The Chosen Ones (27 page)

A Flash of Lightning from a Clear Sky
   Nurse Kleinschmittger stands by the linen cupboard. She pretends to fold and sort face-cloths and towels. Seemingly, we’ll have to manage without your doctor for quite some time ahead, she says and her face looks strenuously buttoned up as if to prevent a sour smile from reaching her lips. Anna Katschenka doesn’t move, just turns Nurse Kleinschmittger’s word
your
over in her mind.
Your
Doctor Jekelius. He has received his military call-up papers, she says. Yes, Nurse Kleinschmittger replies, it was like a flash of lightning from a clear sky for us all. In an instant, Katschenka makes a quite instinctive decision. By not revealing with the slightest word or movement what she thinks or feels, she is refusing to give any part of him away to anyone else. She will not even offer them her own consternation at the
news that he has left. But the truth is that, from then on, an empty hollow yawns inside her. Later, she will speculate that this void is at least one of the reasons why she is seen to receive the news so impassively. From then on, she has not the faintest idea why she is in this institution, a potentially fatal thought that must be repressed, come what may. It did indeed take her several days to find out what had really happened, apart from the basic fact that Jekelius has been called up, that is. And it would take several weeks before she learnt the full story of the four runaway girls from Edna Block, one of the head-office typists. The mother of one of the girls had lodged a complaint against Jekelius and Jokl for shearing her hair, claiming that the two doctors had exceeded their rights to order and administer physical punishments and, according to Block, several members of staff, notably Doctor Krenek, felt strongly that a case should be brought against Jekelius so that a court could establish once and for all what kind of principles applied to the institution’s work. What’s the use of a young girl without hair on her head? Edna Block demanded to know, rhetorically of course. Who would ever employ girls looking like that? And surely there is no hope of them ever marrying? Or taking up positions in domestic service. Which is what everyone is going on about, is that not so? It’s not in the end about how the girls have been behaving, or what they might have been guilty of, but if they can cope with the tasks set for them once we’ve let them out. Miss Block types away with restrained energy and, behind her quivering eyelashes, her eyes fill with tears. Anna Katschenka remembers her day away with Doctor Jekelius, when he spoke of Miss Block as a safe haven. Miss Edna would go through fire and water for me, he had said and jealousy had flapped its black wings inside Katschenka. She knew that Block, on behalf of Jekelius and the other doctors, handled the notifications to the Berlin
committee. She also sorted and prioritised the documents that the clinic received in return. Perhaps it was one of these forms she was working on as she wound a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter and whispered confidingly across the roller: one might have thought there were other things to make a fuss about in this clinic than a few delinquent girls having their heads shaved, right? Don’t you agree, Sister Anna? And the doctor isn’t even here to defend himself!

In the Field of War
   There are ways to fend off adversity or personal loss. But how to fend off slander? Malicious words get under your skin and stay there like invisible wounds, oozing blood long after the hurt has been inflicted but inadmissible because, if you admit to bleeding, the inference is that the blow hit home (
Your
doctor, Sister Katschenka!). During the months that went by after Doctor Jekelius’s departure, she learns just how feeble and fragile her authority is. Nurse Kleinschmittger increasingly looks away impatiently when Anna asks her to do something and Hilde Mayer waddles past looking indifferent, hiding behind her large, self-absorbed smile. That smile of hers signifies a hold on certain higher insights of a nature that does not permit her to utter a single word of what she knows, but
should
she do so, her utterances would be such that, at a stroke, entire careers would instantly crumble to dust. So, despite the fact that no one knows anything for certain, the talk does incessant rounds in corridors and sluice rooms. About Jekelius. About how, already in the autumn, the
very highest authority
had expressed displeasure with his approach to managing the tasks demanded by his post, and how his use of a staff car for his trips has been cancelled and even expenses that have already been authorised are now rechecked and gone over with a magnifying glass. Anna Katschenka feels ashamed.
So, it might be that he wasn’t the man we,
or at least some of us, thought he was
, she suddenly hears Hilde Mayer say from inside her greater understanding of things and, of course, with address to Anna.
Possibly a swindler, or what?
In pavilion 17, the boy called Pelikan stumbles or shuffles past on his twisted, inward-rotated legs. He presses his face against a window to watch two asylum patients in grey institutional clothes try to push a cart loaded with dirty laundry along a path lined by glacial ice ridges and long, murky snowdrifts, and she thinks of her brother Otto, the swimmer, who just in the same way struggles, striking out with both arms, to cross one wall of snow after another to reach Moscow. They don’t know their luck, she thinks as she, too, watches the two miserable laundry labourers who have, by going mad, found asylum and so been excused from having to fight for their country and their dignity. The Pelikan lad stands next to her with his face so close up against the window that his face is outlined in the condensation on the glass. Crossly, she grabs at his twitching arm and hauls him back into the day room, but Pelikan whimpers and resists, then tries to reach around her with his other arm, which she throws to the side again and again as if it were a lifeless object,

for heaven’s sake stop clinging on me all the time.

In the dayroom, the tinkling piano-playing stops and the child sitting at the piano, it’s that Felix Keuschnig, turns to stare at her with his mouth hanging slackly open. Nurse Hedwig, who sits on a chair next to Felix, looks at her with her wide-eyed, clear gaze but all Hedwig can see is the shame that Anna tries not to show and she thinks,

if you hear this, dear Doctor, please come back, just come, come, come.

Then it is suddenly February and Anna Katschenka cuts across the Gürtel to catch the number 6 tram at the Westbahnhof stop.
At the back of the last carriage, she stands face to face with Edna Block, the secretary, who tries to hide behind her handbag when she spots Sister Anna. But there are no free seats in the front of the bus and Anna has no choice but to stand at the rear. And then she sees that Edna Block is crying behind her propped-up handbag. The passengers on seats nearby stare intently ahead or out of the windows, obviously disconcerted by this stranger in tears.

And the two windowpanes seem to join into one and she is back in pavilion 17, standing next to Pelikan while the boy rubs his face against the moisture on the inside of the pane and she sees once more the laundry workers hauling the big sacks of dirty laundry from the pavilion towards the last of the three carriages pulled by the institution’s little train engine that has stopped just outside, and she observes both men slipping on the hard, rough ice and, as they fall, lose their grip on the sacks which open, scattering dirty bed linen on the ground and allowing the wind to tug at the bloody sheets and blow them up into the trees so that, for a little while, the entire institution seems draped by soiled linen and she thinks that these lost souls should be content, happy that they’re still alive and able to stand on their own, helpless legs, watching as the outcome of their mistake flies away in the wind. She steps off at the next stop, unable to stand the presence of the weeping Miss Block any longer.

She had not expected an answer and felt alarmed when a letter arrived for her. At first, she could not believe that the letter came from him even though his name was on the envelope. It was written in large capitals in a hand that was not his. She thought that he might have died and someone had written to inform her. She made herself read several sentences, filled with a numbing cloud of anguish, before she recognised his inimitable way of expressing himself:

Another Life
   A strange time began. She seemed to lead two lives, one in the pavilions with the monstrous children, and one with him. She carried on with the first life despite the shame she felt as all eyes followed her. She had never been one for trying to evade work or responsibility, not even to make a short private telephone call or to share a cigarette in the smoker’s hidey-hole behind the back entrance. She had nothing but contempt for people who, as she thought of it, ‘needed a break’ from the demands work made on them. As if the capacity to endure physical and mental strain – precisely the trait that once made these women see nursing as their vocation – had been nothing more than a mask worn at work that only stayed put for a few hours before it slipped. She articulated thoughts like these
when speaking with him in her head as she sat on the tram on her way home after another stint in the pavilion. Oddly enough, he was around in the Fendigasse flat as well, ever ready for a confidential chat. She would discuss Hilde Mayer’s smile with him as she washed up after the evening meal and, even when she helped her mother with the ironing, he would sit at the narrow kitchen table, in her father’s usual chair by the window where he would fiddle with the evening paper and look at the rain dripping onto the garden below. The sudden return of Jekelius in her life surprised and frightened her at the same time. It made her feel as if her earlier existence had been dull and mute, without either surface or inwardness. Now, every place and moment had another dimension in which new events or observations demanded to be described to him. Often, her conversations with him began with something he had written in a letter but her topics could just as easily have come from elsewhere. New letters constantly arrived for her at her private Fendigasse address. By now, he wrote them himself and although his hand still seemed a little unsteady, at least to her, he assured her that his health improved daily. The paralysis that had struck him down was now over, he wrote. He could sit up in bed and even eat without assistance. She sat next to him, by the head end of his bed. He had described the ward, so she looked around and saw a long narrow room with a row of tall windows along one wall and too little space for the nurses to push medication trolleys between the beds lined up on either side. One day in early April, he wrote to say that he was about to be transferred out of Wien, to Schloss Leesdorf in Baden, to convalesce. The Wehrmacht had just acquired the castle as part of the wartime hospital provision. Could she visit him there? In any case, it was clear that his period of convalescence would be short. He had already been told to await a new order to join up. His invitation stunned her at
first. Would their intimate exchanges stand up to the cold light of reality? Would the sentences they had formulated, the lines of conversation they had spun between them while lying awake, he in his hospital ward in distant Lemberg where wounded soldiers cried out in spasms of pain or mumbled long, incoherent strings of words as the fever-frenzy raged in their bodies, and she in her bed, alone in the little room on Fendigasse, the very bed where she had lain as a young woman losing floods of blood and her sheer, unbreakable will to get up had been all that she’d had left to hold on to? But her life was still a matter of getting up and, unsupported, finding the strength and self-control to carry on. Then, one Saturday morning, she took the tram from the Opera House stop all the way to Baden. She found him on the garden terrace, resting on a reclining chair with a plaid blanket across his knees. He must have seen her when she arrived, escorted by the ward sister who had met her at the gate and briskly led the way along the corridor. He sat with his back to them but, even before the nurse had time to announce his visitor, he turned his head and asked:
Nurse Gertrude, would you be so kind and see to it that we get another chair …?
That was all. She stood in front of him as she had decided to do. Facing him, so that he could see her clearly. And he did observe her for a long time, with his large, heavy head tilted a little to the side but without for a moment revealing what he felt. Then his eyes flickered and fixed instead on two stone urns, ornamental markers of where the steps went from the castle terrace down into the garden. From where she stood, close to the edge of the terrace, the garden looked like a sea of voluptuous greenery. Birds flew constantly in and out and, each time another lot emerged, their throats seemed fit to burst with subdued twittering. Further down in the garden, the wind was grappling with the branches of the firs that formed a high wall of trees, so compact that it hid all view of the
road. A nurse came with a chair. Anna thanked her and sat down. The administration has just moved in here, he explained apologetically, making a gesture that included both the castle building and the two trucks parked below the terrace where two men were unloading a batch of folding beds. As he twisted his body to point, she noticed that his right arm stayed immobile on the armrest. Apart from that, he looked remarkably unchanged. The large head was somehow heavier, perhaps, as if more effort was needed now to keep it upright. His speaking voice was as it had always been, soft and gentle and strangely rich. He had begun to tell her about Leesdorf’s earlier wartime designation as a reform school for girls. He had visited it while on one of his professional trips. Of course, such institutions are superfluous by now, he added. His arm stayed in its old position on the armrest. She wanted to ask about the paralysis, find out what injury had caused it and if he was still in pain; anything personal, to reduce the distance between them, a distance that had been increased by the way he had pronounced the words
reform school.
Still, it was obvious that he had prepared himself for what he talked about now, as if it mattered greatly to him not only to say it but also to say it in this particular way. They are conducting a court case against me in my absence, he said. It appears that they feel my presence in court isn’t needed, as if they could bring the case against anyone, because all that matters is that it is conducted at all. He had turned towards her (his right arm still immobile) while he said all this and the expression on his face seemed to demand a response from her. She thought that the set of his mouth was stern, some might say bitter, something she hadn’t noticed before. She looks down at her hands on her lap. Doctor Krenek … she begins. Doctor Krenek has been plotting against me for years, he interrupts her. Krenek is an upstart. Nothing he attempts or plans has any inherent originality or vitality.
That man never does anything except in simple imitation or obeisance of what others tell him. I don’t know if Sister Anna has ever experienced, he says and, for the first time, there is something of the confiding note in his voice that she recognises from their one day together. The sensation, he continues, of once in your life facing something so immense that your soul or thoughts cannot even encompass it. I will give it its true name, he says. I will call it … love. And now, wide-eyed, he fixes her with his large, dark eyes. She stays still, fearful. She doesn’t understand what he is referring to, with whom (or what) he is in love. She registers a swift, tingling glimpse of the possibility that he is talking about her but that of course can’t be true and his absent gaze, lost in mid-distance, contradicts any such notion, as does the set of his mouth, once more reserved and stern. They know nothing, no one knows anything, he says and now she must do something, change her rigid posture or at least swallow or breathe out. She unintentionally moves one hand and, at once, his ‘paralysed’ right hand lifts from the armrest and takes her hand in a firm grip while his eyes, with their mild, penetrating expression, are again meeting hers, and he smiles: