The Chosen Ones (34 page)
Authors: Steve Sem-Sandberg
Well, some are stronger than you’d expect,
so we’ll have to use other means to manage this.
He remembers these words but not who said them because, in that instant, something happens, something like a sudden shift of perspective. The change is as abrupt as it is inexplicable. He is no longer inside the room. He has become the room. Doctor Illing is not looking in at him from outside the cage. He is the cage and Illing is inside it. The cage is more than a room, anyway. It is expanding all the time. It grows into a cave, then a mineshaft into a mountain. Now he understands. He has moved into the mountain Hannes Neubauer was always on about. He himself is the Mountain and, far below him, the white-coated Doctor Illing is gesticulating and the words are streaming out of him but they don’t reach Adrian because they
dissolve into the great silence of the Mountain. The only clear sound is made by the water that trickles and flows through the cracks and hollows in the rough stone walls. Doctor Illing tries to fix his eyes on Adrian but he can’t hang on to him, not even now. He is everywhere and nowhere, and
some are stronger than you’d
expect,
Doctor Illing says, but to whom?
We’ll have to use other means to manage this,
Illing continues but his voice does not echo and not a single one of his words reaches Adrian where he is floating, high up under the vaulted roof of the cave. He is that roof, he is the cave walls and floor on which they all stand, the doctors and nurses dressed in white. Or think they stand on. One quake, one tremor from him and they will all tumble into the abyss.
*
Final Diagnosis
Next time he returns to consciousness, Adrian is in an ordinary ward, full of light and movement. Nurse Mayer stands rooting around in a linen cupboard near his bed. He recognises the broad hips under the nurses’ uniform and her wheezing breath as she opens and closes the drawers in the cupboard. All around him, the idiot children are making their barking noises and drawn-out, drooling moans. Back to normal, sort of. No more the silence of the gallery. Now, Nurse Mayer stands up straight and looks down at him in his bed. We’ve been struck off the list, have we? she says with an expression of grim distaste, as if the mere fact that he has been transferred back to an ordinary ward contradicts everything she believed right and proper. Struck off the list.
Then
, her words had seemed almost meaningless. Later, he would repeat them many times, to himself and to others. I was struck off the list at the last minute, you see, he would say to Parsley and anyone else prepared to listen to him. But, what kind of list was it? He has been allowed to see almost all the relevant documents: the lists of patients; the day nurse entries
about oddities in his behaviour and any punishments; the ‘clinical’ records from his stays in pavilions 15 and 17; all the medical and psychiatric assessments of him. He also studied the forms sent from the Spiegelgrund institution to the state committee in Berlin and how they were returned complete with a coded instruction to the doctors in Wien either to initiate or cancel a ‘treatment’: there would be either a plus or a minus sign in the upper corner. However, no such form with his name and personal details was ever found, just as his case notes make no reference to any visits by his mother. After the pneumoencephalography, his stay in pavilion 15, ward and gallery, is recorded only in the day notes, where the nurses comment casually on how his condition changes and grows worse, day by day:
16/03 Adrian puts hands constantly to his head and neck, also forehead and left eye; complains of pains in his head and neck. Slight fever, 37.7
o
.
17/03 Possible bronchitis, coughing and rel. large quant. sputum. Temp. 38.3
o
; cough mixture prescribed.
19/03 Febrile. V. restless, complains of feeling suffocated. Poor food intake. Temp. 38.9
o
.
20/03 Febrile, temp. 38.7
o
; drinks too little. Still refuses to eat. Consid. weightloss. Still pats the back of his neck. Complains that ‘someone lies on top of me’.
Then, suddenly, the notes stop. He was sent to the gallery but has no idea how he escaped. He never found who or what saved him. It could have been a random event or the outcome of a chain of decision-making, but he can’t prove anything one way or the other. Possibly, some documentation has been kept from him, or lost or, perhaps, destroyed. All he has to go on is Doctor Illing’s last report,
written after the authorities decided to use other means to eliminate him – dispatching him to a German youth concentration camp in Moringen:
After completing a careful programme of medical and psychiatric examinations, it has been concluded that Adrian Z. has no symptoms indicating any psychotic condition, or any chronic/more profound mental disturbances. We are dealing with someone who has reached relatively normal mental development for his age but whose family background is of inferior quality in terms of racial biology and social morality. Judging by the boy’s progress or lack of it so far, and taking into account observations and evaluations carried out in the institution, the good and caring efforts of the staff, as well as all attempts to influence his character and change it for the better, have had only minor or, at least, scarcely noticeable effects on him. Major inherited character defects tend to direct his behaviour towards misdemeanours of every kind. His offensive and irresponsible manner, repeated thieving, deceitfulness and self-assured mendacity – all these behavioural aberrations can be seen to originate in his almost monstrously impoverished emotional capacity. Adrian Z. lacks normal bonds to other people. He is immune to both praise and criticism, and instead exploits all that is said in his favour or against him in order to attempt to manipulate those around him and gain advantages at the expense of others. He is incapable of remorse, resistant to threats and, according to the nurses’ notes, even demonstrates bad faith when learning of any defeats suffered by the forces of the Reich in the field, while also trying to turn other boys into fifth columnists by urging them to treachery. Thus, he has,
among other seditious acts, been heard to say to another boy:
When the Bolsheviks come we’ll join the partisans
…
With due regard to these severe mental (in the sense of character) flaws and his neglect of normal social rules, it is, in the experience of youth psychiatric expertise, not possible to give him a useful upbringing. The conclusion must therefore be that only borstal or youth labour camp should be deemed appropriate. When dealing with actively antisocial persons with inherited criminal tendencies, such as this youth, one must always expect recidivism.
*
The Mountain in His Head
Two weeks later: the punishment bunker in the cellar under pavilion 11. He has been here before. This time, six boys are waiting in the stinking semi-darkness for their transport to take them away from the institution. They have all grown out of their younger bodies and some of them are almost unrecognisable. Gangly, for instance. He is now so tall that he almost hits the ceiling when he stands. A boy called Emil Furth, who was one of the smaller boys in the group at Zavlacky’s time, has changed, too. Emil used to shy away from others and mutter to himself. Now, he still doesn’t talk to anyone, but the withdrawn child has grown into a rebellious teenager who regards everything and everyone with eyes that are full of hate or scorn. Even though several of them have met before, few speak to each other. What’s the point, when they’re to be taken away from here anyway? They have all learnt to be on guard against each other as well as everyone else. Who knows what any confidences might be used for in the place they’re going to? In the days of Sebastian ’n’ Kohler, they had been sent off in teams to carry out simple gardening jobs like digging ditches and tending flower beds. This time, they just wait. The transport is said to be on
its way every morning. After getting up and making their beds and packing their things, they are made to take their rucksacks outside and stand at
Habt-Acht
for a couple of hours. And then it turns out that there is no transport. The carefully rolled-up towel is flattened, soap and toothbrush are removed from their metal covers, and everything is returned to the right places in the bedside table. The rest of the day is spent polishing shoes or reading the copies of
Der Stürmer
that have been placed here and there in the day room and corridor for their edification. One of their guards, a young man got up like an Hitlerjugend Führer in a brown shirt and with a hunting knife on his leather belt, comes along every morning to lock them in the Bunker. He says he’s called Pfalz. His job is also to see to it that they wash ‘as per regulations’ every morning and to distribute the meagre breakfast. Pfalz comes back later in the day, together with the cooks from the main kitchen who wheel the food trolley around. At about the same time, cleaners arrive to scrub and wash everything and change the sheets. Usually there are two of them: a blonde, plump younger one, and a sour-faced older one who is dark-haired and thinner. The bunker floor has to be sluiced down like a pigpen and, while it dries, they all have to gather in the day room. When the sullen Furth refuses to move for some reason, the cleaners have no choice but to start scrubbing away while he sits on his bunk. At that point, Gangly turns to them and calls out:
why don’t you stay the night?
His lips as he speaks are nervously pulled back over his long, yellow horse’s teeth, but when the other boys start laughing, he tries it on again.
We could play cards,
he says.
You could dance the rumba.
In Mrs Rohrbach’s day, anything of that sort would’ve cost him at least four days in solitary, but this time there is nobody to stop the mischief, no other
Erzieher
, not even Pfalz, and the cleaners themselves obviously have no rights to say or do anything. The dark one
looks as sour as usual while the blonde picks anxiously at strands of her hair to make them stay under her cap. Then they carry on scrubbing. That day, there has been a leak of information about the transport. Apparently the truck that was to take them to the camp has been in an accident on the road from Linz and spare parts are hard to come by, so hard that none have been located yet. What caused the accident, the dutiful Pfalz can’t tell them. But at least they’re allowed to be in the day room from that day onwards. This is when, for the first time, they become aware that the wards have been emptied, not only on their floor but on the floor above them as well. There are no children in the building. Adrian feels a strange mixture of dread and elation when it dawns on him that he can move around almost freely in this place where it used to be impossible to get more than ten metres away from the guards’ immediate field of vision before being captured and punished. The rapid thud of cork heels against the floor, the rattling of bunches of keys, the hoarse shouting of
get up! Bed-wetters step forward,
Mrs Rohrbach’s clapper hitting the beds and then
one two three four!
– all that is still hanging in the dull, dead air, ready to strike him down at the slightest rash movement. He walks slowly through the sun-lit whirling dust in the stairwell. Ever since they left the Bunker, his eyes fill with nothing but sunlight. It is May already and the warm light has brought with it a steady breeze high in the leaves of the trees lining the paths. The wind makes the branches of the Swiss pines swing majestically. The sound of cleaning comes from upstairs, the rhythmic swish of brooms and brushes, the clanking of galvanised buckets and the trickling flow of rinsing water. The younger cleaner is kneeling on the floor of one of the empty dormitories and is scrubbing the floor nearest the wall. The windows are wide open and the reflected flashes of light from the surface of the bucket dance along the walls in quick,
glittering curves that make the whole room swing. He stands in the doorway and the young woman doesn’t see him until many minutes later when she absently looks up from her work. Scared, she presses the wet cloth against her chest. It looks comical. The cloth leaves a large, damp stain on her apron. But Adrian doesn’t laugh. The Mountain is in his head now. He realises how very careful he must be not to frighten her. So, he smiles humbly, almost shyly. The transport hasn’t come yet, he says as if to explain. This is when she makes her first mistake. She asks where he is going. Now, the room is filled only with wind and glittering water. From her point of view, he must have looked as if he were gliding in and out of the swinging shadows of the trees. All he can see is that she is quite defenceless. That is why he tells her. He smiles all the time while he speaks. He wants his smile to inspire trust. And it could be that she, too, is pulled into the sense of safety that the Mountain offers because she suddenly says something about her brother, that he has been forced to go to some camp as well. They dealt with my brother just the same way, she tells him. Why she has decided to cast off the last vestige of the authority she could have sheltered behind is more than he understands. Clearly, she is no Nurse Blei. There is no hard armour underneath all that softness. Her body is young and afraid under her neatly ironed uniform with its apron and cap. He notices all that. She wants to carry on scrubbing but can’t think how she could dare to tell him to go away. Then, he takes a few steps across the damp floor. He sees her open her mouth before she gulps down her scream. He doesn’t have to make her stay silent. She is in the Mountain now. She walks to the windows to pull them shut. But he moves faster. He places his hand on hers, red and a little swollen from the scrubbing. Don’t, he says. And he can’t believe his eyes: his brown hand holding one of
theirs.
Her eyes are huge and round like balls and she strains to get away
from his hands but there is something else as well, something that wants to give in to his heavier body and this other sense makes him weak at the knees. His mouth goes dry with triumph and excitement. That is when he lets her go, scared by his own daring. She opens her mouth and he waits for the scream that will surely follow. But she only adjusts her uniform with trembling hands. Then she picks up her broom and cloth and bucket, and walks out. Without saying a word. He is left, standing with his hand on the open window. Deep inside the rich greenery, he hears the thudding of a diesel engine. On the path just below the window, one of the park labourers in grey institutional clothes walks past pushing a wheelbarrow. He looks straight down at the shaved back of the man’s neck below his cap. A group of men and women in white are discussing something a few pavilions further along and then they stop talking and everyone walks off rapidly in different directions. He leans cautiously out of the window. The drop down to the path is three metres, perhaps three and a half. If he succeeds, it will be his third escape attempt. Oddly enough – and even though he knows that it is highly likely that the young cleaner at that very moment is telling her superiors about him and a phone call might well have been made already to the relevant staff in pavilion 1, who will call in young Führer Pfalz to get on with it and stop that misbehaving lout – he isn’t in a hurry. Later, he will say that someone helped me the last time I escaped. A young woman took pity on me. I had grown up by then. In reality, the enemy hadn’t weakened at all. All that had happened was that the wall had retreated a few steps and the prison confines grown a little larger. He knew that, even as he let go of the windowsill and let himself fall. Ask yourself, what’s the point of escaping when you have nowhere to go?
