Was it poison? Was it out of bounds? An unacceptable risk? She couldn’t have said, but she was in a state all day, though she kept telling herself she was being foolish—if anybody in the entire building knew what he was doing, it was her boss. Since she’d come to work for him just over a year ago, she’d never seen him falter—he was precise, cautious, solid, and he didn’t take chances with his own safety or his assistants’ either. Which you couldn’t say for all the chemists who worked here. Some of them—she’d heard the gossip—got sloppy as the day wore on, not bothering with their safety goggles, crossing the floor with pipettes of nitric acid or sodium hydroxide as if they were on their way home with a bag of groceries, even in one case (though this was only rumor), drinking on the job. And who was left to clean up the mess, to accept blame and cover for them if need be—to lie right to the face of the supervisor? Their lab assistants, of course. Who else?
Herr Hofmann wasn’t like that. He followed safety procedures to the letter, always, whether it was eight in the morning or five in the afternoon, whether they were preparing the chemicals for the first process of the day or the last. She admired his efficiency, his attention to detail, his professionalism, but there was so much more to him than that. For one thing, he’d had no qualms about taking on a female assistant, the only one in the whole company, and for another he was no cold fish, but a man with red blood in his veins. He was unfailingly pleasant, even on the off days, always with a sympathetic look or a smile for her, and under his lab coat you could see the effects of his bodybuilding and the hours he spent training with the boxing club. His hair might have been thinning and he wore spectacles in the lab, but he swept his hair back like Adolphe Menjou so you hardly noticed, and the spectacles only made him look distinguished. Maybe she was in love with him, maybe that was it, which of course she would never have admitted to anyone on this earth, not even her best friend, Dorothea Meier, and certainly not her mother, who if she had even an inkling that her daughter had a romantic fixation on an older man—a married man, no less, with children—would have marched right up the steps of the building and dragged her home by the scruff of her neck.
It was April. The day was bright beyond the windows, spring in the air, the whole world singing, and she was in a state. So what if there was a long and honored tradition of scientists experimenting on themselves—August Bier opening a hole in his own spine to discover if injecting cocaine directly into the cerebrospinal fluid would prove an effective anesthetic; Werner Forssmann running a catheter from an incision in his forearm up a vein to his heart to see if it could be done; Jesse Lazear purposely allowing an infected mosquito to bite him in order to prove the insect was the vector of yellow fever—there were as many failures as there were successes. Lazear had his proof, but died seventeen days later, so what good did it do him? Or his wife, if he had one? But that wasn’t going to happen to her boss, she told herself—nothing was going to happen to him. He was taking so small a dose of the compound, a mere 250 micrograms, it couldn’t possibly have any adverse effect, and if it did, she would be there at his side to see him through it.
She’d come to work that morning in high spirits, never suspecting what he had in mind or that this day would be any different from any other. Because the weather was so fine she’d bicycled to work rather than take the tram, and the fresh air and sunshine had made her feel as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “Good morning to you, Fräulein Ramstein,” Herr H. had called out cheerily when she came through the door after hanging her jacket in the closet and slipping into her lab coat. He was at his desk, peering up from his notebook, grinning at her. “Did you see the way the daffodils are pushing up everywhere? I thought somebody’d smeared the whole landscape with butter while we were asleep.”
“Yes,” she murmured, “yes, it’s all so beautiful—summer will be here before we know it,” and if it was a banal exchange, so much the better, because everything was ordinary, business as usual, and nothing was going to happen to her or her boss, not now, not ever.
But then, grinning still, he gave her a long look and said, “Didn’t you find it unusual when I went home early Friday afternoon?”
She had, but she hadn’t said anything then and didn’t say anything now either—she just stood there at the doorway, waiting.
“Of course, you know it’s not like me—I don’t think I’ve missed more than maybe two days in all the”—he paused, counting up the years—“fourteen years I’ve been at the company, but I felt so strange, or disoriented, I guess, I was sure I had a touch of the flu or a fever or something.” He paused, held her with his eyes. “But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t that at all. You know what it was?”
She didn’t have a clue, but it was then, at that precise moment, that the anxiety began ticking away inside her like one of the time bombs the partisans were using against the occupiers in Vichy and the Netherlands.
“The chemical, the synthesis. You know how careful I am, how rigorous—especially with toxic compounds—but nobody can be perfect a hundred percent of the time and I realized the next morning I must have got a trace of the solution somewhere on my skin during recrystallization, on my wrist or forearm, I suppose—or even my fingertips when I pulled the gloves off. A trace. That’s all. And I tell you, I’ve never experienced anything like it. It was as if I were intoxicated—drunk suddenly, right here in the laboratory, in the middle of the day. But more than that, and stranger, when I got home all sorts of fantastic shapes and images kept spinning in front of my eyes, even with my eyelids closed.”
She said the first thing that came into her head: “You were poisoned.”
“Yes,” he said, rising from the chair and crossing the room till he was standing right there before her, peering into her eyes as if looking for something he’d misplaced. “But how? And what does it mean?”
She couldn’t think. He was too close to her, so close she could smell the lozenge on his breath. “I don’t know,” she said. “That you’re lucky?”
He laughed aloud. “Lucky, that’s exactly it. We’ve got something here, I feel it, I really do.”
“No,” she said, taking a step back, all the precautions, all the rules, everything she’d learned in her apprenticeship and her time here as a full-fledged employee, all the horror stories about inadvertent poisonings, splashes and caustic burns flapping through her brain like flocks of black-winged birds: Never pour water into acid; All volatile materials to be handled in a hood with the exhaust fan on; Always cover up and always wear gloves. “What I mean is you’re lucky it wasn’t worse. Lucky”—she paused and felt something float up in her, some amalgam of fear and loss and love—“lucky you’re alive.”
The chemical was of one of the ergot compounds Herr H. first synthesized in 1938, when she was just sixteen and working as an au pair in Neuchâtel and he an ambitious young chemist hoping to synthesize an analog to Coramine, a cardiovascular stimulant produced by Ciba, one of the company’s biggest rivals. The structure of Coramine—nicotinic acid diethylamide—was strikingly similar to that of lysergic acid, the basic constituent of the ergot alkaloids his mentor, Arthur Stoll, had isolated eighteen years earlier, and so Herr Hofmann reasoned that it would have similar properties and uses. He spent three years on his investigations, which yielded one useful product—ergobasine, marketed by the company for obstetrical use, as it promoted dilation of the uterus and stanched bleeding after birth—and a series of lysergic acid derivatives that, unfortunately, didn’t show much promise, including the twenty-fifth iteration, lysergic acid diethylamide. The pharmacological unit found it thirty percent less effective than ergobasine, though it did seem to have a mild stimulatory effect in animal trials, producing a degree of restlessness in rats, rabbits, and dogs. But Sandoz was not in the business of marketing stimulants for the lower animals, and the compound was shelved, along with its twenty-four predecessors.
The thing was—and he’d tried to explain this to her the previous week—he just couldn’t get it out of his mind. He was paid to experiment, to be creative, to unlock the chemical secrets of natural substances (like ergot, a parasitic fungus of grains that had been used in preparation by midwives from time immemorial) in order to produce new medicines for the company so that the company could market them and make a profit for its investors, and, by extension, its employees. That was his job, his fulfillment, his pleasure in the work—the natural world presented a mystery and it was the object of science to chip away at that mystery and see what lay beneath it. He had a hunch about this synthesis, that was what he’d told her (“Ich habe ein Vorgefühl.”), this one above all the others, and though it was unusual to continue experimenting on a drug once Pharmacology had passed judgment on it, he couldn’t help feeling there was something here they were all missing. And so, on Friday she’d assisted him in preparing a new synthesis for further trials. And on Friday he’d inadvertently poisoned himself and had to go home early. Now it was Monday, the first day of the work week, and he was proposing to poison himself all over again, intentionally this time.
He was right there, as close as he’d ever been to her, and her heart was pounding in her chest. Strangely, his eyes didn’t seem to blink—he was fixated, not on her but something beyond her, through her, an idea—and for the longest moment he didn’t say a thing. When he told her what he was proposing, she let out a little cry—she couldn’t help herself; she was that shocked. “But wouldn’t it be better to test it on animals first—in the event, I mean, in case there are adverse effects, or you, you—?”
She had to look away from him. It wasn’t her place to question him—he’d gone to university, he was an educated man, he was her boss, and she was a girl still, just twenty-one. She hadn’t even gone to high school. None of the girls she knew had—in her place and time women were expected to marry and raise a family. Period. Oh, maybe they’d work for a year or two as au pairs or apprentices in a shop, as typists or assistants in a chemistry lab, but marriage was their prospect and their destiny and that made a high school education strictly de trop.
“Ha!” he said, spinning away from her like a dancer, as excited as she’d ever seen him. “We’ve already been down that road, as I told you—all that would happen is that the stiffs over in Pharmacology would dose a couple of dogs and the dogs’ pupils would dilate and their body temperature rise and they’d pace back and forth in their cages, but dogs can’t talk, dogs can’t tell us about the kind of psychoactive properties this compound might have, does have, I’m sure of it.”
“You’re no guinea pig,” she said, because she wouldn’t give it up. Ergot was dangerous. She’d looked it up in the library because she wanted to be informed, wanted to learn, and what she learned frightened her all the more. It poisoned whole villages in the olden days when people consumed it in their bread, the fungus ground up into flour along with the grain it infested, and no one suspecting the truth of the matter. It caused convulsions, diarrhea, paresthesia, and worse, mania, psychosis, dry gangrene that made your nose, ears, fingers and toes shrivel and drop off.
“But I am,” he insisted. “I am. And you’re going to be my witness.”
The noon hour came and went. She didn’t go home for lunch but, instead, sat outside in the sun and nibbled at the sandwich her mother had made her that morning. Everything around her was buzzing with activity, people from the shops and offices picnicking on park benches or spreading blankets on strips of grass, bees at the flowers, birds in the trees, pigeons rising up and fluttering down again like windborne leaves. She wasn’t hungry but she forced herself to eat, trying not to think about what lay ahead—which was nothing really, she kept telling herself, because ergot was only toxic in much higher and repeated doses so that the photo she’d seen of the gnarled decaying feet of a peasant afflicted with ergotism was the end result of continued ingestion: bread, daily bread. She took a bite of her sandwich then turned it over in her hand and examined it, the neat semicircle her teeth had made, crumbs, the pink of the ham, the yellow of the cheese. The sun warmed her face. Her mind drifted. She chewed. Swallowed. Watched a cloud in the shape of a scythe slice across the face of the sun and melt away.
Herr Hofmann, always mindful of the company’s time, put off the experiment till late in the day. She kept herself busy cleaning the lab equipment, washing and drying beakers, funnels, stirring rods, wiping down the counters she’d already wiped down twice, but all the while she was keeping an eye on him where he sat at his desk making notations in his laboratory journal. The afternoon wore on. She was in the midst of rechecking the inventory, for lack of anything better to do, when all at once he pushed back his chair, stood up, and swung round on her. “Well,” he said, “are you ready, Fräulein?”
It was 4:20 in the afternoon—he made a note of it for the record and so did she—when he diluted 0.5 cc of ½ promil aqueous solution of diethylamide tartrate with 10 cc of water, gave her a “here-goes” grin, raised the glass as if he were toasting her, and drank it down in a single swallow. “Utterly tasteless,” he pronounced, looking past her to the window and the glaze of sunlight on the panes. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was just taking a sip of water.” Again he flashed the grin. “For the purpose of moistening the throat. Always advisable to keep the throat moist, right?”
Her response was so muted she could barely hear herself. “Yes, I think so,” she murmured, but she was watching him closely, feasting on the sight of him actually, this shining man, this genius, and why couldn’t he have chosen somebody else for the trial, somebody who didn’t have so much to lose? He could have called for volunteers, paid someone—Axel Yoder, the halfwit who pushed a mop up and down the hallways all day long as if it were attached to him. Or the squint-eyed woman in the butcher’s shop down the street. He could have paid her, couldn’t he? What would she know? Or a monkey—what was wrong with trying it on a monkey?
Twenty minutes later, nothing had happened. They’d both gone back to their work, the sun held steady, a telephone rang somewhere down the hallway. She could barely breathe. She was aching to ask him if he was feeling anything yet—any effects, anything whatever—but she felt shy suddenly, as if it would be an imposition, as if somehow the experiment would be in jeopardy if she were the first to speak. The toxin was in him, this was his body, his trial, and what could be more private than that? She thought of Werner Forssmann then and how he’d had to physically restrain his nurse on the operating table so she wouldn’t interfere with him when he worked that catheter all the way up his antecubital vein to his heart, and then she was wishing she’d taken the compound with him. Or instead of him.
Every minute fell like a sledgehammer. She wanted to get up, wanted to go to him, if only to press a hand to his shoulder to assure him she was there still, but she fought the impulse and fought it again. And then, just as the church bells tolled the hour, he suddenly shifted around in his chair, glanced over his shoulder at her, and began to laugh. Laugh! And not just a titter or a cackle, but a booming full-chested roar of a laugh that just kept coming and coming till he had tears in his eyes and she was on her feet and flying to him, crying out, “What? What is it?” And, absurdly, “Are you feeling it?”
He tried to get up, then sat heavily. The laughter caught in his throat. “I feel, I feel”—he was struggling to get the words out—“light . . . headed . . . dizzy, maybe. And”—here he laughed again, sharply, more a bark than a laugh—“gay, gay, Fräulein, and why would I feel gay?”
She was standing over him now, barely able to breathe herself, and she did the only thing she could think to do: she touched him, ever so lightly, on the forearm. He rotated his head to stare up at her, his question still hanging in the air, and she saw that his pupils were dilated like the pupils of the dogs in the laboratory trials he’d told her about, so wide open they drove all the color out of his eyes. Normally, his eyes were the color of caramel; now they were black, shining and black, and she made a mental note of that so she could write it down later, and why did she have such an ache in the pit of her stomach and why was she thinking of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?
“I must . . .” he began, then laughed again, waving an arm in front of his face as if he were conducting an orchestra only he could hear, “must . . . record . . .” In the next moment he took up his pen and very slowly and meticulously wrote a single line in his notebook: 17:00: Beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of ataxia, desire to laugh.
She’d drawn her hand back when he’d begun waving his arm, and she wasn’t so much thinking that this was the first time they’d ever actually touched, aside from brushing past each other in the performance of their daily routines, but of what he’d written in the notebook. Ataxia, anxiety. Would he need an emetic? A tranquillizer? Should she call a doctor?
As if reading her thoughts, he turned his face to her again—black-eyed, his features slack and distorted—and murmured, “It’s all right, Susi, I’m fine, everything’s fine, it’s just that—well, let’s see, let’s give it a . . . bit more time.” He glanced at the clock, let out another laugh. “It’s only five. We wouldn’t want to . . . to cheat . . . the, the company out of our last hour’s work of the day, would . . . we?”
Everything stopped right there, right in that instant: he’d called her Susi. Never before, never once, had he let slip the formal bonds of their relationship, under which, rigorously, unfailingly, she was Fräulein Ramstein and he Herr Hofmann. As upset as she was, as frightened, she was rocked by it: he’d called her by her first name, almost as if they were on an equal footing—almost as if they were friends, very close friends, male and female, as if she really were more to him than a starched lab coat and a pair of willing hands. She didn’t know what to say. Cheat the company? No, was the proper response, but then he clearly wasn’t in his right mind and to expect him to continue work—or her to—was absurd.
He abruptly turned back round in his chair, the four legs grating on the floor so that the sudden noise startled her, and he began paging through his notes as if he were riffling a deck of cards. The pages hissed under the pressure of his fingertips, a noise that struck her as frivolous, and beyond that, wrong: this was the official record, not a plaything. He released the pages, took them up, riffled them again. Then again. “Please, Susi, dear Susi, give me, give us,” he said, and here came the laugh, “give us a few minutes . . . and we’ll . . . we’ll see, because when you examine it, really examine it, time has no meaning, whether it’s company time or free time or the, the . . . time . . . they clock at the Greenwich Observatory. Nicht wahr?”
She was still floating on that Susi, dear Susi, when things became complicated (or more complicated, that is, considering that her boss was self-poisoned and acting as if he were a slurring drunkard in the back room of a whiskey bar). Suddenly he jumped up from the desk as if he’d been stung, as if the desk itself had come to life and attacked him, and when he swung round on her she saw that all the color had drained from his face. He wasn’t laughing now. Now he looked ill, seriously ill, the knowledge of what he’d done to himself rising up to infest the swollen black pupils of his eyes. He looked to the ceiling, looked to the walls. “The light,” he said. “The light.”
“You want me to turn off the light?” She crossed the room to the switch on the wall and shut down the overhead lighting, though the lab was still flooded with sunlight so that you could hardly tell the difference.
“That’s not it,” he insisted. “That’s not it, that’s not . . . it at all.” He was standing in the middle of the room, swaying on his feet. “Home,” he said abruptly, his fingers fumbling at the buttons of his lab coat. “Take me home. I need to . . . Help me, Susi, help me.”
If she was frightened—and she was—she didn’t have time to dwell on it. She’d never been to his house, but she knew he lived in Bottmingen, out in the suburbs, some ten kilometers away, and the immediate problem, a problem that could have life and death consequences for all she knew, was to get him home where he could be properly cared for. She helped him out of his lab coat, her own fingers trembling, and then she was handing him his jacket, which he merely stared at it as if he’d never seen it before, and she helped him with that too. And his cap—he couldn’t very well bicycle all the way home without his cap. It took him a moment, turning the cap over in his hands as if trying to reference it, and then he reached up and pulled it down firmly over the crown of his head.
She made a quick survey of the lab to be sure everything was in order and led him out the door. Never once did she think of going to his colleagues for help—just the opposite: she went out of her way to avoid them. She looked in both directions up and down the hall and then hurried him to the back stairway, where there was no one to see him but Axel Yoder, eternally plying his mop. She did this reflexively, to protect him. He was more than merely respectable—he was a cornerstone of the research department at Sandoz—and it would be devastating if anyone were to see him in this condition because they would assume the worst, that he was drunk, drunk on the job. That would never do.
Her next worry was how to get him home. He bicycled to work every day, rain or shine, winter and summer, but was he in any condition to bicycle now? She would have called a car, but it was wartime and there were no cars available, except maybe for the mayor or the president of one of the big chemical companies, so she really had no choice in the matter. “I’m taking you home,” she said to him, firmly, reassuringly, no arguments, and suddenly their roles were reversed—she wasn’t addressing her boss and superior but a child, like Liliane and her sister Juliette, the little girls she’d instructed and chastised and watched over day and night when she worked as an au pair. “You think you can bicycle?”
They were standing out on the sidewalk now, the mild evening sifting down around them, sunlight draping banners across the street all the way to the end of the block and the air charged with the scent of flowers and the cooking smells from the cafes. It was a beautiful evening, the sort of evening she would have reveled in under other circumstances, but all that mattered to her now was that it wasn’t raining and wasn’t going to. There were pigeons at their feet, ubiquitous pigeons, parting and regrouping as she wheeled both bicycles up and held his out to him by the handlebars. He hadn’t uttered a sound since they’d left the building, just let himself be led by her like a schoolboy, but now he began giggling uncontrollably, and a couple passing close by, arm-in-arm, gave him a look.
“Can I bicycle?” he repeated in an odd tone, taking hold of the handlebars and swinging one leg over the crossbar, his movements syrupy and slow, which lulled her for just the instant it took for him to push off and begin pedaling furiously up the street. “Just you watch!” he cried, glancing back at her with a triumphant look, and in his distraction he very nearly ran down an old man with a stiff leg limping across the street. But panic and more panic: before she could even mount her own bike, he was already at the end of the block, slashing left at the corner directly in front of a tram that somehow managed to miss dragging him under its wheels, and the chase was on.
There were people everywhere, on bicycles, in carts, on foot, men carrying satchels home from work, women with groceries, children darting out after hoops or balls till the street was like an obstacle course—and dogs, too, dogs popping up to chase along, disappear, and pop up all over again. The tram. An automobile. A wagon laden with beer kegs. Herr H. was wearing the loden jacket she’d helped him on with not five minutes before and she struggled to keep sight of it, weaving in and out of the traffic. She was pedaling with everything she had but she didn’t seem to be gaining on him, and were they racing now, was that it? But wait, there he went, darting down a side street and into a scrum of bicyclists who were all but dressed identically to him so that for one frantic minute she lost sight of him and wound up homing in on someone else altogether until she saw her mistake, her legs churning, her heart thumping in her chest, and where was Herr H.? Where was he? She pedaled on, frantically scanning the road ahead, until a figure separated itself from the scrum—loden jacket, pale cap, the hard muscled V of his back—and she shot after him.
It wasn’t until they were on Bottmingenstrasse, with its long vistas and thinning crowds, that she finally caught up with him. He hadn’t slackened his pace, not for a minute, and it was only fear and adrenaline that kept her going, because what if he had an accident, what if he ran off the road into a ditch and broke a leg—or worse? She was responsible. She was the one he’d cried out to for help and no one else. Of all the people extant—his colleagues, his intimates, his wife—she was the only one on this earth who knew he wasn’t in his right mind, that he was poisoned and in danger, mortal danger. As she drew even with him, fighting for breath, she called out, “Herr Hofmann, slow down, will you, please?”
The wheels whirred. The breeze fanned her sweat. He didn’t turn his head—just kept pumping and pumping as if she weren’t even there. “Herr Hofmann!” And then, her lungs burning and her legs like rubber, she lost all control and began shouting at him—or no, shrieking, actually shrieking. “Stop it, will you? Albert! Albert!”
That was when he turned his head. “Fräulein?” he gasped, slowing now and giving her a puzzled look. “What on earth are you doing here?”
She was curious about his house—and his wife, Anita, a pretty dark-haired woman of thirty or so she’d met only once in passing—but of course lab assistants didn’t get invited to Sunday dinner or to socialize or sit around dipping croutons into the fondue in the bosom of the family, and in any case, Bottmingen wasn’t exactly in the heart of town. The odd thing was that she hardly noticed the place when they finally arrived—it was a house and he lived there and that was all that mattered. She was sweating, exhausted, her heart about to burst through her chest, but she followed his lead, making a sharp right turn and pedaling up the gravel drive to the front of the house, where he just dropped his bicycle on the lawn and bolted inside, leaving the door wide open behind him, the keys dangling in the lock. Even as she propped her own bike against the tree in the front yard, wondering if she should follow him in and explain the situation to his wife as best she could, she heard him shouting within. “Anita! Anita, where are you?” There was a clatter, as of something metallic crashing to the floor, then a silence. A beat. Two beats. And then a long drawn-out moan of despair: “Anita!”
Tentatively, she made her way up the steps and into the front hall. The sun was out still but it was shadowy inside, none of the lamps lit and the light from the yard held trembling in the windows. “Herr Hofmann?” she called, afraid to enter uninvited.
His voice cracked as he cried out his wife’s name one more time, and then it dropped almost to a whisper: “I’m here,” he said. “In here.”
She found him in the sitting room—sofa, chairs, end table, lamps, everything in perfect order—staring wildly about him. “She’s . . . she’s gone,” he said, and all the breath went out of him.
“Gone? What do you mean?” It was nearly six in the evening—any wife, let alone the wife of such a man, would have been at home, cooking the meal, looking after the children, there to greet her husband at the end of a long day.
“Gone,” he repeated. He pressed his hands to his temples, as if the internal pressure were too much to bear. “And I’m left here dying, I tell you, dying. I’m poisoned, can’t you see—?”
That froze her inside—could it be true? Was it fatal? Had he miscalculated the dose? None of the dogs had died, had they? But then who knew what effect an experimental drug might have, a new drug, one nobody had ever tested before on a human subject?
“No, no, you’re not dying, not at all,” she said, fighting to keep her voice under control. “You’ll be fine, you will—you just need to, to sit a minute,” and she helped him to the armchair, where he dropped down like a stone. In the next moment she was making a frantic circuit of the house, shouting herself now—“Frau Hofmann! Frau Hofmann! Are you home?”—but there was no answer. The wife did seem to be gone, and the children too. She couldn’t help feeling a flare of anger—if she were the wife of a man like Herr Hofmann, like Albert, she would be there for him every minute of every day and night.
Sixty seconds later she was back in the sitting room, repeating what he already knew: “She’s not here.”
He said one thing only: “I can’t stop it.”
“Milk,” she said, “what about milk—to absorb the poison? Do you have any milk?”
He didn’t answer so she went to the kitchen herself, feeling like an alien in this house where he lived, where he spent his nights, where he climbed into bed with his wife who wasn’t even here when he needed her most. . . . She flung open the door of the icebox, but there was no milk. A bottle of beer, yes, cheese, a plate of sliced beef, rosti, and haricots verts laid on the shelf as if set aside for his dinner, but no milk.
When she came back to him, very nearly in tears now, to say that there was no milk in the house and what did he want her to do—the doctor, should she call the doctor?—he flinched as if he didn’t recognize her, as if she’d come to do him harm rather than rescue him. His face was in shadow. He held a hand over his eyes. “The doctor,” she repeated. “Should I call the doctor?”
Suddenly he lurched up in the chair, his face flushed and his eyes snapping at her. “What the hell do you think? God help me, yes—call the doctor! And, and . . . the neighbor, Frau Rüdiger, go next door and ask her for milk, as much as she can spare. . . .”
She was in motion again and glad of it, glad to be doing something, anything, bolting out the still-open door and across the yard to the neighbor’s house, where she pounded on the door until it was answered by a bewildered-looking woman with fleshy pouches for cheeks and drawn-down little specks of blue for eyes. “Help us, please, it’s an emergency, we need milk and we don’t have any,” she said in a breathless rush, “and the doctor, call the doctor, please—”
“The doctor?” the woman repeated. “But who are you?”
The explanation took all of ten seconds and then the woman had the milk in her hand, two full liter bottles, and they were hurrying across the yard to the open door of the Hofmanns’ house and the woman was saying, “Poisoned? How?” But then the woman stole a glance at her—the sweat at her temples, her hair come undone, the frantic look in her eyes—and said no more.
The doctor, who was local to Bottmingen, was there within half an hour, wheeling up the drive on his own bicycle, his bag strapped on behind. When he came into the sitting room, Herr H. was stretched out on the sofa, a comforter pulled up to his throat and both bottles of milk standing empty on the end table at his side. Herr H., who’d been forcing his eyelids shut with the pressure of his fingertips, dropped his hands and flashed open his eyes as the doctor entered the room, and he looked more startled than relieved. After his outburst he’d sunk back into lethargy, muttering to himself, moaning, exclaiming, the whole time acting as if she weren’t there in the room with him, as if he couldn’t see her or trust the evidence of his senses. Now he tried to say something—a name, the name of the doctor, or no, the drug, the poison—but it was garbled and confused and though it really wasn’t her place she couldn’t help speaking up. “It was an experiment,” she said, feeling ridiculous, feeling guilty, as if she were the one responsible or at the very least a coconspirator.
The doctor was an old man, dressed in a shapeless blue suit and a collar that didn’t seem to fit him. His hair was white, his face red, and he lifted his eyebrows in puzzlement as if he didn’t know whether to question her or the patient or even to step back a moment and make introductions, because who was she, established here in his patient’s sitting room, and where was the patient’s wife?
“It was a new compound we—Herr Hofmann, that is—synthesized in the lab, lysergic acid diethylamide, and Herr Hofmann had a hunch, and he . . .” She had to break off—she was afraid she was going to start sobbing. “He, he—it was the minutest dose, just two hundred fifty micrograms. . . .”
“When was this?” The doctor gave her a sharp look, his voice harsh and accusatory. “And who are you, exactly, Fräulein?”
Very slowly, in bits and pieces, the explanation came out, and Frau Rüdiger was there to back her up on the details of what had occurred since she’d brought Herr H. home, how they’d given him milk, how he’d cried out that a devil had taken possession of his soul, how he’d had trouble standing, how Frau Hofmann, today of all days, was absent, having gone to Lucerne with the children to visit her parents, and how Frau Rüdiger had telephoned her so that she was rushing home even now. All the while, Herr Hofmann just lay there on the sofa, staring at nothing.
“All right, then,” the doctor said, turning to him. “How are you feeling, Albert? Can you speak?”
Herr Hofmann—black eyes, fingertips alive at his temples—only nodded.
“This young woman—your assistant, is that right? This young woman claims that you’ve ingested a very small dose of this substance, two hundred fifty micrograms, yes? Nod if that’s true.”
Herr Hofmann nodded, and then he was trying to say something. The doctor leaned in, cupping a hand to one ear. “Yes,” Herr H. said, his voice so soft it was barely audible. “Yes—micrograms.”
The doctor didn’t reply, just pursed his lips and reached behind him for his black bag. He took the patient’s temperature, which was slightly elevated, applied his stethoscope and finally pressed a finger to Herr H.’s wrist to count his pulse. A long moment crept by, Frau Rüdiger looking as startled as if she’d stumbled upon some satanic rite in the sitting room of her next-door neighbor who’d always seemed so unassuming and substantial but was now revealed as a deviate, while the doctor’s eyebrows rode up and down like pale markers in the gathering gloom as the evening deepened and Susi took it upon herself to go around the room and switch on the lamps as if this were her own house and her own privilege.
“Everything appears normal, Albert,” the doctor said finally, turning aside to replace his instruments in his bag. “You’ll be fine—just let it pass. And it was wise”—he looked back to the patient now—“to consume the milk, which I’m sure is acting as an antidote to whatever you’ve managed to poison yourself with . . . what did you say it was?”
And Herr H., pushing himself up to a sitting position now, smiled for the first time since they’d left the lab. The color was seeping back into his face, as if the crisis had passed—or was passing. He was silent a moment, his eyes sweeping over the room until finally coming to rest on the doctor’s. “Lysergic acid diethylamide,” he said. “Synthesis”—a brief stumble over the syllables—“synthesis number twenty-five.”
The doctor left, weaving off into the declining sun on his bicycle, but not before taking her aside and admonishing her to keep a close watch on the patient and call him right away if he should take a turn for the worse. “You never can tell with cases of poisoning,” he said, looking her full in the face, “especially if there’s no known antidote. And how could there be since the agent itself is all but unknown, isn’t that right?”
She could only nod.
He looked at her sharply and she thought he was about to deliver a lecture on the dangers of ingesting foreign substances, but finally, his voice shot-through with scorn, all he said was, “Don’t you people have animals for this sort of thing?”
Frau Rüdiger, wringing her hands in the doorway—and she had a story to tell, oh yes indeed—said she hoped everything was going to be fine but that she had her own family to attend to, if that was quite all right. Snatching a quick look at Herr H., where he lay stretched out on the couch staring at the ceiling and moving his lips as if conversing with someone who wasn’t there, she said she’d look in later when Frau Hofmann returned, and added, oddly, “Do you understand?”
Frankly, Susi didn’t understand, but no matter the awkwardness of the situation—alone now in the house with her boss—she was determined to see it out. She thought of her mother then. Her mother would be worried and she really should telephone her, but then she couldn’t get past the further awkwardness of asking permission—and whom was she going to ask? The wife wasn’t home yet—the wife was on the train from Lucerne, half-mad with worry, no doubt—and Herr Hofmann was in no condition to respond. In fact, for the next hour he just lay there on the sofa without moving except to blink open his eyes now and again and exclaim, “The light! The light!”
She was sitting in the chair across from him, trying to read a book she’d slipped from the shelf—Hesse’s Narziss und Goldmund, which she found heavy going, especially with the way her mind was wandering—when she heard a quick tattoo of footsteps on the porch and the click of a key in the lock. In the next moment Frau Hofmann burst into the room, her face burnished and eyes wild, shrugging out of her coat and dropping her purse to the floor in a single motion, and then she was on her knees in front of the sofa, clutching her husband to her and repeating his name over and over as if in prayer.
Susi didn’t know what to do. She started to get up, then thought better of it. She wanted to explain, officially, to give Frau Hofmann an account of all that had happened, what the doctor had said, Frau Rüdiger, the milk, the bicycle ride, everything, but it was as if she’d been bound in place like Werner Forssmann’s nurse. Everything was so odd. She was here in this house she’d pictured endlessly in her imagination, here among all the things it contained—the family pictures, the ancestral china, the carpet he walked on in his slippered feet—but this wasn’t where she belonged, and it was dark beyond the windows and her boss, the most proper man in the world, the man she esteemed more than any other, was responding to his wife’s embrace with mounting passion, his arms clutched to her shoulders and his mouth pressed tightly to hers in a deep erotic kiss. . . .
“Albert, Albert,” the wife murmured, coming up for air, “what have you done to yourself? What were you thinking?”
He didn’t say a word, just tightened his grip on her and tried to kiss her again, but she pulled away and for the first time seemed aware that they weren’t alone in the room, throwing a quizzical glance in Susi’s direction before turning back to him—to his kiss. “You gave us such a fright,” she whispered, and then she was repeating his name again, over and over, as if to take possession of it.
“The children—?” he began, but couldn’t finish the question.
“I left them with Mother because I didn’t know . . . I thought—oh, Albert, I was frantic, frantic. Don’t you ever do anything like this again, hear me?”
For answer, he pulled her back down to him.
The room went deep then, enclosed, narrowing, a submarine plunging into the depths where only the two of them could go, and Susi, without a word, laid the book aside, pushed herself up from the chair and tiptoed out of the room.
She found her bike propped against the tree where she’d left it. It was chilly out now, but the crickets sang their night song and the frogs, awakened after a long winter’s sleep, joined in. She was out in the country, on her own, and it must have been past ten at night. Her mother would be furious. She swung a leg over the crossbar of her bike, pushed off, and began pedaling down the dark driveway to the darker road, and there was no moon in the sky to guide her, only the pale distant luminescence of the stars God had put in the heavens to mark His boundaries.
She was late for work the next morning. Her mother had awakened her at the usual hour but she’d fallen back asleep, never more exhausted in her life. She’d got home very late and her mother had greeted her at the door with a stony face, but she explained herself patiently till gradually her mother seemed to relent and heated a pan of barley soup over the stove for her, all the while complaining You couldn’t have telephoned even? and she reiterating how desperate the situation had been—and she didn’t have to exaggerate, that was for certain. When finally she did get to bed, she couldn’t sleep, her mind replaying the day’s events in a continuous loop, coming around again and again to the way he’d cried out her name—Susi, Susi, help me!—and then the image of him holding fast to his wife, of their lips, their tongues, the way he moved against her and she against him as if there were no constraints, as if she herself wasn’t sitting right there in the corner of the room. And she wasn’t in that room as an interloper either, she was there as a Good Samaritan, a friend, a savior—and what did that get her? A lonely ride home in the dark and not a word of thanks.
The first thing she saw on opening the closet—his jacket, hanging on its hook like the most ordinary thing in the world—flooded her with relief. He was there. He was all right. He hadn’t died in the night or lost his mind or succumbed to delirium. She fought down the flickering memory of his vacant eyes, his reddened face, his mussed hair that stood straight up on his head like the hackles of an animal, and the way he’d shouted at her when she asked, in all innocence, if she should call the doctor; then she hung her scarf and jacket on the hook beside his, slipped on her lab coat, and stepped into the laboratory.
At the moment she caught sight of him in the far corner (not at his desk but at the window, his back to her), she was struck by the aroma of fresh coffee, a rarity in these days of rationing and hardship, and something else, too, a lighter fragrance, a whiff of nature in this place where the natural invariably gave way to process, synthesis, titration, and extraction. That was when she saw the flowers, the daffodils, a whole bouquet of them, arranged in a beaker on her desk. She was struck dumb. No one ever gave her presents, except for her parents and her brothers, and only then on her birthday and at Christmas, and before she could even think to call out a guten morgen to him she was pressing her face to the soft cool petals and breathing in the scent of the outdoors.
“Oh, I see you’ve found the flowers, Fräulein.” He’d turned round now, grinning at her, his hair swept back, the spectacles pinching his nose, his lab coat spotless and his tie perfectly aligned, everything right again, everything the way it should be. “I wanted to do something more for you, to thank you, that is, for yesterday . . . roses, I thought of roses, but the shops weren’t open yet and, well, I picked these for you along Bottmingenstrasse on my way in this morning. I hope you like them.”
Her first emotion was guilt over the resentment she’d fallen prey to on her way in on the tram, but now, as if a switch had been thrown, she felt nothing but warmth for him—he was his old self and his old self was gentle and giving, and he did care for her, he did. And then, as he crossed the lab to her to take both her hands in his own, she gave way to relief and a kind of amazement at how well he looked, fresher than ever, in fact—if she hadn’t known better, she would have thought he’d just returned from a week at a spa, at Montreux or Baden-Baden, his whole body aglow as if he’d been rebuilt, cell by cell, overnight.
“I do,” she said. “I love them. But you didn’t have to—”
He held up a hand to silence her. “Let’s have a cup of coffee—you do enjoy coffee, don’t you, Fräulein?—and sit down a minute to discuss what’s happened here. I have so much to tell you.”
So they sat—at his desk, on company time—and sipped their coffee, with sugar and cream, no less, and he told her everything, from the minute the drug had come on to its gradual dissipation late in the night. “I experienced things, Fräulein, I’d never thought possible—saw things, saw whether my eyes were open or shut, a whole kaleidoscope of swirling images and colors, and that was only the beginning. It was the most”—he hesitated, then laughed—“eye-opening experience I’ve ever had. Susi, I saw the world as it truly is,” he said, his voice so rich and resonant he might have been singing, “—the immaterial world, the spiritual world, Kant’s Ding an sich in every object.”
She didn’t know what to say. She barely knew who Kant was.
“Table legs. The antimacassar on the chair. The end table, the telephone, my shoes! Everything has a life of its own totally independent of us and I never knew it, never even imagined it, because I’ve had my head down my entire life, my nose in books, in beakers, peering through microscopes at a busy universe no one before van Leeuwenhoek had even guessed at! Do you see? Do you see what I’m saying?”
He was his normal self, that was what she’d been thinking a moment ago, but now she wasn’t so certain—could he still be under the influence of the drug? Was he delirious? What was he talking about? She raised the cup to her lips, blew briefly across the surface to cool it, and looked into his eyes. “Yes,” she said, “I think so. It does have psychoactive properties, just as you predicted, is that what you’re saying?”
His eyes were strange—not dilated now, not black, and back to their normal color—but infused with something like, like . . . mania. Or no, enthusiasm, extreme enthusiasm for this new product and what its possibilities were for the company, for the world, because it was his creation, his alone, and he couldn’t contain the excitement of it. “I won’t say it was all bliss and I don’t know what I said or did”—a long look for her now, deep into her eyes, so deep she had to turn away—“and forgive me for any . . . indiscretions, but if I saw the devil, if I thought I was losing my mind when in fact I was only prying loose the grip of my ego, I saw God, too, shining until His face engulfed the sun and a second sun and all the suns beyond it, and I was left with a peace I’ve never felt in all my days—or even dreamed of.”
He straightened up in the chair, threw back his head, and drained his cup. “This is a revolution, Susi, and make no mistake about it. We have something here more powerful than any bomb, any reagent, any synthesis anyone has ever come across—I’m sure of it, as sure as I’ve ever been about anything, but of course we need more experimentation, more human subjects, and my experience alone is woefully insufficient, I know that . . . but I feel it in my bones, in my heart, my brain, in the neurons, Susi, the neurons.”
Of course, no one would believe him, at least not at first. Three days after his self-experiment, she typed his report on the experience and, at his direction, sent copies to Professor Stoll, his immediate superior at Sandoz, and to Professor Rothlin, director of the pharmacological department. It didn’t take long to get a reaction—within the hour Professor Rothlin was tapping at the door. At the moment, Herr Hofmann was in the middle of producing another iteration of the chemical for further trials—he’d been doing almost nothing but for the past three days—and he called impatiently over his shoulder to her to please see who that was and what they wanted, and if he was impatient, edgy, really, she excused it because the synthesis was so complex and tedious and the resulting product so unstable even light would rapidly degrade it, and of course, all this meant so much to him. This was his discovery, his child, and he would settle for nothing less than the purest synthesis it was humanly possible to produce.
“Yes,” she said, “of course,” and went to the door expecting one of the other young chemists or perhaps a secretary from the main office with some form or other, so it took her a moment to collect herself when she saw who it was standing there before her.
The director barely gave her a glance, just strode into the room, huffing and puffing and waving the report in one hand. “Albert, Albert, what in God’s name is this?”
Fortunately, Herr H. was in the second stage of the process, which involved cooling the isomerized synthesis prior to mixing it with an acid and a base and evaporating it to produce the active substance, so he was able to step away from the hood, strip off his gloves, and nonchalantly shake the director’s hand. “What do you mean?” he said, breaking into a grin. “My report?”
“Exactly, yes. Because obviously you’ve made some error in calculating the dosage—”
“Not at all—and my lab assistant, Fräulein Ramstein, who was at my side throughout the entire process, can back me up here, isn’t that right, Fräulein?”
And here was a role she knew how to inhabit: modest, pretty, bowing her head in accord as the sun sent a slant of light through the window to illuminate her where she stood, and it was almost as if they were in a scene from a film, the heroine stepping forward to exonerate the hero when he most needed it. “Oh, yes,” she said, “we were very precise about that. Two hundred fifty micrograms.”
“Ridiculous,” the director said, and he’d begun to pace up and down the room now, a delicate-looking man of her father’s age, wearing whiskers. “Do you really expect me to believe that the merest trace of this substance—two hundred fifty millionths of a gram—can have any effect whatever? Especially for a man of your size—what do you weigh, Albert? Seventy kilograms?”
“Seventy-two.”
“There, you see? A man of seventy-two kilos affected by a barely measurable dose?” He’d reached the windows and come back again, twice, and now he swiveled round on his feet and pointed a finger at Herr Hofmann—and at her, her too, because she was indivisible from this. “There’s something very wrong here. Either that or you’ve discovered the alchemist’s elixir.”
Herr Hofmann tried to interject, but the director waved him off. “No, no, Albert, I’m sorry, but this is just too fantastic to be credible. I’m going to need to see all your laboratory notes, everything you’ve done with these lysergic acid amides, and I want to be personally involved in any further trials—animal or human—so that I can judge for myself.” He paused, the hint of a smile hovering over his lips. “You’re a solid man, Albert, one of the best we have, and I know as well as anyone here that you’re not given to miscalculation, exaggeration—or what, fantasy?” The director let out a little laugh. “You’re not a fantasist now, Albert, are you?”
Whether he was or not—and, of course, the director was just having a little joke—the compound Herr H. had discovered was simply too intriguing to resist, and within the week the director himself, and Professor Stoll, too, had come to him for a trial dose, and so they became the second and third human guinea pigs to experiment with the drug. They remained incredulous regarding the dosage right up to the moment of ingestion, but Herr Hofmann, insisting that the quantity he himself had taken was an overdose, gave his colleagues less than a third of that, sixty micrograms only, and yet both reported the most astonishing effects, seeing lights, colors, experiencing synesthesia and visual distortions, though neither suffered the terrifying visions Herr H. had summoned, nor the glorious ones either. Which Herr H. attributed to the reduced dosage. Still, the effects were beyond what anyone could have expected, and both men encouraged him to continue trials, which he did succeed in doing on separate occasions with two other volunteers from the chemistry department.
All this was very gratifying. She began to feel an attachment to the work she’d never experienced before because she’d been there from the very beginning, at his side, his helpmeet, and in a sense the compound was as much her child as his. Work, which had seemed so dull and repetitive, was suddenly absorbing, radiant even, so much so that she began to think she’d like to go back to school and become a chemist herself. Of course, she kept all this hidden from her mother, because her mother wouldn’t have approved and because LSD-25, as they were calling it in shorthand, was the secret sweet chemical bond between her and Herr H., and she valued that more than anything in the world.
Spring gave way to summer, the days collecting beyond the windows like so many invitations to another realm, each one softer and lovelier than the one before, and she and Herr H. worked at synthesizing, purifying, and crystallizing the product until it was as close to perfection as they could make it, and sometimes, when the mood was right, they took their lunch hour together on the patch of lawn out back of the building. It was during the second week of June—June the twelfth, actually, and she would never forget the date—that she approached him about something she’d been revolving in her mind for the longest time.
They were sitting side by side in the grass on the blanket he’d spread, casually chewing their sandwiches, books open before them, as relaxed with each other as—well, she didn’t want to push the simile because he was married and always would be married and she’d never be married to him, but it wasn’t like brother- and sisterhood either, and no one, least of all her mother, could ever know what she was feeling. At any rate, she took the last bite of her sandwich, chewed, swallowed, and screwed up her courage, sure he would deny her, say no, claim that she was a girl still and not a woman—not a woman at all, but a girl under her mother’s aegis—and the words were out before she could stop herself. “I want to be a guinea pig,” she said.
He turned his head and gave her a long look, as if he’d never seen her before—or no, as if he were seeing her suddenly in a whole new light. It took him a moment, his eyes fixed on hers, working things out in his mind, and then, his voice soft, he said, “What will your mother say?”
“I don’t care what she says.” She was conscious in the moment of a multiplicity of things, the way the light caught his eyes when he wasn’t wearing his glasses, the breeze, the smell of chemicals from the company’s smokestacks, two toddlers with their mother, a dog running free at the edge of the grass, clouds, shade, the world as it is.
“You mean you won’t tell her?”
“No, I’ll keep it a secret.” She hesitated. “Between you and me.”
He let out a laugh. “Right, and Professor Stoll, Professor Rothlin, all our colleagues, all their assistants, the janitorial staff, and, and—”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I want to be part of this.”
He shrugged. He was leaning back, bracing himself on both elbows so that she could see the muscles of his chest stand out against the fabric of his shirt. “Today?” he said. “Would you like to try it today—just a moderate dose, nothing like what I ingested, but more than Stoll and Rothlin and the others, say one hundred micrograms? Just to be sure you’re going to fully experience the effects?”
In answer, she just smiled.
It felt almost illicit, just the two of them there in the lab at four in the afternoon, he measuring out the dose and mixing it with water, just as he’d done two months earlier on the day she’d chased him down Bottmingenstrasse on her bicycle and gone into his house and seen him transformed. “Are you ready, Fräulein?” he asked, just as he’d asked on that chaotic day, the same words exactly, only now he was holding out the glass to her and he would be the observer and she the subject. Was she frightened? A little, she supposed. She couldn’t quite suppress the image of him as he lay there helpless on the sofa and how he’d cried out and how frightened she’d been, but she had confidence in him—he’d taken an enormous dose, an overdose, that was all . . . and if old men like Stoll and Rothlin could go ahead and take the drug, well, she could too.
She drank, conscious of his eyes on her. The lab was quiet. The sun, which had shone so brightly at lunch, had disappeared behind the clouds and the room darkened a shade. She gave him a smile and handed back the glass. “No taste at all,” she told him, and they were both smiling now.
“Good,” he said, “good. And please remember to record all your impressions and keep as accurate a timeline as you can. You shouldn’t feel anything for perhaps forty minutes to an hour or even longer, depending—”
“Depending on what?” Her smile vanished, just like the sun. It came to her—again, but thunderously now—that she’d just poisoned herself.
“Each person’s chemistry is different,” he said, studying her closely. They were standing there casually at the counter, as if they’d met at the bar of a hotel or a ski chalet in the Alps and weren’t in the office at all. “So, and you must know this from our animal trials, each individual’s reaction time—and the reaction itself—is going to be different. Especially with women. Women are different from men, I don’t have to tell you that, different in every way, and there’s no saying how you’ll process this . . .” He trailed off, and she wondered what she must have looked like just then, her limbs rigid, her face clenched, a shrill pharmaceutical tocsin clanging through her body. “Which won’t be a problem, Fräulein, not at all, so please don’t worry. The dose,” he said, “the dose is so very small, ja?”
She tried to smile, but her heart was in her throat: what had she done?
“Just think,” he was saying, and he had his hand at her elbow, leading her back to her desk, “you have a distinction now, you among all the other women in the world—you’re the first, Susi, the very first.”
He was right. He was always right. Her reaction was mild, to say the least. Within the hour she began to see colors in everything, an intensity of color she’d never dreamed was there, and things began to shimmer as if in a reflection off a wind-rippled pond, but it was pleasant, all pleasant, and more than that, beautiful beyond compare. At six, she insisted she was all right—and maybe she felt a little giggly, like a girl in a horde of girls at a school party, but that was all right too. “Are you sure, Fräulein?” he kept asking her when she told him she was perfectly capable of getting home under her own power and she kept saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” and giggling, and in the end—she was going to show him what she was made of—she wouldn’t even let him take her to the tram stop but managed everything on her own, even if the ticket taker’s face devolved into a clown’s mask and the woman behind her had a voice that came to her in the brightest colors, bright green, vernal green, banana yellow, a voice like a glade in the deepest jungle in a country far from her own. Then she was home and she was sitting down to the evening meal with her parents and her brothers and no one questioned her and no one knew that anything had changed at all. She didn’t see heaven, she didn’t see hell, there were no demons, there was no God, just . . . color, vivid jolting gorgeous color that took her up the stairs and into the enclosed nest of the bed in her room, where the ceiling came to life and all the stars burned right through the roof.
She took the drug twice more in the course of the next year and dutifully recorded her reactions, which were more or less the same each time and more or less pleasant—more pleasant than less, actually. Toward the end of that year she was in the grocer’s one evening when she ran into a boy from the neighborhood who’d been away in the army and just come home the day before. She hardly recognized him because he wasn’t a boy any longer but a man, and if he bore a resemblance to Herr Hofmann, if he was trim and neat in his uniform and wore wire-framed spectacles, all the better. Three months later he asked her to marry him and she gave her notice at Sandoz and never went back there again.
