The Chosen Ones (46 page)

Interlude in Josefstadt
   One day in the 1960s, Adrian ran into Pototschnik in an ironmonger’s shop on Josefstädterstrasse.
Can I help you?
Pototschnik’s cauliflower hair was the same as he remembered it or, if it had thinned and greyed a little, Pototschnik’s face was just as bulging and his eyes as small and sunken and pig-like as ever. Now, these eyes were fixed on Adrian without a glimmer of recognition. How can I help? the hair and face and eyes asked. Did
Pototschnik really not know who was standing in front of him? Or was he pretending because he wouldn’t give anything away? Admission would be to lower his guard. He was wearing the same worn, grey cotton coat as the other shop assistants but Adrian found it hard to believe that he was just a simple employee. Surely he owned the whole shop? What started with a cartridge had ended up as an entire ironmonger’s shop. Pototschnik did have the dignified stance of the owner as he leant forward with both palms resting on the hinged part of the counter that separated the shop from the space behind, where the assistants had to hurry up and down on the sliding ladders along the shelving that covered the full height of the walls in order to locate and bring down samples of all the stuff stored there: hammers, chisels, kettles, brass or iron braces. Pototschnik opened his mouth to ask his question for a third time but in that same instant, a tram passed just outside and a metallic clamour mingled with the quivering of the shop windows and their displays of ironmongery. Adrian thought the whole place would collapse. But the collapse was taking place only inside Adrian. When he looked at Pototschnik again, the man hadn’t moved a single millimetre, presumably
couldn’t
move because his hands were pinned to the counter with massive nails. Adrian stared at the nail heads protruding from the backs of Pototschnik’s hands and the blood that had dribbled between his fingers. It clotted and stained the counter red. Pototschnik apparently hadn’t noticed and was still looking at Adrian as if expecting an answer. No one else seemed to have seen anything unusual either. Behind the counter, the grey-coated shop assistants clambered up and down the ladders, or wrapped up buckets and broom handles, or poured nuts and screws into small cones of newspaper for the customers who were coming and going while the doorbell was ringing incessantly and the noise of the passing trams also continued,
apparently unseen and unheard by all (at that moment) except Adrian. The doors leading to the past are never fully closed, Adrian would say later. But their positions change all the time and you can never predict where they will be and so it is impossible to prepare yourself before you arrive at this gateway or that, unsure if there is any other way of getting in.

The Long Arm of the Law
   When, in the end, he gave up on Austria and went to Italy, he had held down a steady job for quite a long time and even got married. He and his wife Elfriede had a daughter christened Maria but never called anything other than Missi. Little Missi’s fifth birthday was due the year he went away. There is a photo of the two of them taken the previous summer: he stands holding Missi’s hand on one of the tree-lined paths at Schönbrunn. Both stare attentively at the person behind the camera (is it Elfi?) as if they belived there would be no picture unless they looked hard into the lens. Above them rise the canopies of the trees to form a mighty arch of greenery, like in the Steinhof park, and it makes them look small and vulnerable. At that time, the family was still staying in a room in the Rudolfsheim appartment belonging to Adrian’s parents-in-law. At first, this had been a practical arrangement because he and Elfi were working and needed someone to look after their little girl during the day. However, over time, Elfi had grown dependent on her parents. Even though she never said as much, it seemed as if she felt unable to trust her and Adrian’s ability to manage a home of their own. Her lack of trust was inflated by her mother, who made it part of the household routine to slander Adrian. She was quite capable of doing this even when he was within earshot. She would tell her daughter that he was a wastrel who couldn’t be relied on when it came to handling money. And, she would say, he has no practical
sense, either. How could someone like Adrian, who had never had proper training in anything and couldn’t provide properly for his family, ever be a master in his own house? He who had always leaned on the goodwill of others? Had he even tried once to find a family home? This last accusation was especially out of order because, when he had found a modern flat (two rooms and kitchen) for them on Laxenburger Strasse in Favoriten, his mother-in-law had objected, saying that it was far too large for their needs and, besides, much too expensive. And she immediately added another thing to her long list of things to criticise him for: he was ungrateful and had never appreciated everything his in-laws had done for him. Adrian had appealed to Elfi’s common sense and pointed out that it was after all up to the two of
them
to decide how to lead their lives. The exchange became heated and the outcome was that Elfi locked herself and Missi into their one room. His mother-in-law promptly threatened to call the police if he ever so much as showed his face in her home again. For three weeks, he dossed down in the flat of an old acquaintance called Rolf Dellinger and spent all his spare time brooding on the unfairness of the accusations launched at him. In the first place, it was untrue that he had no training and no permanent job. He had done an apprenticeship as a welder and been fixing damage to chassis and finishes for several months in a car repair shop in Hütteldorf. His current boss trusted him and, before the miserable row with Elfi, he had often brought a car back for weekend trips with his family. It had made him pleased with himself to be able to do this, and Elfi had enjoyed it – at least in the beginning. He still didn’t have a driving licence but no one was bothered or asked awkward questions. On the contrary, because he had access to a car, friends and even casual acquaintances would ask him for lifts or if he could pick them up after a night out. He was too proud or perhaps too uncertain about
his skill with motorcars to say no. Or, typically, impatient. Soulless. One day, a much younger man came to see Rolf Dellinger. The visitor, a Yugoslav called Goran, asked Adrian if he would drive him and a few of his friends one evening sometime soon. If he agreed to do the job and kept quiet about it, there would be a 20,000-schilling fee. Of course Adrian twigged immediately that Goran was planning something illegal and that, if anything went wrong, the car could be traced to him, which would mean the instant loss of all he cared for, not only his job but also Elfi and Missi – and, as likely as not, for good. But even though he grasped this from the start, it didn’t occur to him that he could simply say no. One evening in late September, he turned up behind the wheel of a Chevrolet Impala that was in good shape apart from a buckled mudguard. He looked forward to showing off the splendid car to his passengers. He had parked, as instructed, near the corner of Zieglergasse and Mariahilfer Strasse to make it easy to slip into the Gürtel, the out-of-town ringroad. Goran and his companions turned up fifteen minutes late and, even so, didn’t seem to be in that much of a hurry. They slung their cases into the Impala’s huge boot and Adrian turned right towards Westbahnhof and carried on driving the purring engine in the direction of Linzerstrasse. What he learnt later was that the police had been on their tail ever since he pulled out of Zieglergasse. They had identified the registration number and contacted the owner, who informed them that the car should be in a Hütteldorf repair shop. One more call to the owner of the workshop and they had the name of the perpetrator. Exactly what the police had asked, Elfi couldn’t say because it was her mother, and not herself, who had opened the door. Elfi was too upset to say anything, wept incessantly and would not hear of him talking to Missi, which was the reason he had called. Adrian stood in a phone box in Graz with the receiver gone dead in
his hand, knowing that he had to choose. He could go back to work, try to explain to his boss that he had acted in good faith to help friends of a friend. But then, his boss would surely say what they all said: why hadn’t he come clean about his prison record? Or he could go for his only other option, take the consequences of all doors now being closed to him, keeping in mind that they had actually been closed all the time, and try to make a fresh start somewhere else altogether. He went to Italy and worked as a welder at a shipbuilder’s in Genoa, then moved on to Bari in Apulia. Later still, he stayed in Marseille where he met a woman who, like him, had been married before and had had children but been forced to break with her family. He ended up being away for five years, but not a month passed without him meeting his responsibilities and sending money home to Elfi and Missi. Which was probably how they managed to track him down because he had hardly crossed the Austrian border before the police arrested him. He had received 20,000 schillings to provide a getaway car for four men who, on that day all those years ago, had robbed a supermarket on Schottenfeldgasse. His pay-off was a silly sum, a tiny proportion of what the takings had been that day, but the law was in no mood to show mercy. An extensive inquiry was set in motion. It did not only examine his involvement in the burglary and but also his life in general and especially his ‘criminal’ past. Until the investigation got underway, he was kept on remand in a small cell in the Landesgericht building in Josefstadt. From the start, everything seemed horribly familiar. One morning, the guard came to escort him. You’re to see a psychiatrist, he said. This was in November 1975. Adrian Ziegler’s forty-sixth birthday had just passed. They took him to an interrogation room. It was furnished with one table and two chairs, one of them already occupied by the well-known forensic psychiatrist, who didn’t look up from the client
documentation that he was leafing through until Adrian was already in the room and the guard had locked the door.

I am Doctor Gross, he said and took his glasses off.

Hearing Witnesses
   Spiegelgrund is no more. The walls, meticulously built around the institution, are now demolished and what the staff had undertaken under oath to keep secret is now public knowledge. The papers frequently uncover new information about the ‘murderous medics’ at Steinhof. So far, no one has got hold of Doctor Gross but doctors Illing and Türk, later also Hübsch, are locked up in their respective police cells and, while there is much speculation about when they will appear in front of the People’s Court in Wien, images are published of pavilions with bars over the windows, of smiling ‘innocent’ children and parents who claim that they had previously been ‘forced to stay silent’ but will now stand up and tell of how they entrusted their children to these kind, confidence-inspiring medical men and women, and then found that they couldn’t get the children back or, when they insisted, were told that their little ones had died, as it happened, killed by the very professionals who had promised to save, even cure them:
abgespritzt
– the terrible word, which means ‘killed by lethal injection’ but should not be used to signify everything that had been going on in the clinic. Every morning when she wakes up, she is terrified that her name will be announced in one of these fat headlines. What worries her most is that her parents will find out – which is crazy because they have known all along where she was working and, in the end, everyone in their block of flats also knew. But it is one thing to know the kind of things no one really needs to talk about, knowing that gets you
nowhere. It is much worse to be aware of something that you realise is common knowledge, spoken about by all sorts of people and, for instance, run in the papers day after day. Still, her father doesn’t read newspapers and there are times when she thinks he wants to escape the stories. Perhaps his inexorable physical and mental decline is no more than a strategy intended to keep harmful knowledge at bay. Now that she no longer works, she takes her father out for walks every day. They descend the main staircase together. Once it was just that – a staircase – but now, to her increasingly frail father it is a dreaded chasm. It is as if the building they have lived in for so long is not constructed with floors and landings now, but with gaping shafts and hollows. Her father grips the railing with his trembling hand and, because his legs are as shaky, he is no longer sure where the next step is. One day, before she has time to grab hold of his shoulders, he falls helplessly down the stairs. As he falls, he gazes up at her with an astonished look in his eyes as if he could not have imagined that her hands, of all hands, could fail him. Afterwards, she sits with his heavy head in her lap and shouts up into the empty stairwell that someone must come and help her, and above her the flat doors open and people come to lean over the railings. But Mrs Katschenka is a nurse, of course, she hears somebody whisper, she’ll manage on her own, surely. It takes time and effort to get her father to stand up again and, with a handkerchief held against the bleeding wound on her father’s forehead, they continue the descent past the voices and smiling faces of people who quickly disappear behind their partly closed doors. Of course people had talked about the Katschenka family before, but it had been in a respectful tone. They were decent people who kept themselves to themselves. Of her, it has always been said approvingly that she had been such a support for her parents. They had said that to her face as well, in the street or
the dairy round the corner. What mother wouldn’t have wished for a daughter like her! But now they agree that she is hiding behind her poor, innocent parents. The shame of it! But they will come for her soon, mark my words. Soon, soon – no doubt about it. And Otto, who is the one telling her all this, instructs her that she must not speak to anybody about these matters. If you have done anything that can be held against you, keep it to yourself. Never confess. All they are after is someone to take the burden of guilt off themselves. Don’t let them get away with making a scapegoat of you, Anna, he says. But when the summons to appear in front of the judge leading the investigation finally arrives, she feels almost relieved. She can’t quite explain why. Perhaps because, at last, there is something concrete to discuss – claims and accusations but, be that as it may, these can be rejected or confirmed instead of the endless whispered hints and half-truths. She is a respectable person who has nothing to be ashamed of, and because she believes this she wants to confront the law head on. For the interrogation, she dresses in a skirt and a freshly ironed white blouse with a lace collar. She buttons the blouse all the way to the base of her neck. She puts on gloves and a hat. Throughout, the judge behaves very properly towards her. He is keen to emphasise that she is not herself accused of anything. She has been called by the defence of one of the persons charged, namely Doctor Marianne Türk, who feels that Mrs Katschenka could make a statement in her favour. Afterwards, she is presented with a transcript of the interrogation, and is asked to read it carefully before she signs it.

She does sign it.

The first interview with the witness Anna Katschenka, November 1945:

Transcript of a new interview with Dr Marianne Türk, January 1946: