J. B. Thompson

“I’m eating breakfast,” mumbled Titmarsh when he picked up the phone.

“Prunes?” queried the Authorial Rabbit.

“Certainly not,” cried Titmarsh. “I’m as regular as clockwork.”

“Hear them chime, those bowels of freedom.”

“Hilarious.”

The Authorial Rabbit began, not without craft, to introduce his subject. “When I was in Vienna . . . ”

“Ho, boy,” responded Titmarsh, an indication he had heard many of the AR’s Vienna stories.

“Breakfast was a semmel and coffee.”

“Semmel?”

“A distinctive Viennese small bread, a one–portion pleasure. Which reminded me of your fetish for masks.”

“Hey, what?”

“Had you heard of Ignaz Semmelweis?”

“Who?”

“Semmelweis. A man whose name is in translation ‘white semmel.'”

“A baker?”

“Actually no. A doctor and scientist who lived in Vienna in the middle of the 19th century.”

“His father was a baker.”

“No. Almost. A grocer.”

Pause on the line. Titmarsh is curious. “And the mask? When you think of semmels you remember masks?”

“Semmelweis was a hero, especially for women. Women died at a horribly high rate in childbirth in Vienna, indeed everywhere, at that time, of puerperal fever, and Semmelweis reduced that risk dramatically, for which he paid a terrible price.”

Titmarsh is all ears. Which the AR knows something about.

“Doctors in Vienna in those days didn’t pay enough attention to hygiene. They didn’t wash their hands as they went from one patient to another. Semmelweis had the inspired insight that careful hand washing would prevent death, and he was right.”

“So he was regarded as a hero.”

“No, he was regarded as a lunatic, the establishment scorned and scoffed. Handwashing! they cried. Absurd. We’ve never washed our hands like that and we never will.”

“I’m starting to get you. We’ve never worn masks and we never will.” People not willing to wear masks is one of Titmarsh’s most rage-inducing obsessions. “Virus — what virus? Or a mask will make it worse. Or it itches. Or it’s my constitutional right to not wear a mask, even if it kills me. If I am playing hockey or football, I wear a mask. If I dive, I wear a mask. If I am asked to protect myself, my family and my community, I won’t wear a damn mask.” His voice is rising.

The AR feared Titmarsh’s blood pressure but pressed on. “They — these good doctors — hounded Semmelweis until he had a nervous breakdown. He was incarcerated in an asylum where he was beaten by guards, developed infection from a wound, an infection of all things, and died.”

Titmarsh was off his breakfast now.

The AR continued. “Other countries were quite willing to take on Semmelweis’ idea — Germany, the UK — but Vienna, not for the longest time. When Semmelweis left the hospital where he’d been in charge of obstetrics, the death rate from the child birth fever soared again. The good Viennese doctors wanted scientific evidence, people not dying wasn’t good enough, and Semmelweis didn’t have the science yet. All he had was that the death rate went down when hands were washed and it went up when hands were not washed. Science was working on the problem but it was not until Pasteur and his germ theory that the evidence became clear.” The AR wondered if his friend would accelerate into full-blown rage.

He needn’t have worried, on this occasion.

“So sad, so profoundly sad. In his time, for him, and in our time. The human species,” said Titmarsh, subsiding into philosophical melancholy. “Anyway, how are you?”

The uptick in infections has slowed the AG down, to be sure. Wearing a mask over such a muzzle and such ears is not easy. Friends he had not seen for months. The easy freedom of walking and hopping everywhere gone. But, as he tells himself, this too will pass.

“Ok. Not bad. By the way, the author I mentioned a while ago, Anne Applebaum, has her new book out. Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends. It’s reviewed by Nick Cohen in the Guardian.”

“About craven collaborators then and now.”

“Yes, the intellectual elite, the first rank, disparaged; and the resentful second, including the kooks and crackpots, waiting to gain power, regardless of whom they sign on to.”

“Oh, well.”

“She’s was there — in Poland, she’s Polish — is here too, trained at Yale and Harvard. Saw the rise of the one-party state in Poland and Hungary first hand. Gets to see it all again.”

“We hope not, at least for long. Keep the faith.”

“Right. Will do. Careful with those prunes. Until next time.”