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.
Samuel Cogolati was the only other person in the library. He sat at a table on the far side and did not look up from his book. From this distance, Cogolati’s hairless, waxy complexion resembled a child’s. Midhat approached the medical dictionaries and pulled down the latest edition of Larousse. He sat in a chair and turned to “N.”
Page 746 showed an illustration of a wheeled machine captioned “Nettoyage par le vide.” On the opposite page was the definition he wanted:
Neurasthenia: – (Syn: Nervous exhaustion, nervousness, neuropathy, cerebro-cardiac neuropathy, hyperaesthesia general, general neuralgia.)
SYMPTOMS. Neurasthenia may be manifested in two very different ways. Sometimes the neurasthenic has a healthy appearance, a fresh complexion, and a confident air. And on the contrary he is sometimes a depressed individual; emaciated, pale, holding his head down, answering with difficulty even the simplest of questions. These two varieties of patients generally complain of the same ills: headaches occupying the top of the head, limited at the neck or various parts of the skull, increased by sounds, smells, and intellectual fatigue, and decreasing after meals.
This fitted with the stick-stirring, in any case.
Insomnia is frequent and painful. The patient feels the need to sleep after dinner but soon wakes up, failing to fall asleep again until morning; and so he rises already tired, since during the interval he has been persecuted—
A page of photographs intervened illustrating “Nettoyage par le vide.” A man stood in a street beside a vast black machine labelled: VACUUM CLEANER; the same man then knelt indoors, pressing the end of a tube into the floor; then two women in aprons raked the ground with various metal prongs.
—by a kind of jittering of thought and many distressing sensations, so that even when he seemed to rest he was assailed by nightmares.
Dizziness sometimes occurs: an empty feeling in the brain, flies before the eyes, staggering without falling.
A finger down the other symptoms: Digestive disorders … Respiratory and circulatory disorders … Disorders of the genito-urinary tract, one of the causes of the disease … Ringing, observed in the ear … Extreme sensitivity to hot or cold, causing pain …
The constant study of his health to which the neurasthenic applies himself causes him to perceive a thousand sensations, unnoticed by everyone else, which he interprets and exaggerates.
The treatments included a diet without crustaceans, with the addition of raw egg yolks and broth.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Midhat.”
Cogolati stood above him, holding a book with a finger between the pages.
“Ah, Samuel. How are you?”
“What are you reading, the dictionary?”
“I am, yes. I am researching neurasthenia.”
“Interesting. May I sit? What have you found.”
Midhat’s stomach rumbled. He coughed.
“Oh, not much,” he said. “The only unifying trait seems to be strange physical sensations. Apart from that, it seems you diagnose a patient as a neurasthenic if you can judge them to be a hypochondriac. Isn’t that strange? They are ill if they are not ill. There is no specific ailment, nothing