The Chosen Ones (32 page)

Encephalography
   Since he obviously has no shame in his body, they have decided that the evil must be drained out of him, once and for all. Nurse Storch tells him this, pecking energetically with her nose-beak, now to the left, now to the right, as if to emphasise that a new order of things will start at once. Don’t I even get any breakfast? he asks. She doesn’t deign to reply. He is taken to pavilion 3, the hospital unit, where he is shown into a changing room only a little larger than the one next to the anatomy lecture theatre where he was on display for Doctor Illing’s students. And, like that time, he is told to undress but is allowed to keep his underpants on. Two nurses march him into the examination room. He searches their faces frenetically for features he might recognise but it seems that he hasn’t seen either of them before. Something that at first reminds him of a dentist’s chair stands in the middle of the examination room. It hasn’t got a backrest, though, and is more like a stool, surrounded by a steel contraption festooned with dangling leather straps. The structure is a little like the one he was put in when Doctor Gross measured his head on his first day at Spiegelgrund. The two nurses take a firm hold of his arms and place him in the structure, where he is to sit leaning forward on the stool. One of them keeps her grip on his arm, which shakes limply, as if all strength has drained away. By now, he is terrified. They lower the top of the steel frame down over him, fit two
clamps to fix his head into place while a third is pushed against the back of his head until he is forced to sit with his head and the upper half of his body bent forward in a cramped position made even more painful by the forward angle of the seat. He feels as if he is about to lose his balance all the time but he doesn’t fall, because of the leather straps that they are now busily applying to his arms and legs to keep him still and in place. They have pulled far too hard at the straps, which are cutting into the skin. He struggles a little to free himself. Stop fussing, someone says. The voice is a man’s, but Adrian’s head is clamped in that horrible tipped-forward position and he can’t turn to see who is speaking. Someone pricks his arm with a needle. The sting causes something cold and white to spread under his skin. He feels drowsy, and nothing disappears but his consciousness splinters. When words, sometimes entire sentences, come his way, it feels like what you see when you scrape the paint off a window frame. Nothing makes sense. From now on you mustn’t move, a voice tells him. This will take a long time but you must not move. If you move, it will be worse for you. They repeat this to him, over and over. Slowly, his mouth fills with something sweetish, a liquid with an unpleasant, metallic taste that he tries to get rid of by swallowing. But the metallic taste won’t go away and it becomes harder to keep swallowing. He sees one of the white-clad ones approach him, holding a syringe that is the size of a man’s fist and attached to a long tube. Now, sit completely still, the voice says again. Not that they have to remind him because he can’t move a finger anyway. His jaws are numb and his tongue is like a gigantic lump in his mouth that stops him from swallowing. Something stabs at the base of his spine, as if a screw was forced into it. He screams but the scream doesn’t leave his throat. The skull clamps that fix his head seem to press more deeply into his scalp. A painful stiffness spreads from his neck, like the sensation
of spreading pain in his legs and buttocks after Doctor Gross’s sulphur punishment. An intense headache starts up behind his eyes. He can’t see any more. His whole body is awash with cold sweat. The pain in his head is too strong for him, too huge for his head, too much for his body to cope with and, however hard he fights to push it out, to heave himself out of it, he gets nowhere because they have already invaded him. He tries to find a way of puking it all up. But there is no longer an up and a down, nowhere to turn and get rid of what he throws up. He dimly glimpses a nurse who is moving around him. She holds an enamelled bowl under his chin. He can’t feel it. She slaps his face with both hands but he can’t feel it, neither her fingertips nor her nails –

wake up, wake up, wake, you must stay awake

– and, in the end, he actually does wake up. He slides back into an awake state that is infinitely greater than any awareness than he has experienced before. As if he existed in a different part of space or simultaneously everywhere within it, he watches as the white-clad ones move around him, hears them speak to each other although he can’t make out what they are saying. He sees General Pelikan stand by the wall whispering, and it is as if he were close by, but on the other side of that wall. The whisper slides into his mind where it grows bigger and bigger, like an expanding bellows. At the same time, the thickness of that wall is reduced until it collapses into itself and becomes a small glass bubble, so thin-walled and fragile that by blowing on it you could make it crack and disintegrate. He understands that the wall isn’t the real wall but the pain that increases and explodes inside his head. His mother is walking somewhere beyond the pain, her long spider’s legs stretching, her red smile reddening. He screams to her,

mummy mummy mummy

but no one comes, the room is expanding as well, it is inside him and now there is nobody in it.

Line-drawn Mothers
   In every individual’s life, the time will come when certainty about what happened earlier fades and at that point, stories take over. Adrian’s time at Spiegelgrund had always been a gaping hole in his memory, and with what could he fill the hole except stories? As the years went by, he learnt to shape and exploit his narratives for his own advantage. His experiences inside the Nazi killing-machine made the normally tetchy and unapproachable Ziegler interesting in the eyes of his fellow prisoners. Adrian would tell them about his encounters with Doctor Gross and Doctor Türk, about the staff in pavilion 9, like Nurse Mutsch with her long dark hair and staring pig’s eyes, Nurse Demeter with her bony chin and Mrs Rohrbach, lady of the clapper and the whistle. He was sparing with details about some of the aspects of his time there. If he did mention anything about the weeks he spent with the idiots in pavilion 17, it was only to get a word in about Illing, the murderous doctor. Illing was strung up, of course, he would point out; they hung him just after the end of the war. At the time, quite a lot had been printed about it in
Krone.
Adrian used to believe that he was pretty good at telling it like it was while never going on so much it made him seem too talkative. But not saying too little, either, or he might come across as a weakling, perhaps even vulnerable – a mortal sin for a prisoner, who is always at the mercy of the powerful inmates. The big black hole inside his mind grew neither bigger nor smaller just because he stuffed it full of stories. But then something happened, He was doing time at Stein then, so it was early in the 1970s and after his long stay in Italy. They were a team who ate the midday meal at a particular long table nearest to the canteen wall. Above the
table there had been a window that had been covered with black sheet metal held by clamps mortared into the wall. Presumably the window opening had been bricked up as well, so the metal sheet covered a solid wall. An older prisoner used to sit at the table in a particular place opposite Adrian. The old boy’s first name was Petter so he was naturally called Parsley – that’s
Petersilie
in German. He was an exceptionally short man who looked even shorter in his worn prison kit. But inside the clothes, his small body was constantly on the move and, while they were all seated at their table, Parsley’s buttocks and also his hands would shift about constantly on his chair while his lined, old man’s face would stay turned to Adrian and not move an inch while he listened to whatever story was being told. Until, that is, one day, when he pressed the restless palms of his hands against the tabletop and interrupted the flow of words.
You’re lying,
Parsley said.
You’d never be sitting here today if everything you try to con us into believing was true.
Adrian was taken aback. He knew what he had experienced. Still, he had never reflected on the possibility that what he was saying might be untrue. Anyway, if it was true, in what sense should one understand that? How to judge the actual truth in an account of events one barely remembers? But, as of now, he faces Mr Parsley, full of indignation, who insists that nobody should try to pump him full of fake stories, given that, if all these unspeakable things had really been done to a person, he couldn’t possibly have survived for long enough to sit here and talk about it. And perhaps that’s right. Perhaps it’s like this thing with the blocked window with the fixed cover; that is, there might be a window just like it inside Adrian’s head, a window no one can open and even if you managed to break through the outer covering, another wall would be all you found. But if there is nothing on the inside and nothing on the outside either, what is there left to talk about? Adrian
bends across the table, looks in Parsley’s eyes and says, well now. Let me tell you about my mother. Everyone has had a mother, he adds, everyone can identify with a mum. But mine was only an invented mother, he says. She was a pretend figure made up of lines which he had drawn himself on sheets of paper and then painted with a little red colour in order to make the mass of lines look more like his mother, and that drawing was the only thing he had to show when the other Spiegelgrund children were visited by their (real) mothers. But, believe me or not: one day, that clumsy bundle of lines with a little splash of red in the middle had walked from Erdberg all the way to Baumgartner Höhe in Penzing to see Doctor Illing because she (the line-drawn mother) had by some means learnt that her son had been moved to pavilion 17. Now, you might ask yourselves, what’s so special about number 17? Well, the killer-doctor Illing had all failed children transferred to pavilion 17. Failed? Those were the children who hadn’t managed to show that they were useful and willing to work. If a child couldn’t prove his ability to work and so forth, the nurses straightaway stirred a deadly powder into the food they doled out. And that child died. It was ever so quick and easy, just like when you squeeze a poor little candle flame with wet fingertips and it goes out. But now this line-drawn mother stood in front of Doctor Illing and met his eyes in just the way Adrian had just met Parsley’s eyes. She told Illing that she knew something he didn’t, something her poor little son had told her one of the few times she had been allowed to visit him. The fact was (she said to Illing) that in one of the places where her son had been kept, there was also a boy called Julius Becker and apparently young Becker had managed to get hold of a pair of scissors. Obviously, the staff had been careless. One night, he stabbed himself in the stomach with the scissors and died. True, it was before Doctor Illing’s time but the story of what
had befallen Julius Becker, a keen, decent boy who in no way deserved to die, had already been doing the rounds among the mothers who usually clustered around the 47 tram terminal, and wouldn’t Doctor Illing mind if something similar happened again; that is, would he care to deal with another boy (her son, for instance) who could no longer endure the conditions and decided to take his own life? The response was remarkable, in that Doctor Illing sat up and took notice. In his clinic, it was simply part of the routine to murder children (Adrian had himself seen the corpses being carried out and taken away in a cart) but the thought that one of the children should choose to take its own life was intolerable even to Illing because he was, after all, a
doctor
so it had to be on
his
say-so that someone was thought ill or well, fit to live or not. Besides, he had taken an oath that his section of the institution would be a model to all, and model clinics had no use for patients who try to control their own fate. So Doctor Illing called in a certain Doctor Krenek, who headed up the reform school part of the institution, where Adrian had been before, and made this Krenek extract the documentation on
Becker, Julius.
It turned out that the line-mother had been absolutely correct: scissors had been accessible on the ward and, mysteriously, ended up plunged into said young Becker’s abdomen. That kind of thing really mustn’t happen again. Meanwhile, Doctor Illing promised that he would check extra carefully the case notes of the line-drawn mother’s son. That was how they came to decide to do what they did, Adrian says. They had already shone a light into his brain and found only useless rubbish in there. Next, my killer-dose of medicine had been measured up and was ready in the medicine cupboard but, at the very last moment, my mother managed to get me out after all. That, despite her being nothing more than a red blob in the middle of a mass of lines. Now Parsley, too, sits still and listens. Bugger that, he says. But
he isn’t referring to Adrian and his miraculous escape from the snapping jaws of the death ward. He is intrigued by the bit about Julius Becker. Now what I’d like to know is, he says, is that possible? Can you kill yourself with fucking scissors? Like that? Straight into your belly? And Adrian thinks about his mother. After the chaotic months immediately after the end of the war it would take several years before he saw her again. Laura had found a small flat for her in Meidling. Their father was gated (he had started to drink again). Adrian had also been told that he wasn’t welcome, because in Laura’s opinion, Adrian and his father were chips off the same block. Be that as it may, it was Christmas after all. She decided to be merciful and told all her brothers and sisters to come for a meal. Helmut joined them, too, despite no longer being in contact with his family. Laura had gone to his foster parents to find him, for her mother’s sake. Helmut was constantly on his mother’s mind and she never seemed to get over the fact that he had been taken from her. (It was obvious that Helmut was not really with them, though. In Laura’s place, he just sat in the armchair by the window and stared out into the street even when they were trying to talk to him. Adrian sometimes wondered if his younger brother was all there. Or perhaps you got that way after a lifetime of strangers tugging at you this way and that.) But, with Helmut coming, Laura couldn’t reasonably avoid inviting him and his father. Adrian can’t recall which particular institution he was on leave from that Christmas but, in the end, there he was, smiling ingratiatingly into the mirror in Laura’s hall. Laura had had a dress made for her mother as a Christmas gift. The material was thin silk crepe and all three of them were looking admiringly at it. Leonie wanted to try it on and he said that he would pull up the zip on the back of the dress. When he did, he saw how thin her shoulder blades were, as frail as an insect’s wings, and remembered the line-drawing
of his mother he had done while in pavilion 17 and then, a final touch: Laura took out her own lipstick to add a little extra
sheen
to her mother’s lips, which meant that he suddenly saw his image of her completed: the mirror reflected the line-mother with her spidery legs and insect wings, and lips as red as sticky plaster. And then, the entire story flowed from him, just as he would tell it much later to Parsley and the other prisoners in the canteen. He spoke of Leonie Dobrosch, his mother who was made up of lines, and her visit to Doctor Illing and her announcement that, for sure, she would pass on what she knew about what was practised behind the reform school walls if the doctor didn’t deal with her incarcerated son promptly. And then, silence fell. Inside the mirror, the woman with the red lips looked simply embarrassed as she always did when she didn’t want to confront something that should demand her attention and, while Laura was clearing up cups and glasses in the sitting room, she (his mother) confessed that she hadn’t really worried much about him: