Where am I?
Oh, here I am.
I think those questions every morning. Waking up is not a very pleasant thing to do. Of course, no one will consider it pleasant to wake up with the body needing alcohol. Pounding head, tremens, aching for fluids, nausea, all the nerves inflamed, the heart racing, von Angst geplagt. Eternal torture but with one cure: a drink. A doctor knows how to be sick.
So, the first place I am, is next to mein Schnaps, um Gottes willen. Next, as my heart calms down, I look around and I seeâsome kind of a flop haus or cheap hotel, and I am still with Johnny. This is when comes the second drink. That one spreads warmth in my belly and floats my head away, and I can breathe⊠maybe just one more. Quick.
Maybe he notices me I am awake. I donât want to look at him, but I look. All the time, I watch his face. Is he still? Or are the clouds coming. How can I catch it, soothe it, before itâs really time to be frightened. He is all I can look. He is all the fear in the world. Itâs a long time since I realized: there is, too, a little satisfaction in it. If I look at Johnny, I donât have to look behind me. If I am near Johnny, nothing else can get near to me. He is a black cloud, and I am a small man, in a big world, who hides behind things. My fears would be a million, instead of only one, if it wasnât for Johnny.
Perhaps itâs time to hit the road. Johnny never eats in the morning. Sleeping, eatingâhe doesnât need, only I hope for that. His body only needs hate. Truly itâs amazing. A medical miracle, Ja? I giggle. Sehr lustig, isnât it.
Johnny drives the car. He looks straight ahead, not left not right. He looks once at the map and never again til we get there. The only thing for me to do is: carefully measure and time the Schnaps so that I am not overly intoxicated when we stop for the night. Try to keep around 0.12 g per ml. That way he doesnât get angry, too much.
We go in silence. We are lucky that we like the same programs on the radio: the war news and Hitlerâs speeches. Not for the same reason.
So, drink, radio, silence, hours and hours. Looking at these American landscapes you might as well be in Hell already. Nothing, and so much of it. Even the cows look morose. I cannot keep out from my mind the question, the other question, that comes after Where am I?
Perhaps I suffered some great disgrace, no? Thatâs what people always think. He shamed himself and drank away his shame. Maybe so for some. Not so, me. The drink came first, and of course then came disgrace. Then cameâdisappear. Do I think of my family, back at home, that I left behind in what Germany has become? Of course I do. I think: I hope they think âpoor Laszyâ is dead. I think: I do not know if they are.
No, drink came to me the same way as to anyone. Sipping papaâs Bier, everyone remembers. Soon enough, we are at Gymnasium and make merry with the rest of the boys. There is always one who canât hold his drink. We laugh and carry him home. Kleiner Laszy, he tries to keep up with us. Sehr lustig.
Kleiner Laszy, such a clever little Jew, now a big man of 17, already at university in Heidelberg, to be a doctor. Why did papa slave as a merchant, if not for that? Yes, aber also Laszy loves it. What could be more fascinating, than the world, the universe, in the body. To see pain, is difficultânot the bloody inside, not the dead body, but the pain of the living. Maybe some of the other students laugh at him for this. But to ease pain⊠to see in someoneâs eyes, you eased painâŠ. Itâs a calm to the heart, like no other. To learn this, to do itâit fills the life. And there is one fellow student who doesnât laugh: Mitzi, the little Jewess, much more cleverer than Laszlo, with sparkling eyes. By the time of graduate, she goes from âMadmoiselleâ to âMitzi-leh.â Drink? Champagne, to celebrate.
But the engagement is growing long. Poor Laszy, he cannot get together the money to be married. His own fault. He wants to be a surgeon, ein plastischer Chirurg: to save faces and limbs, and Jews are supposed to keep to the lesser specialties: general medicine, or stupid dermatology. So he works at the hospitals for the poor, that will take him, and he lives on nothing, like a mouse, and he saves. Years he saves without getting any closer. Perhaps, in Berlin, there will be more chances. And there are, but there is still little money, and the life is more expensive, and there is no Mitzi-leh in the evening anymore, to laugh with and to care for, and to kiss her little hands and hold her close to him.
Alsoâsimply itâs cold, in the boarding house. He comes home late, he sees no one, he lies in bed, shivering. Surely itâs more important he gets some sleep. Surely itâs more and more important. And more, and more, and more.
It goes so fast. If his hands are shaking, just a little bit, surely he needs to take care of it before he can operate, just a little bit. Just a little bit more, the day is so long. Just a little bit more, itâs impossible to work around such stupid people. Just a little bit more, I am afraid of being caught. I need to slow my beating heart, before they all can see.
How long was it like that before a little girl will never see again? I donât know. It was like a dream.Â
Where am I?
Oh, here I am.
There was no way to say goodbye. A coward, I left them. Papa, brother, sister, Mitzi. Step-mama. If I believed I knew then that I was leaving them in dangerâI canât finish the sentence, even to myself. Maybe I could have gotten them to London? I would have had to look them in the eye.
I had no license there, and I wouldnât try to get one. I had no wishes anymore. To ease my own pain, was all I cared. I took the patients that look for a doctor like that. At first, I thought I can help the girls who are in trouble. Perhaps my disgrace can cure theirs. But I couldnât see it. The tears on their cheeks. Their cruel fathers, desperate mothers, the absolute desertion by the ones they loved, or the discovery that to the ones they loved they had only been Dreck, all along, worse than nothing. And of course⊠to see a little baby in your hands. Who could have had a life, in a different world, where people was not like how they are, where there was different rules. To be intoxicated enough to see that⊠I would be blind, I couldnât move, let alone operate safely on those poor girls. Just kill one at a time, âDr. Einstein,â du Genieâyou genius.
So instead of a criminal doctor, I became a doctor for criminals. It was a good trade. Plenty of work, and few complaints. They werenât trying to look beautiful, no one cared about a few mistakes. I began to make a name for myself in die Unterwelt. Beyond London, even. They came from the Continent too.
The first face I gave Johnny, it was very nice. He was very pleased. You can do good work when you are your own man. But he killed again, too quick. Krrct. He wasnât healed, I couldnât help him, he had to leave. âYouâre coming with me, Doctor,â he said. âOkay, Johnny.â Was it really as easy as that? Maybe so. When those eyes look right through you⊠when you know what heâs done⊠when you know what youâve done, too.
I am not a dummy. I even attended a lecture of Freud once. Believe me, I know, my imaginary lecteur, to who I am talking while I look at the big American nothing out the window, a manâs life does not become to ruination by drink because he is cold. The psyche is like an anatomy, I think. Like when a man loses a leg, and the ghost of the leg, it itches. My psyche is missing a part. When it itches, I drink. If I am enough intoxicated now to blink some tears, and to think backward at the little boy I was, not even out of der Kindergarten;Â and how the world changed without my Mama in it; and how my real shame is that I was broken, so, and was so weak that I stayed that way; and really, it was only a matter of time before everybody would see itâthen I must be enough intoxicated that it will be trouble with Johnny when we get there. Oh no, we have almost got there.
Where am I?
Oh, here I am.
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