The Chosen Ones (2 page)

Portrait of a Father
   Eugen Ziegler took a great deal of pride in his appearance. Before going to bed, he smeared nut oil into his strong, dark hair and kept it in place by pulling a ladies’ stocking over his head. Whenever he might be coming to stay the night, Leonie always put a towel on the pillow to protect it from the oil. To Adrian, a towel on the pillow at bedtime meant that his father was on his way home. Though the towel on his father’s pillow was often untouched, he remembers how hopeful he would feel every time and then how overwhelmingly disappointed, because his father was a great one for making generous promises about the special things he would bring next time he came home. A toy car, perhaps, or a
steely marble or a collection of colourful bottle labels that he had showed Adrian once, promising that, next time, he’d have got hold of another collection just like it for his boy. Then next time, and the next and next again. At times, if and when his father did come home, it could be grim. He often arrived so late at night that Adrian was asleep and never heard the noise of the door slamming. In the morning, his mother was lying half on top Eugen’s body as if she had tried to wrestle him down during the night or as if something inside her had broken and left her unable to move away on her own. Eugen Ziegler kept very quiet about himself and his relatives, which was strange for someone usually so cocksure and boastful. He had told Adrian that the name
Ziegler
had to do with his descent from one of the thousands of Czech labourers who had travelled to Wien to labour in the brick works – the Ziegelbrenners – without whom no houses could have been built in this city. Or so he said. Ziegler became his name because he was a Czech, and moulding and firing bricks was what the Czechs did. It didn’t take Adrian long to realise that this was no more than a tale. Sometimes, his father would speak of his work as a handyman in a railway station somewhere in eastern Slovakia, and how he had just happened to get on a train to Donetsk in Ukraine where he got himself a job at a steel mill and stayed for years. The revolution had just ended and thousands volunteered to go to Russia because they were fired up by Lenin. I’ve always been a communist at heart, Eugen Ziegler would say, beating his breast. This was sheer bombast. Ziegler had no heart but reckoned he could get away with pretending that he did or, at least, that being so handsome would make up for the defect. As Auntie Magda kept saying, Eugen’s looks made women turn their heads. Well,
a certain kind
of woman, Auntie Emilia would add. When Adrian asked her if his mother was one of these women, Auntie Emilia told him that Eugen had been
different in those days. But if Adrian went on to ask more about what he had been like, in
those days
, the answers became vague and muddled because one wasn’t to speak about what had been. Still, it was fact that Eugen Ziegler spoke Russian, so there might have been a grain of truth in the story about running off to Donetsk. Once, he and Adrian almost paid with their lives for his language skills. It happened in the autumn of 1939, just weeks after Eugen had collected Adrian from Mödling and they were planning to start a new life. They lived in the 3rd Bezirk, on Erdbergstrasse, which is only a few blocks away from Rochusmarkt. Every day, Eugen would go to the pub to negotiate business deals and, every night, his oldest son Adrian was told to go and walk him home. On the slow, unsteady way back to Erdbergstrasse, Eugen, who was usually dead-drunk, would go on about how Wien was no longer the city it once was, the streets were crawling with
Piefkes
, he said, traitors and Nazi swine, and, once, when he saw two of them in Wehrmacht uniforms on the square at Rochusmarkt, he swayingly pulled up in front of them and, before Adrian had time to react, let out a stream of Russian abuse, all presumably meaningless to the soldiers. What they did grasp was that this man spoke Russian.
Spitzel
, a fucking spy, Adrian heard one of them snarl as he whipped the rifle off his back. Adrian grabbed his father’s arm and managed to drag him behind one of the remaining market stalls where they crouched, squeezed tightly together, and heard the two soldiers run past, rifles rattling against the buckles of their Sam Browns, the heels of their boots thumping on the cobbles, and then Eugen pulled his fingers through his hair and turned his face, stinking of alcoholic fumes, to Adrian and hissed:

It would take six long years before the Nazis were run out of Wien but when it finally happened, a new life also opened up for Eugen Ziegler, incredible as it may sound. Earlier, his business deals had to be managed hand to mouth. ‘Business’ had always been hugely important for him. No day would pass without his doing deals and Adrian couldn’t remember him speaking about anything else. Much later, Adrian would recognise more than a little of this in himself. My father, he said, was incapable of living with what was closed or already decided or concluded in some way. He existed in the present and for the promise of something to come. When the business was done and he was left facing the results, so many tons of brown coal or cubic metres of logs, he had no idea how to handle the goods he had acquired, or even how to transport the stuff. When he turned up at home, it was never to see me or Helmut or even our mother, whatever he might claim at the time, but to persuade Uncle Ferenc to fund the delivery of his brown coal on time or the down-payment on something he was after, Adrian said, and the rows with my mother broke out every time because he kept trying it on with Florian or Ferenc, and Leonie refused to allow either of her brothers to do business with Eugen. You don’t know what you’re doing, she would say. Leonie, who always stepped into the breach, was the one who got hit. When Eugen Ziegler beat up his woman, he went about it in a properly systematic way. First, everyone else was ordered to leave the flat. They gathered in the yard to wait while the screaming Leonie was hauled from wall to wall. The punishment could last from about twenty minutes to more than an hour, with increasingly long breaks in between bouts. Then the beating seemed to be over, until they heard a terrible scream and it started all over again. If in the end Eugen was too drunk to storm out in a rage, he collapsed exhausted in a corner while Leonie limped around, picking things
up and tidying as always. Adrian remembered the time when his father had ordered a schnitzel and a beer to be brought from the restaurant across the street. Abusing Leonie must have made him hungry. Without a word, the table was laid with a white tablecloth and they all stood around watching the head of the household eat his supper. He ate as methodically as he beat his woman, but something about the way he brought fork and glass to his lips showed that he was out of his head with drink. Before going away, he emptied the coffee tin of the money Leonie and Ferenc had saved up for the rent. He left afterwards, without a word to anyone.

I know it’s no fault of yours, Mrs Dobrosch, the landlord, Mr Schubach, used to say when Leonie went to see him the next morning and, with an ingratiating smile on her lips, asked him to be allowed to wait with the rent. It’s that man Ziegler, a bastard who doesn’t know how to behave decently. But, you know, this can’t go on.

Foster Home
   And they were evicted in the end, on a day in May 1935. Adrian remembers that it poured with rain. Ferenc and Florian had carried the sticks of furniture the family still owned down to the yard: Leonie’s bed, the bed all the children had slept on in turn, and the much-hammered kitchen table, always glued together again by Florian; the chairs, and the wardrobe for Leonie’s dresses. She had packed Laura’s, Adrian’s and Helmut’s clothes into a large suitcase. They had nothing to cover their things with and it rained so hard that the drops bounced many centimetres up in the air when they hit the wooden surfaces. Adrian still remembers this. Their neighbours had come out to watch from the galleries outside the flats. And the boys with whom he and Helmut used to drift around the streets. Now, they stood still and silent, just staring. Next to them, their fathers in their vests, leaning uncaringly against the railings with thin fags
squeezed flat between their fingers. Everyone was waiting for Eugen to drive into the yard in the lorry he claimed to have got the use of, but he didn’t come, with or without a lorry, and finally Leonie had had enough of being stared at, told her children to come along and walked away. Laura went to stay with Auntie Emilia, who in the nick of time had managed to rent a room in a flat on Taborstrasse. Adrian and Helmut were led by their mother to the children’s home called the Zentralkinderheim on Lustkandlgasse. She told them afterwards that she nearly fainted on the way there and simply had to sit down on the pavement outside the entrance to a railway station, the Franz Josefs Bahnhof. A man had come along to ask if the lady was feeling unwell and then he fetched a glass of water for her from a nearby café. Which was the only ounce of kindness anyone showed me during that entire time, his mother said. He can’t remember any of it and has little memory of what it was like in the Lustkandlgasse institution, despite he and Helmut spending almost all of the summer there. He stayed close to his little brother all the time, in the playground and when the food was served. Everybody liked little Helmut, who was blond and merry.
Ein hübsches Kind
. The nursery staff was keen for them to wash properly and, one day, they were helped to dress neatly and comb their hair before being brought into a large room with walls covered in white and black tiles. There were tall benches along the walls and, on these benches, children stood lined up. He and Helmut were to climb up onto a bench and Adrian was told to hold his little brother’s hand tightly and wait obediently for
his turn
. Suddenly, the room filled with strangers. He was so scared his legs felt like jelly and his one thought was that he mustn’t pee himself now that all these high-ups were around. The strangers walked slowly along the benches and examined the children carefully. One of the ladies who stopped in front of Adrian and Helmut wore a red
dress with a white lace collar. She scrutinised Helmut from top to toe and turned to the nurse:

That was that. He and Helmut went with the red lady for a ride on the 71 tram. It was August and he was enjoying the warm wind that blew in through the half-open windows when, after a while, he became baffled by the oddly familiar street outside. Then it dawned on him: the tram was going along Simmeringer Hauptstrasse. This was literally home from home. He even caught a quick glimpse of the greengrocer, Mr Gabel, keeping an eye on the fruit boxes he put out on the pavement every morning. Mrs Haidinger, the lady in the red dress, was sitting opposite him and, as soon as she saw him turn to look out, she reached across the centre aisle and twisted his head to make him look straight ahead. Afterwards, she didn’t take her eyes off him for a second, as if she was worried that he would run away at the next stop or maybe do something worse, like jump at her throat. At close quarters, Mrs Haidinger looked rather less impressive than she had done in the tiled room. Below the hem of her red dress her legs were big and knobbly, and when she smiled, her closely packed, short white teeth reminded Adrian of a crocodile. She acted differently with Helmut, touching him all the time, patting his blond curls, and when they stepped off at Zentralfriedhof to change trams, she went into a shop near the cemetery gates to buy her new little boy a bar of Bensdorp chocolate that cost ten
groschen
. Obviously, Adrian got nothing
because he was so ugly. They got off at the Kaiserebersdorf stop and took a shortcut across the fields and deserted building sites. That way, it was only a ten-minute walk to the Haidingers’ house. Over on the far side of the fields, you could see the jagged outline of the chimneys of Schwechat and when the wind came from that direction it carried the rich scent of malt from the breweries. Mrs Haidinger lived in a large bungalow built to house two families. Mr and Mrs Haidinger, together with her parents, stayed in the rooms on the left, and on the right were her brother Rudolf Pawlitschek and his family. The two lines of the clan were feuding and Mrs Haidinger’s notion of bringing back a couple of foster children did nothing to improve the atmosphere. Mr Pawlitschek was a cripple. Just below his shoulder, where his left arm should have begun, was nothing but a small flap of skin. It might be because he wasn’t
serviceable
, as Mrs Haidinger put it, that he was such an angry, bitter man. He called the children
mongrels
and did everything he could to make them feel worthless and rejected. Adrian was set to work from his first day in the Haidinger household. The large back garden included a barn with pens for cows and goats, and a hen house and rabbit hutches. Adrian had to collect greens for the rabbits, clean dung from the coops and hutches, then scrub them with soda. The goats had to be tethered and moved on when they had stripped the patch of land within reach. If Mr Haidinger needed to water his lettuces, onions, strawberries and tomatoes, Adrian was to haul buckets of water from the well and barrow them to the right plot. He was never paid any wages for his labour. Even though he shared a bedroom with his little brother, they didn’t see much of each other. While Adrian worked, Helmut accompanied Mrs Haidinger on her visits to relatives and friends and brought back gifts, new toys or chocolates from the Konsum. Much later, Adrian realised that the city council in Wien made large payments to foster parents who gave
the children the
right kind of home
. The benefits not only covered Mrs Haidinger’s outlays for board and lodging of both children but also left her quite enough to spend on new clothes for Helmut,
who grew so awfully quickly
, and probably on quite a few outfits for herself. Years later, the thought of this still upset Adrian very much. If all that money was there for the asking, he said to his mother, why not give some of it to you so we could have grown up at home? But his mother only shrugged helplessly in the rather childish way she had adopted of late and replied that she really couldn’t say. But perhaps the authorities had decided to give you just one chance in life to bring up your children the right way, and perhaps she had squandered hers when they had been forced to carry their belongings down into the yard and Mr Schubach had had thrown them out and left them all in the rain while their neighbours lined the galleries, smoking and watching the spectacle.