mad.”
Jeannette gave him an irked expression.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. It seems, I think, that being alive is to stay inside the body.” He could hear, returning into his voice, that note of glib certainty. He tried a more tentative intonation. “This is one way to look at it. And if the body is a place of pain, then that makes it difficult to stay there. So, I suppose, your mother wanted to leave.”
Jeannette nodded. She reached across the gap to touch his arm, and inhaled as though to speak. Then she pulled back, and rubbed her hands.
“I will let you alone, of course. You are studying.”
“You don’t need to,” said Midhat. “I want to help, I told you so.”
“I know you did,” she said, rising. “I don’t know why I’m fixed on this, I shouldn’t be. You must think I’m … I don’t know. I’ll see you later then, I suppose.”
On one of his visits to the university hospital, Midhat had taken part in the observation of a patient suffering from a stomach ailment. The patient was a teenage boy whose abdomen was distended and painful, resulting in some vomiting and loss of appetite.
The boy’s ears were pointed and pale. The four students stood against the wall by the door while Docteur Brion spoke to him. Seated on the bed, shoes off, dressed in a hospital gown, he looked past the doctor at them lined up with their notepads, wearing black robes; his eyes were wide, chin loose, thin legs bent open from the hip and trousers hanging, while Docteur Brion spoke to him in a bright voice. Brion examined the boy’s tongue and the four students hovered behind. The tongue looked angry and raw. His bloated stomach was sensitive to pressure. Brion instructed the boy to push his head forward for the soft-rubber stomach tube, and to open his mouth while he, Brion, directed the tube down the throat. He asked the boy to swallow.
“This attempt at swallowing will first cause the pharyngeal muscles to grasp the tube … and then as they relax it may be pushed downwards until the stomach is reached—in the average individual a distance of about sixteen inches from the line of the teeth.”
The boy’s eyes widened further. He gagged, and his bent knees convulsed.
“Good, well done. Now, the attempts at retching will usually cause the contents of the stomach to come up through the tube. And … here they come.”
A trickle as the liquid came up through the tube and poured out the other end into a glass receptacle. It was thin and yellowish, with mealy grey lumps and a few strands of bile.
“If the contents do not come up at once,” said Brion, pulling the tube up out of the boy’s gullet while the boy rasped, “the patient should be told to strain as if making an effort to pass stool. Or, alternatively”—he reached for a rubber bulb the same red as the tube—“one may aspirate the stomach contents by attaching this to the extremity of the tube, compressing it and gradually, very important that it be gradual, allowing it to expand.”
He slowly compressed and expanded the rubber bulb. The boy’s mouth hung open. A globe of spittle dangled from his lower lip.
What they discovered when they strained and examined the liquid was a low level of hydrochloric acid and a great deal of mucus. Brion’s diagnosis was chronic gastritis. Such a diagnosis always required further tests for lactic acid and the Boas-Oppler bacillus, which were symptoms of cancer. Accordingly, Brion reached for a bottle of Gram’s solution from a shelf, and using a pipette added some of the filtered contents to a small container of the solution. The solution turned bright blue: the Boas-Oppler bacillus was present.
The boy stared over at Midhat and his colleagues while all this was going on, until the solution turned its shocking colour. Docteur Brion trembled uncharacteristically—perhaps he had not expected the test to come up positive, perhaps he would otherwise have chosen to conduct the test in private—and for a moment seemed not to know to whom he should pronounce the diagnosis. They could all see the evidence, however, and although the boy might not know precisely the rule that the Boas-Oppler bacillus stains blue with Gram’s solution, it seemed somehow so obviously a sign of alarm, the solution now the rich hue of a low sky gathering at the meridian.
“Carcinoma of the stomach,” said Brion. “You’ll have to see the surgeon this afternoon.”
For the first time, the boy spoke. “But I have to get back to work.” His voice was unexpectedly high-pitched.
The boy stayed in Midhat’s mind for days afterwards, and on his next visit to the hospital he sought out Docteur Brion to ask after the status of the carcinoma. Distracted then by a new flood of soldiers arriving wounded from the front, Brion looked confused and said he could not remember, waving Midhat out of the way as he pushed the swing doors of the next ward.
It was the look of fear on the boy’s face that weighed most heavily on him. That was the fear of discovery. The boy had glimpsed the malevolence within his own stomach, a thing living there inside him.
After Jeannette left, Midhat ran through his physics notes in a fever, and without time for lunch set off at a sprint for the afternoon class. There were only five other students in the classroom and they all sat in the first row of desks. Midhat raised his hand to ask the professor if they could go over Coulomb’s law of charged bodies, and was relieved to see that he was not the only one writing down the formula. In the corridor afterwards, he caught sight of his biology professor, and running up behind him asked if they could briefly go over the chromosome theory of inheritance. “But there is not much to go over,” said the professor. “You understand the theory, do you? Simply, that chromosomes carry genetic material. That’s all there’ll be in the exam. What is it you don’t understand?” Midhat hesitated, and then expressed his gratitude, yes, at last he understood. He turned around and crossed the courtyard to the library. It was almost half past two. I feel sometimes as though my head were being stirred with a stick, he thought, as he heaved against the massive door.