Terminal Host

In the midsummer of 1880, Marsh Harbor in the lowlands of North Germany. Peat smoke always floats sideways at half a person's height. The salty tide pouring in from the Elbe River soaked the entire lower town. The poor here blame all their ailments on the dank drafts, the church declares that madness is born of sin, and if the animals die, they only need to be skinned before dark. Ernst Behrens, thirty-one years old, a former cavalry surgeon who retired from the Franco-Prussian War, guarded a simple clinic that smelled of carbolic acid at the junction of the slums and the parish. He had no title, and could only use rigid rules to deal with the fishmongers and porters who could not afford half-day wages: looking at hands, asking for contact history, palpating, taking samples, and scratching dry handwriting on blotting paper with a bald pen. When twitching wild cats began to appear in the alleys and indescribable lumps appeared in the livestock pens, the whole town was counting on the blessings of the priest and the red potion secretly circulated among the people. He is the only one who can write down unwarranted arguments: "The evidence does not support it" and "He can pass it on". In the quagmire of illness and rough labor, every judgment he made was as accurate as a marching drill, without missing a step. But he has not yet discovered that on the scale between living bodies and mucous membranes, observation itself is a path. When the strict rules are followed impeccably, people will eventually use their own hands to touch some kind of cold body that should never be named by humans in this bottomless peat swamp.