The Chosen Ones (22 page)

On the Run
   To escape is one thing but to stay alive on the run is another. While Adrian had been sharpening his secret weapon in the institution, he had made no plan, only known that he wanted to get home to his mother. Now he had to face the fact that he had no idea how to find her, that he didn't know where she lived or what she did. Maybe he would aim for the 11th Bezirk, he thought. Someone in the old house on Simmeringer Hauptstrasse might be in touch with her or at least know where she lived now. Or he could try to look for Uncle Ferenc; but even if Ferenc hadn't been called up (Adrian suspected that he had been) there was no guarantee that he or any of his friends would be able or even want to help Adrian. The elation seeped out of him and was replaced by worry and indecision, and after spending some time aimlessly walking the streets around Lerchenfelder Gürtel, he returned to Ottakring station by midnight. He tried to find a suitable house where he might sleep for a while but, by then, most houses had locks on their street doors. New regulations made it obligatory for all property owners to ensure that no ‘alien elements' were present in their buildings. The radio broadcasted warnings about the danger of Bolshevik spies. He had heard Nurse Mutsch speak on the subject. Like flies, she had said, they follow you around. Finally, he managed to get into a tumbledown house on Roseggergasse where part of the attic was used for drying laundry. The drying attic was no more than a bare, rough stone floor under a tall wooden roof. At the top of the stairs, the attic was protected
by a rusty iron grille into which a wooden door had been fitted. He found a couple of dirty log-sacks and wrapped himself in them but they did next to nothing to stop the cold that rose from the stone floor. He breathed on his hands, clenched and unclenched them to keep some sensation in them and fell asleep after making himself as small as possible, with his knees pulled up to his chest and his hands tucked into his armpits. In the morning, hunger drove him out to look for food. In the daylight, everyone could of course see where he came from and what sort he was. People turned to glance at his bare feet in muddy sandals and he could almost hear them whispering to each other:

… one of
those
children …

He dived behind rattling trams, crossed one street, then another. He managed to snatch two apples from a stall at the corner of Ottakringer Strasse and Neulerchenfelder Strasse and ran with them under his shirt towards the big brewery on the other side of the street. The wide gateway was blocked by a barrier but he waited around. When the man in the guard hut started a shouted exchange with someone he knew who was on the other side of the street, Adrian sneaked past into the brewery yard. Near the factory building, a pair of dray horses stood waiting, ready to pull their broad wagons. The horses chomped hay from jute sacks and dumped a load of dung now and then. The rich smell of malt mingled with hay and horse manure reminded him of all the times Mrs Haidinger had made him haul radio batteries all the way to Schwechat and back. Again and again, he was almost clipped by lorries that came into the yard loaded with clunking empties. The sound gave him an idea. The empty bottles must be stored somewhere. If he could take just a few of them he could try to cash in the deposits. No one would think twice about it. There were hordes of boys who did their bit by
collecting deposit money on bottles. If he came home with a pocket full of money earned in a respectable way, maybe his mother would write to the board of the institution and tell them that she was going to keep him this time. He managed to get into the huge brewing hall and ended up in front of an imposing machine spitting out endless rows of dark-brown bottles onto a conveyer belt. The bottles whizzed past strong metal arms ending in claws that lifted each one, turned it in the air and put it down again. Workers rushed up and down along the moving belt, hollering and shouting, but the noise of the machine was so overpowering that their voices were dulled as if calling out from behind a glass wall. He came back to awareness with a jump when a hard hand squeezed his shoulder. A man in a foreman's grey coat loomed behind him and a large face hung over the boy like a lamp. The face might have asked
what are you doing here?
Or it might have mimed the words. Adrian didn't actually hear anything.
Waiting for my mum
, he tried to shout or mime, because he had to answer something. The words were sucked into the clamouring, thumping giant machine that at the same moment grabbed hold of the necks of another half-dozen bottles, tipped them upside down and dumped them back on the belt.
Wait outside then
. The grip on his shoulder changed into a firm hand on his back that pushed him towards the door. The foreman apparently believed him and, as soon as they were back outside the large hall, past the packing shed and the garage for the large lorries, he completely lost interest in the young intruder. He just let the boy out and shut the factory door behind him. Adrian retreated to the corner of the yard where the drays had been waiting. The horses had left, leaving only the dung heaps and scattered remains of their hay. He crouched down and watched as the dark slowly deepened and moved up the fronts of the buildings. Soon, only the top floors were still lit by reflected
sunlight. Adrian felt as if the lower, unlit windows secretly observed him. Then the dark swallowed even the attics. He might have been in the bottom of a well. All around him, walls rose to the sky. Closest to him, the tall factory walls around the brewery. Beyond them: the frontages of the buildings around the marketplace. Not one of them showed a single light. Just as in Ybbs, these buildings seemed to have no exterior: all were part of a system of inner courtyards and narrow, interconnecting paths and passages. Like a prison, but in the outside air. The shadow had by now reached the roof of the factory and, as if that were a signal, the workers walked out into the yard in clusters, five or six at a time. Most of them were men, but there were women among them, too. He wished that one of the women really was his mother and that she would see him waiting and call to him so that everyone else heard it, and then he could run to her. Some of the women pushed bicycles and had already pinned the little phosphorus lamps to their coats, ready to leave by the factory gate, climb onto the saddle and wobble along on the star-shaped network of unlit streets. For by now there was no light anywhere except for a pale, faintly green, reflected band near the horizon. He walked to the house on Roseggergasse under that green, darkening ceiling of sky and climbed upstairs to the attic where the warped wooden door still hung open. At first he thought he would never sleep, what with the grinding hunger in his guts and the raw cold that rose from the stone floor and settled in his bones, but he did fall asleep quite soon after lying down. In his dream, his mother appeared in front of him. She hadn't stopped at just putting on her red lipstick but was also wearing Mrs Haidinger's red dress. And I who thought you would help me, she said as she bent over him. He felt terribly afraid because he knew this wasn't really her. When that face came close to his, the red lipstick-smile cracked and behind it were rows of teeth.
Hard, bony fingers reached for his hand that clutched the cartridge, tried to force his fingers back one by one and, when he wouldn't give way, she lifted his fist to her mouth and bit it with her pointy teeth, as sharp as a shark's, cutting his knuckles. He screamed, woke and sat up with his heart hammering in his chest. All around him shimmered something icily white, which took him some time to realise was only the frozen vapour from his own breaths. He sucked on his hand and tasted the metallic flavour of the blood that stuck his fingers together. He must have clenched his fist so hard around the cartridge that its point had cut him. He was dreadfully cold by now; the shivering began down by his ice-cold feet and carried on all the way up to his teeth, which were chattering uncontrollably. To exercise his legs or wrap his arms around his body didn't help at all. He tried to make some sounds, moans or whimpers, just to stop shaking, and rolled helplessly on the floor until he hit the wall. Then he heard a man's voice, quite near:

… and someone's been up there, you take my word.

Before he had time to react, the door was pulled open and in the dark above him torchlight sliced the dust-laden air, seemingly at random, into rhomboid shapes full of lit, whirling specks. He couldn't be sure where he was lying in relation to the jerky beam of light, or if he had been heard, but was aware that he had to stay by the wall. He pulled his arms and legs as close as possible to his body, and waited. A bit away from the sharp-edged light, another male voice called out but it was so harsh and deep it wasn't possible to separate it from the grating noise made by an iron blade against stone. The caretaker or whoever it was who held the unsteady torch shouted back that he
had to lock up first
and then, from nearby, came the sounds of chains rattling and a lock clicking. Someone tugged vigorously at the door. The beam of the torch slid upwards as if by its own volition, reached
the roof, and then became absorbed into the darkness at the same time as the footsteps on the stairs grew more distant. Adrian stayed lying with his face to the wall as if he was what he had pretended to be: a lifeless object that someone had dumped there. Then he sensed the chilly stickiness between his thighs. He had peed himself. Like Jockerl. He wasn't the slightest bit tougher. He and Uncle Ferenc had picked up a bird once during one of the summers they had spent together herding cattle down on the floodplain by the Hubertusdamm. The bird had been lying on the mucky grass and looked squashed, as if someone had stood on it. The wing that wasn't broken was flapping pointlessly in the air. When he held it, about to put it under his shirt, he felt the bird's heart tapping lightly against the palm of his hand. The sun had hung so low over the river its light was almost white. Now, too, he saw the whiteness. There had been an alcove where they stacked the logs, between the cooker and the sooty wall in the kitchen in the Simmering Hauptstrasse flat. Ferenc advised him to put the bird there, and he had, then settled down next to the bird to keep an eye on it. He didn't know what kind it was. Its plumage was speckled, its beak long and grey, and the downy feathers under its broken wing were brilliantly white. He had never before felt such a deep and terrible longing to get back to something or somewhere as he did now, when he remembered that sheltered place between the cooker and the soot-stained wall. When his mother had fired the cooker up, it was warm and he could lie there without being seen by anyone. Slowly, he would open the hand that held the trembling bird while, close by, Helmut was asleep on the floor, his sweaty hair sticking to his forehead, and their mother was getting ready to go to work. Then he'd hear her heels on the stairs and the door slam followed by the lighter sound of her feet on the flagged yard as she almost ran across it. The 71 tram came and went
on wheels that rattled over the gaps in the rails. He opened his eyes and saw that the dawn light was already strong enough to pick out the shapes of the roof beams in the dark above him. When he made his arms relax their grip on his body, cold cut him like many knives. He breathed on his fingers and the back of his hands until he could move them normally before going to check the wooden door and actually see what he already knew had happened. They had locked him in. The padlock stuck through the hasp had been reinforced with a chain that had been threaded through the iron grid on both sides of the door. He pressed both palms against the upper part of the door. It swung a little on its worn hinges but didn't shift more than perhaps a centimetre. Pushing his finger between the bars, he could just touch the lock with his fingertips. There was only one thing he could do: dig the hasp out of the warped old wood of the door frame. Sooner or later, it must give way. He gripped the cartridge between thumb and index finger, pushed it out between the bars and began to dig into the wood with its tip. His fingers were soon bleeding again. Then his hand contracted with cramps and he had to massage it, and warm it between his thighs before setting to work again. The light had moved from one end of the attic room to the other when he heard the thuds of the street door open and close several times, and shouts between people who came and went, their shouting multiplied by the echo in the stairwell. One of the voices was the caretaker's, he felt sure of that, and he quickly backed away to be close to the wall. Too soon, darkness fell again but he had managed to gouge a big pile of woodchips from the door and made it possible to jiggle the hasp about. After a few more hours, it was completely loose. The padlock went with it and the door opened a little but was stopped by the chain that became taut when he tried to push his body through the crack between the frame and the door. The gap
widened higher towards the top because the chain had been placed quite low down so, by clinging to the grille, and climbing up it, he succeeded first in getting an arm out, then hauling his body through the gap. By then, he was so exhausted by cold and hunger that he no longer had the strength to stay upright as he tackled the abyss of the stairwell. He crawled backwards down the stairs instead, negotiating one step at a time and holding on to the rail. The white-limed wall looked adrift in dark. The doors to the flats were all locked. No voices, not a sound came from behind them. By the time he had reached the bottom of the stairs, any guiding light from above had disappeared. He fumbled his way to the street door, which thankfully could be opened from the inside, and entered a world of shadows. There was no sky up there. Only a faint leaden sheen reached the street. Adrian kept close to the walls as if afraid that the pavement would give way in front of him if he walked too far out. Now and then, he heard the quiet swishing sound of tyres against cobbles but there would always be some time before he could see the dancing phosphorus glow from the cyclist's lamp. He looked for lost coins in the telephone boxes but the small metal bowls for returned change were always smooth and empty. Actually, it was meaningless to look for money because food was only available in exchange for coupons and where would he get any coupons without a fixed address? And even if he had coupons and money to pay with, who would give him anything to eat? All you needed to realise that he didn't belong to anything like a respectable family was a quick look at his face and his clothes. Slowly, the sky grew lighter and the buildings once more emerged from the murk with their closely spaced windows and strictly ordered patterns of panes. He was lying curled up in one of the telephone booths when a uniformed policeman spotted him and dragged him outside. Several passers-by, looking pale and upset, stood about on the pavement. No
one stepped forward to kick or hit him. One man actually brought a blanket and spread it over him. The man wore an armband and a lamp on his forehead. He put his hand on Adrian's shoulder and said in a kind voice that he was to lie still and wait. In the end, an ambulance arrived and he was stretchered into it. The sunlight filtering in through the opaque windows of the ambulance told him that they were on their way up the mountain but, when they stopped, he realised that they had pulled up outside the real hospital, the Wilhelminenspital. He was allowed to spend the rest of the day there, in a bed of his own. A nurse brought him a glass of milk and asked if he was hungry. Then a doctor, a proper doctor, examined him. When Adrian told him where he came from and what he had done, the doctor turned to the nurse and said: