The Chosen Ones (17 page)

Nausedas had also been brought in to model illness in one of Doctor Illing’s lectures. That was why Illing had been so keen that Doctor Gross should get him to ‘stand upright’. That TSC was never on the cards in Nausedas’s case was neither here nor there. In order to determine the incidence of the disease, and its varied forms, whoever seemed a potential case should be included as a useful addition to the control group. Besides, all the children who had undergone encephalography were examined post-mortem and that meant you could compare the results of the investigation with the actual situation in the brain. Hedwig Blei lifts the lid of Nausedas’s cage and frees the boy from his blankets. It won’t hurt, she says. She is lying but knows that the boy won’t understand her. Or perhaps he does, after all, just as an animal understands that its life will soon end. Unusually, he doesn’t resist her, doesn’t even bother to hold his hands in front of his face. She is not allowed to come with him into the X-ray suite but knows from experience how the children are treated, how the nurse undresses them brusquely and straps them down, even children with fevers so high they can hardly sit up, in the same painful position where none of their muscles are at rest: not sitting or even half-sitting, but bending over forward to expose the lower back; then, the long lumbar puncture needle is eased between the lumbar vertebrae and into the space around the spinal cord to extract some of the fluid that circulates around the cord and the brain. It must be carried out very gradually to let the body get used to losing the fluid. And the child’s skin blanches and turns bluish, as if slowly suffocating; then, just as suddenly, the skin blushes and the eyes bulge and roll upwards, white with terror as the pain slashes the child’s head like a thousand sharp knives. Because the child is immobilised, the nurse holds an enamelled basin in readiness for when the stomach contents come spraying out and the child tries to scream though
the sound is dampened by the acid matter which continues to flow uncontrollably from its mouth. All the body’s organs lie exposed, like stones rubbing against each other; and the air flows into the spinal canal and rises into the cranial cavity to surround the brain that is no longer suspended in its protective fluid; then, the light goes as white, reality seems as if corroded away from the world. From that day, Nausedas sings no more. She tries to give him the blanket. He does not react. She has never seen anyone look so vulnerable, like a featherless baby bird. His eyes sometimes stare unseeingly, sometimes hide behind closed, quivering eyelids. The next day, his temperature is very high and he doesn’t respond to being touched. They take him to the gallery in pavilion 15 and there he dies a couple of days later.

Certified as cause of death: pneumonia.

Black Keys and White
   A couple of weeks pass, perhaps a month. The memory of Nausedas fades. After all, new children to care for arrive all the time. One afternoon, Hedwig comes by when Felix Keuschnig is thumping on the piano keys. She decides to tell him to play more quietly but before she reaches him, the chaotic jumble of notes fall into a rhythm that carries a vaguely familiar melody. She stops. It is Nausedas’s song. Felix is running through the chords again and again but can’t keep hold of the sequence. His hands keep slipping off the black keys and onto the white ones, as if the keyboard were slippery, covered with a film of soap. A wave of anger flows through her, so strong it surprises her, and she grabs Felix’s arms to pull him away from the piano. Felix, who knows all the tricks by now, slithers out of her grasp, dashes into the dormitory and runs around slapping the sleeping children’s faces. Fierce slaps. And with every blow, he laughs sharply, triumphantly:
Ha!
It sounds as if he is imitating someone. She comes after him but he has already found new
victims:
Ha!
Otto Semmler screams, red flares on his face. Other children flee in fear and hide wherever they can, under beds and chairs. Felix runs jerkily and drags his feet as if about to make himself fall over. Finally, she manages to force him down in a corner of the room and calls for help. It is the corner Nausedas fled to when he got out of his bed-cage. Felix, she says. And she starts to sing, as if she knows she has to. It is their song: ‘Fuchs du hast die Gans gestohlen’. Then he hits her too, with astonishing strength, right across the bridge of her nose. It hurts so much that tears spurt from her blinded eyes.
Ha!
he laughs and is quickly back on his feet. Of course, such behaviour must be punished. Off Felix goes to solitary confinement even though everyone knows that in his case, at least, it’s pointless. He only sits on the bench in there, staring listlessly ahead. He doesn’t try to hit anyone, but won’t speak either. Instead of answering when you address him, his body twists and his face contorts in his usual elaborate grimaces. There he sits, his face working, for ten days. When he comes out, he asks for his mother. Asks and asks, because he has missed one of the statutory visiting days. Hedwig Blei tries to distract him and leads him to the piano but he sneaks away without playing a single note. She wants him to draw but his rough strokes with the pen rip the paper. He draws coarse figures with lines for limbs and large mouths full of sharp teeth. When Illing does his round, she tells him that Felix Keuschnig is showing hopeful improvements but when Doctor Illing glances at Katschenka she simply shakes her head. Children classified as
vollständig pflegebedürftig
– completely care-dependent – or, as in Keuschnig’s case, just
Arbeitsfähigkeit nicht zu erwarten
– suitability for work not expected – are welcome additional subjects for Illing’s clinical experiments. Sure enough, one morning Katschenka announces that Illing wants Keuschnig for lumbar puncture followed by pneumoencephalography. They come
for him early one morning. By four in the afternoon, she removes the black shoes from his bedside table and places them next to her own in the staff cloakroom. An hour later, Felix is returned to the ward. He is conscious but very weak. She can’t make eye contact with him. He is febrile and complains of pains in his head and the back of his neck. He lies in his bed and worries that someone is trying to throw him out of it. She tells him there is no one. Soon afterwards, he starts vomiting. He throws up again and again until the evening when he becomes feverish and agitated, casts his body from side to side, and waves his arms about as if fighting an invisible enemy. Doctor Türk is on call and Blei asks her to come. She isn’t sure whether Illing has already decided to have the fatal dose administered or whether Türk is just giving Felix the usual sedative. The boy’s eyes look glassy and his face is as white as chalk but he is much less restless, then seems to sleep easily, breathing too lightly but evenly. Anyway, she is going off-duty. Everyone goes but nobody comes, Pelikan says to her as she leaves the day room. She meets Nurse Sikora in the corridor, taking her coat off, ready to start the night shift. Sikora beams sunnily at her. When Hedwig returns to the clinic two days later, Felix has already been transferred to the gallery in pavilion 15. The next day, she asks Sister Katschenka to be allowed to nurse in the gallery again. Katschenka looks up with her usual expression of bland concern. There is no need for additional staff in the gallery at present, Nurse, she says. Besides, I must say that I believe it to be in Nurse Hedwig’s best interests to stay here. When Hedwig goes off work that day, she visits the gallery on the way. Felix is already dead. The end came quickly, Hilde Mayer says. Perhaps that’s just as well. No one wants to see a child suffer. Mrs Keuschnig is waiting on the gravelled path outside. A pale moon hangs in the evening sky. It could be that Mrs Keuschnig has already received information about her
son’s death or maybe she felt a premonition of something serious and has turned up here on her own initiative. What have you done? she asks Hedwig. A group of women are standing a little away from the two of them and follow their confrontation with tense faces but neither say nor do anything. Mrs Keuschnig has been standing in the shadow but now she takes a sudden step into the moonlight and her face gleams white as she raises her arms in a disconsolate gesture and asks, her voice sliding into a scream:

Two porters come at a run from their cabin. They take hold of the screaming woman and propel her off the site. The porters know the routine, well-used to incidents of precisely this kind. The watching women have turned their backs and started out for the tram stop. Nurse Blei returns to pavilion 17. The Pelikan lad opens the door for her and then closes it quickly to prevent anyone from slipping away outside. In the dormitory, the numb childish faces turn to stare at her as if they expect her to say something, but she can’t think how to bring herself to break the silence or, anyway, if there is any silence still to be broken. All that is left now is a white sea. It covers everything.

The War Moves In
   There were of course no angels standing guard at the summit of Gallitzinberg. The old viewing tower stood there, though. The Nazis took it over immediately after marching in and renamed it the Adolf Hitler Warte. It was the highest point in Wien and, from the tower, radio cables ran down into a concrete bunker some ten metres underground where young women wearing headsets received reports about Allied flight patterns, which they then summarised and displayed on a large screen of milky glass that covered the wall behind them. Of course, I heard about all that much later, Hannes Neubauer explained. I mean, no one let on that the mountain with its guardian angels watching out for us was in fact an armoured defence establishment –
Gefechtsstand Wien
. Lots of concrete-lined rooms dug in deep and linked by long passages, some so wide you could drive loaded vehicles down them. The story went about that Baldur von Schirach fled into the mountain during the last days of the war. Unlike the rest of us, he never once had to stick his head above the parapet. There was a safe tunnel ready for him to scuttle down. Thinking about it now, this much later, I think it was almost offensive, Hannes concluded. At Spiegelgrund, people had started to practise evacuating everyone to air-raid shelters long before the first Allied bombs fell on Wien. Every so often, the children had to line up in pairs, in
Zweierreihen
, on the path outside the pavilion, just as if marching off to school. When Mrs Rohrbach blew her whistle they were to jog along at
Laufschritt
and, without
breaking formation, run as quickly as possible past a few pavilions and enter a building which had been equipped with a bunker-like basement room, where they were to settle down side by side with their knees close together while Mrs Rohrbach hovered in the doorway, timing them on her watch. All of which was rubbish, of course, Hannes said. Lining up in formation when an air raid is due simply isn’t on. And no one thought of stocking up with food or even water in the shelter, there were none of the things we’d need if we were to stay for any length of time, days or weeks – not to mention years, as I figured we might. Sure enough, when the bombers did come, the whole evacuation plan went to pieces. It happened in mid-morning on a day in September 1944. Adrian Ziegler was no longer at Spiegelgrund, but Hannes was and so, inevitably, was Nurse Mutsch. Hannes saw her stand with her back to the staff room when the cuckoo call came from the radio that was always on in there.
Cuckoo, cuckoo
, it went. It was a signal to switch to shortwave reception. At the same time, the phone started to ring and Nurse Mutsch answered of course, it was her duty to report phone calls to the ward staff. When she at last had managed to make her trembling fingers link the radio to the telephone jack as instructed, Mrs Cuckoo’s weirdly ethereal voice was already well into her account of the positions of enemy planes.
Ooost!
she said, extending the
o
in the word for east. Normally, there would have been an interval between the end of the broadcast and the air-raid sirens starting up but as far as Hannes can remember, the angels were screaming already. Suddenly, the pavilion doors opened wide and the rooms and corridors filled with nurses and porters rushing about, shouting and screaming so wildly it was impossible to work out if they were just trying to avoid bumping into each other or if they were calling the children together somewhere or if they simply had to speak at the top of their voices to be
heard through the infernal noise of the sirens. It actually was insane, this screeching, wavering noise that penetrated walls and roofs and floors, made bottles and bedpans jump off the drying racks only to fall rattling into the sinks below and the corridor windows vibrate on a frail, resonating note as if each pane was about to explode out of its metal framework (later on, Hannes said, I asked myself if the Allied pilots up there in the milky glass sky didn’t know that the city’s air defence capability was lodged just there, inside Gallitzinberg. It seems obvious that they would have. But did they know that the pavilions scattered everywhere in the shadow of the mountain were full of unwanted children, like piggy banks stuffed with damaged or discarded coins? Or was that perhaps the very reason why the authorities picked just that location for the institution? Their first move had been to tunnel into the mountain and install the defence equipment. And then they brought the children in. As living shields? But, if so, why move us out again? And when the angels on the mountain started off their unholy noise, what happened to the idiots in pavilion 15? Were they, too, moved to special shelters or left behind? After all, they were meant to die anyway). And now the war moved in with them. It arrived promptly, from one day to the next, when the large ambulances with Red Cross signs on the rear doors lined up on the central path that linked the pavilions. In the lesson that day, Mr Hackl spoke in a trembling voice about the heroic sacrifices made by the soldiers who risked their lives on the most forward front lines, and insisted that the Spiegelgrund boys must show themselves
worthy
of such bravery. He picked six or eight of his pupils and had them stand in an orderly formation outside the schoolroom. They marched off to pavilion 12, lined up neatly again, this time by age and height, and sang for the soldiers, songs in praise of the infantry like ‘Infanterie du bist die Krone aller Waffen’ and
‘Graue Kolonnen’. They had been instructed by Mr Hackl not only to march on the spot as they sang but also to push the fists forwards and back as if holding a rifle with a bayonet:

To the soldiers shaking with shell shock, the
Kriegszitterern
, the amputees and other wounded and sick men who lay dazzled by the light-bursts from the flares and dazed by the noise of the multiple rocket launchers that boomed all night long, the sight and sound of these stupidly stamping boys, singing in voices that were either childishly thin or hoarsely breaking, can’t have been anything but a drawn-out agony, like a nightmare that came back to plague them long after waking up.

Ybbs
   Off and on for several weeks, Nurse Mutsch’s face would take on an odd expression, as if she knew something very important but mustn’t tell anyone. As usual, her fat cheeks bulged with menace but her wide-open eyes would gleam with secret knowledge. Looking meaningfully at Zavlacky and Miseryguts, she might say something about a
big clean-out
that was on the books, while she hinted to Jockerl, who had been in a constant state of fear ever since all that with Julius Becker, that he had better mind his manners if he was to come along or else he’d be left behind with the idiots.
Come along
,
to where?
Jockerl asked pleadingly but Nurse Mutsch said no more, only surveyed the group of boys with a glum expression on her face as if she couldn’t but regret the fate that awaited them. One morning in September, the mystery was cleared up. Mrs Rohrbach stepped into the dormitory, complete with whistle and clapper, but instead of intoning her usual orders to get up and dash to the washrooms, they were told to dress at once and line up in the corridor. There was a big, grey bus waiting outside the pavilion. Nobody told them where they were off to. They weren’t allowed any luggage except the few items of clothing and the pair of indoor shoes they had been told to pack in their rucksacks. As they boarded the bus, the boys were handed a small food parcel each. In it was some crispbread spread with margarine and topped with slices of cured ham. Many boys were scared; Jockerl drilled himself into one of the rear seats like a small woodworm. Hannes Neubauer thought about the Mountain and about his father, worrying that he couldn’t let his father know where he was because he hadn’t been told. The bus unloaded them after a short drive to Hütteldorf station where they boarded a train standing at the platform, as if it had been waiting for them. Adrian and Hannes, the tinker’s lad and the officer’s son, sat together with their faces pressed to the window and read out the names of all the stations they passed. Hannes tried to memorise them: Tullnerbach-Pressbaum. Neulengbach. Böheimkirchen. St Pölten. Melk. They were told to leave the train at a station called Ybbs-Kemmelbach, where Mr Hackl and the assistant teacher, Mrs Bremer, did a head-count. They lined up afterwards and marched off when Mrs Bremer blew on the whistle she wore on a string around her neck. As they walked for something like two kilometres, maybe more, hardly a word was said. After perhaps another kilometre, about an hour’s marching, they arrived in Ybbs. The hospital looked like a quayside
fortress, a cluster of low buildings by the river with rendered walls painted yellow. The buildings were linked by long stone arches which led to a series of internal courtyards. The boys were ushered into one of the courtyards and told to wait. On the other side of the yard was a large building that looked like a store or an oversized tool shed. Shouts came from inside it. Some of the more courageous boys, led by Zavlacky and Miseryguts, went closer and realised that it wasn’t a store but a kind of enclosure. The doors had been removed from the wide gateway and the opening blocked by iron bars. The windows that ran along the wall, at least a man’s height above the ground, were also barred. In the partial darkness on the other side of the gate, they glimpsed the pale faces of hundreds of men, most of them old and spent. Some sat on the cold stone floor, others lay curled up as if asleep. Yet others were standing with lips and foreheads pressed close to the bars, empty eyes staring into the dusk. They were all wearing baggy institutional clothing, a hospital uniform rather like what the mental patients at Steinhof used to wear and in the same blue-grey colour, only tattered and dirty. The place smelled badly: like mould or old compost mixed with the harsh saltpetre stench of urine. It seemed that they had to void on the floor where they sat or lay. The road to the building was closed off with a heavy iron chain. Obviously, access was forbidden; a sign hanging from the chain said as much:
Überschreiten der Kette streng verboten
. Jockerl, who was small enough to slip in under the chain, went to the gate and pushed his saved-up piece of bread between the bars. A man’s trembling hand reached out for it. The man wasn’t left alone for long. Seconds later, he was wrestled to the ground by two others who fumbled for the hand holding the bread, by now clenched into a tight fist. More men joined the confused mayhem, some screamed in desperate voices, others ran around aimlessly. An armed guard suddenly turned up
and pushed the children away with the barrel of his rifle and then Mr Hackl and Mrs Bremer came along. Both looked upset. Clearly the boys had not been meant to see what they had just witnessed. They were pushed across the yard in a hurry, into the nearest stairwell and then up to the first floor where a large dormitory, at least three times the size of the Spiegelgrund one, waited for them with its double rows of already made beds. All night they heard screams and raised voices from the courtyard until, suddenly, the noise stopped. Silence. When they had had breakfast in the morning and were dispatched into the yard again, the chain and the barred gate had been removed.

They’ve taken them to Hartheim. It’s probably for the best.

That was as far as Mrs Bremer would go. She turned her face away, pressed her lips tightly together and would say nothing more.

While the two supervisors were on their midday break, some of the boys, with Zavlacky still out in front, managed to get into the old store building. One wouldn’t have believed that people had been in there if it hadn’t been for a few torn rags of clothing and odd things scattered on the floor, objects like small wooden crucifixes and tobacco tins, some shiny copper coins and hand-carved toys that no child would have thought of making. Hannes Neubauer found a doll made of three sewing-thread spools with bits of thread stuck into the top one to mark eyes, nose and mouth. Light entered through four windows that faced the courtyard. The windows were filthy, and against the crumbly, grey light they saw that someone had begun to scratch his name on one of panes. The letters were angular and leaned markedly forward. The attempt at writing was followed by a date:

A … losa … 19 IX 1941

Don’t know about the rest of you but I’m not waiting around to be slaughtered, Miseryguts said later, and the next day, he and
Zavlacky and a boy called Peter Schaubach were gone. They had made their way out during the night unhindered. The long, winding stairwells and many archways between the buildings and the linked courtyards must have baffled even the Steinhof staff. The boys spent the rest of that day and night locked in the dormitory. All they could do was sit and listen to the barking dogs and the rough voices of the Wehrmacht soldiers who had been recruited to catch the runaways though no one was found, at least while the children were at Ybbs. For some time afterwards, they talked a lot about what had happened. About the boys who had got away. About the mad old men and what might have been done to them. And the idiot children in pavilion 15. Would they be brought here? Or were they to stay on the old Steinhof site? Some of the boys were convinced that Spiegelgrund would be made into a slaughterhouse, which was what Nurse Mutsch had meant when she spoke about the planned
big clean-out.
Surely, they argued, the only reason for transferring them to Ybbs was that Jekelius, Gross and the other doctors didn’t want the healthy children to ‘watch’ while they finished the other lot off. On the other hand, there were those who believed that they were the ones led to slaughter and that they were still alive only because the hospital staff was busy killing each other off. The day passed without anything happening at all. So it went for months. Autumn arrived. Chilly mists rose from the mighty river below the hospital walls. In the stairwell leading to their dormitory, a wide window overlooked the river flowing in all its grey, powerful grandeur, swollen by the rains, between banks hidden in unchanging swathes of fog. The river always seemed to flow fastest in the middle, as if the currents there were too impatient to wait for the massive volumes of water idling along the banks. Always, even though muffled by stone walls and sealed archways, you could hear the roar of water on the move,
slowly but unceasingly. Whenever the flow slowed, Adrian thought he could pick up the faint rustling of the wings of the birds that came floating on air currents down to the glossy surface of the water and, as he lay in the darkened dormitory full of boys, some asleep and others not, he imagined animals wading at the water’s edge, perhaps a stag raising his crowned head in the thick, creamily white morning mists over the banks.