The Chosen Ones (15 page)

after alarming, violent incidents such as these. What mattered was the clockwork running of the institution. In one of the secretarial rooms, Marie Kölbl was typing out the standard letters to the families of the dead children. The letters had been dictated in good time. The door to Kölbl’s room was always kept closed and if the clatter of the typewriter ever stopped, it was only because she got up to open or close the window. Afterwards, the typing started again, sounding stronger or fainter, but it never stopped for any length of time.

But those miraculous young beings: what did the world look like to them, deep in the sleep of the drowned? Nurse Blei tells the following story: one evening, when she had just turned up for the night shift, the doors banged and strange voices were heard in the corridor. She went to look and saw Doctor Jekelius in the doorway to the main ward. He was dressed like an ordinary citizen in a coat and a hat. Two people stood next to him, a man and a woman, both upper-class types, Blei said, it was easy enough to spot. The woman’s first impulse was to cover her face with her hand to keep the smell at bay and Jekelius put his hand protectively on her arm.
Now, now, don’t worry
, he said. They had been drinking, the alcohol fumes hung like a cloud around them.
Where is the boy?
the man said impatiently. Doctor
Gross turned up shortly afterwards, so they must have phoned him. The smile on his face was the one he reserved for when he wanted everyone to know that he took no personal interest in what was going on but was present on professional grounds only. Jekelius said that Mr and Mrs whoever (Blei didn’t pick up their name) had decided that they would bring their son home
gegen Revers
– with a consent form – and that he, Jekelius, had granted them their wish. Even later, after she had grasped the context, Blei couldn’t stop being surprised that Jekelius had let her see him in that state, so obviously the worse for drink. However, Gross seemed not surprised in the slightest or, if he was, hid it well. He took the documents Jekelius gave him, started to look through them and said in an off-hand tone that Nurse Blei should go and dress the boy. The child weighed next to nothing in her hands and was so deeply sedated that he didn’t wake up even when she lifted him close to her face. His thin breath smelled slightly of ammonia. In the morning, when Blei went off duty, the bed was still empty but if Katschenka took note of this, she never showed it. It could be that, to her, the child had died the moment it arrived. An empty bed would anyway soon be filled by another severely ill child. All according to Jekelius’s orders.

The Drowned
   Just before Christmas, she is back at work in pavilion 17. As usual, Pelikan opens the door for her and, as usual, Felix is playing. But now he doesn’t turn to her when she sits down next to him. He still takes no notice when she strokes his hair and bends forward to whisper in his ear. He just plays more loudly then before, crashing down on the black keys so that the bones in her face feel like shearing and Nurse Sikora shouts from the corridor
WILL YOU STOP THAT INFERNAL …!
Sikora is on her way into the day room but stops on the threshold when she sees Blei. A false smile
spreads over her flat features. Nurse Blei’s little favourite hasn’t been a good boy recently, she says. Then, out comes a long tale of everything Felix has been up to while she was away. Spilled his food, made a noise in the day room, said very bad words to staff, even wandered around hitting other children in the face. All that is part of his routine now. Seems his evil spirit is getting out, Sikora says. One day, she placed him in solitary for a few days and it did him a lot of good. Isn’t that so, Felix? she asks, and pretends to pay attention while Felix becomes very ill at ease, twists and bends, and finally manages to tear himself free from Hedwig’s grip. Hedwig follows him. They sit together in a corner of the room. The boy called Pelikan listens, leaning against the wall. Can’t you hear the row upstairs? he says. Who’s making a row? Blei asks. The girls, Pelikan tells her. She can’t reply because Felix struggles to get away. Finally, she manages to catch his legs between her own so she can grab hold of his face and inspect it. The boy has sores in his mouth running from the corners of his lips upwards to the nostrils. His breath smells badly. She tries to force his jaws apart to see if his gums have become infected again. Then Nurse Sikora is back in the doorway. We have to tie him at night because he can’t keep his hands under control, he just scratches at the sores all the time, she explains. Perhaps it would’ve been better to cut his nails then, Nurse Blei says and holds up Felix’s dirty, uncared-for hands in the light. But Nurse Sikora sees no fingernails. Only one thing preoccupies her: the ineffectual hatred that, for some reason, she feels towards her colleague.

Cancelled Leave
   The number of children in the pavilion has grown a great deal since Matron had dispatched her to serve time in pavilion 15. Erna Storch tells her why. The reason is that the reform-school side of the institution is constantly sending their ‘hopeless
cases’ on to the clinic. Seemingly, Doctor Krenek thinks we’re more likely to succeed with the tasks they can’t manage over there, Nurse Storch says. They have also opened a new section for ‘unteachable’ girls on the second floor. These are the girls Pelikan is listening out for all the time. Most of the girls are there because they have failed to complete their duty-year, the
Pflichtjahr
, or tried to run away from foster families. Hedwig Blei’s ward is by now so short of space that some beds are placed in hallways and corridors, which tends to make the already tense children even more nervous. One of these displaced children, a boy, just lies on his back, staring into the distance. He refuses to lift his hand to take the mug of water she wants to give him, despite having normal motor control, and fixes his eyes on the wall clock as if his gaze is stuck to the hands. A somewhat undersized nine-year-old with scabies sores on his head – his name is Otto Semmler – potters around the ward all the time, looking for an adult hand to hold. If he doesn’t find anyone, or if Sikora or Storch slaps him or angrily pushes him away, he cries heart-rendingly. He doesn’t want to stay in his bed. Soon, Blei realises that she is accompanied by Otto wherever she goes. It feels like existing with one hand permanently tied behind your back. She wishes that someone would look after Felix, but who would that be? Caring for individual children is not part of anybody’s proper work. Whenever he is allowed to play the piano, he hammers the black keys as if they were nail heads and Nurse Sikora screams as if the nails were driven into her. One Sunday, Hedwig sees Mrs Keuschnig standing between the beds in the corridor, looking upset. She must have visited Felix, because she holds one of the black shoes.
What is this?
she asks, lifting the shoe by its laces with an expression of unspeakable disgust.
Are you preparing for his funeral already?
Mrs Keuschnig’s face is long and thin, with marked folds on her cheeks. She gives the impression of
someone who has spent her entire life exercising self-control. Now, when she bursts into tears, her eyes flood. With tears trickling down her cheeks, she says that she cannot stand watching what the clinic is doing to her son, their mismanagement means that he has lost ten kilograms in half a year and now she is told that it is Felix’s own fault that he doesn’t eat enough even though the doctor has made a note about a big sore inside his mouth which, it seems, has been caused by malnutrition. She says that she doesn’t dare tell her husband about the bad treatment of their son for fear of how he will react. In letter after letter, she has begged Doctor Jekelius to let Felix come home over Christmas, at least for a few days. It surely can’t be impossible? Just look at how crowded the ward is. Besides, Felix always gets better when he has been at home for a while. But Doctor Jekelius has not replied and every time she has tried to phone him she has been told that he is away on business or engaged with someone else. Hedwig Blei is tempted to tell Mrs Keuschnig that if she wants her son back, she had better be rich and, preferably, have a husband with a top position in the party – maybe her husband isn’t enough of a high-up? Instead, she promises to try to put in a good word for her the next time Doctor Jekelius comes to the ward. But it takes a very long time before he visits pavilion 17 again. Meanwhile, the rumours about his out-of-office activities grow wilder and wilder. Several children, some of whom had already been passed for treatment, have been discharged between one day and the next, or else ‘collected’ from the clinic on unclear premises. One might even get the idea Jekelius is running another clinic on his own, Nurse Mayer suggests. On the side. Where he goes on all his ‘business trips’. Another notion of Mayer’s is that Jekelius was ordered to present himself to Professor Gundel, the city councillor, and that Gundel proceeded to tell Jekelius that his behaviour has attracted unfavourable attention in
many quarters, all the way up to the Department of State in Berlin. Mayer claims that she has reason to believe they will ‘see the back of Jekelius’ before the year is out. But when Jekelius finally does turn up on the ward, he seems very far from a broken, haunted man. His movements have the usual, calculated arrogance. He progresses through the ward, followed by Sister Bertha, Doctor Gross and Edeltraud Baar, the psychologist, and if that smile had not been glued to the face of Gross, that exaggeratedly broad, jovial smiling at all and everyone in order to distance himself from his surroundings, one might have thought that nothing had changed. This time, the round stops for a long time at young Keuschnig’s bed. Doctor Gross peers into the boy’s mouth and the two doctors exchange a few brief sentences; but when Jekelius then turns to Blei it is not to explain a planned intervention:

I gather the boy’s mother has been running around the ward. I expect Nurse Blei to keep her at arm’s length in the future. For your information, Nurse Blei, from now on all leave for this boy is cancelled.

Doctor Gross, who stands close to his superior, looks as if the two of them together have succeeded in some great venture.

It’s these marginal cases. If we give up on them we might as well admit defeat altogether.

This is that last thing she will ever hear Doctor Jekelius say as director. When she comes back from her Christmas break a few days into the New Year, she learns that Jekelius has been called up and has joined the army, and that Doctor Jokl is acting medical director until a permanent solution has been found. Meanwhile, Felix’s condition has become much worse. The swelling that deforms his jaw is now so large he can hardly swallow. He lies on his back and breathes through his mouth, and the open wound inside his mouth must be dreadfully painful because he is whimpering and mewling,
and rubbing the back of his head and the side of his face against the bed even though they have tied him down. She knows that they will try to transfer him to pavilion 15 as soon as possible and if he arrives there in the condition he is in now, he won’t leave the place alive. On the Sunday, when she is on night duty, she phones Doctor Türk who is on call that evening to tell the doctor that the boy, whose health has declined rapidly over a short time, now has a high fever. She adds that it might be a symptom of sepsis. Half an hour later, Doctor Türk arrives, at first sceptical about the need to examine Felix at all. Have you managed to make him take any fluids? she asks. Not really, Blei replies. He can’t swallow. Doctor Türk produces a spatula and a torch. While she roots around in the boy’s mouth, Hedwig tells her about the jaw operation Felix underwent just before he arrived at Spiegelgrund, quoting his mother’s description. It’s all in his case notes, she points out. Doctor Türk glances quickly at the notes Blei hands her. Would it be possible to see if they can receive him in pavilion 3? One section of pavilion 3 is set aside for the reform school’s casualty reception and sickbay. I shall have a word with Doctor Hübsch tomorrow, Doctor Türk says. I can’t make that decision. Next morning, Felix is moved to the ward in pavilion 3. Two male nursing assistants carry him between them. Blei accompanies them, and carries the black shoes, the only things in his bedside table (apart from the regulation towel, soap and toothbrush). A nurse called Marie Darnhofer works in pavilion 3. Hedwig now knows that Marie had been at the special children’s care home in Pressbaum while Felix was there. Felix recognises her at once and, for the first time in many weeks, a smile spreads over his swollen face. Two days later, Felix has surgery and when Nurse Darnhofer phones to say that he is out of the anaesthesia, Hedwig goes across to sit with him for a while. Most of his face is covered in a big bandage
with only his eyes and the tip of his nose showing. He can’t talk but no longer casts his head about to distract himself from pain. They stay silent. She plays with her fingertips on his arm.
Fuchs du hast die Gans gestohlen
, she plays.
Gib sie wieder her
. After a while, Felix plays along on top of his blanket, using his free arm.

Deserters
   The next time Hedwig Blei can take time off to drop in, two soldiers have been placed in the same ward as Felix. It looks quite strange. The small boy with his chin in bandages bedded down between two grown men who are far too large for their beds. One soldier is asleep with his back turned to the ward and snores fit to make the walls shake. Nurse Marie says that several of her colleagues have asked to be moved here to nurse war casualties. Their applications stress their patriotic zeal but secretly they all hope to find the right man. Marie laughs and Hedwig realises how wonderfully easy it is to talk to Marie. Here in the sickbay there is none of the hostility that makes working in pavilion 17 so grim, what with the busily gossip-mongering Nurse Sikora and Nurse Storch, her puffed-up companion who snoops everywhere and threatens with the sack anyone who doesn’t donate to Winter Aid. Hedwig Blei now and then gives herself errands on other wards where the war-wounded men have been accommodated. Most of patients are young and have been diagnosed with various battle-induced neurotic conditions, which makes them, in the eyes of Wehrmacht officialdom, a bunch of defeatists and deserters, though defeatism isn’t what first comes to mind when you see them, often covered in bandages, some with facial burns or shrapnel wounds. Two of the patients are in wheelchairs after having had both legs amputated. One of them, just a lad, with a wide face and chiselled features, reminds her of her brother. If Nico had lived with his legs blown off and his crushed pelvis, maybe
he too would have been forced to stay here. The thought makes her feel sick at heart. The two wheelchair-bound men have been joined by two other patients, who have rigged up a card table between them. When she comes in, all four interrupt their game and their eyes follow her. She smiles at them but they don’t return her smile, only stare as if their eyes can’t quite take in what they see. On her way back, she spots Felix out walking in his black shoes. He is testing himself, all alone on the small lawn behind the pavilion, he takes one step forward, stops, then a couple of sideways steps, then one more forward. He reminds her of a chess piece moving on a very large board. Between black and white squares. Afterwards, when she sits by his bed, he points to his mouth to show her that he is hungry. Then he asks for his mother. And, then, for his piano.