The Chosen Ones (12 page)

Institutional Life
   Adrian Ziegler lived, on and off, at Spiegelgrund from January 1941 until May 1944. It amounted to a total of three and a half years, if you include the three to four months in the autumn and winter of 1941 when the entire institution was shifted to Ybbs. For someone as young as he was, three and half years almost adds up to a lifetime. During that period of time, the world outside was torn apart by war, and was devastated and rebuilt many times over. Spiegelgrund was the only place I could call home, Adrian used to say a little solemnly. Spiegelgrund had been set up as a place of transit but become a home for life for many of the inmates. Though unintended, such things happened. The institution was structured to be a place of selective elimination, where the weak were continuously separated from the even weaker. In that sense, Spiegelgrund was in a way a reflection of the world. You could see it in the staff they recruited. Take Nurse Mutsch: Adrian had come across her before he arrived at Spiegelgrund when she had been
Mrs
Mutsch, and had worked as a cook in the Mödling reform school. When he joined the long dinner queue of boys in institutional kit he would see her at the front, spooning out
Rindsgulasch
and
Knödel
from steaming pans. When he came to Spiegelgrund, he had recognised her at once. She had spotted him, too, but neither cared to say anything about it, and he had not told anyone about her sudden elevation from a mere cook to Nurse, or even Tutor. But perhaps she treated
him better than she otherwise would have because she knew that he knew something she wanted to hide from the others. True, she did call him her
nasty little cheat
, but never
tinker
. What was Nurse Mutsch like? Not very tall, but broad and solid. Her high-cheekboned face looked shiny, as if rubbed with cream every morning. Her thin mouth, always tight-lipped, had a determined set. Round eyes, wide open and with a look in them as if everyone in the whole world conspired to humiliate and affront her in particular. Once, Adrian said, when she had turned her back, I looked at her and it was like seeing someone else altogether. She had let her hair down and it was rich and black and smoothly glossy, like the fur on a large, agile animal. She turned towards me quite suddenly but didn’t seem to mind me having seen her like that. Mostly, she distrusted the children in her charge and didn’t think them capable of understanding what they saw. This was why it was better not to let them see anything at all. When she ate everything in Julius’s parcel, her eyes had stared emptily and indifferently ahead, while below them her jaws went on chewing and swallowing. Consuming the contents of the children’s parcels was clearly something she automatically regarded as her right. I heard her say to Nurse Demeter that the big problem with the war was that there were no men around, and some women
suffered
because of it. While Julius was incarcerated in the punishment cell on the other side of the corridor, she went to him at least five or six times. Once, she left in tears, with blood on her face. She said that the degenerate child had struck her. Nurse Demeter had to give her a hug and tried to comfort her. Nurse Mutsch went on sick leave for a few days. When she returned, she still had the staring look in her eyes but her expression was somehow different. You could see that she hated the children for what they forced her to do to them.

The Chosen Ones
   Julius Becker was locked up in the punishment cell for five whole days. His punishment was solitary confinement or, as the term was,
einzeln geben
, and while he was held there he served as the institution’s bad conscience even though nobody dared to say anything. On the sixth day, in the morning just after Julius had been released, Doctor Jekelius, the medical director, came on a visitation. Adrian had seen the medical rounds come and go before but this was the biggest one so far and, when they got up that morning, Mrs Rohrbach used the clapper to make very clear that there was
no time to lose – straightaway, off to the washrooms! Then go stand in line!
The children who hadn’t had time to finish making their beds were pulled along and out into the corridor with Rohrbach shoving them from behind. Line-up meant that they had to stand in two rows, the youngest in front and the older ones behind. Jockerl stood in the middle of the front row. In the back row, Becker stood next to Miseryguts and Hannes Neubauer, who as usual didn’t move a muscle in his face. They had to wait for more than an hour and were not permitted to move their feet or even straighten their necks. Their nervous minders kept rushing to the windows to see if
they
weren’t coming and then,
at last
, they were on their way. Adrian, who had waited for the inspection rounds many times, still remembers in detail the sounds the medical staff made as they approached. It must have been like when the chords on a huge Baroque organ are being added together until a mighty, complex body of music emerges, music as inherently mysterious and abstract as it is terrifyingly able to fill and penetrate every space, every soul and thought. The approach of the round begins plainly: you hear doors opening and closing in the stairwell, then the harmless scraping of feet as people walk on the stairs, soon to mingle with the monotonous rumble of a group talking. The talk later splits into single voices, women
and men can be heard speaking across each other, some mumbling, others sounding more insistent. The mass of sounds grows stronger and louder until, suddenly, it is as if a dam has given way, the ward doors open and the white-coated horde pours into the corridor, a dense crowd of junior and more senior doctors making up the bulk of the procession, followed by a tail of nurses and nursing assistants whispering together, but in an order related to their rank or status, and always an ‘appropriate’ distance of one or a couple of steps behinds the medics. This time, Doctor Gross led the procession. His head was inclined politely to listen to Matron Klara Bertha, who was apparently informing him of something of the greatest import. Doctor Hans Krenek was at their heels. Krenek was responsible for the childcare institution’s educational role (in practice, he was the headmaster) and Edeltraud Baar, the psychologist, was walking at his side. Baar was an older woman who used to come along to the day room after the quiet hour and gather up their completed writing and drawing exercises. Recently she had been observed in the corridor several times, talking with Mrs Rohrbach after visiting Becker in his cell. Eventually, Adrian also caught sight of Doctor Erwin Jekelius somewhere in the middle of the cluster of doctors. He looked surprisingly young and might have been taken for an accompanying junior medic if it hadn’t been for the observant look in his eyes and his restrained way of walking, as if any minute he might have to take control over where he was going and what he had to do next. He took a folder full of documents that Sister Bertha handed him but turned to the boys at once, without looking in the folder, and briefly cleared his throat. Immediately, everyone fell silent. Even at the edge of the group, where Doctor Gross had been continuing his conversation with Matron, the talk died down as if someone had turned a switch.

Children
, Doctor Jekelius began,

(He spoke in the same way as he moved, in a low voice, sounding slightly tense but at the same time almost too gentle.)

HEIL HITLER!
The reply rose from the tightly constricted throats of thirty children who all raised their arms in the correct German greeting. Doctor Jekelius had turned away as if the sight of all these suddenly far too eager boys made him weary. Next, the selection process would follow and the selected chosen ones separated from the less worthy. Accompanied by Mrs Rohrbach, a smiling Doctor Gross walked slowly past the boys in the front row. Then he turned and started to walk back, meanwhile scrutinising the boys in the back row while Mrs Rohrbach read to him from a list of names. Now and then, Gross would stop, take hold of an arm or a chin, sometimes simply using his thumb to part lips that fear had kept tightly closed or to force screwed-up eyelids apart. Now and then, he said something incomprehensible for Sister Bertha to note in the big folder. And then they reached Julius Becker. They stayed there for what must have been just a short moment but which felt like an eternity to everyone. Nobody said anything. Doctor Gross smiled. And went on to say:
We can only hope that you have improved somewhat, Becker, now that you’ve had time to think through the consequences of what you did.
Still, he didn’t sound angry or anything, just amused. He also kept smiling (he had smiled like that at Sister Bertha, in a partly knowing, partly supercilious way) and even winked, barely noticeably, with one eye as if to send a message to say that what would happen next was a matter between him and Julius, and nobody else. How Julius reacted is not on record, because the boys could not turn their heads to have a look, but they could all see how Doctor Gross searched in the pockets of his white coat and found a small, round
sweet, peeled the wrapper off with seductively slow finger movements. He then held the sweet up between thumb and index finger, delicately, as if it were a precious object, before popping it into Julius Becker’s mouth, and he kept looking at him (his smile, if possible, even more comradely and encouraging) until Julius had started to suck at the caramel, at which point he nodded gently, contentedly. All the while, he kept a keen eye on the folder in which Sister Bertha now was writing very quickly as if there wasn’t enough time to make a note of all essentials. And then it was all over, the procession reformed, more quietly now, though some of them were still chatting, and they set out along the corridor where Mrs Rohrbach stood, ready to open the door for them like a hostess about to say goodbye to her guests. And that was that (once more, but now it was final) and for those left behind, still standing with straight backs, and eyes locked onto the row of windows opposite, it was impossible to work out what was worst: the realisation that whatever had happened was irrevocable, that what had been decided at the inspection was a sentence that would be carried out, or the certainty that this was how things were and would be forever after, and that whatever plans they might dream up, they would never escape this kind of scrutiny and, yes, more than that, that the entire purpose of their existence here was the inspection with its crowning event when the reward for having been chosen, as promised, was the sweet that Doctor Gross with such punctiliousness inserted into the cavity of your mouth and watched to see being sucked so there was no way to remove the dank taste, mingling with the sticky sweet caramel flavour, of that alien finger inserted into your mouth and touching your tongue or the inside of your cheek. Eventually Adrian, too, would come to belong to the happy group of selected boys who were given one of Doctor Gross’s sweets. For as long as the inspection continued, no one was safe.

Interrogation of a Traitor of the Fatherland
   From that day, Julius Becker seemed transformed. Before, he had been drifting about, scowling and withdrawn. Back then, the only time he brightened up at least a little was when his titular uncle delivered one of his rare parcels. After the inspection, Becker smiled continuously but it was a flat, dumb, joyless smile. When he opened his mouth, his gums were the colour of cement and his eyes, always directed at you but apparently not seeing you, looked as dull. Everyone knew that his end was nearing. Every day that passed with him still among them was painful. When they lined up to march off to school, Miseryguts was twisting with discomfort. He asked Hannes if they wouldn’t come soon for the traitor to the Fatherland and take him away. Away, where? Hannes asked. And Miseryguts knew: to pavilion 15, of course. Julius stood just behind them but looked unmoved. His smile and his unseeing eyes did not flicker. Mr Hackl knew, too. Why else would he torment Becker with lots of questions when he hadn’t as much as glanced at him before? All the schooling took place in pavilion 13, to the right of pavilion 15 and opposite the kitchen, which was on the other side of the site’s central axis path that ran from the main entrance all the way to the church with the angels. Structurally, pavilion 13 was very like their own building but with the difference that the two floors had been changed to schoolrooms for four classes, all furnished with rows of coat hooks and linoleum on the floors to conserve heat. Mr Hackl taught older and younger children, and both boys and girls, but in separate classes. It was obvious that he preferred to be with the older boys, which conferred more of a sense of power and status even though, when all was said and done, each and every one of them was (as he incessantly told them) of the same ilk, all unteachable thieves and ruffians. Mr Hackl wore a monocle, though he could have been little more than thirty years old, and boasted that he was related to
the great explorer Julius Payer who, in 1873, had discovered the group of islands in the Arctic called Franz Josef’s Land. Or,
Emperor
Franz Josef’s Land, as Mr Hackl would have it. The islands made up the world’s northernmost archipelago, an uninhabitable place although nonetheless conquered by the Austrians, of course, characterised as they are by the resilience, self-discipline and willpower so typical of the Germanic race. Most of Mr Hackl’s lessons, not just those in the natural sciences and geography, often ended up as long lectures on the character of mankind, how human moral strength and stature were reflected in physical activities and also, he argued, the other way round. Each lecture left him utterly exhausted, as if he had trudged across the same icy plains as Payer and his companions, so he had to support himself against the teacher’s desk and wipe his forehead with a hanky. With an almost resigned gesture, he let the class take over the exploration of the topic by asking them a series of quick questions, like this one for Julius Becker: