The Chosen Ones (31 page)

Hurry up, we mustn’t keep the doctor waiting.

He has noticed this side of Nurse Blei before, seen her clear blue eyes narrow and the look in them become edgy and resentful. When Blei gets angry, her freckles pale and a kind of grin, all teeth, spreads across the lower part of her face. She directs it towards him now and he feels more frightened than he has been before in his life.

Upstairs, the layout looks identical to the floor below but is different in that there are no ill children around: only nurses dashing about, in and out through doors that seem to open and shut on their own. Nurse Blei shoves him through one of the corridor doors into a room where another nurse is waiting impatiently. She is older than Nurse Blei and looks fed up, as if she has been through this far too many times already. They pile into a very small room or cubicle, barely large enough for him and the two nurses. A wooden bench and a few hooks above it have been fixed onto one of the short walls. Here’s where you hang up your clothes, the older nurse says. And your shoes go under the bench. He bends down to undo the laces
but his hands are trembling so badly that Nurse Blei has to help him. His face is level with the broad ribbon of freckles across her nose but her eyes are expressionless. At the opposite end of the room is a door without a handle. Adrian hears sounds from the other side of the door: a distant mumbling on a single note, as when a lot of people talk quietly in a crowded space, and also a noise as if someone were pushing a heavy object across the floor. The people in there are presumably getting some kind of execution machine ready for him. What else could there possibly be on the other side of a door that is opened from the outside only? He starts to cry. Nurse Blei takes no notice.
You’re to undress now,
is all she says and when he can’t bring himself to do it, she and the other nurse together manage to get everything off him, his underpants and socks as well. When he is naked and shivering, the older nurse knocks on the handleless door. The last thing he hears before the door is opened from the other side is Nurse Blei’s hissing whisper:

Remember, not a word from you while the doctor talks!

The Anatomy Lesson
   The space he enters is surprisingly large. In front of him are rows of expectant faces. All young women, sitting side by side on rows of seats that remind him of the classroom, except they are raked and arranged in a semi-circle, like in an auditorium, so that they can all see him when he comes into the room. He has never felt his nakedness
burn
like this before. The women’s collective gaze starts off fires everywhere on his skin. He has nothing to shelter behind. Wherever he places his hands, in front of his sex or his face, he remains exposed. Not that the nurse who escorts him allows him any time for evasive moves. She shoves and drags him to the middle of the floor where Doctor Illing is waiting. Next to him is a wooden footstool. Doctor Illing is holding a long, thin pointer in his hand. It
has a sharp tip, like a spear, and reminds him of a hooked implement Mr Ritter had used to pull down maps of foreign countries.

He no longer knows where to look and so simply stops seeing. Somewhere else, beyond his closed eyelids, Doctor Illing’s voice drones on, now and then interrupted by a well-rehearsed flick with the pointer:

For some reason, the last remark makes the audience laugh. Behind his closed eyelids, Adrian tries to recreate the image of his line-drawn mum, somehow enclosed in a bright red wrapping of shame, like himself. However, the angrily pricking pointer will not permit digressions. It draws down one map after another on his bare, burning skin and then slaps and prods busily at each one. Here is Franz Josef’s Land with its high, terraced mountains …
as you can see, the cranial shape is what provides us with the most unmistakable indication: the long, partly deformed skull structure of marked Gypsy type
… the vertebral column that turns out to be the Andes, a landscape full of irregularities and marginal ridges and then deep ravines that he wishes he could merge with or disappear into but …
STAND STILL
…! smacks the pointer and then slides across the …
disproportionately elongated torso contrasts
with the short, curved legs. I would ask you to notice especially the coarse vertebral curvature that accompanies these anatomical defects
… (New Zealand Tasmania South America) …

A wave of blood-red hurt runs through the Pacific. Inside the Mountain, an echo lingers of what sounds like the noise made by Thunder
himself. However, it is only Doctor Illing, who strikes at the shameful red suit with his pointer:

That wasn’t so bad, was it? Nurse Blei says when he is back in the small changing room again and he would have liked to be able to show with a gesture or a movement that, of course, it was perfectly all right. The trouble is that Doctor Illing has used his pointer to remove everything from him that he might have used for speaking. Hands, eyes, lips; and his tongue and gullet, too; all have been removed by that pointer. He is unable even to swallow the few words he might have found. Or, it seems, he might be unable to swallow at all. He just looks at Nurse Blei with eyes that he hopes will look pleading and despairing at the same time but Blei has no patience for those who can’t speak when spoken to and is already off into the corridor on hard, tapping heels.

Gulliver
   He isn’t dead yet. Though not properly alive, either. So, what is he? At least I’m not ill, he says one morning to Nurse Storch, who looks as if she doubts every word he says. He attempts another strategy. I’d like to read a book, he says. He fancies that his new status as exhibited specimen gives him some rights to ask for things. He tries this on the male nurse called Heinz who comes to help with changing the bed linen for the bed-wetters. What book would that be? Heinz asks dubiously. Because he can’t think straightaway of a suitable title, he says
Gulliver
. He can’t think why the name sounds so familiar. Instead of bringing a book, Heinz comes along with paper
and coloured pencils. He tells Adrian to draw something. So he draws his bed: it’s a huge throne. Zigzagging wires and lines radiate from the bed and join up at the other end of his drawing and meet in a small point which, with a little goodwill, looks like a crushed spider and which is all that remains of his mother now that he has heard what Doctor Illing has to say about her. Adrian might have been struck mute afterwards but he isn’t stupid. If Illing’s opinion of Adrian’s mother is that she is
a low-grade type in terms of racial biology
who keeps pestering the staff with her
questions
, then it means that she has been here and that the doctor has met her, probably not just once but several times. It’s a fact that lots of people who want to get into the pavilions aren’t allowed to. He has this information from General Pelikan, who has observed with his own eyes that people have been turned away from the pavilion doors. Once, he saw male nurses jump on one of the visitors, wrestle him to the floor and use a police hold to keep him down. So, it could be, Gulliver thinks in his tall bed, that the nursing staff have orders to pack up and hide away all day rooms and dormitories every time an outsider comes along. Only on visiting days are they allowed to look around, and things like their day room and corridor are unpacked and then it’s possible that the odd confused relative, who might have been looking for the right place for years and years, is suddenly welcomed with tremendous warmth by Nurse Erhart or Nurse Storch, who will then bring them that relative’s
own
Konrad or Gustav or Roman or whatever they’re called, all the dribbling idiots thought harmless enough to be on display. And now, it’s a visiting day. Gulliver lies on his throne-bed and looks through closed eyelids so that he can squeeze a little red from the grainy light between the lids and eyeballs, and with the red he should with any luck be able to shape a pair of red lips. With still more luck, it might be possible to unfold and straighten the
corridor so it gets to look like a real one and then, perhaps, his mum can be fitted in with her thin, stick-like line-legs. He works so hard at his eyelid gymnastics that his mother’s face in the end looks more like a smear squeezed out of a tube. But whatever he does, he never manages to make rooms and corridors meet up with his mother in such a way that his mum can come through to him.

Thunderstorm
   Why is there never a visitor for me? he complains aloud to Nurse Storch one day. Not that he expects much of a reply. Nurse Storch reacts to everything he says by shoving it into the same old sack of angry silence and, should he ever dare to remind her of anything he has said, her eyes just draw closer to her long, resentful nose as she glances crossly and disapprovingly at him. But this time, something different happens. To his surprise, Nurse Storch comes back just a little later the same day and says that she has spoken with the doctor (she doesn’t specify which one) and he has told her that Adrian isn’t allowed to have any visitors because he has tried to run away once and if you’ve tried to do that once you might well try again, and that’s a luxury they won’t put within reach of a useless boy like him. Nurse Storch’s voice sounds unusually kind. Judging by her stork’s beak of a nose that moves rhythmically up and down, she is practically elated. On the other side of the hospital wall, his restless mother hurries past with a shameless smile on her blood-red lips. Gulliver, you mustn’t be angry with me, she says. But Gulliver
is
angry. Gulliver is furious. Determined now, he approaches General Pelikan who is standing straight upright by a wall. He tells the general that he is no idiot, not at all, he can read and write and there isn’t the slightest reason to keep him locked up in this place. Besides, he is very strong. With his Gulliver hands, he can tear down all these walls in seconds and fly away. Also, he can take everyone else along with
him. Very well, prove it, General Pelikan says and straightens up some more. Gulliver stares at him, then pushes with his hands against the wall with such energy that his head swims. General Pelikan is not convinced by this kind of thing. You’ve got to let Thunder out first, he says and points to the dormitory where Thunder is sitting in his bed-cage with one eye looking blankly out from under the pulled-up blanket. General Pelikan is scared of Thunder. If it is possible to avoid coming close to the bed-cage, he keeps well away and sticks to his familiar routes. The Otto-Stroker, who shivers with fear if Thunder as much as moves about in his cage, behaves just like Pelikan. Of all the children on the ward, only the piano-player, Felix Keuschnig, fails to notice when Thunder is roaring and thumping. His noises simply don’t reach into the bright space where Felix’s long chains of notes ring out. (On the other hand, at times they hear Thunder hum some of Keuschnig’s tunes, though only faintly, on feeble puffs of air between thin lips, and then the ward falls quite silent and everyone looks with trepidation towards the cage because when Thunder sings, an outburst will come soon. Everyone knows this so, by the evening, anxiety hangs over the dormitory like a suffocating, wet blanket and the younger children won’t stop crying.) Just now, though, Gulliver has eyes only for General Pelikan. What’s on the man’s mind? However, Pelikan no longer stands by the wall, his face has slipped out from under its stern general’s mask and has become as empty and expressionless as usual when he doesn’t stand to attention behind his screen of words. This, of course, is a strategic move. Sneaky, smiley Pelikan can’t be thought to have anything to do with fermenting trouble on the ward. He wants Gulliver to carry out his ideas for him. But what is Gulliver other than a far too large body in a too small bed? When he lies awake at night in the blue light, he hears his mother rummaging behind the wall. Mum is urging him
on. Do it, Gulliver, she says. He thinks of the bullet casing he stole from Jockerl. If he hadn’t stolen it, he would never have been able to escape that time. And Mum knows that. She has fixed her lips so they are large and red, and now she says to him: I’m here, Gulliver, I’ve been here all the time, though you never knew about it. And then, of course, he does it. He gets out of bed and walks over to Thunder’s cage. In the blue light, the pale, flickering shadow of its grid falls on the white wall behind it. He has watched from his own bed several times when Nurse Blei bends over Thunder’s bedside. The movements of her hands as she unscrews and lifts off the roof of the cage are so routine that he doesn’t even have to search to find the right screws on the inner surface of the roof. Through the grid he can see the shadowy outline of Thunder’s body under the blanket, pressed lightly against the side of the bed but as immobile as ever. He can’t hear anything, not even faint intakes of breath. He loosens the nuts and puts the roof down, as he has seen Nurse Blei do. Thunder lies under an open sky, but inside Gulliver something has become knotted, like a clenched fist or like something bulky you’ve swallowed that won’t go down properly. He walks back to his bed with short, uncertain steps and settles down at a safe distance to watch Thunder wake up. Then it begins: a dull, quivering rumble as when a loaded truck is driving past. Very slowly, the strength of the sound grows and you only grasp quite how powerful it is when walls and floor start to reverberate. Then comes a violent crack followed by dark, thumping thuds, as if Thunder were striking with his arm or leg against something hard. Now, he is ready for the thunderclaps. Adrian remembers hearing Nurse Storch say once how unbelievable it was that anyone human could make these noises but, then, Adrian is pretty sure that it isn’t Thunder who is making the noise. It is as if he were placed at one end of something much greater than himself
and has just triggered off an underground power source by accident, because that’s truly what it sounded like (Adrian said later); that is, as if the underworld itself was heaving itself up through the pavilion, and everything on top and below it had to give way. By then, all the children are up and desperately searching for doors they can’t find, or at least sanctuary in a bed further away. Adrian suddenly feels a mouthful of cold saliva pressing against the side of his neck. Of course, it is Otto the Stroker’s wet mouth. Adrian is far too tired to kick the small, terrified body out of his bed. Suddenly, his mother comes and spreads her large red cloak over them both. He finally closes his eyes and drops off into Gulliver-sleep that lasts for seventy or perhaps seven hundred years. When he wakes, it’s too late – inevitably. Thunder is gone. The dormitory is bathed in cold daylight and all the bedclothes have been ripped off the beds, which are left in irregular rows. Here and there, naked or wrapped in sheets, senselessly screaming children are standing about. He has just registered that Thunder’s bed is empty when he hears Nurse Storch’s cutting voice through the noise. Next, she is suddenly standing beside him holding his coverlet and, with her other hand, Stroker-Otto’s hand. Around them, an increasing number of ward faces gather: Nurse Erhart and Nurse Sikora and, a little later, Doctor Gross with a contented smile on his face. He must have been called specially. Obviously, Adrian is in for it, because he has let Thunder out, but Nurse Storch seems much more interested in Otto-Stroker, who is still curled up in Adrian’s arms with the dribbling mouth pressed into his armpit and all five fingers of one hand gently curled around Adrian’s thumb. Have you no shame, boy, Nurse Storch says. It is unclear if she means him or little Otto. With one powerful tug, she succeeds in tearing Otto out of his secure place and forces him down on the floor where she wrenches both his defenceless arms up on his
back in a prisoner’s hold and, even though Otto screams like a stuck pig, doesn’t stop banging his round, oversized head against the floor until a mask of smeared blood outlines the Stroker’s nose, mouth and eye sockets. Meanwhile, Erhart and Sikora have grabbed Adrian and dragged him off to a solitary-punishment cell at the far end of the corridor. Once locked in there, all chances of flight or rescue have vanished.