JARDA CERVENKA

How I Came to the Feast

The cause of my distraction is prosperity. It is everywhere around me. At some times it tranquilizes me to the extent of sleep-walking. It slows my movements as if they were filmed by a slow-motion camera.

The abundance, the affluence.

My employer, Universitat Giessen, has been endowed well, almost famously, even through recent times of leaner budgets, and therefore my lab lacks nothing. I can look forward to working, when I get up in the morning, in air conditioned to a balmy 21 degree Centigrade, open the refrigerator and remove lowfat milk and orange juice at 5 degrees Centigrade, and pour the milk over American cereal supplemented with enough fiber, vitamins, and trace minerals to "satisfy the recommended daily dosages." Every day I sin with a cup of freshly ground coffee, and off I go on my perfect machine, a titanium 21-speed mountain bicycle, on the paved bike-path leading safely to the University. I paddle between the alleys of chestnut trees and through a park past the Goethe statue surrounded by flower beds, uphill between villas with rock gardens in bloom and a show of geraniums under each window. Everywhere I look, there is a tranquility and wellbeing. Some people I meet smile at me; some greet me with a waving hand--civility prevails. It is enjoyed, but without exuberation.

In a way one could be proud, being from Giessen in Bavaria, and most of the inhabitants are. I hasten to say that I appreciate it too; I do, indeed! But.... My problem could be diagnosed as a recurring restlessness, as the urge to disappear to some malarian hole at the edge of a jungle, with sauna-like heat and humidity, about as healthy as a hospital sewer, under a leaden sky that pours five meters of water per year on the palm-fronded roofs of sorry shacks sticking out of a permanent mudpit. Always, when I have managed to land in a defeated territory like that, I have felt such exhilation and happiness that a conventional judge would assume I was wallowing on a topless beach in a Club Med with a "Viper Key" cocktail in my left hand and an incarnation of Brigitte Bardot supported by my right. And that, exactly, was the state of mind I attained trotting down the jungle path from the hills of the Golden Triangle, on th Thailand side.

The forest was like a botanical garden, enchanted by singing and shrieking birds, butterflies the size of swallows, and beautiful beetles of bizarre shapes, the colors of gems. I stopped often, rested, and observed this curious world, the sweat and thirst only enhancing my feeling of adventure and, therefore, my exaltation. It was later in the day when I began tripping over the exposed roots because I'd lost concentration. My eyes were still watching the wet laterite clay of the trail, but my brain had started to turn over the kaleidoscope of images recorded during the past few days I'd spent up in the hills.

(The Lisu people grow the poppies and harvest them for the Karen people. They live in utter misery: diseased, scrambling for meager grub to survive. The opium dow is prepared by Karen tribesmen, who own the fields, tilled by the Lisu for almost nothing. The opium is bought then from the Karen by a solitary Hmong, who is ripping off the Karen expertly. The Hmong transfers the opium to a Chinese, down in Chiang Mai, who roars with laughter at the profit he's made from ripping off the Hmong. The stuff goes to a Thai military man who, of course, rips off the Chinese. And the Thai officer has further connections to the villains who make heroin from the raw opium. And the further way of heroin...that is a story too dangerous to know.)

I woke up from my ruminations to a strange noise coming from everywhere around me. It was an uniformly susurrant shshsh. I stopped. I was not in the botanical riot of the jungle any more but surrounded by a forest of slender trees of equal size, standing in neat rows about ten feet apart, obviously planted by man. The sound was coming from the tops of the trees, which looked like skeletons, almost devoid of leaves. Puzzled, I resumed walking and turned a bend in the path.

I almost ran into him, a white man standing there motionless, looking at me. He did not seem to be surprised; he'd probably heard me coming. My first impression of him was his tallness, and the visor on his head. He must have been six-foot-six, in a bleached-out shirt with a Hawaiian design, shorts, and sandals. He had a leather visor on his head with a narrow shield as long as I have ever seen. It was a well-worn thing; sweat had made patterns on the shield resembling a horizon of mountain ridges. The wearer did not allow any frivolous tilt to it--the shield was pointing straight ahead, like a raven's beak, at me.

"Hi." I used the American greeting, and smiled.

"Hi."

I stopped, took my eyes off him, and pointed at the tops of the trees. "What a strange noise!" I said in English.

"Yeah, caterpillars." By his accept, he was an American.

"Caterpillars?"

"Yes. The destiny of monocultures in the tropics," he said. I must have looked puzzled. "Yeah, they are eating the leaves of those teaks. They're almost finished. That is what you hear."

"Hah!"

"When millions of those microscopic jaws gnaw--one can hear it. I wonder how many millions we hear," he said. "Very interesting."

I extended my hand: "Lothar Burgdorf. How do you do?"

"I am Rick Gorlinski." He grasped my hand firmly. Rick was built quite impressively, sturdily; lanky tall, his spare movements gave the impression of power and speed, that his sinews held everything together tightly. His skin was sallow but darkened evenly, as goes with long stays in the tropics. His skin was sallow but darkened evenly, as goes with long stays in the tropics. He had not been suntanned on a beach. His unruly hair, of no particular color, was bleached rusty at the ends. One could see he was not in the custom of smiling readily; a suggestion of scorn was carved around his lips. His poked-in cheeks added to his stern look, quite in contrast to the pleasant, bright blue eyes flanking the beaked nose of impressive dimensions.

We walked together down to town, because he also was staying in Chiang Mai. Somehow, at first, his appearance made me cautious, and so I avoided small talk (to which I have an unfortunate affinity), at the expense of long silences. Slowly, our exchanges took the form of conversation. I learned that we were visiting the same mountain tribes of the Golden Triangle, but we did not go deeper into it. Maybe later, if we could trust each other a little more, I thought.

His home was San Francisco, which he had left almost two years ago. He had traveled through India to China, through the Philippines to Malaysia, before he arrived here in Thailand--for how long, he did not know. It was his rule to globetrot without rules, with one exception. Every morning, before he would set out on his excursions, he studied the local language. Later, it impressed me to hear him ordering our food in Thai and being understood. Thai sounds to a Western ear like gurgling, with lots of krch-chrch, and it pours out like an uninterrupted stream over sharp rocks.

From the first village, we were lucky to catch a bus to Chiang Mai. Darkness came with a near-equatorial rapidity at the time we arrived, and we entered the first lighted eatery at the outskirts of town. I ordered just a salad, since my German palate was sick of the spice that flavored everything here. Was it cilantro? Lemon grass? Fish sauce? It seemed to be in every dish I had eaten during the three weeks of my stay. And I did not want any more. Lately, I had become preoccupied with dreams about fresh rye bread with a crust, just butter spread on it, a glass of cold milk, potatoes sprinkled with chopped parsley-plain potatoes, the simplest. Rick seemed to enjoy the thick chicken soup with some leafy vegetable that emanated the smell of THAT thing. He seemed more relaxed after the soup, and we talked about his travels.

Then I told him about my interest in liver cancer and about my research in the University Hospital, here. I was collecting biopsies of tumors and setting them up in tissue cultures, forcing the cancerous cells to grow in flasks. Rick seemed interested in my project and asked many questions that revealed a surprising knowledge of the malignant process. Surprising, because he was a computer specialist by trade. We talked about remissions and prospects for treatment of cancer in the future, about mortality. Mortality?

"Sometimes death is okay, I think. Sometimes it isn't," he declared.

"Why do you say it is okay?"

"Not long ago, a good friend of mine died, you see. He fell asleep during some meeting. They pulled the chair out from under him, for fun. But he was already dead when he slumped to the floor. The 'falling asleep' was a massive heart attack," Rick told me, his gaze blank, seeing his friend, perhaps. "That is an 'okay' death, I think. You see, for himself he did not die. Only for others: for friends, family. Not for himself."

"But he died. That is the sad fact!"

"Yes, but the last thing on his consciousness, the very last, was perhaps a vision of a shapely female, a pile of great food, or the smile of his kid. Isn't that what people visualize during meetings? So death, dying, did not enter his mind, even in the last second of his life--and then there were no thoughts any more."

"I understand--death without dying, siimply an end of existence. Comfortable, great stuff! And it should be like that for people of any age--but the hitch is that for those who remain, for family, friends, the age of the dead one means much. That is the bad part," I said.

"I was thinking about that. One can draw a 'curve of ruin,' so to speak, a curve of the degree of devastation for those who remain. It might be relatively low at birth, rising and rising, then descending down again at old age. Would it make sense, you think?" He asked himself more than me, and continued: "I am Jewish, Lothar, so I check in some old books from a rabbi, once. But I couldn't find anything explicit, blunt enough about this curve."

"Jewish or Catholic, no matter; ethnicists, they would struggle with such a curve, I imagine. I think it would almost imply that over the age of, say, a hundred and under the age of one day, or before birth even, the curve would approach, or reach, zero. On both ends of your curve, death would mean nothing, no grief. How about that, then?"


"The sanctity of life! A sacrosanct concept--or a folly of Western man?" Rick raised his hand. He had a pleasant smile, a little sad though.

I forced a laugh, thinking that we were deviating too far from anything resembling a pleasant discourse over dinner. "By the way," I said, "did you notice that girl who just came in?"

"I noticed her," Rick said dismissively, still in thought. "You know that the Eskimos, Inuit, have solved all this, in old times. They had it all figured out, what different values life has at which ages...."

I ordered another Tsing Tao, Chinese beer, which tastes as bad as Miller Light--doesn't even vaguely resemble the brew at home in Bavaria. "Why the hell do we have to talk about death, Rick, with waitresses around like the one serving the back tables. Why? Have a beer," I said.

"Because...You know why?" He sighed and did not look very happy, at that moment. "I have been bumming around Asia for two years, I told you. That's why." I did not understand the connection. He topped out glasses, leaned back, and started to unbutton his shirt, from the top. I looked around, but nobody seemed to be paying much attention to us.

He undid the last button and opened the shirt so that his chest and belly showed. He had the suntan-distribution of a peasant: the darkness of his neck descended in a V-like triangle pointing to his chest-bone. The rest of his body was white. An enormous scar ran down from the edge of his rib-cage, turned sharply across his belly, and disappeared sideways under the flap of his shirt, at least a half a foot long, down, and maybe a foot across.

"What happened?"

"Melanoma, my friend. My brother, he's a surgeon in Tucson, he took it out two years ago." Rick watched my reaction. "My dad is a doctor, too. They couldn't guarantee anything--no way to know about metastases, about the risk that it will come back; nothing. Just the usual: let us hope." He paused, looked at the scar and then at me. "That was not good enough for me, so I sold everything and went to India and decided to travel till I'd either spent all the dough or had a relapse--and that would be it." His mouth smiled, but his eyes did not.

"But you look great; you are in great shape," I said.

"Well, I don't know. Can't sleep well for over a week now--I worry. Look here." He pointed at the scar. "See it? You are a cancer man, aren't you?"

Right in the middle of the scar there was an elevated lesion covered with a scab, a little wet with lymph. It was surrounded by a pink halo. It was not too big, just about a couple of centimeters or smaller. "They told me in Tucson to watch for something like this." He started to button up the shirt. "It doesn't heal; seeps a little lymph, doesn't hurt, and it crusts. It ain't pigmented, though. But they said it need not to be."

"How long have you had it?"

"It's been about ten days since I noticed that."

Let's have another beer, what do you say?" I suggested, and Rick called the waitress over, the uglier one. "I think I can help you, Rick. You are in luck. At least I hope you are in luck."

I told him that, by coincidence, my friend in the Hospital, a Thai surgeon, had spent five years in Germany studying and operating on skin cancers, and melanomas are his special interest. He might be the number one melanoma expert in all of Thailand. Great experience; nice guy, too. I knew he would be in the Outpatient Clinic tomorrow. So we would meet at the Hospital in the morning, and I would arrange for Rick to be seen by my friend. First thing tomorrow.