Alphabet House

by Adler-Olsen, Jussi

  The building to the north lay parallel, though staggered, in relation to theirs and was connected by a corridor. It blocked the view of the gymnasium and the entire area beyond. Some of the wards further down were also practically hidden by its sharp yellow corner.

  Guards with dogs could be seen constantly, day and night, as they patrolled the fence encircling the area. The few civilians who were admitted to the hospital were always accompanied by security officers or SS soldiers.

  Fear of being confronted with the family of the soldier whose identity he had assumed was a constant nightmare for Bryan during the first long weeks. But even though the ward was full of men whose recovery might have been speeded up at the sight of a familiar face, no one’s family members ever turned up. The men were isolated and no one wished to inform anyone of their existence, let alone their state of health. Why anyone bothered to keep them alive at all was a mystery to him.

  Bryan never saw James look out the windows. Since the beginning of April he had seldom been out of bed and was apparently heavily drugged by the medicine he was given.

  Three lorries drove out the main gate, which was closed after them. I should be sitting in one of them, driving like crazy till I am home again, Bryan daydreamed. The motor noise died away quickly behind the ridge and the lorries disappeared down into the valley. Pock-Face’s neighbour came and stood beside Bryan’s bed, looking silently at the guards with his broad face. Meanwhile his leg quivered and his lips moved incessantly. He had carried on this silent conversation with himself since the very first day and Bryan had often seen Pock-Face and the broad-faced man’s neighbour on the other side put their ears to his mouth with expectant, patient faces. Then they usually shook their heads and giggled like half-witted children.

  Bryan laughed as he thought about this and stared directly at the constantly moving lips. The man turned around and looked at him with a loony expression that made his whole face look even more comical. Bryan had to cover his mouth and suppress his laughter. Then the lips stopped moving for a second and the man smiled at him. The broadest smile he had ever seen.

  Chapter 10

  One morning the sound of waltz music came from the corridor. The barber came and shaved their cheeks smoother than ever, even though he had been there the previous day. One of the porters, a veteran of the First World War, rattled his iron hook against the nearest bedpost as usual, the signal for bathtime. Bryan felt confused and disorientated about this change of routine.

  Among the patients, he wasn’t the only one.

  Most of the nursing staff on duty smiled as they handed the patients snow-white, newly washed dressing gowns and told them to get ready quickly. The security officer who had shot the malingerer in the gym stood elegantly, straddling the swing doors. Inspecting the men, he nodded in an authoritative and almost friendly fashion as they stood lined up in front of their beds. Then their names were called out. Some of them never reacted when this happened. Bryan had decided long ago to be different.

  ‘Arno von der Leyen,’ barked the security officer. Bryan started. Why should he go first? He hesitated, but yielded when an orderly took his arm.

  The security officer clicked his heels and stretched out an arm in a heil as the strange procession filed past him through the swing doors while their names were called. Only the few patients who had just received shock treatment remained behind, among them James.

  Bryan glanced around nervously at the head of the procession. Behind him were seventeen or eighteen men who could still be called raving mad. They had been looked after for over three months now. What were they intending to do with them this time? Were they to be moved to other wards or hospitals, or maybe weeded out? And why was he called out before all the others? The security officer who hammered his boots on the stone floor made him uneasy, as did the orderlies and porters who escorted the group on either side. Perhaps it was a good thing James hadn’t come with them after all.

  The row of men walked past the treatment room, the electroshock room and the doctors’ room and out through the door they had entered the very first day and not been through since. By the time they reached the stairs the group was already showing signs of nervousness and soon a couple of patients were standing along the walls, hugging themselves. They didn’t want to go. The orderlies laughed, forced them back into line and smilingly tried to encourage them.

  It was a beautiful day, but it was only the second half of April and at that altitude the dampness was still raw and penetrating. Bryan glanced down at his socks and slippers as he walked, trying imperceptibly to dodge the muddy puddles in the churned-up courtyard. When he saw the group was being led over to the gymnasium he began feeling panicky.

  In the lead was an SS officer who was walking one step ahead of Bryan. His revolver hung heavily and incitingly in his belt, only a few inches from Bryan’s arm as it swung forward in the goose step. What were his chances of grabbing it? And where should he run if he did? It was over 200 yards to the fence behind the gym and an even greater number of guards than usual stood chatting not far away.

  Then they passed the barrack buildings.

  Over behind the gym was a big, open square. Alongside the grass Bryan could now see the houses he had hitherto only been able to imagine. There was a building that lay parallel with the gym, two wards and a complex that resembled an administrative block with small windows and brown double doors. The group came to a halt beside a low wooden corridor that connected the gym and the building behind them, and for a moment the security officer left them alone.

  This will be the last sunrise I’ll ever see, thought Bryan, glancing at the nascent light above the tops of the fir trees and then at the row of men standing with their backs to the wall. Standing stiffly at attention with head stretched back, Pock-Face towered above them all.

  The guy with the broad rubber face stood between them, muttering the words no one could ever hear. At the sound of more footsteps Bryan froze and his neighbour’s lips almost stopped moving.

  The first dazzling rays of sunlight swept over the square from behind, adding a touch of grandeur, stylishness and dignity to the black and green uniforms that stepped forward into the light. This was in stark contrast with what Bryan had expected. A carnival of medals, iron crosses, shining diagonal bands and patent leather boots banished all thoughts of an execution squad. SS badges and skull and crossbones were everywhere to be seen. All corps, all types, all ages and all possible kinds of wounds. This was the march of the wounded, an array of bandages, slings, crutches and canes.

  The elite soldiers’ proof that war cannot be won without blood.

  The soldiers chattered in small groups and filed slowly towards the flagstaff in the middle of the square. After them followed a rear party of soldiers in wheelchairs pushed by nurses. And finally a few beds with huge wheels rumbled forth on the tiled path with sweating porters as anchormen.

  The air was miraculously fresh, but also icy cold in the scanty getup of nightshirts and dressing gowns. Bryan’s neighbour’s teeth began to chatter. Don’t let this get to you, Bryan thought to himself, as he glanced up at the swastika that had been hoisted in solemn silence, followed by a respectful heil.

  They were standing almost at the back of the area’s northwest corner. Bryan leaned a bit to one side as if he were about to doze off and cast a sidelong glance behind the corner of the building. From there, he could just make out a small brick building at the edge of the rocks. Presumably the hospital chapel. Down at the opposite end beside the western fence there was another gate, flanked by guards who were standing at attention and staring at the show with arms raised in salute.

  With their outstretched arms still pointing up at the flag, they suddenly all burst simultaneously into the Horst Wessel song with such enthusiasm that it made birds flutter up from the bushes.

  None of the mental patients joined in. They stood either passively or mumbling to themselves, gazing round in confusion. The echo and force of the many voices filled the
square and the air with intoxication and determination and gave the flag an impressive look. Bryan was still petrified by the grotesque beauty of the scene, and not until they unveiled the Führer’s portrait did he grasp why they had been assembled there and why they had been shaved a day too early. He closed his eyes and visualized yesterday’s scrap of paper hanging above Calendar Man’s bed. It had read 19 April, so today was the 20th, Hitler’s birthday.

  The officers held their caps tightly clamped to their sides beneath the elbows. They stood stock-still despite their wounds, looking respectfully at the portrait, which contrasted starkly with the caricatures of Hitler that usually decorated the RAF crews’ barracks, defiled by added features, darts and abusive language.

  Some of the veteran warriors were lost in a world of ecstasy and shaded their eyes from the morning light as they stared devotedly up at the flag, dazzled by its beauty and their own sentimental emotions. Bryan checked out the area behind them. Beyond the barbed-wire fence on this long side there was yet another fence made of rough-looking planks intertwined with barbed wire. The stone track they had once driven up along hugged the fence for a short while and then presumably continued alongside the boulders and up over the mountain. Bryan turned his head a few degrees and glanced once more to the west and over at the guards who were now talking together.

  This was the direction in which he would escape. Over the first fence and under the next, along the road and its accompanying brook, then down into the valley and over towards the railway line that followed the Rhine all the way to Basel.

  If he followed the rails further southwards he would reach the Swiss border sooner or later.

  How he would cross it, time would show.

  A sixth sense made Bryan turn his head. He found himself looking straight into Pock-Face’s eyes, at which point the huge man instantly looked down and kept his eyes on the ground. There had been something very attentive about the gaze he had met. Bryan would have to keep an eye on Pock-Face, as discreetly as possible. Then he looked at the fence again.

  It wasn’t too high, he judged.

  If only the flagstaff could be tipped over by removing its bottom bolt, it could be leaned over the fence like a bridge. But flakes of rust spreading out over the nuts made him change his mind. If he’d had a wrench he could have done it. It was small things like this that were so important. Insignificant items and events like the chance meeting of a future wife or husband, unexpected incidents in one’s childhood, or luck that smiled on one in a propitious second. All the isolated fragments that suddenly emerged and together constituted the future, making it unpredictable.

  Just like the random patch of rust on the random bolt.

  So he would have to crawl over the fence and count on tearing himself to shreds on the barbed wire that topped it. And then there were the guards. Because it was one thing to climb over unseen, another was to get away afterwards. A single, stray burst of machine-gun fire in the dark would be enough. There was chance again.

  He couldn’t leave things to chance if he could at all help it.

  The ceremony concluded with a short speech by the chief security officer, delivered with a fervour that no one ever would have credited to such an anaemic looking individual. Finally there was an extended wave of heils, so long as to seem endless. Thereafter the square was slowly emptied of wheelchairs and bedridden patients who lay with a smile on their lips, exuding pride and patriotism. Presumably convinced that they had done their bit and were now safe.

  The dark firs behind their block shook gently in the wind. The cold and the few hundred yards’ walk over to the building made all his joints ache. No good came out of trying to make them move faster. Look after yourself. Take care not to get ill, thought Bryan.

  Now he’d found an escape route. If he got sick, he and James wouldn’t be able to get away before the next series of electroshocks. So there was some rapid, thorough thinking to be done. And James had to be initiated, whether he liked it or not. Without James, no tenable planning.

  And without James, no escape either.

  Chapter 11

  James felt awful when he woke up from the aftermath of the electroshock. It had been like this every time. Most of all he was weak. Every fibre of his body was at low ebb. And then there were the emotions, the sentimentality, the self-pity and confusion. All his mental states were churned up like mud, leaving him in a chronic state of anxiety and melancholy.

  Anxiety was a strict master, James had realised this long ago. But as time went by he’d learned to live with it and tame it. And as the war drew nearer and the rumble of bombs over Karlsruhe resounded in the distance, he began to cherish a faint hope that the nightmare would come to an end at some time. Though always on the alert, he tried to enjoy what hours he could. He lay very still, surveying life around him or dreaming himself far away.

  In the months that had passed he had learned to get fully into his role. Nobody could suspect him of simulating. They could arouse him from his torpor, no matter when, and receive but an empty stare in return. The nurses didn’t have much difficulty with him either, for he ate as he was supposed to and didn’t soil his bed. Most importantly, he took his medicine without showing the slightest reluctance. Which is why he was eternally lethargic, slow-thinking and, during occasional lucky moments, indifferent as well.

  The pills were incredibly effective.

  On his first visits to the surgeon lieutenant he had merely nodded when the latter raised his voice. He never made a movement without being ordered to. The senior nursing officer sometimes read aloud from his case history so his borrowed life history slowly grew as James assumed it from the lined yellow pages. If he’d ever had a guilty conscience about throwing the corpse out of the train window, it would have ceased the instant he became acquainted with the true nature of his saviour.

  James and his victim were roughly the same age. Gerhart Peuckert, as he was called, had risen through the ranks incredibly fast, ending up as a standartenführer in the SS security police – a kind of colonel. Thus, apart from Arno von der Leyen, whose place Bryan had taken, he had the highest rank in the ward. He enjoyed special status. Sometimes he even had the impression that some of them were afraid of him or hated him, and sat on their beds staring at him coldly.

  There was no sin this man had not committed. Gerhart Peuckert had ruthlessly removed all obstacles in his path in every situation and had dealt out punishment mercilessly to anyone who displeased him. The Eastern Front had suited him admirably. In the end, some of his subordinates had gone berserk and tried to drown him in the same receptacle he had used when he personally tortured Soviet partisans or troublesome civilians.

  The attack left him lying in a coma in a field hospital. No one had expected him to recover.

  Proceedings against the assailants had been swift, piano wire around their necks. When he woke up nevertheless, it was decided to take him home to Heimatschutz, to the embrace of the Fatherland. It was on this journey that the real Gerhart Peuckert finally paid for his misdeeds and James took his place.

  James’ case was characteristic of the ward as a whole. He was a high-ranking SS officer, mentally unhinged and too clever a henchman to be abandoned just like that. Normally there was only one SS cure in critical cases such as this: an injection and a coffin. But as long as there was hope that just one of these high-ranking officers in the Führer’s most loyal bunch of adherents would recover, all available means were used to bring it about. Until then, the fate of the patients was largely kept a close secret from the outside world. An SS officer could not be brought home insane. It would be demoralizing, a slight to the greatness of the German Reich, and could have unforeseen consequences regarding confidence in reports from the front. Furthermore, it would sow doubt in the minds of the population about their heroes’ invulnerability. The officers’ families would be disgraced, as the security officers had repeatedly impressed upon the doctors.

  Rather a dead officer than a scandal, they might have
added.

  This circumstance, combined with the fact that the physically wounded SS officers also constituted an elite, had made the area a strategic target for external as well as internal enemies of the state. The hospital was therefore converted into a fortress that no unwanted person entered and only healthy patients and their keepers were permitted to leave.

  The capacity of the hospital was constantly being stretched by new wounded soldiers, though no longer by mental patients. Perhaps, in view the way the war was progressing, it had been discreetly accepted that the Third Reich wouldn’t have time to recycle the latter. After the collapse of the Eastern Front there was no time to waste on trying to heal their minds.

  Lately, many of the patients had begun showing so many signs of improvement that anyone lagging behind in treatment results would be conspicuous. James stopped humming and hoped to escape the recurring shock treatments. More than anything else, this violent treatment affected his powers of concentration and therefore constituted a threat to his principal occupation: lying flat on his back, eyes closed, visualizing his favourite films…