The Chosen Ones (33 page)

And his mother muttered something about how she had found some doctor in the institution to talk to but she simply couldn’t remember what he was called and

And in the mirror, he saw the red lips crack open in the same servile smile as the time she had visited him in pavilion 9, the only time she came to see him, and she had been so anxious to please that when Mrs Rohrbach had walked past with an armful of folders, his mother had responded to some deep-rooted instinct of domestic service and hurried along to open the door. At that moment, he knew that she would do everything she could to please him, too, never mind if it meant having to lie and pretend. But the truth was plain to see, namely that she couldn’t remember a thing about any pleading on his behalf. So she told him, when everything is said and done, I never was that worried about you, Adrian, but your little brother Helmut, he was never as brainy as you. And when his sister Laura returns to the hall to lead her mother to the laid dinner table, his mother looks simply grateful: someone has come to get her out of the uncomfortable situation she has suddenly been landed in, alone with a son who has been kept away from her for so long. Much later, when he had been given access to his case notes, he realised that his mother had told him the truth. His notes record only one visit from his mother for the period between 1941 and 1944 and she apparently did not ask about him but about Helmut, who had disappeared around that time but was later found to have been adopted again by yet another family. It meant that the story about the line-drawn mother who had threatened Doctor Illing was a lie from beginning to end. There had been no visits. There hadn’t even been a line-mother. If there was nothing to tell and nobody who was prepared to listen even if there had been something to tell, then – where to turn with all the unbearable things you remember? One has to be content that one survived, he said to Parsley as they got up from the table to return their trays and glanced one last time at the covered, bricked-up window that concealed nothing and led nowhere. And he thought that all he had
done in his life was to stay inside the cranial cavity Doctor Illing had lit up for him, like a patient left sitting in the waiting room long after the surgery has closed but whom the staff have forgotten about for some reason.

Song without a Voice
   When he wakes up he is dead. At least, that’s what it feels like. As if he were no longer inside his body but has been left hanging in an ether-stinking, hollow space criss-crossed by voices that have nothing to do with him or are even heard with his own ears. He observes an arm lying on a bed. It is his arm. There is something wrong. However much effort he puts into raising his arm it stays lying there, stiff and immobile. And because he is not inside his own body he can’t raise his eyes either. He doesn’t know where his head is. The place where his head should have been is occupied only by pain, ice-cold, smooth and relentless. It feels as if he is still held by the sharp-edged steel clamps that they screwed into his skull to keep it still, although he isn’t aware of any screws. The dull ache in the muscles of his neck sometimes sends pulses of white, shooting pain straight into the back of his head. It causes a sensation of the cranial bone being about to break. He tries to wriggle just a little to move the place where the cramp might be starting but that only causes everything to slide and undulate and the nausea rises inside him like a wave of slurry. He would like to vomit but has no strength to do more than helplessly open and close his mouth. The nausea stays inside him, bathing him in cold sweat, leaving him in a sea full of shadowy bodies that move about somewhere deep below and then, from somewhere even further away, he hears a soft voice hum a song he vaguely recognises. It is a simple tune, a song for children, something about a fox that has stolen a goose but is told he must let go of the goose or the hunter will shoot him:

Dawn is breaking, the moment has come when the light begins to take over the room but before it has acquired the weightiness of full daylight. Apart from the floating, white ends of the beds, he only manages to distinguish right-angled patterns like the white-painted grids over the windows and the chequered floor that disappears under the threshold and cupboards. The remaining darkness still swallows everything that is curved, like the bodies that must be lying there under the white coverlets. He is lying in the bed nearest the corridor wall. In the bed next to his, he sees a boy who he feels he has seen before. The boy is his own age or maybe a little older. He is lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, and his face looks strangely bird-like, with sunken cheeks and a sharp ridge of a nose. Even though the boy seems to hardly breathe, the song is emanating from him. His singing voice is low and only slightly modulated but clear enough for Adrian to hear how it takes off for each repeat –
gib sie wieder her, gib sie wieder her
– and increases in strength towards the end of the verse –
mit dem Schieeessgewe-ehr …!
When one listens intently to a song or just the sound of a voice, one’s entire being is focused, wide open to the music. Even though he still can’t sense his body, Adrian turns towards the day room at the bottom of the corridor where Felix Keuschnig is playing piano and watches how Felix’s usually clumsy hands move across the keys on either side of his straight back. This is in pavilion 17 and the idiots are
sitting about, on chairs or on the floor, surrounding Nurse Blei, lifting their hands and clapping and …
gib sie wieder her!
Nurse Blei sings and …
GIB SIE WIEDER HER!
babble the idiots and clap or try to clap at the same time or at least in the same way as she does. The very same Felix Keuschnig is now in the bed next to Adrian. Felix seems lifeless. How can this be? How can there be one Felix who plays and sings, and another one in that bed? Unless there are two of them, one in the day room and one here. It might explain why Adrian himself can’t move his arms and legs. Actually, he is not here but in some other bed, in another pavilion or somewhere quite different altogether. From far away, he hears the sound of the medication trolley being wheeled along. The wheels rub and grind against the floor, the bottles and jars rattle and clank against each other when the trolley is pulled across the threshold. Soon the doors are opened to let in a whole horde of nurses in white.
His temperature is up again,
he hears somebody say. It is impossible to work out if they are talking about him or about Felix or perhaps someone else in a bed further away. Because he can’t move or even focus his eyes, it seems to him that all voices come from every corner of the room simultaneously and that is too much for the heaving sea inside him: once more, everything tilts and the retching becomes uncontrollable and he finally feels he can’t contain any more of this blackness without bursting and being ripped apart.
Hurry up with a basin, he’s vomiting again!
He senses the surface of something hard and cold (metal, perhaps enamel) bump against his chin.
There now,
the voice says and out it comes, all that was in his stomach and then the stomach itself. He chokes on the thick, ripped-out, warm stomach lump, it suffocates him but he hasn’t the strength to resist. And the hard enamelled dish is there again and presses against his chin and he heaves and cramps and finally succeeds in puking out the
whole black lump, dripping with chewed food and after it comes everything that is joined to the stomach, the long, fat gut tube is hauled out of him like a gross length of sausage. He feels the pain inside his belly as one segment after another is torn off from its attachments and then the gut is followed by all his other organs: a slippery, fat-infiltrated liver, the slender kidneys, lungs squashed into two foam-filled bags and then, when nothing else is left, his heart. He can feel the sensation of it pulsating as it works its way up his body and into his throat, where it sits like a slimy egg that beats and beats. Then he vomits it out as well. He has no heart any more, and he lies back, scraped out and emptied, as if sunk to the bottom of the room. Only the angry hammering on the piano and the alien singing are left. The light in the room is large and white and open. Felix thumps on the piano keys as if the instrument were the only thing still keeping him here, in this world. The white-clad ones try to pull his fingers off the keyboard but he is ahead of them every time and off playing on new keys. They try to get a hold on his long, slender, straight back but he is too slim and too agile for them. Adrian sees them push a stretcher over to the piano and, heaving together, tip Felix’s body onto it. But the piano has stuck to his playing fingers and follows him, tilts upwards and then falls to the floor with an enormous crash. Then, a sudden silence. A huge silence like a vast suffocation; he tries to scream even though he has no lungs left. He screams all the same and screams and screams. High up, somewhere near the ceiling, a door opens and a nurse enters. She comes walking down towards him, as if descending from the sky. It is none other than the ward sister herself, Katschenka. Her progress is slow, her movements measured and silent, as if she has all the time in the world. In the large white light, her face is expressionless and quite still. Nonetheless, she seems to be smiling at him and when
she smiles, at the very instant her lips part to show her grey teeth, the room suddenly disappears and true silence falls.

The View from the Gallery
   He has no clear idea of how long he spends bedded down in the ground-floor gallery but at least it is long enough for him to get to know who is who of the different nurses that worked there. He keeps them apart more by the sound of their footsteps and the rhythm of their movements than by the expressions on their faces or the sounds of their voices, which still merge and separate again as soon as he tries to listen to what they are actually saying. Sister Katschenka’s gait is unmistakable: slow and solemn, she floats along almost as if levitating. Nurse Mayer walks with a limp and breathes heavily when she has to bend down or lift something. In contrast to Mayer, Nurse Kragulj is utterly quiet and moves in little weaselly dashes here and there. Seemingly, her impatient fingers lack even normal sensation – they are hard and pointy and peck away at you all the time, like birds’ beaks. In the mornings, it is usually Nurse Mayer who comes to empty the bedpan and wash his fevered, sweaty body. He hears her push one hip forward and then drag her leg along. Everything she does must, from some inner necessity, be followed by something she says. When she gives him food, she says
now eat up so you grow big and strong. You don’t want to go the way of the rest of them, do you
and holds out the plate with the spoon on it. She smiles knowingly and seems well meaning but, behind her smile, her face radiates stern, single-minded insistence. He tries to twist his head away but the spoon gets into his mouth all the same. He believes that they put poison in his food. Surely they do. Why else is he lying here? They want him to die, that’s why. He bites on the spoon. He turns his head. But Nurse Mayer knows her trade, turns the spoon and, one way or another, manages to make
him swallow.
There, that’s not so bad, is it?
she says in a contented voice that he has learnt to recognise. And the next spoonful is on its way. In the night, he wakes up because someone has covered his whole body with a tightly fitting sheet that isn’t made of fabric but some kind of rubber-like material that adheres to every exposed part of his skin. His nose and mouth are almost sealed off, too, so he can’t breathe properly. He has a vision of his face as it sticks to the inside of the rubber sheet like a mask. The rubbery stuff sucks the sweat out of him and it condenses into a cold, clear, metallic liquid that seeps into his mouth and nostrils and makes breathing even harder. He struggles to rid himself of the nauseating, elastic membrane, tries to spit or cough out the liquid as it reaches his gullet but every time he coughs it hurts and burns and the air he is fighting for doesn’t seem to get into his lungs. On the other side of the sheet, many bodies are bending over him. He can only guess at their outlines but knows Nurse Kragulj’s quick, impatient fingers the moment they touch his face. He hits out, again and again. An aimless fling of one of his arms must have struck someone because he hears a woman shriek. As he twists and turns, he doesn’t just tangle his bed linen but knocks over everything on the bedside table. Glasses and metal objects crash to the floor. Then, briefly – perhaps the violent noise has brought on an attack of fever – he has a lucid vision. He sees the entire gallery space along its full length, the row of windows facing the garden, although now the curtains are drawn and let in only a dull half-light so it is impossible to be sure if it is dawn or evening or, perhaps, no time in the day since time might have been cancelled. He isn’t clear about what is ceiling and what is floor, up or down, but distinguishes a long row of beds, placed closed together so that their iron legs form an abstract, brightly lit pattern, above or below which the children’s weightless bodies lie. Felix Keuschnig’s old bed is now occupied by
a girl of about two or three. The bulging growth on her shoulders makes her look as if she has just been stopped mid-parachute jump. Or maybe the cancellation of time has meant that her fall has been halted. Below the unwieldy lump, her face looks glazed, sombre and blank at the same time, and her two wide-open eyes also look so glassy it is impossible to say if they are watching him or if they stopped seeing long ago. His weightless state lasts only for a little while. Perhaps he has managed to crawl in under the bed but, anyway, they have already got hold of his arms and legs. By now, the group around him has grown to four or five people, he is inside a cage of bodies that cuts him off from above and below. They are not all nurses, even though he feels nurses’ hands on him. More firmly and distinctly outlined then any of them, he sees Doctor Illing’s compact body leaning over him and, behind the doctor, Sister Katschenka’s face rising like the pale, shining disc of the moon.