The Chosen Ones (41 page)

The Solitary Guard of the Mountain
   Hannes Neubauer has been keeping watch at the entrance to the Mountain for many years now. He has let no one pass, and has not tried to escape like some of the other boys. First, it was Zavlacky and Miseryguts who legged it just after they had been taken to Ybbs, then that thieving tinker’s boy, Adrian Ziegler, went off and, not long afterwards, Jockerl disappeared. Though Jockerl didn’t run away. He fell ill and then someone came to get him
gegen Revers
. To be discharged
gegen Revers
meant that the institution consented to hand back children they had agreed earlier to take on – usually for only too good reasons, Nurse Mutsch said, which is why it only happens in very few cases so that’s nothing for you to be hoping for, Hannes. But Hannes hoped all the same, never mind what anyone said. He kept guard outside the Mountain, let nobody pass and if one of the others came to him with escape plans, he always turned them away like the brave warrior he was. He would stay at his post until his father came for him, whether
gegen Revers
or in some other way. Though it was true that Nurse Mutsch was a little less rough these days and less sure of herself when she harangued them about the war and the courage of the soldiers. Somehow, an inexplicable anxiety had sneaked into her mind. Hannes checked on her sometimes when she was holed up in the nurses’ room and the radio was on. Usually it played music quietly while Mutsch pretended to be busy with something else altogether, but Hannes observed her keenly and noted how she held
her head – a little to the side as if intent on listening – and that she would stop mid-movement from time to time. She was concentrating on the radio, that’s for sure. And so it came at last, that sharp, piercing cuckoo-clock signal she had been waiting for, and Nurse Mutsch turned round and shouted
IT’S TIME AGAIN
and from all around the pavilion, white nurses’ uniforms came running and gathered around the radio.

Right! Line-up! All children to the shelters!

Doors were pulled and pushed, shoes laced up at record speed and soon they stood lined up in front of the pavilion, ready to carry out the manoeuvres Mrs Rohrbach had practised with them hundreds of times: set out for the shelter at a regular running pace, keep in step and don’t break formation, get down there and, in an orderly manner, find a place to sit on the benches. Meanwhile, Mrs Rohrbach locked the heavy door. They sometimes sat there for hours without anything happening. This time, though, they heard the bombs fall, or rather felt it, because the Mountain shook under them. Nurse Mutsch sat stiff and silent on her bench with her tightly clenched hands in her lap and her eyes staring blindly ahead. Hannes made an attempt to calm her. You mustn’t be worried, Nurse, he said. The Führer is sure to come and rescue us soon. But, to Hannes’s great surprise, Nurse Mutsch looked baffled, even shocked, as if he had said something offensive, bordering on very rude. The air-raid warnings come much more often now. It happens that they have to run to the shelters so early in the morning that they don’t even have time to put their clothes on. One day, they had to stay down there all the time, a whole long day without food or water, just sitting on the benches or the bare floor wrapped in the blankets that were the only helpful things Mrs Rohrbach had had time to bring. That day, 12 April 1945, the detonations were very close. Hannes listened out especially
for the heavy thudding noise of the anti-aircraft batteries. Now and then they would fall silent, but after a short while they started thudding and howling again. It all seemed endless. When Rohrbach turned the large, tap-like handle on the shelter door to let them out, he expected to see the hospital in flames but it still looked just the same, a grey backdrop against the cooling, pale yellowy-pink, early evening sky. The Steinhof rooks were flapping above them, excitedly raucous, as usual. But somewhere further away another light glowed, flickering and red. Nurse Mutsch, who always used to keep up an impassively stern, utterly unemotional attitude towards the children, suddenly turned out to have a great fund of information which she would share generously with anyone, colleagues or children.
The Opera went on fire
, she said. And
St Stephen’s cathedral has also been hit
and
what shall we do?
she said, and then
what will become of us?
and
you poor children
and so forth, all incantations that she couldn’t stop herself from repeating. From that day, Hannes takes on an extra stint of guard duty by the Mountain and stays awake, which is really hard, while the others sleep. By undertaking this, he actually witnesses several strange things. One night, Mrs Rohrbach and Nurse Mutsch come into the dormitory. The faintly bluish-violet glow of the night-light makes their bodies dissolve a little but he hears their voices well enough. Mrs Rohrbach says that the hospital board will act to stop the children ending up in the wrong hands, whatever it takes. There’s talk of sending them to München or possibly Berlin. By bus or truck. This makes Hannes Neubauer realise that he must on no account leave the Mountain. In the worst case, he will have to follow Julius Becker’s lead and use the scissors. Will he be brave enough? A few nights later, he dreams about his sister for the first time in many years. He knows he had a sister once but his father has told him that the children’s mother took the girl away. Despite
having no memory of his sister when he is awake, he sees her quite clearly in his dream. She has thick blonde hair braided into two plaits and is standing on top of a tall stone wall, quite near the edge. They must be about to demolish the wall because there are broken chunks of stone everywhere, and crowbars and pickaxes and lots of other tools are lying about on the ground below the wall. His sister is dressed in a simple, bias-cut dress that is tight around her upper body but swings like a sail every time she jumps from the top of the wall. She is laughing. Her laugh is happy and gurgling and it wells up from his own insides, too. But the dream behaves like a film that has stuck. Again and again, he sees his sister spread her arms, and her skirt lift as she falls, and he hears her quickening laughter. He never sees her climb up onto the wall. She just jumps and then she is back up there and, with each jump, the wall seems taller and the fall more precipitous until he is gripped by fear and he can’t stop her because he never sees her climb the wall. But
come on, jump, jump!
the Mountain screams from everywhere around him. He opens his eyes. Everything is silent and there isn’t a nurse in sight.

The Mongols Attack
   At first, he doesn’t want to believe that it is true. The night-light is still on, even though sunlight enters through the crack under the blackout blind. It is so silent that, through the top-most ventilation pane that has been left open, he can hear the birds twittering. He lies absolutely still and tries to catch at least one of the
ordinary
sounds, like the echo when a door opens and slams shut, or the tap-tap of cork heels disappearing down the corridor or voices speaking to each other. Nothing. The towering silence, as compact as a wall, is nearer than the birdsong, and all the more insistent and lasting since it is not interrupted or undermined. He realises that he isn’t the only one to lie awake. All around him, other
children stir anxiously and their white, wide-open eyes stare into the darkened space. And then the silence is ripped apart by machinegun fire. The firing seems to come from very close by. He climbs out of bed and walks towards the door and, in that instant, the machine gun starts rattling again and, when it stops, there comes what sounds like a shout and then a low laugh. He expects the door to be locked, as usual, but to his huge surprise, it slides open easily. Outside, the corridor is empty and abandoned in the glassy light. The ventilation panes have been hooked open and here, too, the birds are building their trelliswork of fleeting, insistent twittering. He walks on, his legs seemingly filled with water. Checks the nurses’ room. Empty. Ward kitchen? Empty. The washroom, with its heavy enamelled tub and the row of showerheads that look like bent boys’ necks? It is empty and the tiles shine with reflected light. Back in the corridor, he meets a boy from the upstairs section. He is called Rudi and is a driven soul who wanders restlessly whenever there is a chance. It is as if his feet have a will of their own and the rest of his body simply follows wherever they go. Hannes has never heard Rudi say a word to anyone. He doesn’t this time either, just jumps nervously when he sees Hannes. The two of them stare at each other as if they were complete strangers. And then, Rudi’s feet start to move on and Hannes returns to his own dormitory.

They’ve all gone
, he says.

Twenty pairs of eyes are fixed on him.

What, have the Mongols come?

As always when Pototschnik speaks to Hannes, there is a hint of a sneer in his voice. But this time, Pototschnik is frightened. His roving eyes betray him. Pototschnik realises that Hannes has noticed and instantly reshapes his fear into a kind of desperate daring. He swiftly walks past Hannes and out into the corridor, then to the
nurses’ room where he picks up Mrs Rohrbach’s clapper. With grimly stuck-out chin and strict expression, mimicking Rohrbach, he walks energetically from bed to bed, hitting the ends with the clapper, and shouts in a loud, shrill voice,
aufstehen!
or, alternatively,
raus aus den Betten!
Once he has roused the entire dormitory, he goes to the ward kitchen and sweeps all the plates and glasses from the shelves, pulls out all the cutlery drawers and tips the contents on the floor so that knives and forks and spoons scatter everywhere. Now the wall has cracked. Some of the boys try to hide under the beds but most of them join Pototschnik. They bang saucepans and lids against tables and chairs and whatever is within reach and nobody listens to Hannes, who calls out
wait!
and
hang on, they might be here any minute!
At least, Pototschnik doesn’t listen. He leads a whole company of children into Rohrbach’s office to pull down folders and books, empty cupboards and filing cabinets, and tip what is in her desk drawers onto the floor. The telephone, the only one on the ward, is torn down from its shelf and carried like a trophy by eager children’s hands all the way up to the day room on the first floor. Here, Pototschnik finds a new use for Rohrbach’s clapper. He breaks one windowpane after another and then, to huge acclaim, the telephone is squeezed out between the bars and lands, neutralised, on the lawn outside. From a little bit away, the bulging, unmoved gaze of an alien soldier follows their activities.
Shuush!
Hannes hisses and they all duck below the window sill. After a while, tips of noses emerge as they try to look outside. The soldier has a rifle hung with a leather strap over his shoulder and continues to ogle their window.
A Mongol
, Hannes says. Then the Mongol is joined by two other soldiers. He points out the telephone to them. It still lies on the lawn below the window with the receiver off. Hannes explains: they think it’s a hand grenade. Pototschnik has flecks of foam around his mouth, either
from fear or excitement. He starts to say something but interrupts himself at once. Now, they can already hear the clomping sound of the Mongols’ heavy boots on the staircase and their coarse, strange voices are calling out to each other. They’ll cut the throats of the boys down there any time soon, Pototschnik whispers nervously. But instead of howls from the dying, they hear a man’s voice burst into loud, hearty laughter and then a chorus of children’s voices trying to join in the laugh. The soldier’s voice seems to be saying:
Burszuj
…
!
He says it again and again in an apparently jolly tone and the children on the ground floor keep laughing. They cautiously descend the stairs with Pototschnik in front, raising Mrs Rohrbach’s clapper like a blunt lance. Three Russian soldiers, surrounded by a horde of wideeyed children, are now standing guard at the entrance to their ward. The soldiers are much shorter than Hannes had imagined but they have broad shoulders and necks. Two of them wear fur caps with earflaps and, framed by the caps, their faces look small and fat. One of them really does look like a Mongol, with his narrow eyes, blunt nose, and straight black hair sticking out below the edge of the cap. The third soldier is different from the others in that he is tall and blond and wears high leather boots spattered with dirt and mud. When he catches sight of the small crowd led by Pototschnik, he holds out a packet of cigarettes: …
Vy kurite? Mogu li ya predlozhit sigarety?
A tense moment this, as the strange soldier in the boots – Hannes understands that he must be some kind of officer because, unlike the other two, he has a uniform greatcoat with insignia of rank sewn on – tries to persuade Pototschnik to accept a cigarette while Pototschnik looks anxiously around, wondering if he should continue the advance with the clapper or take a break and have a cigarette. The officer puts the packet a little closer to Pototschnik who makes up his mind, takes a cigarette and holds it between thumb and
index finger as if it were a fragile insect. The officer has a lit match ready and takes a step forward to light the fag for Pototschnik, who leans forward and then straightens up, puffing happily with fat, round cheeks. The soldiers let out a roar of laughter. Obviously, it is all just a game to them but, no matter, they are full of goodwill and slap the boys’ backs. More cigarettes are handed out and lit. Some of the boys don’t know which end to hold and they cough and grimace with tightly closed eyes and it all ends with everyone laughing inside a cloud of smoke.

Riot
   Hannes Neubauer isn’t able to recall with any certainty what happened next. Or, rather, he has a series of sharp, distinctly remembered scenes but he can’t order them into a sequence or be clear about which role he had at any one time. Is he the one who is beating a nurse across the back with a broom handle or is he standing aside, watching someone else do the beating? In another memory tableau, he sees himself standing at a window, screaming at the top of his lungs into nothingness. The window is the one on the first floor in pavilion 9 that they broke to dump the telephone. The evening is drawing in but it is still light outside. The telephone lies untouched on the lawn but in the dormitory behind him all the beds are overturned and the floor is covered with blankets and mattresses. In yet another memory, Sister Katschenka is looking at him with her steady, calm eyes. He can’t think how she came to turn up but knows who she is even though she isn’t wearing her uniform. At the other end of the room, Pototschnik stands at the front of his company of about thirty boys, all armed with something: dustpans, pulled-off chair legs, broken bottles. From the start, Pototschnik plans the operation. After making sure that the kitchen has been plundered of anything edible (with limited success: all they found were dry
biscuits and a few loaves), he leads his squad towards the main building. The plan now is to take the hospital kitchen by storm, find more to eat and then liberate the idiots in pavilions 15 and 17. Hannes isn’t clear about exactly who is following Pototschnik. Some join the ranks because they really want to, thrilled by their leader’s enthusiasm. Pototschnik’s face is glowing with excitement under an imaginary helmet. Others, like Hannes, are coming along because they have nowhere else to go, or because they are afraid of what will happen to them if they stay behind. True, considering all that has been said about the Mongols and their cunning and capacity for evil, they do seem oddly indifferent to what the children are up to. While Pototschnik’s company advances as per his plan, trucks are reversing in through the main gate. The Mongols are moving goods into the hospital grounds. In the garden in front of the old hospital theatre, soldiers are resting, some lying in the grass next to a pile of their packs. Members of the hospital board and a few doctors in white coats are conferring with enemy officers. From their gestures, it is obvious that the Bolsheviks are looking for soldiers’ quarters and that the hospital board is trying to fend them off. However, when Pototschnik’s small army reaches pavilion 17, it is already full of Mongols. An obviously retarded boy stands by the door and bows with a silly smile on his face and won’t let up on the bowing and scraping even after all the soldiers have passed. However, he refuses to let Pototschnik through, makes an ugly face and then starts to cry with an irritating, hacking sound. Pototschnik hits him on the head with the clapper. That does the trick. The boy becomes servile again, bows and smiles. Pototschnik pushes past with his followers behind him. The boy is the first idiot they have come across but there are many more. Most of them stand pressed against the walls, some rock helplessly from side to side and others stare with open, wet mouths,
whining or screaming heartbreakingly. Hannes isn’t clear why they are so upset but it could be the upheaval as the Russian soldiers are pouring upstairs to claim dormitories and day rooms. There are nurses here. At least, there is one nurse, who rushes about, trying to get her patients out of the way as the soldiers take over the children’s beds. One of the children seems to be paralysed. The nurse tries to move him with her hands under his armpits but he is either too heavy or else he might be resisting her. Hannes watches as the nurse sags under the weight. One of the soldiers, a tall, bony man with pockmarked skin, makes an awkward attempt to help. Then the nurse screams shrilly, as if someone has stabbed her, and the paralysed boy falls to the floor with a bump. The soldier makes another attempt to lift him but now the nurse is hitting out wildly with one hand while holding her other hand in front of her face. More men come along until the nurse and her patient are surrounded. Hannes sees the boy’s eye-whites gleam nakedly between the broad boots that are suddenly tramping about everywhere. Meanwhile, Pototschnik is advancing. He and his company have gone upstairs and found that the upstairs rooms are swarming with Mongols. They have settled down with their cooking vessels between their knees among scattered hillocks of piled-up packs, while they drink and smoke and pass bottles from hand to hand. A group of staring children have gathered in the doorway. One of the soldiers has an accordion and squeezes it to produce long, wailing notes. Two others grab at the reluctant children, pull at their arms and legs to make them dance, but they don’t understand, try to get away and stumble when the laughing soldiers trip them up. One of those who fall is a girl with her hair in two long plaits down her back. A Mongol grabs one of the plaits to pull her up again and the girl’s face twists in pain. Suddenly Hannes understands what the Mongols should have
understood long ago (or maybe they did and that’s why they amused themselves with the dancing lark): the girl is blind. The boy the nurse dropped on the floor was probably also blind. The pavilion is full of blind children who have no idea of what is going on around them and can’t work out who these strange people are, who smell odd and shout and yell without saying anything you can understand. At this point, Pototschnik steps straight into the noisy dancing circle and is greeted with great good cheer by the soldiers. A bottle is produced. Pototschnik takes it with unbelievable self-assurance and drinks a couple of deep draughts. The accordion player pulls the bellows out as far as it goes and twenty-odd alien male voices howl out something that later shapes up into singing in harmony. With crazy, swinging chords, the accordion player launches into a polka and Pototschnik dances. More precisely, Pototschnik staggers around the room, hopping on one leg at a time while the soldiers clap to the beat and watch him. Then – when he looks about to fall over – they push and pull at him to drag him back into the dancing circle. Pototschnik’s face is bright red, and his thick cauliflower hair looks like a wig that someone will soon rip off his head. Hannes cannot tell how long the performance drags on. Nor is he clear about how many others, apart from Pototschnik, are forced to join in. All he knows is that he must get out of there. Suddenly, the walls seem to have closed in on him. Men with dirty faces whose uniforms stink sourly of sweat are everywhere, on their way in or out. They have taken over the corridor, too, and filled it with their things. When he tries to slip away, they reach for him or grab at him or hit him around the head with rifle butts. Their language is strangely boneless and seems to stick inside their mouths. The more there are of them and the more wildly they hit out, the more deeply he despairs. How can his father come and rescue him now? Does this mean that all of Germany is
lost? What has happened to Mrs Rohrbach and the nurses? Have they slashed these women’s throats, the way Nurse Mutsch always said they would? Just as he thinks that thought, time collapses and he loses several hours. Is that time lost only to his memory? Or has it been excised from reality? He finds himself again at the first-floor window, screaming out into the night with all the power that his young lungs can generate. The dusk is growing denser. He can see the last gleams of daylight as a faint line above the allotment huts on the other side of the road. The strangest thing is that, although he is screaming with all his might, no noise is coming out. It is as if he were screaming into a padded bag. Why scream at all? Something dreadful must have happened but he can’t remember it. After another few lost hours that seem to have left no trace in his mind, he is once more himself but, by then, it is dark and he is in a quite different pavilion, in an unknown dormitory where the beds stand in orderly rows along both main walls. The beds seem to float in space. Even though he hasn’t been here before and has not the slightest idea of how he got here, he is absolutely certain that this is pavilion 15. Like his own dormitory, this one smells strongly of Lysol but mixed with the bitter, stinging smell of iodoform and the sweet, nauseating odour of urine and loose stools, a combination so powerful and penetrating in the warm half-light that he has to swallow several times to stop himself from vomiting. Some of the beds are covered with grids or gates. Faces are pressed against the netting, their features dissolved in tears, or whining or grimacing. In other beds, he sees small bodies distorted beyond all understanding, some with undeveloped or malformed limbs, some with huge skulls and watery, blank eyes. Half a dozen soldiers have pushed their way into the room. Hannes recognises one of them, the officer with the muddy boots and the big, black-toothed grin who offered the children cigarettes. The soldiers
have brought torches and the criss-crossing beams abruptly isolate a stretch of brown-painted wall, then a child’s face (scraped as bare as a skull from a grave), then a pair of hands with partly bent fingers fumbling in the air. The soldiers walk from bed to bed with scarfs or handkerchiefs over their faces to keep out the stench while they talk agitatedly in their soggy language. One of them starts rolling a bed out into the corridor, probably because the officer has ordered him to, but a nurse suddenly comes running from nowhere, shouting
no no no no!
She is directly followed by another nurse, who tugs at the soldier’s sleeve to make him take his hands off the bed. He seems taken aback at first, but then steps closer and hits her so hard in the face that she staggers and falls to the floor.
No!
This time, Hannes is shouting. But even though he stands nearby, nobody pays any attention to him. Seemingly, he is not in the room at all or else they can see straight through him. Two soldiers are trying to shove the nurse out of the way and when she struggles they do to her what his father has described other men doing to his mother. One of them grabs her arms, another her legs. They drag her into a corner of the dormitory, tear off her uniform and then the things she has on underneath. But now he can’t see her anymore because the bodies of the men are in the way. Only a pair of thin white legs sticks out. The legs open and close spasmodically. Hoarse, rumbling laughter comes from the corridor and someone shouts in the Mongol language. Even if he understood some of it, he wouldn’t have grasped anything because now the woman’s screams and the idiots’ loud wails are drowned by a terrific row in the stairwell. The door suddenly opens and the first thing he sees is that bowing show-off of an idiot boy from pavilion 17. Sister Katschenka lies on the floor next to him. She must have fallen down the stairs because she has a bleeding cut on her forehead. She is trying to get up and Hannes wants to help her. He wants to tell
her that what is going on in here is against all law and all justice but she looks at him with an expression of such bottomless contempt and disgust that he can do or say nothing. The moment is only seconds long. Then the boy-army, with Pototschnik still out in front, comes stumbling down the stairs. Pototschnik’s face is very red and there is more foam around his mouth now. He floors the bowing parrot-boy with a single blow from the bloody clapper. The boy curls up like a hurt insect, his limbs pulled up against his belly. The rest of the army trample over him to get to Katschenka, who has no time to stand before the blows start raining down on her. He recognises some of them: Jan Schipka, a big boy called Ewald, Rudi Steinhofer, Bruno Mayer. They all take turns to let her taste Mrs Rohrback’s clapper. And before he knows how it came about, he is with them and beating her as well. True, he isn’t sure whom he is hitting. It might be the yelling Pototschnik and his hateful, curly head, or the broad back of the woman who is collapsing under the burden of the children (he can literally hear her body sag, air whooshing out as if from a punctured tyre), or the flabby idiot who is still lying in a foetal position on the threshold of the dormitory and who, once the Mongols start to separate the boys, seems to be the only one left around for them to beat up.