The Chosen Ones (18 page)

Otherwise, nothing much had changed. Mrs Rohrbach woke them in the mornings with her whistle and her clapper, Nurses Mutsch and Demeter continued to discipline them during their quiet hour, and Mrs Bremer and Mr Hackl to struggle with teaching them to spell, count and praise the Führer and the German army’s unbroken success in the field. They were even visited by Doctor Gross a few times, once to examine a boy who had a sudden attack of stomach cramps at night. On Christmas Eve, Doctor Krenek arrived and gave his usual speech about how, in these hard times, the children must forgo, even sacrifice things. Then they were told to queue for a seasonal gift: a paper bag containing a few rather dry pieces of cake and an apple. And that was it. No prettily glittering tree, no singing. The gloomy Christmas reinforced their suspicion that they had been sent here to hibernate, to survive some crisis. Then, one January morning (Adrian remembers the thin layer of powdery snow on the courtyard), they heard the coughing noise of the bus engine. Next, they were ordered to pack their toothbrushes and felt slippers and get going. This time, they went by bus all the way back to Wien. As Mr Hackl told them, as he swayed along the narrow aisle, hand over hand: they were going to Steinhof.

The Devil’s Claw
   They had stayed at Ybbs for a total of 148 days – more than four months. On day 149, they were in their Spiegelgrund
pavilion again as if nothing had happened. Pavilion 9 was just as when they had left it, with piles of books and drawings stacked in the day room. In the washroom, small, cracked bits of soap were still stuck in the drain covers under the showers. The floor under the beds was covered in a fine layer of dust. The idiots on the other side of the path were in place, and their moaning and shrieking travelled far in the crisp, clear winter air. Nothing had happened here, so why had they been forced to move? In the weeks that followed, excursions and walks in the surroundings were organised. Boys from other sections took part and each group was marshalled by an appointed group leader, responsible for organising the line-up outside the pavilion entrance according to regulations. The group leaders were entrusted with the football and also the obligatory bowling balls that gave everyone a collective bad conscience because nobody knew what to do with them. The excursions were usually led by Mrs Rohrbach but she was sometimes relieved by another
Erzieher
, like Mrs Krämer, who always turned up dressed in in knee-length woollen trousers and a tailored suit jacket with an NS-Frauenschaft pin on the lapel: a black shield with the hooked cross symbol in the centre like a small drop of blood. They often marched along the Steinhof wall, up over Wilhelminenberg to Kreuzeichenwiese, where they were to sit on the grass and eat their packed lunches. If there wasn’t enough time for this, as was frequently decided, they went left immediately after the old fire station. By going that way, their excursion followed most of the old asylum wall, as if the point was to measure and once more fortify it, and so make the wall appear even more impossible to scale. In Adrian’s memory, the late-winter sky always lowered above the landscape, dark clouds massed within the grey haze and swelled, growing into the misty sky until its greyness turned into true darkness. A sharp smell of woodsmoke always hung
above the allotments in Rosental where the hollow rattle of utensils for cooking and laundry was mixed with the sounds of dogs barking and voices calling to each other, with long pauses in between. All of which induced a strange feeling in Adrian of being pulled into a fast-running stream that was carrying him off against his will. Unexpectedly, the excursions transformed Nurse Mutsch. She laced up her thick-soled, practical walking boots and stepped out briskly. As she walked, this otherwise uncommunicative woman talked a blue streak. As they followed the Steinhof wall, she would tell them that it was even longer than the old city wall that once protected the heart of the city, the Innere Stadt, and that the cathedral and the Hofburg and the
whole caboodle
could easily have fitted in behind this wall, and when she said
whole caboodle
she even laughed a little, real laughter and not just a lip-tightening smile. Mostly, Hannes Neubauer was picked for the special place next to Nurse Mutsch and he was the one to whom she directed her out-of-character chatter. Mutsch detested Hannes much less than the other boys in the section. It might have been because of his seemingly harmless round head and the upturned, somehow smiley corners of his mouth or perhaps simply that he never talked back, only walked along muttering to himself. But on one occasion, Adrian happened to be at Nurse Mutsch’s side. She didn’t seem particularly bothered one way or the other (the exercise rather than the company made her talkative) but Adrian felt hot with pride. If only he had dared to, he might have reached out for her hand and held it, at least for a little while. It would have been an attempt to hold on to the curious, unusual feeling of freedom that belonged to this day, to the sounds of their feet on the frost-hardened ground, and their breathing in and out in the cold air, and the deep, rising and falling notes made by the wind in the bare crowns of the trees high above their heads. To get
all the stone blocks needed for the wall, Nurse Mutsch went on, they’d had to blast until they got so far down into the quarry that the sky couldn’t be seen any longer. But there still wasn’t enough stone and they carried on until they hit the Devil’s Claw, right at the bottom of the hole.
The Devil’s Claw?
The boys gathered around Nurse Mutsch, their mouths gaping like big
o
s. Nurse Mutsch’s eyes had opened wide and were so pale they looked transparent. You see, she explained, the Devil’s Claw looked like the black, curving root of a tree, but no matter what they did to try to get it out of the way, this black thing stayed where it was. And the men who attempted to shift it by heaving or pulling turned rigid, like stone, and shook feverishly for days afterwards. They tried to blow it up with dynamite but before they even got the blast caps in place the ground shook like in the worst earthquake.
Now, now, Nurse Mutsch, you’re telling the boys an awful lot of nonsense
, Mrs Rohrbach interrupted, but she didn’t look quite as angry as she usually did. Nurse Mutsch seemed to feel quite pleased with herself but a little anxious at the same time. Perhaps she realised that by giving way to her eagerness to tell stories, she had made the boys pay keen attention to her, much more so than with her normal disciplinary methods. A dubious victory, perhaps, but a victory nonetheless.

The Green Cart
   The worthiness of working hard was constantly preached. It was imprinted in their minds that they must at all times strive to be useful, to deserve being fed. The boys were divided into two teams: one made up of the older ones, who were to carry the heavy food containers that the small, red hospital tram brought every afternoon, and one for the littler ones, or
the left-overs
, which was how the bigger boys referred to them, who were to lay the table with plates and cutlery from the ward kitchen on a rota that Nurse
Demeter organised. Boys told to join the table team were thought to be favoured. Nurse Demeter called the names of the select in her hoarse voice:
Blaschek! – Hauser! – Neubauer!
A bit away from her, Nurse Mutsch was ticking off the food trays as they arrived against the list of names. The system broke down quite often due to the brisk turnover of children: a portion too many was delivered, say, or one was missing. One day, Mutsch turned and stopped Adrian by gripping his shoulder as he passed, carrying cutlery sets and glasses:

Normally, she would turn to Hannes with these requests. Nice little Hannes with the ball-shaped head, innocent eyes and little self-contained smile. But now
the tinker
had been given the go-ahead. Adrian would remember that moment for as long as he lived: Nurse Mutsch’s hand on his shoulder, her face high above him, all glassy eye-globes and tightly stretched lips. Why was he granted this privilege? Was it because they had got
on speaking terms
during that walk, when he had even been tempted to hold her hand? Was she testing if the understanding between them was to last? Or did she know already what was likely to happen next? She produced a bunch of keys with strict instructions as to where to go and what doors to unlock and lock, and which key fitted which door. The keys that she had handled so easily weighed heavily in his hand. Children who were sent off to the kitchen on some errand were told to use a small door at the back of the building. Then, you went up a wide cement staircase and along a narrow corridor with a serving hatch at the far end. The frame of the hatch was lined with a sheet of tin, ice-cold when you leaned your bare arm on it. Beyond the
hatch, the hot air was full of the heavy smells of cooking and of sour steam rising from the washing-up, and fat women in aprons hurried about with rattling trolleys stacked high with trays and glasses. You had to shout at the top of your voice to be heard above the noise and, when you had been shouting for a while, one of the cooks in a white uniform would come to the hatch, wipe the sweat from her face and, in a cross tone, ask something like
where are you from then?
but without bothering to listen to the answer. Adrian just pushed the chit with the order that Nurse Mutsch had given him into the cook’s hand and she twisted the piece of paper this way and that as if she found it incredibly tricky to make out what it said. Then she sighed, disappeared and returned with a tray. On it usually stood a plate covered with a metal lid to keep the food hot. How proud it made one to be
allowed to carry the tray
. This time, there wasn’t just one plate on the tray but two, one large and one slightly smaller, also with a lid on top. It was drizzling outside. Adrian lifted the tray closer to his face to try to smell what was on the plates. The large one smelled pungently of meat stock and overcooked vegetables. The other one didn’t smell of anything at all. Adrian fancied there might be a piece of cake on that plate or maybe even a cream-cake made with real cream. He couldn’t remember a single instance of the children being served a dessert or even given a sweet since he had arrived at Spiegelgrund. There were stories about boys who had were given nice things to eat, like a boy who had refused to open his eyes, and came and went quickly, but had been offered a small slice of apple pie with cream. Or, at least, Peter Blaschek claimed he had seen this: Nurse Demeter sitting on the edge of that boy’s bed and urging him to have another spoonful of cream. Could the smaller plate be for some special thing like that? Who was to have this extra portion? When, much later, Adrian tried to remember what had
really happened that afternoon, he was struck by the chilling insight that
perhaps there never was another plate with a lid on it
. Could it be that he had imagined the whole thing? Or rather: had the memory of the events of that afternoon made the second plate materialise, as it were, although there had only been one plate on the tray, as per normal. But if there hadn’t been another plate, how come he remembers with such clarity that he spent ages in the increasingly heavy rain looking for a suitably out-of-the way place where he could put the tray down? Why had he suddenly become so troubled? He was innocent, after all. All he did was to walk somewhere carrying a tray. But he had chosen an odd way back. The obvious route went from the kitchens and then at the back of pavilion 13, the very same one they followed every day to walk to and from school. Instead, he crossed the central path and carried on, past the front of pavilion 13 and then towards number 15. Just as if it had been waiting for him, the green cart stood just on the edge of the steps leading down to the back of the pavilion. The cart had a thick, arched cover, painted green, and at one end, a pole for pulling it. The pole handle was resting on the grass because the labourer who pulled it around was urinating against the pavilion wall a little bit away. He was dressed in the usual institutional uniform, a grey jacket and trouser set that was far too small for him. Adrian stopped, unable to make up his mind what to do next. Still nothing to put the tray on. In front of him was that inexplicable green cart, so close that anyone who was looking out from behind the barred windows in the pavilion (if anyone was) would instantly have seen him standing by the cart. A voice spoke inside his head, sounding as powerful as the wind in the trees, and it said
don’t do it don’t lift the lid off the plate
. Afterwards, he was quite sure that when the voice said
don’t lift the lid
, it had meant the metal lid on the smaller plate but, for some reason, he
had put the tray down on the gravel and moved towards the mystery cart. Of course, it had a lid, too, with a handle on the lower edge. The man in the hospital uniform was still busy urinating. The pavilion windows glistened in the rain. He could see the trees along the path reflected in the panes and realised what he had thought were movements behind the glass was only the swaying branches of the trees. No one seemed to be watching. The strong, arched lid on the cart reflected nothing. The raindrops stuck to its painted surface before narrowing into tiny streams that ran along his fingers and down over his wrists when he finally closed his hands on the handle and pulled. The lid swung up and over surprisingly easily, as if an invisible third hand had supported his elbow and helped him lift. Inside, he saw the corpses of three children, stacked at odd angles to each other as if they had been thrown in any old how. They were naked. Their skin was a dull yellow, like old wax, and their faces were not really faces anymore. At least, this how the boy on top looked. His mouth was a gaping cavity and the pulled-back lips exposed rows of teeth as discoloured as an old horse. All he could see of the other two bodies was a slightly curved spine, part of a shoulder blade, and an arm that lay across another body, as if for defence or comfort. Where did the dead children come from? From pavilion 15? He glanced at the rain-streaked windowpanes. In that instant, something peculiar happened. It was as if he was up there, looking down at the green cart with the opened lid, and himself staring at the corpses of the dead children, already getting wet in the rain and, up there, other children came along to stand next to him at the window so that he was part of a crowd of warm, sweating bodies who, like him, wanted to see out. It made no sense, of course. How could he be himself and another himself at the same time, both inside and outside the pavilion? Where was he, really and
truly? And could he trust that it was himself he saw, that he
was
himself? He cautiously lowered the lid over the bodies, picked the tray up from the ground and, without turning to look, followed the path back to his own pavilion. The park was completely silent apart from the sound of the wind dragging its hands through the trees and the crunching of damp gravel under his feet. Not another sound, not even from the idiots in number 15. When he reached his pavilion, he pulled out Nurse Mutsch’s keys, found the right one, put it into the lock and entered. The corridor was full of dust and shadows. He walked along with the tray, past the ward kitchen and into that day room where the children were still seated at the table. But all the trays of food had been taken away. The boys sat as they had to sit during quiet hour, with both palms resting on the table, and Nurse Mutsch eyed him from her place at the top of the table, then glanced at the clock and said
where have you been all this time?
But she was smiling, her real smile, the one he had seen on her face when she had turned to him during the walk. And the fact that she was smiling at him
as if nothing had happened
even though it was only too obvious that everyone had finished their meal and was sitting there only to watch while he was punished suddenly became too much for him. His arms and legs grew long and heavier than they had ever been. Now, he had to hand the tray over but it slipped out of his hands and struck the floor, lids and all, in a wave of deafening clatter that broke all around him.