LITMIR.BIZ

       9

       An Incident in Student Life

      ‘I shall not forget it,’ said Fritz, thinking of an early morning in May, towards the end of his year in Jena. His Aunt Johanna had died of pneumonia in the bitter spring winds which Professor Schiller had just survived, and Fritz had lodgings in Schustergasse 4 (second staircase up), which he shared with a distant cousin – but where was this cousin when Fritz woke up, having been dragged out of bed half naked?

      ‘He and some others are in the students’ prison,’ said the visitor, not a friend, hardly an acquaintance. ‘You all went out together yesterday evening –’

      ‘Very good, but in that case why am I not in the Black Hole along with them?’

      ‘You have a better sense of direction than they have, and you were not arrested. But now you must come with me, you’re needed.’

      Fritz opened his eyes wide. ‘You are Diethelm. You are a medical student.’

      ‘No, my name is Dietmahler. Get up, put on your shirt and jacket.’

      ‘I have seen you in Professor Fichte’s lectures,’ said Fritz, grasping the water-jug. ‘And you wrote a song: it begins “In Distant Lands the Maiden …”’

      ‘I am fond of music. Come, we have not much time.’

      Jena being in a bare hollow, at the foot of a cliff, you can only get out of it by walking steadily uphill. It was still only four o’clock in the morning, but as they tramped up in the direction of Galgenberg they could feel the whole stagnant little town beginning to steam in its early summer heat. The sky was not quite light, but seemed to be thinning and lifting into a cloudless pallor. Fritz had begun to understand. There must have been a quarrel last night, or at least a dispute, about which he remembered nothing. If a duel was to be fought, which in itself was a prison offence, you needed a doctor, or since no respectable doctor could be asked to attend, then a medical student.

      ‘Am I the referee?’ Fritz asked.

      ‘Yes.’

      The referee in a Jena duel had to decide the impossible. The students’ sword, the Schläger, was triangular, but rounded towards the point, so that only a deep three-cornered wound was allowed to score.

      ‘Who has challenged who?’ he asked.

      ‘Joseph Beck. He sent me a note to say he must fight, who or why he did not say. Only the time and place.’

      ‘I don’t know him.’

      ‘Your rooms were the nearest.’

      ‘I am glad he has so true a friend.’

      They were now above the mist level, where the dew was beginning to dry, and turned through a gate into a field which had been cleared of young turnips. Two students were hard at it, with flapping shirt-tails, attacking each other without grace or skill on the hardened, broken, yellowish ground.

      ‘They started without us,’ said Dietmahler. ‘Run!’

      As they crossed the field one of the duellists cut and ran for it to a gate in the other direction. His opponent left standing, dropped his Schläger, then fell himself, with his right hand masked in blood, perhaps cut off.

      ‘No, only two fingers,’ said Dietmahler, urgently bending down to the earth, where weeds and coarse grass were already beginning to sprout. He picked up the fingers, red and wet as if skinned, one of them the top joint only, one with a gold ring.

      ‘Put them in your mouth,’ said Dietmahler. ‘If they are kept warm I can perhaps sew them back on our return.’

      Fritz was not likely to forget the sensation of the one and a half fingers and the heavy ring, smooth and hard while they were yielding, in his mouth.

      ‘All Nature is one,’ he told himself.

      At the same time (his own common sense told him to do this, without instructions from Dietmahler) he gripped the blubbering and spouting Joseph Beck under the right elbow, to hold up his forearm and keep the veins at the back of the hand empty. Meanwhile the whole sky, from one hilltop horizon to the other, was filled with light, and the larks began to go up. In the next meadow hares had stolen out to feed.

      ‘As long as his thumb is saved, his hand may still be of use to him,’ Dietmahler remarked. Fritz, with no way of swallowing his own saliva, mixed with earth and blood, thought, ‘This is all of interest to him as a doctor. But, as a philosopher, it doesn’t help me.’

      They returned to Jena in a woodcutter’s cart which was providentially going downhill. Even the woodcutter, who normally paid no attention to anything that did not concern him directly, was impressed by the cries and groans of poor Beck. ‘The gentleman is perhaps a singer?’

      ‘Drive straight to the Anatomy Theatre,’ Dietmahler told him. ‘If it is open, I may be able to find needles and gut.’

      It was too early to buy either schnaps or opium, though Dietmahler, who was also a disciple of Brownismus, was impatient to pour quantities of both down his patient.