Alphabet House (12 page)

Then came the heat. And with the heat, all the changes.

The nurses exchanged their knee-length stockings for small, white ankle socks.

The smells in the ward developed. Every time the swing door was pushed, air that was heavy with moisture streamed into the ward from the lavatories and washroom at the end of the room. This caused Vonnegut to send for an SS private who’d been a carpenter, who planed one of the windows so enthusiastically that fresh air streamed into the room and diluted all the smells, whether the window was wide open or shut.

All the other windows were screwed firmly into their frames.

The period of constant bird twittering under the eaves a floor and a half above them had already passed. Long streaks of indeterminable filth on the windowpanes still bore witness thereof.

Vonnegut had stopped looking through the casualty lists in the newspapers. All too often he’d suddenly sat stock still, mumbling to himself. Now he settled for laughing over ‘Süss, the Jew’ and other small newspaper satires, or solving the crossword before anyone else.

Several of the patients were so noticeably better that it couldn’t be more than a matter of weeks before they’d be sent back to their units.

All forms of sick leave had been cancelled indefinitely for patients belonging to groups Z15.1, L15.1, vU15.1 and vU15.3. All these categories were represented in their ward. They comprised most kinds of mental illness, of either a temporary or chronic nature. In times of peace such illnesses would mean automatic exemption or light duties. No one ever told them what the individual designations actually stood for, and as time went by no one took notice of these categories anyway. All that remained of the letter/number combinations was the nickname the nurses had given the ward.

They called it the Alphabet House.

The main object of the hospital treatment was to make lower-ranking officers well enough to know in which direction to order their companies to point their weapons, and make higher-ranking officers capable of assessing why they should point them at all.

But something more was expected of this special ward.

The army surgeon, Manfried Thieringer, had already had to report twice to the local
gauleiter
who, as representative of the authorities in Berlin, had been ordered to achieve some real results. He’d been told that the welfare of certain officers was being closely monitored by the supreme command and that he would be made personally responsible if these excellent soldiers did not get well at a reasonable rate.

Manfried Thieringer loved to repeat these reminders to his subordinates and twirled his moustache as he inspected these so-called ‘excellent’ patients who could still scarcely distinguish their own slippers from their neighbour’s. ‘But a cure is a cure,’ he remarked. No matter what even Himmler himself said.

James’ powers of concentration deteriorated week by week.

The first to disappear were all the details that spiced his flights of fancy and gave the characters in his stories personality and life. Then chunks of the plot vanished, making the deterioration of his mind evident.

James had considered not taking the pills countless times. Those potions that dulled him, yet made life easier to endure. If he threw them on the floor he would run considerable risk of being discovered. The daily cleaning was adequate, if not thorough. If he were caught taking them out to the lavatory, there could be consequences that were not unpredictable. There weren’t many other possibilities.

And then of course there was Petra.

When it came down to it, Sister Petra was the real reason why he made no attempt to avoid swallowing the pills when she placed them carefully on his tongue and put her face close to his.

Her breath was sweetly feminine.

Inevitably she disturbed his thoughts. She was his enemy, but also his benefactor and saviour. So he had to swallow the pills in order not to get her into trouble.

So long as things were as they were, escape was out of the question. The risk that the malingerers might discover something was always present. James felt pinned down. Discovery would mean instant death. Kröner, Lankau and Schmidt had already struck twice. The first time was when Kröner strangled James’ neighbour in order to take over his bed.

The second time had been less than a week ago.

A new patient had been transferred from a normal ward with a hole in his leg and a short circuit in his brain. He’d lain sighing all day long on his bed beside Calendar Man.

There had been reports on Vonnegut’s radio of such serious developments on the Western Front that the one-armed orderly had rushed into the ward in order to pass on his information to the junior resident doctor, who immediately flung his papers onto the nearest bed and followed Vonnegut back to the guardroom. Later in the day came the rumours. During the course of the evening the rumours had solidified into verified reports and reached the ward in the form of the nurses’ chatter and the porters’ mumbling.

‘They’ve landed in France!’ Vonnegut finally shouted. That gave James a start. The thought of Allied troops now fighting a few hundred miles away from them, with the sole object of advancing closer and closer, made him feel like weeping.
That
would be something for you to know, Bryan!
he thought.
Maybe it would make you relax
.

As James was about to turn his face to the wall, the new patient diagonally opposite him began to laugh. Finally his hysterical laughter made the bed shake next to James. It was Kröner’s. The latter pushed his blanket down over his shins, got up slowly and stared across at the presumptuous man. James felt Kröner’s eyes on him, causing a flash of heat to rise inside him
and recede again quicker than it came. The laughter stopped by itself but Kröner didn’t lie down again.

During the next couple of days the malingerers took turns monitoring the new arrival. When he was fed, when he sat on the bedpan, when they changed him and wiped his body with alcohol. The simulants watched over him in all ways possible. The whispering in the dark ceased, making the nights unpredictable. On the fourth night Lankau got up and walked over and killed the new arrival almost noiselessly. The muffled snap of the neck vertebrae was fainter than when the idiot patient at the other end of the room cracked his knuckles. Then they dragged him down to the window the SS soldier had planed so nicely and pushed him out, head first.

It took less than three minutes, from the moment the guards outside started shouting, for one of the security officers to be standing in the ward. All the lights were switched on. The officer rushed furiously to and fro between the window and the duty nurse who stood wringing her hands. His anger knew no bounds. The window was to be nailed down immediately and whoever had made it openable would be called to account.

Then the officer walked up and down the rows of beds, inspecting each patient in turn. James stared him straight in the face, visibly shocked as he had reason to be, and made the officer pause for a moment.

The chief security officer entered the ward with sleep in his eyes, closely followed by two weary SS officers who could hardly stand on their feet. The army surgeon turned up, too, but didn’t react to the accusations awaiting him. ‘The window will be nailed up tomorrow,’ he said curtly, turned his back on his interrogators and strolled back to his quarters.

Just before the light was switched off Bryan woke up from his stupor following the morning’s shock treatment and looked around dully. James closed his eyes instantly.

Later that night the whispering started up as before, bringing with it the familiar state of uneasiness. The malingerers
exchanged remarks briefly. Kröner had recognised the dead man and had all too clearly seen himself be recognised. He praised Lankau, but added dryly that in the future they’d better find other methods if new ‘problems’ turned up in the ward.

‘But why?’ Lankau asked. ‘So what if they’ve nailed the window shut? What should prevent a suicidal patient from flinging himself out of a closed window?’ he chuckled. But Kröner didn’t laugh.

This was a worrying development. Bryan would resume his small signs and attempts to contact James before long.

Schmidt and Lankau would continue to sleep well through the daytime, but Kröner showed no signs of letting himself be caught off guard.

This was something Bryan would have to realise.

The nurses had been smiling at Bryan all morning.

Pock-Face nodded eagerly as he passed by with his overloaded linen trolley and pointed towards the swing door. A deputation of nurses, of whom Bryan recognised only a couple, walked stiffly up to him and promptly began singing right in his face. Their enthusiasm and volume were worthy of a Wagnerian choir. Nice it wasn’t.

Bryan drew back, hoping they’d go away. Instead one of the older ones bent over the bed, pressing the palms of her hands to her bosom. She sang like a baritone. Bryan was afraid she might leap right into bed with him. A couple of patients clapped and the chief nursing officer handed him a small package beautifully wrapped in tissue paper. She waved impatiently behind her and a paltry brown object appeared in a nursing aide’s outstretched hands. As far as Bryan could tell by the frayed border and wavy surface, the object was a piece of cake adorned with a tiny swastika. Everyone around him was beaming. Later the head doctor arrived, looked covetously at the cake, and gave Bryan a friendly smile for the first time. His teeth were rotten.

Bryan lay back in his bed, staring uneasily at the dry piece of pastry. He was the focal point of another man’s birthday. The first to be celebrated in the ward.

It hadn’t been long since James’ twenty-second birthday, which had passed by in silence for obvious reasons. Bryan had tried to give him a little nod, but James had just lain there, staring into thin air.

James had been lying like this most of the time for the past couple of months. It was becoming more and more difficult to imagine how he was going to help carry out their escape plans.

It was understandable if James succumbed to melancholy on his birthday. But what about the other days? Why did James isolate himself like that? How much longer was Bryan going to have to wait?

Bryan nibbled gingerly at the cake and gave a bit to his neighbour, who smacked his heels together as usual and devoured it as if it had been an order. It could only be a matter of days before the man would be sent back to hell. The fool was looking forward to it and he stood for most of the day with his back to the ward, staring out the window at the undulating green landscape beyond the watchtowers.

A sound of rumbling came from the north just as Pock-Face and his broad-faced companion were wheeling the food trolleys into the room. It didn’t last long, but it was enough to make an experienced RAF officer take notice. Bryan glanced at James, who was lying with his hands behind his neck.

The muffled sounds came from quite a distance. Baden-Baden, some people whispered. Others mentioned Strasbourg. Finally Vonnegut pointed out of the window with his iron hook and shouted the names of both towns at a cleaning woman who was lying in the middle of the floor, scrubbing between the chairs as if nothing in the world had anything to do with her.

Suddenly the noise became much louder and several of the patients stood up and watched the flashes from the anti-aircraft guns become brighter as daylight dwindled. Strasbourg burned the whole night, casting a faint aura of reddish-yellow light into the summer night.

They’re getting closer
, thought Bryan, and prayed for his friends in the air, for himself, and for James.
Next time it may be Freiburg. Then we’ll make our move, James!

One of the patients who up until now had been lying like a stalk of limp asparagus began waltzing around, closely followed by a thin, stiff-necked fellow patient who preferred to turn his whole body rather than just his head. These Siamese twins had been standing at Calendar Man’s window all morning, gazing patiently and wordlessly across the valley as if something more were under way. When the blaze over Strasbourg was at its peak and the explosions echoed faintly from the mountain ridge, the
thin man took the other one under the arm and rested his head gently on his shoulder.

Down at the other end of the ward Calendar Man returned from one of his rare visits to the lavatory to find the Siamese twins with their heads stuck between the window bars. Growling, he tried in vain to drag the thin man away from his turf by the knees.

Bryan noticed them and began leaning against the window as well. The twins had heard correctly. There was in fact something in the air. The quiet hum bounced off the mountain and was sucked up by the trees.
They’re headed south. To Italy, maybe
, Bryan thought, staring across at James.

A few seconds later the twins gave a start. The dull explosions came from behind, washed over the hospital and struck the wall of rock half a mile away, to return as hollow echoes that could hardly be distinguished from one another. The planes must have come from the west in a line south of them. The formations may have moved in over Colmar, or else the wind had been toying with the sound and tricked Bryan.

At any rate the bombardment of Freiburg was now a fact.

‘
Schnell
, schnell
,’ the nurses urged, without displaying outward signs of surprise or fear, let alone panic. They let the few unconscious patients remain where they were. The rest were down the stairs in a couple of minutes.

From outside came the sound of air-raid sirens, hasty crunching steps and banging doors. A guard stood at the entrance to the yard, pointing his weapon so that no one could be in doubt that they were to walk past him and follow the steel banister down into the Alphabet House basement. The mentally disturbed men kept pushing from behind. The explosions and turbulent atmosphere bringing to mind the very experiences that had driven them insane.

The basement was divided into two sections. On the left, a number of cells were furnished with grey steel doors from which came a constant stream of laments and muffled screams.
A single door on the right led into a room half the size of their own ward. With no chance of moving back towards James, Bryan was propelled forward until he found himself squeezed up in the far corner while scores of patients from other wards pushed in through the narrow door opening.

James stood under one of the faint, flickering ceiling lamps in the middle of the room, gazing emptily into space with Pock-Face’s arm resting on his shoulder. Several of the patients with physical wounds from the neighbouring block were in pain, due in part to their upright position, and were trying to procure enough space to enable them to squat on the floor or at least avoid being shoved.

The staff were busy calming the most dissatisfied and agitated cases and making sure no one was trampled on. A young orderly gazed despondently into the air, breathing heavily and oblivious of the sweat trickling down his face. Perhaps he had some relatives in the thick of the bombardment.

Bryan rocked backwards and forwards, humming like James had done at first. With every movement he managed to create a slight opening in front of him into which he could step without protests from those around him.
Keep going, air-raid siren, keep
going
, Bryan said to himself, rocking and humming as he edged his way slowly towards James. The ceiling light had stopped flickering. The noises from outside merged into one.

A patient seized Bryan’s shirt and began to spit a lot of nonsensical abuse at him. His eyes were heavy and his grip limp. Bryan couldn’t comprehend how he had the energy to be so aggressive. He twisted the man’s thumb out of joint and glanced over at James.

The look that met him was one he had never seen in James’ face before. It was neither hateful nor angry, but dismissive, threatening, murderous.

Bryan suddenly stopped humming and snorted heavily. James looked away. Then Bryan took another couple of steps forward and the look immediately returned. Pock-Face glanced down over Bryan’s neck and his eyes followed the direction in which Bryan’s
nose was pointing. Bryan had no idea if he’d managed to look away in time.

Until he was lying in his bed once more he couldn’t shake the feeling of constantly being watched.

The time spent in the basement had given him a lot to think about. Such as the screams coming from the small cells alongside the passage, which everyone could hear but no one paid any attention to, even as they left the air-raid shelter again. Who could become like that? What had happened to them? Was it possible, after all, that Dr Holst and Manfried Thieringer didn’t really know the number of shocks a human brain could stand over the course of time? Or was this the punishment that awaited James and Bryan if they were found out? Would they become like those wretches in the cellar?

And then there were the looks that James and Pock-Face gave him.

In the evening Pock-Face and his broad-faced companion were as smiling and solicitous as ever when they dealt out the plates and cutlery. Even though the latter almost always slept most of the day, he nevertheless toddled around the corridors at mealtimes and fetched the food pails from the kitchen a couple of blocks away. Everyone smiled happily at the two of them as they struggled past with their heavy burden.

That evening Pock-Face winked to his partner. It was scarcely visible, but Bryan saw it. At the same moment he turned to look at Bryan. Bryan was caught off-guard as he stared at Pock-Face, but had the resourcefulness to let the spit that had assembled in front of his tongue slide out of his open mouth, filling the cracks in his lips and the cleft in his chin with foamy saliva.

Then the giant straightened the plate in front of him and ladled another spoonful of sliced sausage up beside the chunks of bread. The lucky patient tried ungratefully to avoid this extra ration, but Pock-Face didn’t notice. He saw only the saliva on Bryan’s chin.

Bryan had learned a few words of German since he’d landed in the hospital, even though their meaning was not always clear. But with the help of guesswork, tone and emphasis and the facial expressions of the speakers, he managed to figure out what mental state his fellow patients were in, and to a certain extent the doctors’ expectations regarding his recovery.

This insight demanded great concentration, which was not Bryan’s strongest point during the shock treatment phase. When the first few days of dullness had passed, the surrounding world reappeared in a series of distorted, slow-motion images.

Bryan knew he had to avoid looking at Pock-Face. If his suspicions were correct, there were things going on in the ward that he did not yet understand, things he had to watch out for. Pock-Face would often bend over him while he was dozing. The big man kept changing his tone of voice and he scared Bryan out of his wits with his friendly chatter and jovial smile. Bryan didn’t understand a thing.
Make sure you don’t give yourself away
, he admonished himself, when he felt the giant’s breath on his face.
Pull yourself together!
he scolded, struggling to shake off his stupor.

The atmosphere in the hospital had changed since the bombardment of Freiburg. Several of the young orderlies had been sent to the front or to help with reconstruction work in the surrounding towns. The workload in the wards had therefore increased as the number of wounded arriving through the gates began to far exceed the number that were driven out again. It had become necessary to incorporate the gym as an emergency ward. It could only be a matter of time before it was the Alphabet House’s turn. The wounded always came first.

Worry was reflected in the faces of the personnel. Many of them had lost members of their family during the bombardment. Little Petra crossed herself fifteen times a day and seldom said a word to anyone but James. The smiles and the little kindnesses were now few and far between.

Everyone just did his or her duty.