The Chosen Ones (23 page)

He'll be staying with us for today. Let's wait before we inform the institution up the road about his whereabouts.

Then they took him to a large ward where several children were bedded down and put him in a bed, too. The sheets smelled clean and fresh and Adrian fell asleep there and then, an untroubled sleep as if the world no longer existed. The next morning, they came for him and took him back to Spiegelgrund.

The Bunker
   Naively, he had imagined that his escape attempt would lead to an inquisition session conducted by Mutsch or Rohrbach or one of his other usual tormentors. He was mistaken. Instead, after he had showered, they took him straight to the punishment block in pavilion 11, down into the basement, which seemed to consist mostly of narrow corridors criss-crossed by bulky tin pipes that gave off burping or gurgling noises. One of the corridors ended with a wide iron door closed by massive bolts. His male nurse escort pulled the bolts back and pushed him into a large room, as low-ceilinged as
the corridor and lit only by an unshaded bulb in a wall socket. This was the Bunker. And there they all were: seated on one of the benches fixed to the wall he saw the master escapist himself, Zavlacky, next to Peter Schaubach (another Ybbs runaway) and, naturally, Miseryguts, whose head was sagging between his shoulders. None of them seemed particularly surprised to see Adrian turn up. Miseryguts was the only one who spoke but only to state the fact that it was
totally insane
to run away as Adrian had, in the middle of the night without food or water or warm clothes. No further comments were made. As Adrian would put it later, once you got as far as the Bunker, you were on your own, no one gave a damn and all bridges were burnt –
jeer der duchbrennt muss sich um sich selbst kümmern.
Even so, being a Bunker detainee brought a certain status. Once you had done time there, no one would try to get the better of you or make fun of you. Evening came. Two male nurses – or were they
guards
now? – carried a cauldron of soup downstairs. Because all the others had their own bowls, he had to be content with two slices of the dry rye bread that was handed out with the soup. No one offered to share their soup with him. Once the meal was cleared away, the guards returned to take them to their cells on the floor above. Adrian's cell looked exactly like the lock-up one in his ‘old' pavilion, with the one difference that here, two benches were fixed to the wall, not just one. When he realised that the other bench had no one assigned to it, it also became clear that his ‘treatment' was not yet complete and, once that had dawned on him, he of course couldn't sleep. He spent most of the night speculating about what they would do to punish him. In the morning, he could hear the guards walk along the corridor, unlocking the door to the dormitory where the other boys stayed, then the sounds as they got going, emptying their swollen bladders noisily into the pans, then running water into the basins. His cell
remained locked. By mid-morning, they finally came. Doctor Gross and, after him, two nurses. Both ex-asylum nurses, that was easy to see: the same solid build as Nurse Mutsch and the same flat, gormless features. Adrian expected Doctor Gross to acknowledge him, not exactly with a greeting but perhaps with some sign that he had seen Adrian before. But Gross seemed not to recognise him and didn't address him at all. The older of the two nurses told Adrian to lie on his back. When he didn't obey instantly, they pushed him down on the bench with practised hands, and then shoved both arms behind the back of his neck. It hurt horribly. The humiliation felt worse still. They manhandled him like an animal. Gross sat down on the edge of the bench and placed the palm of his hand against Adrian's chest. He held two syringes in his other hand, both about ten centimetres long, but with short needles. Adrian instinctively tried to twist his body away but the quick hands of the nurses had already gripped his kicking legs in vice-like holds while Gross administered the injections, first in one thigh, then in the other. One of the nurses swabbed the needle marks with a cold pad. That was all. What are you doing? Adrian asked pointlessly. Doctor Gross didn't bother with an answer, just got up and left the room, followed by the nurses. Adrian stayed where he was for a while, feeling slightly nauseous. Nothing else. When he stood to walk over to the half-open door his head spun a little. In the corridor, a little further along, one of the guards stood looking at him with a watchful, worried expression. Because he didn't want to be on his own in the cell but had no idea where else he would be allowed to go, he turned to walk towards the basement stairs. He saw from the corner of his eye the guard walk into his cell and come back with the institutional clothes he had worn the night before. With the clothes neatly arranged over his arm, the guard followed Adrian down into the basement and along
the passage with the oddly slurping pipes. The iron door stood open this time, as if the Bunker welcomed him back. Inside, some twenty boys were waiting with their eyes fixed on him. I hardly felt a thing, he said cheerfully and, to prove it, took a couple of dance steps across the floor. Suddenly, a hideous, icy pain shot up from his legs, all the way into his pelvis. All the blood seemed to be sucked out of his head and he fell, face forward, with both his legs locked in cramp. For a moment, he had a vision of himself as the others must have seen him: his mouth gaping, his eyes staring blindly. He crawled around with his face against the floor, like an insect you have trodden on and almost crushed, and the pain was like nothing he had ever felt before, as if a rusty bolt was being hammered through both his legs to fasten them to the boards. The crowd of boys followed his torment with blank looks on their faces. They had seen it all before. The guard briefly stopped in the doorway before he quietly put down the bundle of clothes on the floor and left, as if he, too, had had more than enough of this spectacle and didn't care to stay on for more. He barred and locked the door behind him.

Among the Punished
   With time, he would become familiar with the range of treatments that Doctor Gross and the institution's other medics would apply to suppress any resistance. He had endured the sulphur cure, generally regarded as the worst. For two weeks afterwards, he could barely support his weight on his legs. Even when lying down on a bench, the cramps could start in his thigh muscles and spread into his hips and lower back. It made resting on his back impossible. As soon as he moved even very slightly, the contractions became so intensely painful that the tears streamed from his eyes. Helplessly, he screamed and flailed about, striking the cell walls as if desperately drawing attention to himself so that someone would
come and help him. For several days and nights, he fought the pain as if it were a wild animal. He couldn't sleep but sometimes went into inexplicable semi-comatose states. Finally, the pain died down a little. It didn't go away but rather seemed to have retreated back down into his legs where it created a numb, unceasing ache. He still couldn't stand. As soon as he tried to get up, his legs gave in as if made of rubber. Zavlacky and Miseryguts took turns to bring him food in his cell. It's important that you keep eating, Zavlacky said with the weary assurance of someone who has endured most things. It was strange to see how much both boys had grown. Miseryguts had powerful shoulders, and Zavlacky, who looked more like a weasel than ever, had an Adam's apple as prominent as a grown man's. Whenever he raised his new voice, nobody doubted that he was in charge. He could stand, arms akimbo, and say things like
has everyone here understood what I'm trying to tell you?
or
any questions?
After a week in the isolation cell, Adrian was allowed to sleep in the same dormitory as the others. The boy who slept in the bed next to his was known as Gangly, and looked weird, with his long legs, skewed shape, strangely shifty eyes and yellowish horses' teeth that showed when he smiled. Gangly moved just like Jockerl, in a jerky, evasive way as if any time expecting blows and kicks from every direction. Adrian tried to ask Gangly questions when the two of them were on their own together, but Gangly never replied. He only spoke when there were several people around and then compulsively, in long, incoherent orations. Gangly's idea was apparently to distract his audience
away from himself
, as if the flow of words formed a wall he could shelter behind. And he kept smiling while he talked: a weird smile with his lips stretched over his teeth and a dull, submissive look in his eyes.
Please don't hit me
, his eyes pleaded. All the same, Gangly was the one who made sure that Adrian got up in the morning and helped him wash and dress while
the effect of the treatment meant that he couldn't stand or walk. It was also Gangly whom Adrian had to thank for being taken down into the Bunker each morning and, when the guards unlocked the big door in the evening, it was Gangly who offered his shoulder for Adrian to lean on as he limped up the steep basement staircase. It was odd, the way we were left to our own devices, Adrian said later when he looked back on these days. As if running away once and for all turned us into a special category of boys. No longer ordinary inmates in a care home but not exactly prisoners, either. I never figured out what we were seen as. The male nurses or nursing assistants who looked after us behaved above all like guards, even though they wanted the title ‘Tutor' –
Erzieher
. He remembers two of them especially well. Kohler was the one who had followed Adrian down into the basement after the sulphur injections and brought his clothes. The name of the other one was Sebastian. Because they had the same rota, they were often talked about as the collective
Kohler 'n' Sebastian
. The boys were given daily tasks by Kohler 'n' Sebastian. One morning, they might be told to scrub the basement stairs, or clean the kitchen and the dormitory, or make the beds. Everyone made their own first, of course, but then Kohler, or perhaps Sebastian, would rip everything up and order them to start again. It could go on for hours. If anyone objected, he had to stand in front of his unmade bed, as if in the stocks, while the others, boys who knew what obedience meant, were excused the rest of the bed-making. Then again, they might be divided into labour crews, and one crew left behind to carry out Bunker chores while the rest marched off to do straightforward jobs like ditch-digging, or sawing and stacking logs. It was usually Zavlacky who decided who belonged to which group and, for as long as he did it, the allocation of jobs went smoothly and without any conflicts. Adrian would later recall an occasion when one of their so-called
tutors (someone who was
neither
Kohler nor Sebastian) had turned up in the Bunker to row them for not cleaning tools and returning them in good order to the shed, and then Zavlacky had stepped forward as if to physically defend his group. He went with the man to the tool shed and came back an hour or so later, looking as calm as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. No punishments were meted out either. In their previous pavilion, the situation would have been unthinkable from beginning to end because justice there bore no immediate relationship to the offence, but was no more than a device for maintaining a pre-determined, abstract order. Why this approach to discipline did not apply in the Bunker, Adrian never understood. Unless the fact that they were in the Bunker at all was seen as punishment enough.

The Women's Pavilion
   One early December morning, Adrian's crew had been assigned to ditch-digging around one of the outlying areas of the hospital's gardens. Frosty nights and an early fall of snow had hindered previous attempts to complete the work. By now, only a few weeks left to go before Christmas and, if the new vegetable plots were to be drained and dug before the serious cold set in, all who could had to help. Adrian was grateful to get away. He was fed up of the stench of stale sweat and old urine that hung around Gangly wherever he went, and after only a few hundred metres' march in the preferred army-style ranks, he was amazed at how much light and open sky you could find even here, in obscure corners of the walled-in hospital site. They worked for three hours before midday and then sat down to eat the meagre rations they had been given. The place that was to become part of the gardens was a low-lying meadow between two intersecting roads. Pavilion 23, the so-called women's pavilion, stood behind tall trees on the other side of the
meadow. It looked like their own pavilion, Adrian thought, but perhaps a bit longer. It would have seemed abandoned but for the smoke rising from one of the chimneys. When they had been sitting with their spades across their knees for some twenty minutes, two female guards came out and stopped just outside the main entrance. Their clipped voices resounded under the frost-white sky. Soon, twenty-odd young women, in some kind of prison outfits, came outside, stood to attention –
Habt-Acht!
– and then received an order delivered at screaming pitch, turned and came marching straight towards the boys. Who just stared. The women marched briskly, two by two. When about half the line had passed, one of them suddenly turned to the boys, ripped off her prisoner's cap and exposed her clean-shaven skull. A little later, two of the other women did the same and raised their arms triumphantly in the air. It enraged the guard in front. She blew her whistle and then walked along the line, slapping the prisoners as she went. The boys were fascinated and kept staring:

but by then Zavlacky seemed not to listen anymore, only smiled as if at some sudden inner vision. And then he spat between his drawn-up knees into the grass. Instead, Miseryguts had to step in with missing information: