The Chosen Ones (7 page)

At this point, Mrs Althofer writes a letter to the board of the institution and demands that they should let her have her child back. Her stated reason is that she felt unable to establish contact with her daughter on her latest visit, an experience she describes as
‘something completely new’. Even though Sophie has chosen not to communicate ‘as people normally do’, Mrs Althofer insists that mother and daughter had developed ‘their own language’ and that they could speak fluently with each other. The girl had been happy and often laughed.
When I held her by her waist and lifted her high in the air she would choke with laughter and whisper in her tiny voice, ‘Thank you, Mummy!’ It is with deep distress that I have been forced to realise that my girl is no longer herself. You have written
[Mrs Althofer refers to a letter from Doctor Jekelius]
that no amount of wishful thinking can make my daughter well again and that at Spiegelgrund she will receive all the care and attention a child needs. Are you telling me to be grateful that my daughter seems no longer able to recognise her own mother?

When Katschenka checks on her that evening, Sophie seems to be sleeping peacefully for the first time in weeks. Her smooth features show no sign of the earlier distortion. Anna would like to stop and place a hand on her face. But there are so many children. Soon afterwards, she is called to pavilion 17, where a boy is banging his head against the wall. He has to be restrained. In the other ward, a boy has come down with scarlet fever and must be isolated at once. Hildegard Mayer is bullying a girl, she shouts and hits the child. Nurse Mayer really has an awful temper. By the time Katschenka returns to pavilion 15, Sophie has been moved to the gallery wing. Her temperature has gone up again and she is breathing irregularly. Each breath seems to be ejected separately, one by one, from her misshapen chest.
The pallor of her face has turned grey, and her skin is unnaturally glossy, like a sheet of shiny, thick paper. There might well have been glimpses of awareness in her eyes before but now they are empty beneath their heavy lids. Anna thinks that her face shuts you out, like a blank wall. Later that day, a so-called
Schlechtmeldung
, a bad news announcement, is put in the mail.

The following morning, two of them wash Sophie Althofer’s body. Katschenka props the corpse upright while one of the nursing assistants pulls the mattress and sheets off the bed. The child’s body is lighter than Anna had imagined and easy to hold: the strongly arched pigeon chest fits into the bend of her left arm. They suddenly hear a shrill, piercing scream from the corridor, and Anna briefly fears that Mrs Althofer has arrived and that she is to be the one who hands the dead girl over to her mother. But it is a child who screams. The note about Sophie’s declining health had been put in the post after a deliberate delay to make it too late for Mrs Althofer in case she decided to come along. But she might not come at all, just as Doctor Gross had explained earlier: the mothers may well be tremendously loud and pushy while their children are here, but once the little ones have died, they’ll write and ask us to ‘look after the practical issues’ and that they’ll pay us for our expenses, thank you kindly.

The Procedure
   A few days after the death of Sophie Althofer, the office finally informs Anna Katschenka that Doctor Jekelius wishes to see her. Does a child have to die before she is offered the reward of an audience with him? The Jekelius she meets in his study isn’t the humorous, pleasantly jovial doctor she remembers, or believes that she remembers. He doesn’t get up to greet her, and carries on leafing through documents while taking occasional notes. She is left to stand there. When he finally turns to her, he moves in the old, relaxed, carefully controlled way but his face is like a stone wall. There is no way to get through. He slowly places one hand on top of the other and asks if she is becoming familiar with the routines and pace of the ward work. She says yes, since that is obviously what he expects. This unchanging face of his frightens her. He goes on to say that he assumes she has by now observed the miserable condition of most of the children, taken on board the fact that many of them are incurable and also understood how the institution deals with this type of case. She thinks of Sophie, and the far too high dose of phenobarbital she was given, and of how strangely light, almost weightless the child’s body had felt in her arms. Tears fill her eyes. There is nothing she can do to stop them. She feels in her uniform pockets for a handkerchief, can’t find one and tries to turn her head away. Weeping is so undignified but Jekelius doesn’t seem to have noticed that her feelings have got the better of her. His face is still rigid as he leans forward over the desk. I shall now have to remind Sister Anna about the professional oath that binds you and the pledge of confidentiality that you will have made at the same time. As you know, you are, under no circumstances, to communicate any details whatsoever with respect to any individual case to anyone outside the institution. And you are not to ask any unnecessary questions. Has Sister Anna grasped these implications? She nods. The corners of her eyes have almost dried and
now she thinks that maybe Doctor Jekelius’s stiffness is related to the message he is trying to convey to her. He sits back in his chair to unlock one of the drawers in his desk, finds a thin sheet of typescript and hands it to her. It is some kind of certificate with a signature at the bottom and the Nazi emblem in the upper left-hand corner. She is far too tense to get a grip on what the lines of typescript actually say. As Sister Anna can see, this circular carries the Führer’s own personal signature, Doctor Jekelius points out. It means that legally, this document has the same status as an already enacted piece of legislation. He pauses to give her time to take in the overwhelming significance of this but, somehow, she is struck mute and also feels unable to grasp what he is trying to tell her and what the circular has to do with any new laws and regulations. She stares at the piece of paper in her hands. So, that’s what Hitler’s signature looks like? Doctor Jekelius continues to speak but in a gentler voice, as if he has sensed her confusion. What we do in certain circumstances, he says, is confined to
extreme cases only.
And our interventions aren’t crimes, neither morally nor legally, as you can see now. On the contrary, the measures we take should be seen as acts of mercy in the spirit that has always guided medical science, that is to ameliorate or remove sources of pain and suffering. Then he explains the practical aspects of the procedure, how for each patient certain forms are to be completed and sent to the Ministry for Internal Affairs in Berlin, where a dedicated medical committee scrutinises the submissions with great care and sees to it that every individual case is tested before their decision is made and which it is our duty to carry out. But, by now, she has ceased taking in what he says. She gets up, politely excuses herself, but she really must leave. They are waiting for her down in the pavilion. Presumably, he believes that she is upset because of the information he has just entrusted her with and his gloss on the words
in that document. She is upset but that isn’t why. Often that day, as well as during many of the days and nights that follow, she returned to the thought of how differently she would have reacted if he had taken her into his confidence rather than laying on that performance. How she would then have understood not only the words he used but, with a will, embraced the meaning of it all. However repellent the new legislation he had spoken of appeared to her, she would nonetheless have been completely loyal to it. Now, it seemed as cold and abstract and impersonal as Jekelius himself. And what of those monstrous children, was there nothing for them except the law? No mercy, no love, no life? She lay awake all night in her old girlhood bedroom in her parents’ flat on Fendigasse. Although their area was usually calm and quiet at night, she seemed to hear a chorus of voices rising from the street: loud, high-pitched voices speaking across each other and then yet cut through by other ones, as sharp and shrill as officers’ commands. The ultimate decisions are not made by us, but by them, in Berlin. All we can do is knuckle under and do as we’re told. None of us can be regarded as personally responsible. We are obliged to obey current legislation. We have no reason to feel guilty.

Two Lives
   From that time, she seems to lead two lives. With her parents, she chats contentedly about her new, secure post at Steinhof and the remarkable Doctor Jekelius who looks after his staff so well. Sometimes, she also tells them about the children she cares for at the institution, the
poor little things
– that’s how Hilde Mayer describes them – with their comical notions, and about the games the nurses think up to amuse and distract the few who have enough sense to be distracted. She never says a word about the circumstances that have led to the children’s institutionalisation or gives the slightest hint of any of the repulsive defects and health problems they suffer from,
but instead manages to suggest that these are quite normal children, though maybe a little slow to develop. Doctor Jekelius had assured her that euthanasia would be considered only in extreme cases. He expanded on this theme: only when we are one hundred per cent certain that being cared for in this institution will never lead to anything better than conditioned responses that please the staff; only when the child is so retarded or afflicted by such grave defects of hereditary or racial biological origin that the only predictable outcome is endlessly drawn-up pain and degradation; only then will we choose to abandon attempts to extend artificially the tormented existence of such children and instead end its life, something we will do, as instructed, in the most humane way possible. However, Anna Katschenka had no doubt at all that the committee in Berlin had been notified of just about all of the children in pavilion 15 and that new patients were routinely referred on admission. Nor had it taken long for her to understand that most of the children on the ward had already been prescribed the ‘treatment’ but some were still there only because it was due start later. She never grasped the logic of the timing. On her daily rounds, all she knew was that some of the children were ‘sentenced’ but not whether they had weeks or months to live. However strange and distressing she found it, nothing stopped her from carrying out the necessary day-to-day work. Children rated as unfit to live still had to be washed and changed regularly, and fed with solid or liquid food as required. Those who couldn’t swallow must somehow be
made to
in the end, and those who were immobile had to be turned to prevent bedsores developing. And all ought to be talked to and cared for, perhaps even sung to, as Anna found herself doing to a little girl whom no one and nothing could comfort. She sang the same songs she had once sung to the children in Professor Knöpfelmacher’s infection wards. They were childish verses and
riddles, like the one about the fox who stole all the hens in the coop. Then the knotted, hard muscles in the little girl’s face relaxed slowly and the large, infantile mouth began sucking on its own tongue, then two fingers went into her mouth and she fell asleep. A few hours later that same girl woke and convulsed badly. They had to tie her hands to bars at the head end of the bed to stop her from scratching her face. While Nurse Sikora tried to bottle-feed her, Anna Katschenka phoned for Doctor Türk who came at once, as tight-lipped and focused as ever, inspected the girl’s throat and prescribed scopolamine injections since the child clearly could no longer chew and swallow on her own. A week later, the girl had to be moved to the gallery wing where the most severely ill children were cared for or, more to the point, where they kept the children whose ‘treatment’ had advanced to the last stage and who had only a few hours left to live. Along the wall, opposite the row of tall windows with the ventilator panels always open to let the persistent stench of Lysol and faeces escape, the febrile children were bedded down under thick white duvets. It looked like a line-up of little mummies. Some might cough, making rough, painful sounds as if a spoon was scraping the inside of their frail chests. Most of them lay quite still, their lids half closed over cloudy eyes. The hardly audible breathing of one child after another would cease and all that was left of them was the mess on the sheets. The alkaloid agent that was pumped into their bodies to dull their restlessness and convulsions seemed, at least in these huge quantities, to affect the mucous lining of the intestines and cause the faeces to become semi-liquid and stained with blood. The bitter stench of shit mixed with medication was so overpowering that nothing you washed the floors with could remove it, and however often you cleaned and aired the place, it was still there. The smell would never go away. Outside, the corpse-porters were waiting
with their covered carts to take the bodies to the mortuary, where they were washed and made ready for the post-mortem examination. The soiled bed linen was bundled up and the packages taken on the little train to the laundry. And that was it. A casual visitor might have been surprised at how quiet and orderly the procedure was. No one struggled to save lives here. No
dashing about
, as Nurse Mayer might have put it. The two ward medics, doctors Türk and Gross, came and went at their own serene pace. If some especially interesting case had been admitted, the doctors might all turn up and cluster around the bed. Their discussions could become lively but rarely loud. Doctor Jekelius never joined these case conferences. Often, it was Doctor Gross who took the lead with his usual pompous authority. And it was also Doctor Gross who usually decided about whether to carry out encephalographic examinations on the children, or any other investigations. The young patients who had been subjected to lumbar puncture, and especially those who had to have several punctures, which of course took much longer, were often in terrible shape when they were returned to the ward. It took just a few hours for some of them to fall ill with nausea, vomiting and severe spasticity. And then it was time for scopolamine injections again. Instinctively, Katschenka knew that it was wrong to up the dosage of pain-reducing and tranquillising agents to this extent, especially for very sick children. But what right did she have to express medical opinions? She assumed anyway that the cases that were selected for cranial X-rays were already so ill that the child’s relatives would have given their consent, and she also hoped that these investigations were carried out in order to reach the high scientific goals that Doctor Jekelius always invoked. Besides, it was a comfort to see that in the end the children became calm and somnolent after all their pain, although it was impossible to make them take any nourishment
afterwards. What was truly hard to deal with was the way all these interventions were undertaken without a word being exchanged about them, and in an atmosphere of gloom and mutual distrust. She would sometimes catch Nurse Kleinschmittger watching her as she stood in front of the drug cupboard with her list of prescribed medications, as if weighing up what Katschenka might know of all that was unsaid and simply taken as read when it came to the running of the ward. Would she reach a stage at which what was left unsaid would become unbearable? But, no, of course there was no such stage. Rather, it was a relief when one of the members of staff turned what they all knew into a joke; someone like Nurse Mayer, whose uncaring, coarse manner could feel liberating.
Isn’t it soon time for little Fritzl to have his next shot?
she might say, all mock innocence. Or Emilie Kragulj, who was simply thoughtless, would lift one of the most malnourished children and say
the doctor will come soon
, unintentionally making Nurse Kleinschmittger smile even as her restless eyes nervously flickered across the room to check on Katschenka. All this meant that they formed a collective after all, without trying to and without any real understanding between then. What they were not allowed to talk about or even mention in front of the others made them bond more tightly than anything else they might have in common. The shadow of all that was unsaid would never disappear. It was no ordinary shadow because somehow those on whom it fell were induced to lean further into it. Katschenka has that darkness inside her. She can’t explain her awareness of the shadow in any other way. When she went home in the evenings, she sat in the tram and all around her people would crowd in, with the workaday briefcases squashed under the arm or between their knees. They were all pure, spotless, and it showed. She paid attention to how she dressed but avoided anything startling, and carried out her
duties flawlessly; the shadow grew as flawlessly. She realised that it would soon invade her so thoroughly that none of it would show anymore, inside or outside her. Then, not even the fact that it existed would seem remarkable.