The Chosen Ones (16 page)

Doctor Illing
   In the summer of 1942, six months after Jekelius’s call-up to the front, a new medical director is appointed, a Doctor Illing. He is German. Everyone is making a big thing out of this: he comes
from there
, probably on direct orders from Berlin. Ernst Illing is Jekelius’s diametrical opposite: a stocky, broad-shouldered, energetic man who stalks the corridors at a fast pace. He has a habit of sticking his head forward as he speaks, perhaps to compensate for being short or to make sure the other won’t escape. Illing speaks with a marked Saxony dialect and the powerful tobacco he favours makes his breath smells sour and thick, and it stains the brief grin he bestows automatically on anyone who listens to him and does what he says. His domineering manner and sharp, piercing eyes make Hedwig Blei feel uncomfortable, and the new, stricter rules he enforces worry her. Already, on his first day, he states that visiting will be restricted from now on. No visits unless arranged beforehand with himself or, when he is absent, the acting medical director.
Visiting hours must be used to greatest effect and not to indulge the whims of relatives. Your work here is your contribution to the war effort, he announces in his loud, rather high-pitched voice. From now on, it is our duty to the Fatherland to maintain an unimpeachable front to the world. He also emphasises how crucial it is to keep the patient’s case notes up to date. This is a medical establishment, he says. Every detail in the course of disease can become of the utmost importance to diagnostic assessment and the final decisions on treatment options. Illing seems to have recognised Sister Katschenka’s usefulness. She is to act as Matron Bertha’s deputy when the senior nurse has been required ‘for other tasks’. Unlike Jekelius, who only leafed through the case notes, Illing wants to know all there is to know about every child. There is one boy in pavilion 17 who interests Illing in particular. The boy’s name is Jakob Nausedas. He is eleven years old but looks about six. In the photographs Gross took of him, Jakob is almost alarmingly beautiful, with large, deep-set brown eyes, dark hair and delicately sculpted ears. Because he will not lie still at night, he has been placed in a netted bed but so far not in a straitjacket. He usually sits absolutely still in the middle of the bed with his legs crossed under him, staring straight ahead. He is very shy. If someone comes close, he pulls a blanket over his head. Even so, Blei has seen him up and about several times. Unlike many of the children, he seems to have no physical impediments. In fact, he moves like a little angel, leaping along with alternate long and short steps and, as he runs, he puts the front of each foot down first as if to use its arch to lift off. He seems fearful of being hit, holds his hands uncertainly in front of his face or upper body to cover himself, even when it is just Pelikan, on the alert as always, who is on the move to open the door for the caravan of white-clad doctors and nurses. By the time they are all inside, only the tip of
Nausedas’s nose and one glinting eye peep out from underneath the blanket. The blanket was with him when he arrived, Nurse Sikora explains to Doctor Illing, who has already asked Blei to lower the side of the child’s bed. Standing next to his chief, Doctor Gross gives an account of the patient’s convulsions followed by paralysis, attacks that usually occur at night. Another characteristic of the fits is that Nausedas’s voice grows deeper and somehow strange. Almost as if the boy was possessed, Sikora suggests. Doctor Illing impatiently skims the notes that Katschenka has given him.

Kaunas, now, isn’t that in …?

In Lithuania
, Katschenka fills in.

And how come the boy has ended up here?

He’s an orphan
, Katschenka says.

He’s actually circumcised, Doctor Gross says and turns away with assumed indifference, as if to say that he is done with this. But as far as Doctor Illing is concerned, nothing can be dealt with that quickly. He bends over the bed and rips the protective blanket from Jakob’s grip. They hear the child’s faint intake of breath; his body is already pressed up against the inside of the net cage over the bed. He breathes in gulps as he lies there like a wounded bird, with his arms and legs pulled up against his body. Doctor Illing pushes and digs with surprisingly strong, capable hands and when he has seen with his own eyes that Doctor Gross’s information is correct, he just flashes his joyless, toothy grin and nods. Nurse Blei wants to let the boy have his blanket back but Illing waves her away, takes a firm grip under the boy’s arms and lifts him upright. Jakob’s head slips this way and that, his eyes roll, too, both pupils flickering like the quivering centre of a spirit level.

Can the little Jew boy be made to stand upright? Talk?

Blei shakes her head mechanically. Katschenka looks down at the case notes as if waiting for a new command.

Doctor Gross, would you see to it that by Monday next, this boy can stand? If you have to, why not give him something to perk him up. Just make him capable of
standing upright.
I would like to demonstrate this case at my lecture next week.

Nausedas’s Song
   Marie Darnhofer told her a story about the man who had come to the door of the office in pavilion 1 and asked if this was the place that took in children. He had looked as if he was sleeping rough, unshaven and dressed in a large, worn coat that smelled. The boy he had brought had been standing a few metres away with his face turned to the cloakroom, as he wanted nothing better than to hide among the coats and jackets. The man stated that he was not the child’s father and not any other kind of relation. But he had been given the child in his charge. That was the phrase he used.
In his charge
. For how long, or who had given him this responsibility and why, he could or would not say. Instead of answering Doctor Gross’s questions (Gross was the medic whose job it usually was to assess the child’s
status somaticus
), he produced a creased piece of paper on which someone had written down the boy’s name, date and place of birth – born in
KAUNAS
, it said in large, wobbly capitals. The man said that the child was healthy and, at first, had not presented any problems but, of late, had started to behave very strangely at night, so he didn’t dare to keep him at home anymore. By then, someone in the office had started to smell a rat, phoned the gate porters and asked them to notify the police. When the man saw a policeman come upstairs, he took fright and ran away. The boy also tried to run but was restrained. That’s all. On examination, Doctor Gross was able to confirm what had been suspected by any thinking observer: this was a Jewish child who had been hidden from the authorities. How the boy had come to end up in Wien (if it was true, as the
note said, that he was from Lithuania) was beyond investigation. Nor did it seem possible to find out who had protected him and hence if these persons, too, were of Jewish extraction and also in hiding. Whatever was the case, the boy seemed quite unable to provide answers to these or, indeed, any questions. He just stared at you with his large, frightened eyes and, if approached too abruptly, covered his face with his hands and curled up like a scared animal. Because he showed clear signs of debility, he was placed on the ward in pavilion 17 until further information could be obtained. It soon became only too obvious that Nausedas
made a row
at night. When Hedwig Blei heard him for the first time, she thought that the squeaking noise was from a dormitory window that had been left open and was swinging on its hinges. She opened the door a little and listened into the dim realm of subdued night-light and sweaty, sleepy breathing. If these children slept at all, they were usually restless. In the bluish light, she thought she saw the shadow of someone, presumably Pelikan, slip along the wall. Now, the sound grew stronger and came from inside Nausedas’s bed-cage. If it hadn’t been so loud, she would have assumed that the boy was grinding his teeth, but it was rougher and louder than that, a little like pulling a nail out of warped wood. It gradually became deeper but at the same time began to slide up and down, with a quality more like a vibrating saw-blade. Words emerged from the wavering tune: harsh, angular words, incomprehensible but unmistakably words from a song which formed part of an ever more distinctive melodic line. After a while, she became used to Jakob’s alien song. The children did, too. When she was on nights, she would make her way past from time to time, look through the peephole in the door and see everyone lying nicely and quietly in their beds even though Jakob Nausedas was ‘singing’. One night, there was a tremendous crash from the ward followed by loud
shouting and howling. Jakob’s bed was empty, the mobile children had got up and were running around. Pelikan was the liveliest of the lot. His shadow swept up and down along the long wall like a crazy minute hand and he was shouting:

Thunder!

Thunder!

And the song that came from somewhere sounded like distant thunder, short barking pulses as if the swaying melody had stuck in the boy’s throat and had to be coughed out. Little Otto Semmler, who lived in a permanent state of fear, tugged at her hand and pointed to the corner of the room where Nausedas crouched with the blanket over his head. Someone must have let him out of his cage and he had gone to ground in the furthest corner of the room while he ejected his thunder clashes at an ever-madder tempo. Come to think of it, that such a small creature could emit so much noise was just about incredible. She wanted to know who had opened the net cage on Nausedas’s bed? Her question was of course never answered. Pelikan, panting a little, was ready by the door when she left. He sings because he misses his mother, he explained helpfully.

The Living Dead
   It is said that when a human being dies, the soul leaves the body. But the soul might leave the body long before you die. If that happens, you get to look like Katschenka, Hedwig Blei said and went on to speak about that so seemingly calm, pale face and those eyes, which gazed at her with an expression of deepest benevolence despite the cutting criticism she, in her role as acting matron, was just about to deliver. These days, Sister Katschenka worked from Sister Bertha’s office, although she had never formally been appointed to the post of matron. It was irrelevant, since Sister Bertha could be away for months on end. Besides, as Blei put it, Katschenka
was ‘made for the job’: efficient, unswervingly loyal and invariably sensible. Now, she wanted to know how this kind of chaotic situation could ever be allowed to erupt in a ward that was under strict observation around the clock. And, has Nurse Blei found the culprit yet? Who was responsible? Katschenka looks at her in silence, still with that distant but kindly expression. In my opinion, Nausedas got out of his bed by his own efforts, Blei says. Katschenka doesn’t contradict her, just shuffles some papers and remarks that Doctor Illing has decided to X-ray the child’s skull. Just as well to have that done in good time. Good time, before what? But there is really no need for Blei to ask or say anything at all. He’s just a Jew boy, isn’t he?

Encephalography
   While Jekelius was in charge, ‘puncturing’ children was done only occasionally but, as soon as Illing took over, these interventions became practically a matter of routine. The great majority of the children, including many who were very ill, underwent lumbar puncture followed by cranial X-rays. Hedwig Blei hadn’t grasped the extent of this practice until Miss Block in the office explained that Illing used the encephalographic evidence in a research project he had begun long before he took up the post as Spiegelgrund’s medical director. His goal was to perfect a clinical method for the diagnosis of severe neurological disease, notably the incidence and manifestations of tuberous sclerosis complex. TSC is a rare genetic disorder that leads to small, dense tumours forming in the brain and many other organs. The symptoms are complicated and often contradictory because the tumour locations are so scattered. Illing was keen to record their distribution in the brain and in the cerebral cortex in particular. Miss Block said that she daily spent many hours corresponding with hospitals on Doctor Illing’s behalf, asking for information from case notes and autopsy reports.
He has himself found two
proven
cases of the condition and displays them, not without pride, in his lectures to the medical students in the pavilion 15 auditorium. One of the patients is a boy of about thirteen or fourteen called Julian Eggers, and the other an epileptic girl who is an inmate in the girls’ section of pavilion 17, even though the Berlin department decided that she was to be ‘treated’ and should have gone to the gallery. However, Illing insisted on ‘saving her up’ to let him follow the development of her TSC. Her symptoms and signs were near perfect and, for a start, her face showed the characteristic distribution of small, pale nodules. But the boy also has spots on his face, little leathery patches, and has had quite a few epileptic fits lately. It all adds up to a real monster for us to tackle, Doctor Illing explains to his audience of young clinical students who listen in breathless silence to his expositions of the illness his specimen patients are suffering from: