The Chosen Ones (13 page)

Can Becker tell us what an evil person is?

The question was so surprising that most of them had no time to turn round to look but if Becker himself was surprised, he didn’t show it. Unhesitatingly, he opened his mouth, inside which one could already see the grey bones of his cranium and said calmly, quietly, but with certainty:

An evil person is an extortionist and profiteer whose deceits and betrayals shame and dishonour the entire German race.

Mr Hackl didn’t seem surprised either. He even looked pleased, as if he had recovered a little from his fatigue:

And what do we call such evil people, Julius?

We call them Jews and Bolsheviks, Mr Hackl.

And what about yourself, Becker, what kind are you? A Jew or a Bolshevik?

This time, Julius didn’t have his answer ready quite so promptly. But Mr Hackl didn’t care because he had got what he wanted and turned to the class:

I can inform the rest of you that Becker isn’t a Jew because then he wouldn’t be here. How we treat Bolsheviks is a matter I’ll tell you about tomorrow.

That was the end of the lesson. Nobody said anything else. After the midday-meal break, Mr Hackl switches to teaching arithmetic. They get their ‘homework’ problems to solve during the quiet hour. As usual, they sit straight-backed, with their hands on the table, and stare at their notebooks. This time it is Nurse Demeter’s turn to supervise them. She scans her subdued flock, eyes sharp inside her long, scoured, red-nosed face. After half an hour, Julius puts his hand up.
Do you want the toilet?
Demeter asks. Like Nurse Mutsch, she knows the routine.
Small or large?
Julius says large and Mrs Demeter sighs, goes to pick up the keys and brings two pieces of toilet paper. Julius gets up and follows her outside.

Scissors
, says Hannes Neubauer.

No one has a clue what he means, as usual.

Then darkness falls and a boy walks inside the Mountain.

Guardian Angels
   The children in Spiegelgrund have guardian angels watching them from the summit of Gallitzinberg. Like the world’s children, the angels are innumerable. They stand with their arms draped across each other’s shoulders, like football players, so close that no one can get up to or past them. In case the Mongols attack, the guardian angels will protect us, Nurse Mutsch explains. To give the children an idea of the Mongols, she puts two fingers slant-wise over her eyes, bends forward and bares her teeth in a dreadful grin. Mongols and Bolsheviks are the same, really, she
says. They eat children. That’s why a lamp that casts a pale blue light must always be on in the dormitory when the children are asleep. If the Mongols were to attack, the nurses must have time to lead the children to the shelters and lock all the doors so the Mongols can’t get in. Julius Becker doesn’t believe the bit about the angels on the mountain and, on quite reasonable grounds, he doesn’t believe in the Mongol story either. But he does believe in that strange, bluish angel-light that every night lifts the white-painted bedsteads and bedside tables from the floor and makes them float free in darkened space. This night, too, all the children are adrift. They are hanging helplessly inside their dreams, as if enclosed in large white cocoons. Inside one of these cocoons, Julius Becker slowly closes his hand around the handle of the pair of scissors he stole from the nurses’ room. Afterwards, there will be much talk about the scissors and how Julius could have got hold of them. All tools and equipment that might hurt a child must be kept locked up in the appropriately designated cupboards or similar spaces and only Mrs Rohrbach or members of staff trusted by her have access to the keys, which means that if any such key goes missing or is suspected of having ended up in the wrong hands, the loss must instantly be reported. No report had been submitted. Nobody has seen any keys in the wrong place. Also, nobody has noticed that a pair of scissors has gone missing. However, it has of course been known for a long time that Julius Becker was in the habit of sneaking about without permission to investigate cupboards and drawers. Several of the children have already admitted as much. One morning, he was caught trying to hide writing exercises under his bed, actually quite comical efforts but nonetheless done without permission. In other words, cunning and deceit are not at all unfamiliar aspects of this child’s behaviour. Why should he not also have managed to steal a pair of scissors
without anyone noticing? But Julius sees the scissors quite differently: a long, thin object with properly sharp blades that feels warm to hold. At least, his fingers go warmer as he closes his hand around it. He might be thinking: I’ve got it now. Perhaps also: now Nurse Mutsch can’t open my parcels. Or maybe he took the scissors simply to have a weapon to defend himself with. Against the other children, or against Nurse Mutsch, who came to him in the isolation cell, bent over him and spat in his face before demanding to be told what made him believe he deserved extra rations when no one else could have them, and then went for his pathetic little body, shoved his elbows and his drawn-up legs apart and hit him where it hurts most, on his midriff and genitals, on the small of his back and his neck, hit his Adam’s apple until he couldn’t draw air into his lungs and couldn’t get a scream out either so it stuck, as if inside a gigantic, brightly lit space full of pain. Now, he has a pair of scissors in his hand but the pain is still inside him. Nurse Mutsch is still there, too. She bends over him and spits and rubs her saliva into his lips and closed eyelids.
You swine
, she says.
You have no right to live. We’ll either send you to the idiots or else the doctor will inject you here and now.
And the scissors are no longer scissors. The object rises into the blue light, floating as the other objects do, he must get it back down before Mrs Rohrbach comes in and discovers it and, the moment he thinks this, Mrs Rohrbach is there. She slams the clapper against his bed, only his bed and nobody else’s.
Bang bang bang bang!
it goes and all around him, the children climb out of bed and come to stand around him shouting
BANG BANG BANG BANG!
and Julius has to silence them and grabs the scissors with both hands, lifts them high up in the air and plunges the blades straight into himself, right into his middle. And then silence falls. For an instant, it seems as if even the blue angel-light dies down. But then the light comes back
on and with it comes a pain too enormous to grasp and he clenches his teeth and contracts his nose and mouth to shut in the terrible scream that is raging inside him. Now he knows he can’t get away with it. Not after taking the scissors. Not after what he has done with them. This time he must stab himself deeply, at best so deeply that the blades can’t be pulled out and the thought of how he must do this grows so big there is hardly room for it in his head, it becomes even bigger than the pain and the glisteningly cold wave of nausea that flows through his body but, in that moment, he can’t feel any hands holding the scissors. What can he do without hands? He loses his grip, manages to grab the edge of the mattress and haul his whole body around so that he lands on top of the scissors and, this time, the blades pierce the membrane lining of his abdomen, then his intestines, go all the way inside him where everything explodes, and the pain, too, and all bursts out, washes out; as if drowning, he reaches for the blanket, bites into it to hang on and save himself from the rising sea of blood that is pouring out of him and to save his scream, too, before it erupts from him. And no scream comes. Or perhaps he has already screamed, only so loudly he didn’t hear it. Now all he hears is the sound of blood running over the edge of the bed onto the floor. He listens to it running, then dripping – drops falling in a rhythm that slows steadily – until, finally, the drips stop and only the bluish-violet angel glow is left, although it is also fading as the faint dawn light comes through the curtains and starts to make the white-painted beds blanch and their shapes solidify, as do the floor and the walls and the sleeping children. Daylight also brings the dry clatter of the day nurses’ cork-soled sandals hurrying along the corridor outside; then, the sound of keys rattling, of double doors opening and Mrs Rohrbach entering, there’s a shrill screech of her whistle, she claps her hands …
one two three four
… and everyone wakes apart
from Julius who stays curled up in his bed, half on his back, half on his belly and, between his two partly clenched hands just below the diaphragm, the handles of the scissors protrude like a big white shout and there is blood everywhere: on the sheets, down the side of the bed, on the floor, even around Julius’s eyes and mouth. His lips are twisted into a rigid grimace. But for the fear in his eyes, even after death, one might have thought he was lying there, laughing Mrs Rohrbach straight in the face.

She Who Waits
   I didn’t know her, Hedwig Blei says (speaking about Anna Katschenka). Of course, she worked in pavilion 15, Jekelius appointed her to ward sister. I was there, nursing in the gallery wing, only for a few, fairly short periods and I thank the Lord to this day for being spared. My post was in pavilion 17 and even though both belonged to the same clinic, in practice there was little contact. It was only at the time when Katschenka started to take on some of Sister Bertha’s duties that I got to know her a little better and, I must say, I never resented her as many of the others did. I felt that she might well be one of the nurses who are said to live for their work. Always there when she was needed. Always knew what was missing or what should be done. Never lost control, never lost her temper. Why, I’m not even sure she had a temper. She got around at this slow processional pace, sort of queenly, and the way she moved drove some people to distraction. Oh, hang on, let me hold up your train for you, I once heard Hilde Mayer say behind Katschenka’s back. There was a rumour going around that she had had an affair of sorts with Doctor Jekelius in the past and that she went for the Spiegelgrund job just to serve under him; the story was that when he was called up later on, only about a year after she started, and then the entire institution was restructured, her world collapsed around her ears. I don’t know if I believe any of that talk. There were so many rumours I sometimes had the feeling people got by on telling tales about each other and finding fault, and passing it on, or informing
on someone, you know, for failing to show the right degree of political commitment or whatever it might be. That was something the Nazis brought with them and it did create an atmosphere of distrust and constant begrudging. I haven’t come across anything as bad anywhere else. Anyway, if it was true that Katschenka had a special place in her heart for Jekelius, I must say that she took his departure quite coolly. I never saw the slightest crack in the façade she maintained against the rest of us. On the other hand, I did have a feeling that she was always waiting for something. I don’t know what it could have been. Perhaps she just expected that she would crack. Or that someone would
command
her to crack. I know that she was one of the few who stayed behind with the children after von Schirach had capitulated and the entire leadership of the institution scarpered. It actually doesn’t surprise me at all. Would you like me to say a little more about the others who worked in the clinic? First of all, I should make it clear that the two pavilions had quite different functions. The children in number 15 were the ones selected for ‘treatment’. Pavilion 17 was for patients under observation and was meant to be a transit station where the children would only stay for about a month, maybe a couple at most, until someone reached a decision about them, one way or the other. Even so, some of the children were kept on for a really long time or sent back and forth between the wards. Take Felix Keuschnig, who started out in 17, and then went to 15, then to 17 again. Of course it was totally forbidden to spoil the children. But it couldn’t be helped, some of the ones who were around for a long time became favourites. Sooner or later, everyone picked a pet to make a fuss of. Even Sister Katschenka. She had taken a fancy to a retarded boy they called Pelikan (it might have been his real name), whom she had trained to open the door for her whenever she visited the ward. That was quite typical.

About Emilie Kragulj– a dog. That’s all. I won’t say any more;

About Nurse Kleinschmittger – spent all her time badmouthing people (I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone so quick to abuse others);

About Nurse Bohlenrath – I barely knew who she was (she worked on one of the wards for bedridden little ones);

About Hilde Mayer – she was quick and got on with things, a real workhorse. Before, she had been a psychiatric nurse at Steinhof and it showed. There were those who thought she was brazen, always ready to speak her mind about whatever it was. But she wasn’t a snooping, false bitch like Kragulj. They said that Mayer was a Nazi; I mean, an actual party member. But she insisted it was a misunderstanding and that she had signed up because they demanded it of her if she was to keep her job. Everybody says that, of course, but just in Mayer’s case it wouldn’t surprise me if it was true.

About Erna Storch – now, she was a Nazi. She married a German from Sudetenland. I think she ran away with him after the war. I remember that she used to go around collecting for Winter Aid. Storch was in pavilion 15 at first, then in 17.

Frank was another one, Marie Frank, I think. A nice girl as I remember, who had a very hard time when the Russians came.

And Nurse Sikora. She was one of the ones who ran away. Sikora worked in pavilion 17 for a while. Built like a barn and an out-and-out sadist, if you ask me. It seemed to me that she positively enjoyed tormenting children. She often worked herself up into such a rage she could hardly breathe. To be honest, I think there were quite a few of those at Spiegelgrund. They were drawn to the place because there you were given the opportunity. To torture people to death, that is.

The Piano Player
   There is a piano in the first-floor day room, pushed up against the wall to be out of the way of nurses and others
who need to pass by. Felix Keuschnig sits at the piano and plays for hours every day. He sits so straight you can see the tense tendons at the back of his neck. He strikes the keys unhesitatingly, with full force, and always plays incredibly fast: as if the music were already composed within him and he is in a hurry to make his hands execute the essential but clumsy mechanical movements. Nurse Blei stands or sits by him, listening. Sometimes, she suggests a song for him to play and they sing it together. Simple rhymes or songs for children, like ‘Fuchs du hast die Gans gestohlen’ (‘Fox, you’ve stolen the goose’). Or ‘Alle Vögel sind schon da’ (‘All the birds are already here’). Often, she needs only to hum the words and he picks out the melody on the keys, with the proper chords, and then sings along. His voice is breaking and sounds rough and hoarse (at least when he speaks) but he never misses a note. When he plays, he uses only the black keys. The white keys are dangerous, he says. You’ll drown if you touch them. For him, playing is constant vigil, to keep safely on firm ground. Felix can play for hours on end without a break. If he is interrupted and someone attempts to make him think of something else, he howls like an animal, and he has been known to go for Nurse Hedwig’s face and scratch it. That is why she sits by him, ready to catch the twisting, unwilling body that alternates between rigid, harsh resistance and slack, leaden weight. At these times, it becomes necessary to pilot him with cunning and gentle force out into the deaf, white, toneless world again, and preferably to do it quickly before Sikora or Storch or one of the others starts up the usual line about
never seen such an awful lot of fuss
and
why does she waste so much time on that good-for-nothing
: remarks also made within her hearing in kitchens and staff rooms, whispered behind doors that slam shut as soon as she comes near. On Sundays, Felix’s mother visits him. Felix knows and counts down every week, starting at seven.
Now it’s just four days to go, he will say, holding up the right number of fingers. But even though ahead of every visit he is buoyed up with expectation, he becomes cross and contrary on the day and, when his mother actually arrives, doesn’t want to talk anymore. He cringes and fools around, rolls his eyes until only the whites show, climbs and clings onto whatever is at hand. Now and then, he emits loud howls, rather like mating calls, which embarrass all of them and his mother in particular. Blei observes his mother’s hands as they keep sliding over the boy’s body, caressing, protecting and attempting to cover it up, all at the same time. Felix’s mother explains, explains away. Felix caught polio when he was one and a half, she says. The illness seemed to fade by the time he was four. For several years, he was a perfectly normal child who sang a lot and played like everyone else. The discipline problems began at puberty. He found it increasingly impossible to sit still, began to say things he didn’t mean, lost concentration quickly and could become bad-tempered abruptly and unreasonably. Reluctantly, his mother agreed to register him with a Biedermannsdorf specialist children’s home that ran support classes. When what they had to offer didn’t help, he was taken in at Pressbaum. That’s how it was these days: all children with something out of the ordinary about them had to be reported to the authorities, who made all the decisions about how to proceed, even if it was just something like certain learning difficulties, as in Felix’s case. At Pressbaum, he contracted an inflammation of the gums which was left untreated for so long that the entire jaw area of his face became swollen and he had to have an operation. All this did Felix no favours, he got worse in every way and, in the end, it was decided that he should be transferred to Spiegelgrund. Felix’s mother had no complaints about the care her son was getting here, she wanted to assure Hedwig Blei about that; but mightn’t it have been better for
the lad to stay at home or, at least, come home for Christmas and Easter? This was a matter she had raised in letters to the institution’s board but no answer had been forthcoming. One of the secretaries in the office had told her in confidence that she didn’t have hope. They wouldn’t let go of Felix until he was fourteen. She then turned to the Gau-Jugendamt, the regional youth authority, even applied for an audience with the Reich Governor himself. Wherever she turned, she was cold-shouldered. But why shouldn’t Felix be allowed to stay in his own home, when it is obviously good for him? Take his feet, for instance. At home we saw to it that he wore good shoes with the right kind of insoles, to help him walk properly. But at Pressbaum, they took the shoes away from him. They said that shoes were for well children and that if Felix couldn’t walk normally he should stay in bed. But he must exercise his muscles to strengthen them, his mother said, how on earth can he ever get well unless his muscles are built up? And then she burst into tears. When she entered the day room, she had been walking ahead firmly and resolutely, and had used the German greeting. Now, this grown woman weeps because she isn’t allowed to be with her son. Between the tears, she says that Felix isn’t an idiot. Why, he can count and read and write, and has anyone ever heard a child sing and play so angelically?

Case Notes
   Doctor Gross had been duty doctor when Felix Keuschnig was admitted to Spiegelgrund and carried out the statutory medical examination. Gross had weighed and measured and assessed, and then made notes on his conclusions:

The last note had been added because the boy’s mother had insisted on bothering him, Doctor Gross, with her silly insistence that Felix would be better off at home. There is a note in the margin recording that the mother is employed by the Wehrmacht which is followed by
(!)
, the exclamation mark intended to draw attention to the contrast between the mother’s occupation and the fact that her child is unfit to live. Gross has also taken pictures of Felix, three in all, which show: one, the boy resists handling with his arms stretched straight out; two, he squints with his eyelids pulled back; three, he grimaces so wildly that his jaw seems dislocated, which makes him look imbecile. Felix behaves like this when making body contact with anyone, including his mother, at least initially. But of course Doctor Gross couldn’t have known that.

There Is No Harm in the Boy
   Felix is one of the ward’s bed-wetters. Still, he is dry during the day. Mostly, his state of mind is calm, at least if you compare him with the other children on the ward. As Nurse Hedwig writes in one of her day notes:
Felix is a kind and well-behaved child who calmly puts up with most things; his happiest moments are when he sits at the piano
. What Blei does not add is that Felix keeps himself to himself almost all the time when he isn’t allowed to play the piano or his mother isn’t visiting. He never plays with other children unless compelled and doesn’t even talk with them. If you ask him for something he puts on the same stupid squint as when he feels disturbed or stressed. He gives gormless,
irrelevant answers to even the simplest questions and can be crude and offensive. When a meal is served, he doesn’t say thank you as he has been told but instead
Servos Kreutzer!
And he gulps down the food with incredible greediness, as if he hasn’t seen food before or as if he could never be satisfied. There is ward time set aside for singing lessons, which is why the piano is there. But instead of leading the song herself and encouraging all the unwilling, half-witted children to sing along with her, though that admittedly only results in a distressing, baying noise, Nurse Hedwig allows Felix to sit down at the piano first and then tries to make as many children as possible gather around him. Felix accepts this. She whispers some of their songs in his ear and Felix plays and she sings and shows the children where to sing along or clap their hands, and they all sit around the piano, their eyes alight with excitement and hands raised, ready and eager to clap. And Felix plays song after song, all in the same safe key of C-sharp. When they’ve run through the songs, he starts from the beginning again. There is no end. Long after the other children have drifted away, he carries on hammering and crashing on the black keys. Then, a huge labour begins. She has to catch his resisting arms and make his entire oppositional body come to rest. At nearly fourteen, Felix is physically approaching adulthood. All the same, once he has calmed down, he curls up in her arms like a child. As if to show that that he might well have agreed to a temporary truce but that the contest has not ended, he often sits with his forehead pressed against hers and his eyes pierce hers like spears. All the same, the way he encloses her with his warm, moist breath is loving. She doesn’t dare release him until they have sat eyeballing each other for ten minutes or more.
There is no harm in this boy
, she writes in her notes.