The Chosen Ones (9 page)

She looks up and sees Pelikan staring at her, from his throne of supportive arms. His gaze is so penetrating that she gets lost in the text she is reading. The room is very silent. Then, a new conversation
starts up between Doctor Jekelius and the institution’s director, in a different, more factual tone:

The two medical men leave the room together. Young Pelikan, too, leaves in his mobile throne, followed by the two nurses who both
turn in the doorway and curtsey to Anna, as if to some superior. Because she doesn’t know what to do next, she returns to the car. Soon afterwards, Jekelius comes along and insists that they must drive into Totzenbach. Someone lives there whom he must visit. But first, he has a couple of phone calls to make in the hospital. Sister Anna can go ahead into the village to pass the time, he says. It sounds like an order and she obeys. There is a cemetery on the village side of the hospital. It is surrounded by tall poplar trees that cast a basketwork of swiftly changing shadows over the gravestones. Some of those buried here must have been patients who died in the hospital, but most of the graves are for staff, all female. The tall headstones have the same year chiselled into them: 1918. The year of the Spanish flu. She recalls Jekelius’s long lecture on the way here: were these nurses themselves the cause of the infection that killed them? A narrow path runs from the wooded burial ground between broad fields towards the village. For a while, she follows a slow stream with wooded banks until houses and farms close in around her and she is in Totzenbach. She has arrived at a ruined castle with a moat that looks more like an overgrown ditch. The castle seems to have been recruited as an army base: parked military trucks and troop-transport vehicles are parked everywhere along the moat. It is midday. The heat encloses her like a bell jar. She feels dizzy again and recognises the spasms at her temples that announce a headache. When ten minutes have passed without any sign of Jekelius, she walks slowly towards the church at the far end of the village main street. There are hardly any men around, only women and children. Yet another sign of the war’s silent presence. A flock of boys and girls come running from the school building and set off, shouting and laughing, down a road lined by flowering pear trees with large flower clusters far out along their branches. She is looking for cool places where she can
settle down to rest, and when she sees the door to the church transept standing open she walks inside, then stops in front of a low stone relief on the wall of the porch. It is a triptych and the central panel is crowded with allegorical figures. She stares vacantly at the scene for a long time before she suddenly recognises two of the Fourteen Holy Helpers in Need: Saint Christopher holding the infant Jesus in his arms and Saint Catherine with the wheel. And then she realises that they are all there: Saint Barbara with the tower, Saint Blaise with the crossed candles, Saint Margaret with the dragon. When she was little, she had to learn about them in school, the fourteen names and attributes of each saint. Irrespective of where you were or what affliction you suffered from, there was always a Holy Helper to pray to and the hope of a pair of protective or supportive hands, like those escorting young Pelikan from his hiding place. There should have been a helper for her mother, too, someone to save her from the insane time warp that made everything seem to slip out of her hands. Perhaps Saint Florian would serve, he who blessed and secured the sanctity of the home when fire and warfare lay waste the land? She notices next that the two worshippers kneeling on either side of the frieze’s central panel, a man and a woman in prayer, have had their heads knocked off. But the vandals have spared the saintly helpers. Only time has worn their bodies smooth. There is the sound of a car engine in the distance, and from inside the gloomy transept she sees Jekelius’s large Opel Kapitän slowly approach along the tree-lined street. Some of the children have climbed up into the pear tree closest to the church but one little boy is too small to follow them on his own. He stands around on the ground below while excited voices call from inside the canopy and then go silent when Jekelius gets out of the car and stops near the tree. He first looks up, then at the boy, who tries his luck by expectantly stretching both arms into the air.
Jekelius grabs hold of him and lifts him up into the anxiously waiting tree. Then, he walks to the passenger side of the car and silently holds the door open for her. She climbs in. He stays silent all the way back to the city. Even though he has not commented on the day’s events, she feels that he all the time wanted her to be there, not exactly as an assistant but more as a witness. He intended her to watch his assured, decisive examination and evaluation of the children of Bruckhof, and liked her to see the affectionate firmness with which he lifted the little boy up into the tree. And then she recalls the scene in Martinstrasse, when that woman was impatiently waiting while Jekelius manoeuvred the car out into the street. It has struck her that she is now taking the woman’s place. She briefly wonders if he, too, is aware of that, only to push the thought right out of her mind. It is too absurd and irrelevant to follow up. Instead, she leans back, allows herself to be dazzled by the setting sun and thinks of nothing else until they drive into suburban Wien.

The Quiet Hour
   There were around fifteen, maybe twenty boys in their dormitory and their section probably held sixty or so, I can’t quite remember, Adrian Ziegler says. Generally, remembering is hard for him. The others agree. It is as if their memories are somehow smudged, or as if much of what was once stored has been corroded. When Ziegler is shown photographs of the boys, he recognises most of them but can’t for the life of him work out where or when he has met them. He remembers their nicknames even when their proper names are lost. Apparently, one of them was called Cape (for Cape of Good Hope); there was a Miseryguts, and an Escape-artist whose real name was Pawel Zavlacky. He instructed Adrian, with all the precision of an experienced locksmith, about the locks in their section that could be hooked or picked, what kind of tools there were and how they functioned. Easy locks, like those in the doors between the day room and the corridor, or the dormitory doors, could be picked with any kind of object that was pointy enough, like a filed-down nail or a knitting needle. Or a piece of a tin lid. Tin lids could be hammered into a point as sharp as an awl. In the toilets and the shower rooms, the window latches were fastened to the wall and secured with bolts, so to break these you needed stronger kit. Another snag was that the windows were barred on the outside, so just breaking the locks didn’t do the trick. To get out, you had to be slim and agile like a
real
escape artist. Zavlacky boasted that he had lost count of all the times he had got out of the place. Adrian had only seen him escape once and
thought he had died in the process. Just over a year later, Zavlacky was caught and incarcerated again, and by then it had been like meeting an entirely different person. Spiegelgrund did this to people’s bodies and minds: deformed them almost to death. The children who didn’t manage to escape or disappear some other way ended up in pavilions 15 or 17. The idiots were kept in 15. You could hear them screaming and moaning in the summer when it was warm enough for all the narrow ventilation panes at the top of the row of windows to be left open. Their noises would hang in the moist, still air between the pavilions and became somehow tangible, almost fleshy, and you could hear the slow, heaving intakes of breath that preceded the long screams, and the whimpering from those who couldn’t breathe in enough air. Adrian slept in the second bed, counting from the main dormitory door. The younger children were usually placed in the middle and the older ones, like Zavlacky and Miseryguts, and later Pototschnik, closer to the door. The bed on Adrian’s left was Julius Becker’s and the one on Becker’s left was Jockerl’s. Jockerl was a bed-wetter. Hannes Neubauer slept closest to the window. Neubauer was one or maybe two years younger than Adrian, a small, solid boy whose spotty, scarred head was as round as a cannonball and, apart from scattered pale tufts, almost bald. His expressionless face gave nothing away, his eyes were a pale, almost transparent blue and his mouth was tight but with slightly upturned corners, as if smiling at something only Hannes could see. He sometimes wandered about for days without looking at anything much or saying anything in particular, seemingly only to carry his round, blond head from place to place rather than to be with others, a habit that might have made people take him for a hopeless idiot had it not been for him actually talking to them from time to time. He had to name everything he saw and might say:
a chair
. Or:
a plate
. The words could also come tumbling
out of him in long, incomprehensible sentences in which only the swear words could be picked out clearly because they were recognisable, although he sometimes used really strange ones, like
schiache Hustblumen
or
g’fäulte Marillen
or
leck mich du Amerikanische Tuttelaffe
. What normal person would ever say anything like that? But the words would keep pouring out of Hannes until he suddenly stopped talking and then he looked blank and seemed to wipe them away with the back of his hand as one does when wiping snot or saliva from one’s face. His father was an officer in the Wehrmacht and fought at the front. That’s why Hannes was in Spiegelgrund. Not because he had said or done anything stupid, or misbehaved, but because there wasn’t anyone at home to look after him. At least, that’s what he said. In a manner of speaking, Julius Becker’s parents were war victims too, but that was different and, unlike Hannes, he never spoke about them. Becker normally didn’t speak at all unless there was someone he could harangue. Miseryguts said it was because Becker was an
intellectual
and it was a fact that he looked like one: tall, with narrow shoulders, thick hair as curly as a Negro’s, and small round glasses with chrome rims that he treasured and always tried to hide in some safe place. The other boys worshipped Julius but hated him as well. They thought he was god-like because he wasn’t at all like them. And probably detested him for the same reason. He would tell them about another, much larger and better world that existed
outside
, or that was what he claimed anyway, when he bothered to say anything at all. He was sure there were
good powers
working for his release. His time inside was limited, come what may. Or so he said. All the time, according to Adrian, it was as if Becker had something to long for, some hope for himself, and that made the rest of us feel sick because we too had of course something to long for, only we had been told it was just crap, and no one was waiting for us to come
outside, let alone anyone who could be said to have
good powers
, and so we knew that life inside was not about keeping yourself to yourself and digging in for the duration, as Julius saw it, but precisely the opposite; that is, you had to become as invisible as possible to avoid becoming the target of the fury of the nurses, to never resist and instead try and eliminate your real self to make it possible to play along and pretend to do what they wanted, given that what they did want wasn’t what they said, which was to make us better people, Adrian explained, but to get rid of us, wipe us off the surface of the earth once and for all, which of course meant that the only remaining way out of there was willingly to agree not to be. The fact was, Julius was always afraid. Fear was the price he had to pay for his belief in something outside worth having faith in or longing for. When he sat on his bed, he always perched on the edge, with his legs together and his thin shoulders raised. His posture was the same when he ate. And he was always on the lookout for a confidant. Julius confided certain things to Adrian that he only understood much later. For instance, Julius’s father, who had been a top legal advisor to the Schuschnigg government, had resisted the demand to let the Nazi insurgents out of prison and had himself been imprisoned just after the Anschluss. The Nazis had gone after Julius’s mother as well and made her work in the armaments industry. He didn’t know where she worked or at what, but he said that someone he called his ‘at-home uncle’ knew and the ‘at-home uncle’ would visit sometimes, bringing short letters or secret notes from Mrs Becker. The uncle also sent Julius parcels that contained food and warm clothes and added useful items like shoe polish, plasters and antiseptic cream. These last three things in particular infuriated Nurse Mutsch (
… who does he reckon we are? Doesn’t he think we’re minding the children’s every need …?
). One day, she made up her mind that she had to stop this special gifts business.
She acted during what was called ‘the quiet hour’. Every afternoon, once they were back in pavilion 9 after their lessons, and before they went off to queue for their supper, the children were made to sit down for the quiet hour. This meant that they went to the day room, where they sat, straight-backed and with their hands visible on the tabletop. They were allowed to read books or do their homework but not to say anything or ask any questions and, while they sat there, Nurse Mutsch or bony Nurse Demeter would keep an eye on them so, naturally, the nurses’ beady eyes would register
all
there was to see, every failing and every mistake their charges had been guilty of that day, every sign of indiscipline or disobedience which then, as the compact silence gathered in the room, would surface, urged on by bad conscience as heat drives sweat from the pores of the skin. Such is the wickedness of children (so they were told) that it is as impossible to choke it off at birth as it is to stop it being found out. Which was why Mutsch chose to produce the new parcel from Julius’s would-be uncle during the quiet hour and put it down in the middle of the table, in front of fifteen pairs of frightened eyes:

…
now, let’s see what we’ll see
, she says and holds up a pair of scissors.

…
scissors
, Hannes says.

She begins to cut. Fifteen pairs of childish eyes follow Nurse Mutsch’s brisk movements as she plunges the scissors into the parcel, cuts the coarse string, pulls the folded ends of the wrapping paper back and puts her hand inside. The parcel is so big that her massive forearm disappears. Then it re-emerges and she begins to line up her finds. There are little jars with preserved apricots and pears, and she twists the lid off one of them, makes pincers of her right thumb and index finger and extracts one of the halved, syrup-soaked pears, golden-grey and soft, and pops the entire piece in her mouth,
then licks her fingers, not to miss a drop of the wonderful syrup. Her hand goes back into the parcel and out comes a box of original Manner Kex, the Neapolitan wafers layered with chocolate cream. Looking thoughtful, she opens the box and starts eating, slowly and systematically, crunching on one wafer after another. By now, all eyes have swivelled to fix on Julius. In the beginning, he just sat there, looking as scared as everyone else and unable to believe what was happening. But when Nurse Mutsch has munched her way through all the fruit in syrup and all the biscuits, and gone on to examine the warm socks the uncle had packed, and the handkerchiefs and the spare leather bootlaces, he gradually begins to shake. It is a strange fit of the shakes that starts at the top of his body, around his head and shoulders, but he manages to control it so that he sits still, or almost still, back straight and hands on the table as per orders, but the lower part of his body is less controllable, his hips rock on the seat, his thighs tremble and his feet rattle against the floor like drumsticks. Nurse Mutsch stares at him:

What’s up, do you want the toilet?

Julius opens his mouth as if to answer.

Big or small?

Julius opens his mouth again but Mutsch is too impatient to wait for a reply. She looks for something to wipe her hands on. There is nothing obvious nearby so she grabs one of the carefully folded socks from the parcel, uses it to wipe her mouth and nose, finds her bunch of keys and picks up a couple of the precisely measured strips of toilet paper that she keeps in readiness next to her place at the table and walks with firm strides to the door, unlocks it and holds it open for Julius who slowly, as if reluctantly, gets up from the bench and walks towards her,

come on, what are you waiting for do you think we’ve got all day …

and then the door slams behind them and from the corridor the others can hear Mutsch’s voice, muffled but still perfectly audible, then the keys turn in the toilet door lock. Shortly afterwards, the door to the day room opens again and Nurse Mutsch returns. Without a glance at anyone, she sits down and carries on exploring the parcel. When she can’t find anything more, she makes a bundle of the wrapping paper and takes the rubbish to the nurses’ cubicle. There’s a discreet knock on the door. Mutsch admits Julius, and as he walks to the table it is obvious that he has managed neither the small nor the big stuff but that everything is as it was before – except there is no parcel now, only Nurse Mutsch, who carries on staring at Julius and, next, slowly but surely, he starts shaking again and now Mutsch is ready for him.

Do you want the toilet again?

Julius shakes his head but by now there’s no telling if this means no, or if the disturbance of his body has reached his head, and Nurse Mutsch gets up and walks over to him to issue an order,
get a grip on yourself
, and next (when Julius still hasn’t managed to subdue his shakes) slaps the side of his head with the flat of her hand, his glasses go flying and
no one allowed you to stand
, she says when he makes a reflex attempt to pick the glasses up, and then
sit down
, she says as she bends to pick up the glasses before returning to her seat at the head of the table. She holds the glasses in her fist, her fingers wrapped around them so firmly that everyone can see how tightening the grip just a little would squeeze the thin frames to breaking point and the glass would be crushed. Please, Julius pleads quietly, and Nurse Mutsch goes,
you just stay where you are, nice and proper, and you’ll get them back at the end of the quiet hour
. Julius sits where he sits, trembling as hard as ever. One can almost hear the skeleton rattle inside him. He doesn’t put his hand up to be allowed to go to
the toilet and Nurse Mutsch doesn’t anticipate any request by asking him if he wants to go. No need for that. A little later, the silence is broken by a liquid, rustling sound and soon afterwards they see a puddle spreading under the table, over which Julius droops, wet and still shaking like a rattle. Nurse Mutsch watches him with something akin to satisfaction.
It’s when one doesn’t think before one acts that everyone can see what kind of a weakling one really is
, she says with distaste, and even though she is looking in another direction no one fails to realise that she is talking about Julius.

Wake-up Call
   All days begin exactly the same way. At 5.30 a.m. punctually, their tutor or
Erzieherin
, Mrs Rohrbach, unlocks the dormitory door and steps inside followed by the day staff. Mrs Rohrbach blows on a whistle she has hanging from a strap around her neck and uses a short, rubber-coated metal stick they called ‘the clapper’ to bang underneath the metal bars at the ends of the beds.