The Chosen Ones (35 page)

Hasenleiten
   He thought he was on his own at first, lying low and trying to keep out of reach of the authorities, but it didn’t take long to discover that there were many other boys who, like him, were homeless drifters and always looking for a lucky break. Some were his age, others older and already members of a gang. Then there were the boys who always seemed in transit from one institution to the next and were known as ‘spooks’ because you could never be sure which side of the fence they were on. Hans Blanker was one of them. He boasted of having escaped from four different Nazi camps where orphans and young people were used for slave labour. Several runaways sought out Blanker, hoping to find some kind of security by being with someone who had been through even worse things than they had. Then, one night when they were holed up in a cellar, the police arrived and arrested the lot of them. Afterwards, the word was that Blanker had been acting as the rat-catcher who lured the invisible children straight into the arms of the waiting police. Later, Adrian realised that he, too, had been suspected of being a spook and that he had been watched for a long time before he was contacted. During his first few weeks on the run, in May and early June, he stayed on the edges of the city, around Gerasdorf and Süssenbrunn, where he hoped to find jobs on the farms. During his time with Ferenc, he had learnt to handle a fork and a shovel, and knew how to make himself useful. He slept in stables and haylofts, and sometimes in the open air. The earth kept turning below him and
star signs he had never seen before appeared in the sky. But however conscientiously he worked, in the farmers’ eyes he would never be anything other than a shifty, unreliable type. They suspected him of stealing. One night, he woke when three men (one of them was the farmer who was employing him as casual labour) marched an unwilling policeman along the edge of a field where the rye was already waist-high. It was the bright beam of the policeman’s torch that alerted him in time. He ran, slept for a few hours in an old linesman’s cottage in Stadlau and then, in the dim light of early dawn when what was left of the crescent moon hung pale and exhausted above the still-dark Prater forests, he crossed the river first by the Stadlauer bridge and then by the Ostbahn bridge. The river flowed so fast and huge under the railway bridge that its banks seemed to hold their breath to let it through. The cold mist of water vapour above the river swept everything along with it, his body too, as he crouched on the bridge. Now, he was almost back home. The tall chimneys of the generating station towered on the other side of the canal and next to them, the large gasometers in Simmering. Hasenleiten, the site of hospital barracks from the days of the empire, was further to the east, on the other side of Simmeringer Hauptstrasse. When the hospital moved out, the buildings provided shelter for the homeless and other drifters. Adrian’s father had often made his way there to buy cheap alcohol or just have a natter with his ‘mates’. Adrian remembers the lanes well, bone dry and dusty in the heat of summer and muddy ditches when the rains came, but always crowded with people. Back then, the whole area was fenced off with a barbed-wire fence. There was only one way in, a gate wide enough for horse-drawn carriages and trucks. There was a guard’s hut that would probably have a policeman in it now, so he couldn’t risk the gate. Instead he climbed the two-metre-high wooden fence and got in at
the back of the most distant row of barracks. They looked even more tumbledown than he remembered and some had collapsed. Once, the long, low buildings had small front gardens where some of the inhabitants grew vegetables. All had been trodden into the ground and not a trace of greenery was left. Most of the windows were either broken, the remains of the curtains torn, or covered with thick boards. Solitary figures moved about here and there. Some stopped and stared openly at him. He tried to walk purposefully, stopped at one of the barracks and pulled at the handle of a door before noticing the padlock. To his surprise, the door opened anyway. The lock had been tampered with. Someone had stayed there, or perhaps still did and had left only for a short while. Dirty crockery was stacked near the sink and clothes, both men’s and women’s, hung in the wardrobe. Other items of clothing were thrown over the backs of chairs and on the unmade bed. The property, if that was the right word, had three rooms: the kitchen, the narrow room where the bed stood and, on the other side of the main door, a store or, better, a workshop. A carpenter’s workbench had been put in the far corner, with irregular rows of tools hanging on the wall above it. A low window to the right just inside the door was too silted up by muck and dust to let in much light. A kiln stood against the wall along from the window and its rusty chimney-pipe exited through a hole in the windowpane. The ashes in the kiln were cold but Adrian decided that he couldn’t trust that this place with its workshop was actually uninhabited. He sat down on the road outside the house and waited for a long time until the last of the evening light had gone. Since no one had come to claim the place, he crept back inside, spread some rags out on the floor under the workbench and fell asleep. Next morning, he woke to find a boy of his own age crouching by the workbench and staring fixedly at him. The boy had the bluest eyes
Adrian had ever seen, so blue they looked almost transparent. Are you a Jew? the boy asked dubiously. Adrian must have looked shocked. Jews lived here before, you see, the boy explained. Can’t you smell them? Adrian hadn’t noticed anything special by way of smell, other than damp wood shavings, varnish and the stench of solvent-soaked rags. I thought you might be one of them, the boy said and the vague, guileless tone somehow went with his strangely luminous blue eyes. I mean, you might’ve come back to look for someone … or something. Who took them away, then? Adrian asked. The Nazis, of course, the boy said without blinking. Then he stood and sounded much more decisive when he spoke again. My uncle says, if you’re not a Jew, you can come to our house and have something to eat. This was how Adrian came to meet Leopold and his uncle, Karl Brenner. Mr Brenner was a middle-aged man, short but powerfully built. He had a bushy black moustache and always wore the same things, including a light overcoat and a cap with a black lacquered brim. He might have been a city porter once, Adrian thought. The Brenners lived on Kobelgasse, very near the St Laurenz church. When he arrived, a woman was already making soup for them. Poor lad, you must be starving, she said and moved the heavy soup pan from the cooker to the table. You sit down and eat now. But she didn’t bother to look at him and Adrian realised that they must have agreed on something between them, probably all three of them or at least Leopold and his uncle, because they didn’t say anything while they ate, just stared into their plates and spooned up the soup. After the meal, Leopold took him down to where the Ostbahnbrücke crossed the canal. Just a few hundred metres after the railway bridge, the tracks turned a shallow curve. After crossing the bridge at speed, the large freight trains had to slow down almost to a crawl for less than half a kilometre. On the curve, the trains would move so
slowly that if you managed to get up the high embankment, and if you could sprint quickly enough, it was possible to catch up with one of the coal trucks at the rear, grab hold of the lowermost rung on the ladder and clamber up. Then you would have a few more seconds to shuffle or kick down coals before the engine driver started to accelerate. But there’s got to be at least two of you, Leopold explained. One who climbs into the truck, and another one who runs along on the ground to collect the coals and can warn of risks, like if the driver turns and sees what is going on, or if there is a guard on the train (it has happened more than once). Mostly, the driver doesn’t notice or perhaps doesn’t mind that much. The trains go past here several times every day. Of us two, who’d be the runner? Adrian asked, and Leopold said that he had to ask his uncle who supplied the buckets, but by then Adrian had of course already worked out what it was all about.

An Encounter from the Past
   At dusk, just as the light in the sky faded and the mists began to rise from the wetlands along the canal, they made their way to the Ostbahn railtracks again. Leopold walked in the lead with his uncle’s wheelbarrow full of rattling tin buckets and Adrian followed, ducking all the time to avoid being hit in the face by insistent low-hanging branches. When they arrived at the embankment, half a dozen boys had already gathered. Adrian had thought it would just be the two of them but before he had a chance to say anything, Leopold had started up the slope. It was so steep he had to use both hands to stop himself from sliding back down. The train was already on its way across the Ostbahnbrücke. They could hear the slight clicking noises from the rail joints. Then, the engine’s whistle sounded and the air vibrated with the shearing, grinding noise of the brakes. Adrian looked up and saw the engine
approaching slowly, as if to show off its full grandeur. The last carriage hadn’t travelled more than one metre from where he stood when about a dozen heads suddenly emerged above the top layer of ballast on the track and boys started running past at crazy speeds. Some were hanging on to the ladders and hauling themselves up into the trucks. Adrian saw four or five of them, moving as if in a mad dance, outlined against the inflamed evening sky. Chunks of coal were raining down and the boys left below ran about on the embankment to pick them up. Among the boys, he recognised one as easily as if all the others had been tarred and only that one painted white. Adrian stood as if frozen to the spot and just stared.
Get moving!
Leopold shouted, grabbed two of the buckets and started to pick up coals with his bare hands, just like the others. Unwillingly, Adrian took a bucket and began. It was only a matter of time before he and the white one would meet up. Then Jockerl looked up from his bucket and met Adrian’s eyes. A shadow seemed to fall over his pale face. Then Jockerl bent again and carried on with the task in hand as if he hadn’t recognised anyone or there had been no one to recognise.

The Silver Knife
   Jockerl had grown, just like the other children. His frame was as thin and frail as before but he was taller and almost reached Adrian’s shoulders. On the other hand, he seemed to behave as he always had, still as jumpy when someone addressed or touched him. But at the same time, he couldn’t bear being left out when something important happened and would wrestle or squeeze himself into any crowd regardless of who was in it or where. Jockerl didn’t want to let on that he knew who Adrian was, even though they worked in the same team and didn’t compete with each other, as Adrian had at first thought. All the runners and pickers – as they were known – were under the command of an older person called the Silver Knife.
His hair was streaked with grey and he was always correctly dressed in a three-piece suit and hat. He wore the hat at an angle calculated to have the brim shade his scarred face. A deep cut ran from his left ear across his cheek and ended at the chin, almost like someone in an adventure comic. The Silver Knife was domineering but spoke in a weak, nasal voice and hardly stressed any one syllable so that everyone had to come close to him in order to make out what he said. From his mouth flowed instructions about which trains to run for and when to expect them. The coals or briquettes the boys scraped together were stored in a tool shed at the back of Karl Brenner’s garden and in the cellar under his house, where several boys, including Adrian, also slept. Twice a week, late at night or early in the morning, a small lorry came bumping along on the potholed roads and then all of them had to work as a chain gang to load it with coal while the light was still low. Once the back of the truck had been covered by a large, black tarpaulin, they were allowed to troop into the kitchen where Gertrud or Mrs General, as she was also known, dished out potato goulash in deep bowls. Mrs General wasn’t Mrs Brenner, as Adrian assumed at the start, but another of the Silver Knife’s employees. When cooking utensils, crockery and cutlery had been washed, dried and put away, she walked to the tool shed that doubled as a coal store, hauled out her bicycle, carefully pulled on a pair of tight, white gloves and cycled away. It was the Silver Knife who decided who was to be a runner and a picker on a particular day and, for that reason, he usually turned up somewhere along the tracks about an hour before the train was due, gathered everyone around him and said
you!
in his dreary, whispering voice. Everyone held their breaths while the eyes under the hat-brim swept past their faces, the cowards trying to avoid his gaze and others meeting it anxiously until it fixed on the next chosen one. The runners were those
who chased the train, clambered up and shoved coals off with hands or feet. The simplest and most effective way was by kicking but to stand made the runner’s job extra dangerous even if the train was moving slowly. If, as often happened, the driver took it into his head to brake (presumably to shake off the boys who crawled all over his train like bedbugs) or if the train suddenly jerked or became unstable for any other reason, one could easily topple off the trucks. The drop to the track was at least two metres, followed by another three down the sloping side of the embankment. Even so, the boys competed and jostled each other to get to stand in the place where the Silver Knife’s pointing finger would stop once his decision was made.
You!
signified that you had been moved to another, higher division, like a football player or a boxer. Adrian couldn’t help remembering the time at Spiegelgrund when they had been ordered to line up in the corridor and Doctor Jekelius had given that speech about how they all were
the chosen ones
and Doctor Gross had produced one of the boiled sweets he carried about in the pocket of his white coat, peeled off the wrapper and popped it into Julius Becker’s mouth and how, later, Julius had stabbed himself in the stomach with a pair of scissors and bled to death in the night. Adrian couldn’t think why that memory returned to him just then and wasn’t sure if he was alone in remembering things like that or if similar bits of the past came back to Jockerl sometimes. What did Jockerl actually remember? Anything at all? The days went by. They chased trains and searched for coal all along
die Ostbahnstrecke
. Now and then, the police came. Their orders were to ‘scatter’, as it was called, if the cops turned up, and then follow certain routines. They became steadily better at being in one place for a split second, only to vanish and materialise somewhere else. One June evening, they were getting ready to follow the narrow gravel path that made a shortcut up to Karl Brenner’s
house when the Silver Knife came to meet them. Leopold had just gathered up the shovels and spades, put them in the wheelbarrow and was about to grab the handles when the Silver Knife put his arm around Adrian’s shoulders and said in his monotone, which this time sounded a little confiding: