The Chosen Ones

by Steve Sem-Sandberg

  They laughed. And then sat together in silence. From outside came a noise as if someone quietly, discreetly, was scrunching up crisp sheets of paper. It was the sparrows dashing in and out of that dense mass of leaves. She had forgotten about them for a while.

  Why do you tell me this? she finally asked.

  Perhaps, he replied, because what you need is just someone to snap their fingers in front of your face – like this! – and, suddenly, the world looks different. Put it this way: to cure disease, truly to heal, doesn’t exclusively mean doing something to, or even for, the patient. The person who is ill is part of a context, and that is what must be changed: the very way we understand illness. I would be happy to discuss this further at your next appointment.

  A Healer of Souls Needs No Eyes

  You ask if I had a relationship with Doctor Jekelius and it makes me proud to be able to say: yes, I did, although not in the coarse sense that you might have had in mind. I had never before in my life trusted anyone as I trusted him. When I first sought him out, it felt as if I was anaesthetised, body and soul. I felt nothing if I raised my hand or touched something, as if unaware that I had a hand, and then he came along and placed his hand on mine and my sensibility came back, and the mobility of my fingers. A healer of souls needs no eyes, was what I once wrote to him after he had been wounded on the battlefield and could neither move nor see. By now, they have robbed him of everything: his body, sight, hearing, and his honour, too. But there is one thing no one can take away from him, and that is what he did for me. He gave me my life back. Does it follow that I must also be close to him in other ways, such as politically? This is what you imply but, of course, it is not so. I knew all the time that Doctor Jekelius was a National Socialist. However, politics never meant anything to me.

  *

  The Vocation Anna Katschenka had known that she wanted to be a nurse ever since she was ten. That was her age when her sister died from an inherited thickening of the heart muscle. Everyone had known about her heart trouble and that it might be fatal at any moment. Anna’s sister had found it hard to keep up with the other children, and soon became breathless and had to sit down to rest. She was perfectly fine when they played what their mother called ‘quiet games’, and could even be a little protective of Anna. The day before she died, Anna’s sister had been swinging her legs to and fro as she perched on the edge of her bed and they had pretended that her legs were little wild creatures that Anna had to catch, but once the wiggling feet had been caught and shoed and the laces were tied, Anna’s sister stood up but was breathing oddly and sweating, and her face was flushed. The following day, her bed was empty, the bedspread stretched flat and tightly tucked in. They had removed all the pictures, and the books from the shelves, and even the ‘secret box’ where Anna’s sister had kept her pretty things, her rings and necklaces, together with saved-up letters and a diary. It seemed they felt nothing of hers could remain, now that she was dead.

  Whosoever doth not bear his own cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple. So therefore whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.

  She had told Doctor Jekelius of a memory of the funeral. Anna and her mother, who had been deeply affected by her daughter’s death, were leaving the church together, walking arm in arm. Above them the mighty church bells had swung and hammered and banged incessantly with their massive brass clappers. She used to say that the bells had called her into service, but at heart she knew that nothing so uplifting had taken place. It had been a dreadful moment. For perhaps a second, all went black as the overwhelming, choking din of the bells took her over. It was as if the Lord had hurled back down to Earth each one of the dead child’s frail heartbeats, transformed into a crushing weight of iron that boomed and trembled, boomed and trembled, until the sky seemed like a gigantic heart about to break. Her mother had clapped her hands over her ears and moved closer to the wall as if looking for shelter. But the wall, too, broke, and the pavement cracked and sagged under their feet. Anna’s hand, from now on to be a helping hand, could not reach her. No hands could help. From that day, Anna Katschenka’s mother never went outside. She said that she dreaded the looks in people’s eyes. Perhaps more than their eyes, she dreaded those whispering voices that, even as she sat beneath the stone arches of the church, had begun to creep into her mind, every one of them murmuring that she had failed to save her daughter’s life. From then on, her child’s heart failure took shape and became a dominant presence during all her waking hours, just as being blind or paralysed can dominate someone’s life. It meant that every objection, every attempt to inject some uncertainty into the absolute truth of what the mother said about her dead child only served to make the illness stronger still, because it brought back memories of shame and guilt. Anna, from now on, was the one charged with preventing the chaos and disintegration in the outside world from getting through to her mother, and seeing to it that her mother heard only what was cheerful or encouraging, and nothing that maimed or tore apart. Day after day, Anna did her bit to create a provisional world order that was sound and harmonious, even though her mother had long since stopped believing in anything of the sort. One of her sayings used to be: the healthy don’t shun the light. This was one of her mother’s many incantatory phrases that Anna now made her own. To prove just how healthy and tough they all were, her father would sometimes spend an evening displaying his photos from the time when he was a sportsman. He had been a long- and medium-distance runner, and could be picked out in the group pictures from championships in strange cities as a tall, gangly young man standing among his teammates, all with their arms loosely draped across each other’s shoulders. The young sportsmen belonged to the Wiener Arbeiter Turn- und Sportverein and the banner above their heads read WAT Ottakring. As an older man, Anna’s father had been asked to take on the honorary post as the society’s treasurer. He used to sit at the kitchen table most evenings after supper and run his index finger down the columns of paid and unpaid membership fees, or else he went to the sports ground and settled down alone on the empty coach’s bench with a stopwatch in one hand and a notebook in the other, checking his son’s lap times on the track below as Otto trained for the hundred-metre hurdles in the club championships. Into the light, then out of it.

  *

  Blood Anna loses blood. Warm, sticky, dark blood. When she pushes her hand between her legs, it fills her cupped palm. It is menstrual blood, as she knows perfectly well. What she can’t understand is why such a lot of it pours out of her. Headaches and nausea follow in its wake and she, usually such a good pupil at school, who hangs on the teachers’ every word and is diligence personified, has to ask leave to go to the lavatory too often during lessons and must walk out while everyone in the class giggles and looks the other way. To tell her mother about this affliction is unthinkable. To her father, she says it is just nerves. But, in the end, it is the ageing printer, a shy and inhibited man with little idea of women’s health problems, who takes his young daughter to see the doctor. They learn that Anna is anaemic and needs to take the prescribed tablets. At school, she gets called Woodlouse because of her greyish, unnaturally pale skin, set off by greasy hair and teenage pimples. How she hates this physical self that grows and swells and wants nothing more than to wallow, languid and bland. She hides behind a wall of chilly self-control. She has few friends at school but stays top of the class. The healthy body that she never before felt ashamed to see in full sunlight has changed irrevocably into an alien continent. That is how she sees it. Like the school’s wall maps of Africa or South America. Her skin is like a coastline, long and thin. Beyond it, there are endless forests through which the blood flows, in narrow winding streams or in huge glossy rivers, only to end in internal lakes in cavities enclosed on all sides by the vault of a sky that has no inner or outer surface but exists only as the boundary of the truly boundless inner world. This childlike idea of the body stays with her even much later, when she has learnt so much more
about human anatomy. When the migraines come, the headaches establish a hold over this alien continent, and when she sleeps, her dreams are inner seas and skies in which she travels. Unlike the world out there, it is pleasingly easy to move from one internal place to the next. Her feelings, which she is quite capable of concealing from everyone, can in moments transport her mind from the black bog of despond and self-contempt onto the high plateau of willingness to forgive herself. Pain, she soon learns, is another way of travelling.

  *

  The Healthy Don’t Shun the Light To be a nurse is no longer her vocation. Training has become a compulsion: the only way to make the alien continent her own while at the same time keep it at bay. Control it. She follows her father’s advice and takes a three-year course in domestic science and then gets a poorly paid job as nursery nurse at the children’s hospital in Leopoldstadt. If your background is ordinary, it is hard to land a good traineeship. It was only in May 1924 that she found an opening. Wien had been a federated state in its own right for a couple of years and the city council was under Social Democratic control. Now, the hospital in Lainz offers a three-year course leading to registered nurse status. Anna Katschenka sails through the preliminary exam. The training also includes voluntary work, and the following year Anna’s class is recruited to run the first aid station at the large sports championships held by the Austrian labour organisations at Trabrennbahn – the trotting course – in the Prater. Her period is due just then and, in the morning, dizziness overwhelms her as usual despite her attempt to deal with it by lying in bed with her feet higher than her head to force the blood to run back into her head. (But there’s nothing else for it. This is her baptism of fire. And she wouldn’t miss it for anything in the world.) Here they are! Twenty-odd dutiful nursing students, Pflegeschülerinnen in freshly starched uniforms. In front of them, out on the race track, thousands of young male and female athletes are marching in perfect formations behind their colourful club standards, while above them the span of the sky is as high and deep and blue as it can be on a summer’s day, and a light breeze toys with the pennants on the packed terraces. Afterwards, she remembers the conductor in his absurd tailcoat, leading the orchestra from his podium with amusingly snappy baton movements while the music emerged from the laughter of the audience and the noise of marching feet: the crisp bleating of the brass section, the twittering of the flutes and the heavy, rhythmic, but somehow distracted thump-thump-thump of the percussion. Once the athletes’ walk-past was completed, the procession swung round and, led by the standard bearers, marched towards the exit and she craned her neck to spot her brother among them when, in an instant, nausea hit her again. Her next memory is of lying flat on her back in the grass with some of the other trainee nurses bending over her, so many of them that their faces screened the sun, and black night seemed to envelop her. It was in this shame-filled darkness that she heard the voice of her husband-to-be for the first time:

  Let me through. I’m a doctor.

  She later said to Doctor Jekelius that, from that day on, she took to heart that a vocation like hers was not a call coming out of the blue, not a gift from a merciful God, but something you must struggle for all your life.

  He introduced himself as Hauslich, Siegfried Hauslich, she went on to explain. All that about being a medical man was just something he said to make an impression. He told her, much later and with not a trace of shame, that he had been watching her at a distance for months and waiting for the right moment to make himself known to her. They had gone walking together after that first encounter, up and down the Prater Hauptallee to ‘let her get some air’ and, during that short time, he had not only harangued her with fussy medical advice but also made her tell him what her parents’ names were and where they lived. Only a few days later, a letter addressed to her father arrived in which Mr Hauslich introduced himself as the holder of pre-clinical degree, claimed to have grand ambitions and also to enjoy the patronage of Julius Tandler, presumably because Anna had let slip, against her better judgement, that her father was a great admirer of Professor Tandler, who as a leading city councillor had done so much to improve the health and social services for the working classes of Wien. Hauslich explained to Anna’s father that Professor Tandler had helped out with bursaries from his personal funds and that he would surely also support Anna’s studies. One believes what one would like to be true. Is that not so? Afterwards, her father happily overlooked the fact that everything Hauslich said was empty chatter and meaningless boasts, and yes, even that he was a Jew …

  And Doctor Jekelius, are you telling me that Hauslich was a Jew …?

  She said, yes, what did you think?

  Doctor Jekelius, if he was a Jew, why did you agree to marry him?

  She looked straight into his large face with its receding hairline, powerful hawk nose and the clear, sincere eyes below dark, dense eyebrows (he seemed relaxed and deep in thought but his eyes were alert) and knew that she had confided too much to back out now. Doctor Jekelius had already learnt all there was to know about her dead sister and how her family had attempted to recover from the defeat of their inability to keep her alive. And now, about the shadow, the shaming black mark in her past that was the man she had had the misfortune to marry and who was a curse she still had to live with. It was my father who insisted that we should marry, she told him. My father was very serious about not making distinctions between people. It’s the character that matters, not someone’s faith or blood, he used to say without realising that in this case it was precisely Hauslich’s character that was the problem. By then, it should have been blindingly obvious that he would never do the right thing by anyone, let alone complete his medical training. He was a charlatan. Who could tell how many people he had already deceived with his pretty talk? Before the wedding, she had already started in her first post as a nurse in the maternity unit at the Brigitta-Spital on Stromstrasse. So it was she who supported him while he lived in a rented room in the neighbourhood but expected any time soon to move into the large flat that his wealthy uncle was renovating for them both. The flat, falsehood like all his promises, never materialised. One evening she decided to confront him, went to his shabby room and told him that if he did not qualify as a doctor, start paying off his debts and find a decent home for them both, she would divorce him. The pathetic man had burst into tears, kneeled before her and begged her to stay with him, insisting that ever since that day in the Prater he had loved her madly, blindly. She stuck to her guns. Her father, who rarely allowed anything to upset him, was furious with her. But he was no longer her guardian, she had made up her mind and nothing could stop her. There were jobs going at the unit for infectious diseases at Karolinenspital and she applied happily, even though she knew how demanding the work would be. Her years at the Karolinenspital under Professor Knöpfelmacher would provide her experience of nursing children. Her first two years at the unit coincided with one of Wien’s worst-ever epidemics of diphtheria. She was the charge nurse in a ward with beds for forty-five children and, within one month, thirty of them had died. Can you imagine what it was like, Doctor? What it was like to hold a four- or five-year-old child in your arms and watch, powerless, as the small life slipped between your fingers? The one factor that made the years in the unit bearable was Professor Knöpfelmacher’s personality, his courage and strength of character. But 1934 brought changes that turned absolutely everything upside down. Professor Knöpfelmacher was forced to leave, as were many of the doctors. I worried, too, through nights of desperation. The Patriotic Front was in power and one of the things they did was send my father to prison because of a rumour going around that he had embezzled money belonging to WAT. They suspected that the money had been spent on arming the Socialists. My father was freed in the end and I had meantime managed to arrange for a transfer to Lainz, so all could have turned out well in the end if the Nazis hadn’t come to power. And this time, they had of course found out about everything.

  Doctor Jekelius, sorry? Wh
o? What had they found out?

  She said, they said that of course they couldn’t have an employee who had previously married a Jew.

  Doctor Jekelius, aha, that man Hauslich, yet again …!

  There was something about the indifferent, uncaring way he pronounced the hated name that made exasperation suddenly explode inside her:

  Can you have the slightest sense of how I felt, Doctor Jekelius? What it was like to have fought all my life to stay sane and well and so escape from the suffocating influence of this man and then, when I had succeeded after years of faithful service, to be told that my work had been in vain?

  Jekelius’s face remained unmoved:

  Nothing you have done is in vain, Mrs Katschenka.

  And, much later, when the war had ended, when Spiegelgrund stood shut and empty after the discovery of what happened to the interned children, she would be able to recall, almost word for word, what they had said to each other that day, which was to be the last time she came to him for treatment. How she had tearfully confessed to him that it was work that kept her well, nothing but the good, self-sacrificing work, and he found a handkerchief for her in his jacket pocket, unfolding it in his calm, measured way. I understand your predicament very well, he said. And then, you are in the front line. And, you have nothing whatsoever to be ashamed of. A few months later, she learnt that Jekelius had been appointed medical director at the clinic for children and adolescents that had opened in the old Steinhof asylum. The Wien city council’s new department of health was advertising for staff at the recently established Wiener Städtische Jugendfürsorgeanstalt, ‘Am Spiegelgrund’. After hesitating for a while, she took her courage in both hands and phoned them. Later, this would be held against her because, by then, she had surely realised whose interests Jekelius served and what they were up to at Spiegelgrund, though this was something she would consistently deny. Again and again, she would repeat what she had told Doctor Jekelius the first time they met: that all she wished for was to be allowed to work with children again. And this time, her application was not returned as it usually was, with a covering letter to the effect that her qualifications were ‘insufficient’ or even ‘unsuitable’, but instead she was called to a face-to-face interview in the personnel department and found to her great surprise that the long conversation never touched on subjects such as her previous marriage or her father and brother’s illegal political activities. When she, just one week later, received written confirmation that the post was hers, she wept with happiness. She felt certain that in the future, too, Doctor Jekelius would hold out his hand to support her.