The Chosen Ones (20 page)

Hannes Neubauer was the first to register the danger signals and ran off to alert Nurse Mutsch. Not even Mutsch managed to undo
Pototschnik’s stranglehold on Jockerl’s neck. Two more asylum nurses had to be called by Mrs Rohrbach, who stood with her back turned and her hand cupped around the mouthpiece whispering
he’s killing him, he’s killing …!
and together they broke open the appalling grip, wrestled Pototschnik to the floor and freed Jockerl, who was unconscious and had to be revived with oxygen. And from that day, Hannes Neubauer became Pototschnik’s Sworn Enemy, according to the logic that defined Adrian as everybody’s Doormat and Jockerl as the eternal Footman. Hannes’s and Pototschnik’s beds stood just two beds apart in the dormitory. The two boys often ended up side by side in the march to school and the queue for the midday plate of soup. Now and then, Pototschnik would try to wind Neubauer up.
Why do you need to be here, you little turd? Your father’s an officer!
he might say. Or, for example,
a real German officer doesn’t dump his son in an institution!
But Hannes refused to be provoked and only went on muttering quietly to himself. Gradually, Pototschnik with his fat paws, vice-like thighs and slitty eyes welling with false tears became part of the ever-growing narrative that Hannes constantly told himself and which would be revealed in its full greatness first when his father came and the prisoners were released from inside the Mountain.

Visiting Hours
   What would once and for all decide the power struggle between Pototschnik and Neubauer was that Pototschnik had regular visitors while nobody ever came to see Neubauer. Also, Pototschnik’s visitors came in large, busy groups, and they all laughed a lot in the corridor and banged the doors when they left. At least, that was how it seemed to the other children who were sitting quietly in the day room, waiting for their
special moment
, as Nurse Mutsch put it. The visiting hours were surrounded by more
rituals and regulations than any other recurring event in the pavilion. The rules demanded that the children started the preparations by cleaning the washrooms and toilets and scrubbing the floor in the corridor. After the midday meal, the children were locked in the day room while the pavilion’s staff stood guard outside. When the visitors started to arrive, the guardians suddenly underwent a near-total personality change. Names and titles were exchanged in voices laden with pretence and the children occasionally even heard the nurses laugh and joke. In the day room, the air was thick and sticky with sweaty expectation.
Shush-shuush!
The children who were standing with their ears pressed to the door wanted to try to understand what was being said in the medley of voices, the nurses’ fluting tones mingled with the bassoon notes of the male visitors. Then the day room door would be unlocked, opened ever such a thin crack, and in the gap between the door and the frame either Nurse Mutsch’s or Nurse Demeter’s face would peep in, grinning as delightedly as if its owner had been sainted; yes, there might even be a modicum of breathless excitement in Mutsch’s voice as she called out the names of the children who were granted the happiness of stepping outside to receive their visitor and, always, Pototschnik’s name came first in the list:

And so Pototschnik stood up and left; next, Rusch and Wild: tight boys’ backs, stiff with hope. Every time the door closed after them, Adrian told himself that he would never behave as soppily just because his name was called. But why sit there and hope for something that would never happen and, anyway, if, against all reason, it ever did, what good would it do? You thought all this if your
special
moment
didn’t arrive. Perhaps Hannes Neubauer thought just the same. Or else, perhaps he thought about nothing of the sort: his
special moment
was of course due in another world, another time than the present. But then, one day, the wondrous, unimaginable thing happened: the door opened, Nurse Mutsch popped her head in and smiled:

Adrian couldn’t believe his ears. Seemingly, Nurse Mutsch didn’t quite believe it either because when he came forward on trembling legs and bowed to get underneath the nurse’s arm that held the door open, she glanced at him with an expression of such deep distrust that he at first thought that the visitor was some person from an authority that had come to take him away to some even worse place. But it was his mother. She wore the same tatty, collarless coat as usual when she went visiting and stood squashed into a corner at the far end of the corridor. She had put on lipstick and when she smiled, her lips expanded into a big, bright red flower. But she wasn’t looking at him when she smiled but at Mrs Rohrbach who was just passing, sagging under the armful of folders carried pressed against her chest. Mrs Rohrbach returned the smile with an expression indicating that she had little time for that kind of thing. And:
thank you, don’t worry, it’s alright, alright, not to worry
, Mrs Rohrbach said to Adrian’s mother, who had leapt to her feet to try to open the door for the busy lady. By then Mrs Rohrbach had smartly freed up an arm and produced a key, and now the door opened and then slammed behind her without any assistance from Adrian’s well-meaning mother, who was left standing with hanging arms and pathetic flower-lips. This was the first time in four years that mother and son had been in the same
room but Adrian’s mother seemed hardly to see him or, if she did, had no time for what she saw. She behaved as if her made-up lips and her coat added up to a kind of disguise which might be exposed for what it was at any moment, so she had to say as much as she could before it was too late. Her first subject was Adrian’s father, who had been sacked from his job at the locomotive factory after giving in to the temptation of sharing a bottle with a mate and who probably had to join the army unless there was some civil defence work to be done. Next, she spoke about Laura, whom she had managed to contact. Laura was in good hands but she had heard nothing about Helmut despite having been told that he was to be moved here, to Spiegelgrund, but now someone called Doctor Krenek has informed her that they have no record at all of a boy of that name and, she asked, has Adrian seen his brother or heard something about him? At this point, something thick and warm wells up inside Mrs Dobrosch, who can’t keep it down and then her entire face bursts into tears. Actually bursts. Like a stone, perhaps, that cracks from inside. And his mother stands there, helpless, her face broken to pieces and everything just pours out. She doesn’t even hide the mess in her hands. And inside Adrian, something changes. He wouldn’t have thought it possible but now he is ashamed of his mother. And, worse: a mute, quite useless rage grows inside him. How can he go on to tell her what he really wanted her to know? How can he speak about this institution where they kill children and the doctors choose which children are to die next and show it by popping a sweet into their mouths? And the chosen ones are taken to a pavilion where they are injected with poison or maybe get poison in their food and, when they are dead, their corpses are dumped into a body-cart with tall wheels and a green, arched roof which is pulled by Steinhof patients in grey asylum suits who perhaps don’t even know what a terrible load they
are hauling along. But how can he speak such things to her drained and grief-stricken face that weeps for a child who is nowhere to be found? Adrian is reduced to helplessness and, when she opens her arms and takes a step forward to hug him, he feels even more helpless. The embrace she seems to offer him is no more than a pair of quivering arms and more sobbing. His
mother
looks to
him
for comforting, not the other way round. And her coat smells badly of damp and engrained dirt. She can sense how stiff he is and that he can’t help becoming still more unyielding, which of course makes her cry even more. Then,
at last
, Nurse Mutsch approaches with a look of uneasy concern on her face, places an experienced and protective hand on the back of his neck, leads him away with firm, determined movements and deposits him in the day room where a wild fight has just broken out. Nurse Mutsch stands in the doorway and roars
you will stop this row at once, remember the visitors are still here!
Everyone obeys until the door closes again. Finally, Pototschnik stands in the middle of the room with his arm triumphantly raised. He lowers it slowly, opens his fist one finger at a time and shows the empty bullet casing in his palm and they all scream,

… I want it I want it I want it …

Hannes Neubauer stands by himself. No visitor today either. He desperately wants that cartridge and Pototschnik sees it in his face. It’s a real Mauser cartridge, Pototschnik says. From an automatic pistol. And he comes closer, holding out his broad palm where the cartridge rests as if on a tray with its sharp end pointing straight at Hannes’s face and then he says:

A WHORE! WHORE! WHORE!
everyone in the room screams, Adrian is the loudest of the lot. His face goes red with the sheer thrill of saying a word like that out loud. Then Pototschnik suddenly turns and gives Jockerl the cartridge.

You take it
, he says,

(and then, with his back turned to Hannes)

I don’t want it anyway.

A Secret Weapon
   It is late in the autumn now. To stand in for Nurse Demeter, who is on sick leave with a hurt ankle, Mrs Lauritz has been moved to their section. Mrs Lauritz is older than Mutsch and Demeter, and her face looks stitched together, like a patchwork. One part of her face might smile while another part looks scared or tense. But Mrs Lauritz’s body is slender and energetic, and it follows that she is very keen on outdoor activities. From the moment she arrives, they are to keep their rucksacks packed and always have at least one change of dry clothing ready. If, against all her plans, the weather really is so bad there can be no talk of open-air exercises, she makes them sit in the day room engaged in what she and Mrs Krämer call
kit cleaning
, which means that you take the laces out of your shoes, shine them and put the laces back, and keep repeating the task until Mrs Krämer feels you have spent enough effort on it. Adrian Ziegler is pleased to have these things to do because he has hidden the cartridge at the bottom of his rucksack. It’s of course the one Pototschnik gave Jockerl. Adrian has stolen it but nobody knows about the theft. Jockerl doesn’t. Obviously, Pototschnik doesn’t either. Jockerl is surely content to think the cartridge is still with the other worthless precious things he has collected and hidden in a space behind the drawer in his bedside table. Jockerl never pulls out the drawer to check his treasure because he knows that it would
give away what he keeps there. That wouldn’t do, because nobody in pavilion 9 is allowed any treasures. Everyone remembers what happened to Rudolf Ortner. The first thing Rudolf did when he arrived in this place was to spread out his shell collection on a table in the day room: lots of differently shaped mussel shells that were beautifully ridged on the outside and bluish-white inside, or else coated in shimmering mother-of-pearl. Nurse Mutsch came along to admire it, too. When she’d had enough of the display, she swept all the shells onto the floor and trampled on them. The shells were crushed to fragments under her cork heels.
In this section you can forget about personal belongings.
Adrian Ziegler could only too easily imagine her face lighting up in a cold smile the moment she caught Pototschnik out for secreting real ammunition in some hidey-hole. Which was of course why Pototschnik had handed over the actual storing of it to Jockerl. Power-mad as Pototschnik might be, he was also a cautious, not to say cowardly operator who took no unnecessary chances. But they had failed to take Ziegler into account even though it’s well enough known that tinkers can’t resist anything that gleams and glitters. One night, said tinker slipped out of bed, gently eased the drawer in Jockerl’s bedside table out of its seating, pulled the cartridge out and then sat with it in his hand, twisting and turning it for several hours. Being up and about at night is risky because now and then the duty nurse comes past to check the boys through the peephole in the door. And the night-light is treacherous. It seems feeble but is in fact very revealing. So Adrian carefully bundles up his coverlet under the blanket to make it look as if it covered a sleeping body and sits on the floor in a place he knows is safe because the bed-ends block the sightline from the door. He sits there night after night, grinding the point of the cartridge against the heel of his boots. Of course, in itself the cartridge is useless, but just to hold
it gives him an intoxicating sense of space and freedom, of being in control of his life, and reminds him of what Hannes feels when he guards the entrance to the Mountain. In these moments, they can both say: I know where
you
are but you know next to nothing about where
I
am and what
I
am doing. Sometimes, Adrian replaces the secret weapon in the drawer, sometimes not. If not, he sleeps, coolly holding the cartridge in his hand, even up to the time when Mrs Rohrbach comes along with her clapper to wake them up. One day, he goes as far as to hold the cartridge in his fist and say to triumphantly to Jockerl:

This is the last night you see me lying here,

you had better believe me, you little shit

(everyone calls Jockerl ‘little shit’);

and Jockerl looks in terror between Adrian’s clenched fist to his face, worn by lack of sleep, and doesn’t have a clue what kind of secret weapon Adrian has got hold of, is clueless about everything.

And the days pass, and the daylight takes longer and longer to arrive in the mornings and disappears ever earlier in the evenings. The rain that falls during the night collects in deep puddles on the gravelled paths between the pavilions and the puddles are still brimming when the morning comes. The morning wind sweeps through the tops of the trees in the hospital park, carrying the sour smell of damp stone dust from the old quarry. The boys in pavilion 9 have lined up, rucksacks on their backs, for a new day excursion. They shiver in the cold. This time, Adrian Ziegler has brought his weapon, stuffed deep in his rucksack, concealed like a riddle or a treasure trove or perhaps just something that sets him apart from the others and gives him a glimpse of colour in the greyness. This morning, it seems to Adrian that they are not so much walking as rising: ever higher towards the sky that slowly becomes brighter and clearer as the sun climbs up behind
Gallitzinberg, like a sharp needle of glass. Level with the fire station, a horse-chestnut tree leans over the asylum wall, its leaves burning beautifully brown and yellow when the sunbeams strike them; a mighty, dangerous tree that, when the winds stirs its branches, leisurely scatters scores of small, angrily clattering chestnuts all over the place. The hard little fruits hit the boys on the path, too, and suddenly someone calls out about the chestnuts that are hitting his head. Before Mrs Lauritz has had a chance to respond, the boys have run off in every direction. Normally, no one would of course have dared to break the rules quite so flagrantly but Mrs Lauritz is new and not properly initiated into the strict routines introduced by Nurse Demeter and Nurse Mutsch, so even though Lauritz blows on her whistle …
tweet-tweet-tweet!
… no one takes any notice and she has to run around herself to try to sort out the boys, who are chasing chestnuts on the path. As ever, Jockerl is the first to spot imminent danger and self-sacrificingly runs up to tug at Mrs Lauritz’s sleeve: