The Chosen Ones (42 page)

Occupiers
   When Anna Katschenka finally arrives at the hospital, everywhere is dark and silent. Someone must have closed the ventilation panes because on a mild evening like this, distant echoes from the hospital wards are carried by the wind out under the trees in the park. You never get away from these noises: the screams and moans of the children that on some days can be as loud as the cries of rutting animals while, in a higher register, you hear the deceptively harmless-sounding chatter of the nurses against an accompaniment of rattling glass and metal objects. She realises as soon as she uses her key that the pavilion door is unlocked and, somehow, that frightens her more than any of the tangible signs of the otherwise invisible presence of foreign soldiers. The air in the stairwell smells of sweat and bitter tobacco smoke. From somewhere, she hears strange voices speaking, coarse ones. Male voices. Further away, a repetitive, dull thudding sound, a little like the diesel-engine generator they used when the electricity supply was cut. Are the Russians installing generators? She takes a step into the corridor and then, suddenly, Pelikan jumps at her. He doesn’t utter a word, only presses his long body against hers. He is as wet and slippery as an eel. In her mind, the number of unlocked doors is multiplied, Lord alone knows how many times, and panic grows inside her as she tries to rid herself of the clinging boy. How has Pelikan managed to get here from pavilion 17? He refuses to let go of her, instead tightens his grip and won’t stop his dog-like panting. With the boy on her back like a heavy sack,
she gropes along the walls to find the door to the gallery and catches sight of a familiar figure in a nurse’s uniform at the far end of the room.
Is Nurse Hedwig on duty here tonight?
She hears her own voice sounding so thin and unconvincing it might have belonged to someone else. A door opens upstairs and she hears men talking again, more distinctly this time. Definitely soldiers’ rough voices.
Nurse Hedwig
, she says again.
Is everything in order?
Her question is patently absurd, as she realises the moment she asks it. Behind Hedwig Blei’s white body, three alien men step forward, all of oddly short, stocky build, or perhaps they only look small against the white uniform of the nurse. One of them leads the new nurse, Marta Fried, with a hard grip around her arm. The other two walk towards one of the gridded beds closer to the corridor. She sees the whites of their eyes, the rows of teeth in their half-open mouths. She also spots a boy of about fourteen or fifteen who doesn’t belong to this section but is vaguely familiar. His head is bald and as round as a ball. He stares at her with a leaden gaze. She tries to say something, perhaps to beg the boy to try to get the soldier to set Nurse Marta free. She would like them all to leave the pavilion. The incomprehensible presence of these men soils the space around them. She opens her mouth or perhaps makes a dismissive gesture with one hand. Instantly, Nurse Hedwig – who earlier stood stock-still, as if frozen to the floor – springs at the alien soldier and starts pulling at the hand that holds Marta. The other two shout indignantly and hurry towards their mate. She, too, wants to run to Marta’s side but Pelikan stubbornly clings to her back and now he squeezes her sides with his heels as if she were a horse. This time, the boy is the stronger of the two. Or it could be that what she has witnessed has drained her strength. Like a determined rider, Pelikan steers her out into the corridor again and then upstairs. The presence of the intruders is if possible even more obvious on the
first floor. Piles of kit and parts of uniforms are strewn everywhere and the air is heavy and turgid with smells of sweaty feet, tobacco smoke and alcohol. Once upstairs, Pelikan hurries off to the dormitory where some of the blind children are housed. The beds are in place but there are no blind children in them, only fully dressed Russian soldiers. Now Pelikan runs ahead of her into the room as if to demonstrate with his body the enormity of what has happened. His obvious eagerness, while still shying away from the beds, and his rather dog-like movements make the foreign soldiers laugh. Suddenly, a boot flies through the air. Pelikan ducks in time but can’t avoid the kick that follows up the thrown boot. The tip of another soldier’s boot lands on the boy’s jaw with an oddly crunching sound and Pelikan howls with pain, then half-falls, half-crawls out into the corridor. Anna Katschenka looks around, utterly powerless. There are alien bodies in the beds where children should be resting, and hostile eyes are fixed on her. No officers in charge anywhere. And – where
are
the children? What have they done to them? She fumbles through the semi-darkness but it feels as if she is moving against a slow current. Wherever she looks, soldiers are coming and going. One of them stands on the landing. He is wearing a pair of shoes that are far too large for him. He holds one of those smelly cigarettes of theirs in one hand and draws on it with grandiose, exaggerated gestures. He sucks, and his cheeks draw in while his eyes bulge like large, white balls, then exhales with his eyes almost closed into narrow Bolshevik fissures and his lips stretched into a threatening grin. She understands that he grimaces at her, that he wants to provoke her for some reason. Then he suddenly says something, it could be
get ’er
or
go for ’er
and the moment she hears his slight, hoarse voice she knows where he comes from. They are on her in a second, fifteen or twenty of them at once. All are children from the reform school.
How have they got here? And where are the children who should have been here, the sick and the blind ones? She is asking herself this even as they knock her down. They are no stronger individually than Pelikan but much more determined about what they want. Some are carrying implements from the kitchen like knives and forks. She sees one of the boys grin delightedly and lift a pair of scissors with the tip pointing at one of her eyes. She lifts her arm to protect her face just in time. A powerful kick hits her in the belly and she tumbles helplessly down the stairs with the whole horde coming after her. The back of her head hits the railing with a hard crack, then one cheekbone. The pain makes her lose control. She believes, or maybe it is just fantasy, that someone is calling out
KA-TSCHENKA KA-TSCHENKA
in a loud, piping voice. What she is definitely not imagining is that the alien soldiers stand by and watch as the children either heave her or (when her knees fold under her) drag her along the corridor. Some of the soldiers are laughing out loud, and applaud encouragingly. But
none of them
intervene when the children shove her into the office, dump her on the floor and slam the door. Someone kicks at it as well. Then cacophony breaks out next door. She hears the boys rummaging about and coarse soldiers’ voices talking across each other saying God knows what. Then more laughter, as someone inserts a key into the lock. She throws herself at the door. It is too late. They have already turned the key and the door doesn’t budge.

Helpers in Need
   At some point during the night, Pelikan must have curled up on the other side of the office threshold. She even thinks she can feel the sticky warmth of his breath through the narrow gap between the threshold and the bottom of the door. Now and then, she hears him whimper in pain as he turns or tries to turn his body into another position. But he doesn’t move away, not even
when someone (one of
them
?) stumbles on him or, possibly, kicks him again. She wishes she could do something, anything, to help the boy but feels paralysed. As soon as she attempts to lift or just straighten her body, pain cuts like sharp knife blades through her head and the back of her neck. When she touches her head, her hand becomes smeared with blood. She wonders what Jekelius would say if he could see them now, her and the boy, lying head to head almost like conjoined twins, separated only by a locked door. If truth be told, she backed the boy up all these years only for Jekelius’s sake. She has needed to keep the memory of him alive – which is bizarre since Jekelius himself would never have let a misfit like Pelikan stay alive. She thinks back on their journey together, and of the village church in Totzenbach where she waited for him and found the relief of the Fourteen Holy Helpers in Need. She tries to remember all their names but the only ones that come to her as pain pulses through her body are the ones in a memory rhyme that her mother must have taught her when she was little:
Barbara mit dem Turm, Margareta mit dem Wurm, Katharina mit dem Radl – das sind die heiligen drei Madl
. Barbara is the saint of the dying and also protects the imprisoned and incarcerated. Margaret watches over the wounded and over pregnant women, while Catherine helps all those who are struck mute and can no longer speak. There ought to be a fifteenth one, a saint who intervenes for those who abandon their duties and fail to protect the weak with whose care they have been charged, someone to heal those who stand back when the barbarians come and chop the heads and limbs of the helpless and vulnerable kneeling at their feet and begging for mercy. She must have fallen asleep, or perhaps consciousness was mercifully taken from her for a while. When she comes back to life and reason, it is still night. The silence is total. She listens for the breathing of the
boy on the other side of the door but can’t hear it any more. The next time she comes to, daylight fills the small office from the edge of the desk to the shelf in the corner with its rows of roll-top archive cupboards. She hears resolute steps in the corridor outside. And voices, not only speaking in that Russian babble. The lock rattles as someone tries out several keys. Meanwhile, a man bangs vigorously on the door and shouts in German:
Open up, it’s an order!
She tries to pull herself together and reach the threshold but has no time before the door is pulled open and at least half a dozen men enter. The group is led by a senior Austrian police officer, an older, squat man with narrow grey eyes and grey stubble all over his cheeks and chin. He may or may not be in charge but, in any case, he speaks for the others. He gestures in her direction and, without a word, two of his men lift her upright. She almost faints with pain. The policeman comes close to her. His breath smells acidic, sharply metallic, almost like battery fluid.

He yells the questions straight into her face.
The Russians
… she answers, or tries to answer. He looks at her as if he had never heard anything quite so comical.
There are no Russian soldiers here
, he says.
They’re all quartered in barracks
. I was locked in, she wants to say but feels exhausted merely by knowing that now she has to tell him about something he really can’t know, namely that the Russian soldiers helped the children to find the keys but it was the
children
who locked her in. The pain sends steady hammer blows through her weakened body. All she wants is to lie down on the floor and sleep. But where can she find a place to rest? The ruined room is full of
people wandering in and out, opening cupboards, pulling out books and folders which they leaf through without understanding a word of what they read. And the policeman won’t leave her alone. He pulls at her arms, slaps her face and shouts at her again:

She tries to say something about the children but gets no further than the word when he steps back abruptly and then:
the children
, he says,
they have been taken away and are now safe from the attentions of people like you
. She doesn’t know what to say, except to ask:
what do you mean?
Or, perhaps she doesn’t ask. Perhaps he only reads the question in her face because he smiles, a tired, slightly arrogant smile making her suspect that, somewhere behind that worn grey face, root fibres link him to an ancient family, to nobility or, anyway, to a class which deals with inferiors like this, with a slight smile and a dismissive gesture.
We’ll stop you from carrying out any more experiments on these sad, useless creatures. Because, that’s all they meant to you, isn’t that so? Experimental animals, nothing more
. Someone carries a large cardboard box into the room and starts putting files with correspondence and address registers into it. Instinctively, she wants to stop them and demand to know by what right they expropriate other people’s possessions. But her palpitating heart won’t allow her to say anything. Anyway, she couldn’t draw enough air into her lungs to pronounce the words. The officer turns to her.
Of course, we have no idea how much you have destroyed already. You’ve had all night after all
. He searches in his memory for her name. She has already told him innumerable times and can’t bring herself to say it again. Then he straightens
his back, as if her anonymity and her inability to answer him make him feel still more indignant: