The Chosen Ones (45 page)

into his shoulder, then slip off as his legs shake and give way until all of him slumps at the edge of the platform and a stream of acrid vomit gushes out of his mouth. The space between the rails is as dark as a grave, and it is dark once he stands up again. He wonders if all of Wien is like this or if there is something wrong with his eyes. Then he catches sight of his mother at the far end of the platform. Her shoulder blades protrude under the grey cardigan like a pair of wilting, powerless wings. He smiles at her in a way that she knows well because it is just as uncertain and guilty as his father’s smile used to be, and
don’t you recognise me?
he asks her.

His Father’s Land
   From that day onwards, all inside him that might have responded to the name Dobrosch had died and his allegiance was to Ziegler. He had become securely rooted in his father’s land. During the first few months after the end of the war, he worked as a bartender for a friend of his father’s known as Count Frosch or just ‘the Count’. Frosch ran a restaurant on Rotensterngasse in Leopoldstadt. Adrian turned seventeen that year and it was the first real job he had ever had. But the restaurant guests were thin on the ground and, often, the only ones sitting at the tables were waiting for people they had arranged to do business with. He usually had little to do behind the bar except wash glasses and stack boxes of empties. One day, the Count took him along to the store which was housed in a building across the street and consisted of a suite of several dark, dusty rooms. In one of them, crystal chandeliers lay on the floor like wounded birds. Two of the rooms were filled with sofas and couches, dressers and dining tables and lamps of many kinds, with shades of glass, or pleated or pretty flowery fabrics. The Count assured him that nothing was stolen goods but objects which he had rescued, often risking his life, when the Jews were driven out of the city, and
which he then had to take care of again when the Nazis left. The Russians were in Leopoldstadt now and the Count’s relationship with them was, to put it mildly, rather complicated. Only a few days after the ‘liberation’, a small gang of Red Army soldiers had come into his restaurant and demanded to be served schnapps. When he refused, they simply commandeered his entire stock of flour, sugar, sauerkraut and potatoes. The only things they let him keep were these items of furniture, probably because they hadn’t realised that the rooms on the other side of the street belonged to him. Lately, he had managed to negotiate a cessation of hostilities with a senior officer in the secret police on terms that granted the officer all he could eat and drink a couple of times a week, and also to invite any colleagues he fancied to dine with him, at the Count’s expense. Once he had finished the meal, the GPU officer would usually leave it at that, on the condition that he could take a few cases of German sparkling wine with him as he left. The Count would have the boxes in readiness for this eventuality. If he had only dared to, the Count said, he would have entrusted his store to this officer, too. However, he knew that in the Russian zone of occupation, the police crime squad had initiated a wide-ranging investigation into dealers in stolen goods, and in particular among restaurant owners. Also, it was well known that the zealous communists in the GPU did not take kindly to anyone who seemed to do too well at the expense of the others. So, the stored items remained where they were and the entire place was swelling and becoming sore, like a bad conscience, and would Adrian not care to help him dispose of these compromising things? Preferably in exchange for medicines, food, cigarettes and suchlike – things that people truly valued. He would earn a good commission on every item he managed to sell. Adrian didn’t answer. He had reached a room crammed with shoes: from tall riding boots
to rubber overshoes, from button boots to elegant women’s pumps. Some looked as good as new, others were worn and dirty. For a long time after he had taken on responsibility for the store, Adrian couldn’t think about anything except shoes. Nothing in which a human being clothes himself – or herself – could possibly be more humble than a pair of shoes, and nothing easier to wear out or get rid of. Perhaps his fellow prisoner Alois Riedler had known that when he, like a new Houdini, slipped out of the ropes that tied him to the others as they were marched to the river barges. The clogs he had so elegantly leapt out of stood on the quayside as if they had never had anything to do with the childish body that had been torn apart by rifle bullets just five hundred metres away. But, at the same time, there is surely no item of clothing that carries more visible and intimate traces of its owner? The movements of a whole life can live in the heel grips of a pair of much-used fabric sandals. Adrian Ziegler had become the administrator, responsible for other people’s lives and property. But what of his own life? Officially, he is registered as staying with his parents, but because he can’t stand being with his father, Count Frosch has agreed to house him in a small room, hardly bigger than a walk-in wardrobe, that is part of his restaurant. Adrian actually prefers to go home to one of the Count’s friends, a man called Paul Schöner, who owns an allotment on Wasserwiese near the Prater. Schöner’s piece of land is taken up by a vegetable plot and a tool shed. They move parts of the Count’s store to the shed, and because someone should keep an eye on the goods, Adrian persuades Schöner to let him sleep there. It is a cold, draughty place but there is a small wood-burning stove and logs to feed it with. Water can be drawn from the pump next to the vegetable plot. He has survived in worse conditions than that. Paul Schöner works night shifts at the famous Ankerbrot bakery out in Favoriten, another part of the
Soviet-occupied zone. Because the large bakery receives earmarked consignments of flour from the Soviet Union, they have succeeded in getting production going already. For Adrian, it means that Paul comes cycling every morning with freshly baked bread, as a special favour from the bakery. Schöner has managed to sell several pairs of Adrian’s black, ladies’ evening shoes to Russian police officers who don’t care in the slightest that the shoes might have been worn by Jewish women and happily send them home to their wives or give them away to prostitutes. Sometimes, Schöner is paid in vodka bottles and then lots of people turn up at the small shed on Wasserwiese. One day, the Silver Knife is there.
I know you
, he says,
you’re the one who ran away from that madhouse
. And he smiles as if he had just made an amusing discovery. But Adrian hasn’t got it in him to become really angry about the taunt. Since they last met, the Silver Knife has become afflicted with cancer of the liver. Below the brim of his hat, his face is, if possible, even thinner. His suit hangs on his emaciated frame as if on a scarecrow. At one get-together in the shed, he pulls out his wallet and extracts a newspaper cutting, which he hands to Adrian in a manner as significant as if it had been a banknote. Three of the doctors who worked at Spiegelgrund have been arrested and will be appearing in court. There is a photo of the accused flanked by armed guards: Doctor Illing is seated between doctors Türk and Hübsch. He stares at the three familiar faces and wonders: why not Doctor Gross? Has Doctor Gross been allowed to get away? To where? That is the only thing he thinks. Otherwise, the people in the photo might as well be complete strangers. He reflects on how he has rid himself of them. That is why he feels nothing now. He has excised the five years between the ages of ten and fifteen from his mind. It was a time he lived through without having to think or sense or miss anyone or dream about anything. But what will become
of your life if you haven’t even got a past? That night, they all drink Paul Schöner’s schnapps, all except the Silver Knife who mustn’t drink anything alcoholic ever again. As so often when he has had too much to drink, Adrian becomes disorientated and speaks about many things from inside the unrecognisable mask that is his face, and just because he can’t make out who he is any longer, it seems all the more important to keep them reined in with long ropes of words and he won’t stop letting out more rope until Paul Schöner shouts that he must fucking stop this crap. So Adrian slaps Paul in the face and then hits him again and again. He beats up Paul as he once beat Jockerl, slowly and intently, with a sluggish, heavy charge behind each blow. It is as if his aim were to completely annihilate this man with whom he had been laughing and joking just minutes ago. Only the swift, united intervention by the others stops Adrian from murdering his friend. It seems that’s all the thanks I get, Schöner says the following morning when, covered in bloodied plasters, he mounts his bicycle to go to work. A few hours later, the police come for Adrian. If it is Schöner or someone else who has fingered him, he will never find out. This is in September 1946. They take him to the county court, the
Landesgericht
, and he is eventually sentenced and sent off to the youth detention establishment in Graz-Karlau to serve fourteen months for breaking and entering, dealing in stolen goods and causing grievous bodily harm. This is the next stop in what will turn out to be a lifelong progression from prison to prison.

In the Store
   It would take many years before Adrian Ziegler learnt to endure the sight of the children of strangers. Or any groups of strangers, whatever age. As soon as he encountered gangs of noisy children or groups of schoolboys with rucksacks on their backs, he would look away and cross the street. It troubled him especially to
observe the unformed, thin bodies of boys who, ever anxious about where the next blow or kick was coming from, cowered in front of their mates, because he felt, back inside his own young, hunched body, as weak-kneed and frightened. He remembered the anguish in his belly; it had felt like a scoopful of scalding hot water always about to splash. The longing for obliteration of the self that he saw in the eyes of some children was perhaps still more frightening. He thought he knew it as an ingrained, unending plea to be
let off
, not to have to
be
here, or
walk
here and, above all, not to have to
pretend
all the time. Most of all, Adrian would have preferred to vanish entirely or become invisible to all these people who were messing about and crowding in on him. If only he could be seen by himself alone. His mother and father had moved in together again, just a few years after the end of the war. They lived in a large apartment on Kundmanngasse which had been rented out to a Nazi family who had all left when the Red Army marched in. As with all such abandoned homes, the Russians first thoroughly plundered it of everything of any value before handing it over to the Wien city council. Because Ziegler senior had useful contacts among the Russians, he managed to have them register the apartment in his name. It is so sizeable – four rooms, a kitchen with a separate larder – that Adrian’s sister Laura reluctantly agrees to visit her mother again. By now, she brings her husband and two young children. Because Laura has sworn by everything holy never to say a word to her father again, Eugen locks himself in one of the rooms for as long as his daughter is there and won’t come out until after she and hers have gone. Adrian, who was set free after dutifully doing time in Graz, is allowed to come to stay on Kundmanngasse. He is even given a room of his own, a fact his father boasts about to everyone he does business with. Eugen also fixes up new jobs for Adrian and because his contacts are mostly in
the restaurant or cooking trade, his son ends up as a bartender or a waiter. For instance, Adrian works for a while as an assistant bartender in the Hietzing casino frequented by British officers. That particular joy lasts for six weeks and then he is called in to see the manager, who is furious with him for not admitting at once that he has done time in prison. What would
he
think of a casino staffed by ex-cons and burglars? His father has to come to his aid again and find him a new job. A man he met once, one of the many casual acquaintances Adrian has made among saucepans and across cutting boards, once expressed his deeply serious belief that you can see if someone has a soul or not. It shows in a person’s eyes, he insisted. The way they look at you. People without a soul won’t look you in the eye and that’s because their gaze has nothing behind it to keep it in place. That is why Adrian Ziegler wants to look at himself in the mirror as little as he cares to see himself in others. Seen from the outside, he makes a pleasing and perfectly respectable impression. He is slim-hipped and broad-shouldered, but perhaps a little on the short side, as if his legs had given up on growing while the rest of his body took on the size and proportions of a man. He has inherited his father’s dark hair and strongly marked eyebrows. He observes his hands where they emerge from under the cuffs and thinks they look pale and somehow numb, as if they don’t know what they should be doing next. His ‘Semitic’ ears still stick closely to the side of his head and it is hard to detect the gaze in his deep-set eyes, while his mouth, which knows that his eyes always seem evasive, tries to improve his appearance by putting on a smile that is meant to be open and trusting but comes across as ingratiating and unreliable. His father’s smile, and perhaps his own most characteristic feature. So he becomes one of the soulless, a man who can’t rest, who never gains the trust of others and stays at his different places of work only because they do
not yet know everything about him. For a while, he works for a haulage company in Ottakring. He sits in the driver’s cabin, ready to help with loading and unloading. His boss considers him a hard-working, decent chap and suggests one day that Adrian should drive the truck himself. If only he can get himself a driving licence, he will get a better-paid job. Adrian goes to the police station on Juchgasse and asks if they might not make an exception in his case so that he can get a driving licence. The policemen stare as if they think that he is out of his mind. The haulage company remains understaffed and the boss wonders why he hasn’t got himself that driving licence yet. In the end, Adrian has to tell him straight: soulless people are not ever trusted with driving licences. This makes his boss furious, not because of the lack of a licence but because of the betrayal, the falsehood: why didn’t he say straightaway that he had been inside? Daddy Ziegler says: don’t worry, we’ll fix it. But by then Adrian has had enough. When the war ended in 1945, he was fifteen years old. In 1955, when Austria was once more declared an independent country, he was twenty-five and had already been sentenced and imprisoned three times. During these ten post-war years, his sister Laura had gone from being a pale, withdrawn teenager to a self-assured and resolute mother of two. The day came when Laura decided that her mother had suffered enough, went to the police and charged her father with domestic abuse. Eugen stayed on in the Kundmanngasse apartment. It simply wasn’t possible to shift him. However, Leonie was given a small flat of her own in Meidling that was out of bounds for her husband. Laura also thought it best that Adrian shouldn’t go near it, although Adrian couldn’t make sense of this. At first he had thought that Laura had been mixing up father and son without thinking since he officially still stayed in what had been the large family flat, although it had come to house only his father. It turned
out, though, that Laura’s reason for finding Adrian as hateful as his father was that she linked them both to a past which she felt was degrading and would have nothing more to do with. This was why she had forbidden Adrian to talk about his time with the Haidingers or about Spiegelgrund and what went on there: she wanted to lead a normal, respectable life, she said, and not have the past riding her all the time. She doesn’t care one way or the other if Adrian
cannot
put his past behind him. Actually, she sees it as him trying to make a virtue out of his inability to forget and carry on. It is 1955, after all. Earlier that year, the occupying powers signed the new Austrian State Treaty, and perhaps it because the wartime past is now
definitely
behind them that Laura finally weakens and gives in to her mother’s nagging: the whole family, including Helmut, is allowed to celebrate Christmas together. On that Christmas Day, Laura (who runs her own dressmaking studio) presents her mother with a lovely crepe dress. Adrian stands in front of the mirror and tries to pull up the zip at the back of the dress with his clumsy fingers and his mother stands in front of him, passively, her neck bent and her fragile shoulder blades drawn up, and suddenly he can’t bottle the question up any longer: do you remember when you visited me in the pavilion, Mum? And of course she doesn’t because it is the case with soulless persons that they don’t become included in other people’s memories and, just then, his father arrives, so drunk he can barely stay upright. I see the lad has bribed somebody to let him get at the festive spread this year as well, he says, first thing. And so Adrian hits him, perhaps enraged because his father had once more taken the trouble to turn up only to humiliate his son again. Or perhaps it is more that he wants to beat him up to make it clear that they are not of the same ilk, he and his father, and that Laura is prejudiced. But if that is what he hoped, he could not have been more mistaken. The effect is
exactly the opposite.
Out! Get out now!
Laura screams and, that evening, his last glimpse of his sister is of her lips, so thin and bloodless you can hardly tell them apart. She slams the door after them. Father and son, peas in a pod. So much so, they are bounced from the same venue at the same time. What Adrian could not have known is that liver cirrhosis had been eating his father for years, causing his muscles to shrivel and his normally flabby face to slowly hollow out until only skin and bones remained. He could not have known that the only reason why his father hadn’t sought medical help long ago was his fear that the doctor would take his booze away, even though had reached the stage when he could hardly drink a glassful before vomiting it up again. Though they no longer lived together as man and wife, Leonie visited him twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, when she would shop for him and clean, and cook what little he was still able to eat. She kept this up until he was finally admitted to Allgemeines Krankenhaus, the city’s general hospital. A few months later, by which time Eugen was obviously past all hope of recovery, Adrian was given leave from prison to visit him and stood in front of his father’s bed with his cap in his hand and his neck bent, as if to apologise for something. He never worked out for
what
he wanted to apologise but it didn’t matter because by then, his father no longer recognised him.