III
Spiegelgrund
Steinhof The asylum had existed as a concept long before she saw it with her own eyes. In the Steinhof, one would say. This or that individual was in the Steinhof. And this would always be said quietly, almost in a whisper, with a distant look in one’s eyes. Her grandfather had been a Steinhof patient for many years and when she was nine or ten and, as they thought, old enough, she was taken along to visit him. She remembers narrow lobbies full of men in the institutional uniform; how the staring, oddly bright eyes in their coarse, unshaven faces would fix on her and follow every step she took. She remembers the screaming, high-pitched and repulsive, as if from animals taken to slaughter, that would rise suddenly from behind the open doors of the wards and which often triggered frenetic activity, sending staff along the corridors at a run, with the long, effective strides of trained athletes. But just as often, the screams would be completely ignored. A mat of sound was ever present beneath these frightening outbursts, woven from thousands of mumbling voices, incessantly muttering and whispering. Somewhere far inside this huge cathedral of sound, her granddad lay quietly in bed. Dad, don’t you recognise me? her father would ask every time, on a sliding scale of anxiety. Her grandfather didn’t recognise anyone, it seemed, but now and then he would reach out and touch Anna’s head the way you tentatively touch an object you would like but don’t dare to hold. Her mother, who never came with them, opined that her father-in-law was paying the price of a life of drunkenness and she missed no opportunity to tell them about all the sacrifices her husband had been forced to make for his alcoholic father. However, for the son, these visits were no sacrifice. Afterwards, father and daughter would walk for a while in the hospital park and maybe climb the hill to Otto Wagner’s lovely church with its copper dome, green with verdigris, and its great gate guarded by four angels with raised, golden wings. Anna remembers the hospital site as always thronged with people of all ages. Some of the strolling groups would include a patient in his pyjama-style daywear but there would also be people dressed for a picnic, or entire families, the boys in knee-length shorts and the little girls with bows like small propellers in their hair. The trams taking you away from Steinhof would always be crowded. It felt as if the whole city had enacted a communal pilgrimage and happily went home in unison. A few years later, Anna’s granddad was moved to the Ybbs hospital and no more visits were made, at least not by her. The family would sum up what happened as: the old man was lucky to die in good time. What that was supposed to mean, no one cared to explain.
*
Has Sister Anna Worked with Idiots Before? When she starts work, she discovers that Steinhof has changed and no longer has anything but the walls and the façade ornamentation in common with the hospital site she once visited with her father. It is January 1941. The day is overcast and still. Near the imperial clock by the main entrance, the Nazi flag droops, as if glued to the flagpole. Set among the bare trees in the park, the pavilions look like bunkers with their high, solid walls and window grilles. Anna Katschenka presents herself to the administrative office in pavilion 1 and is given instructions about where to go next, but she is soon met by the matron, Klara Bertha, who comes walking briskly down the wide drive. Bertha is a strongly built, middle-aged woman with, in some people’s eyes, striking good looks. Arguably she would have been respected, whatever profession she had taken up. In conversation (with patients or colleagues) she comes across as slightly reserved, someone waiting patiently if a little irritably for what the others have to say before finally delivering her response, distinctly and explicitly. On the way towards their pavilion, she points and describes with pedagogic clarity which of the pavilions still belong to the ‘old’ Steinhof establishment and which to the new institution for children and adolescents. She explains that the odd numbers, as in 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13, are ‘theirs’. We have tried to avoid mixing former inmates with, for instance, the children from Lustkandlgasse who have been placed in pavilions 3, 5 and 9, and those from Juchgasse in number 7. Pavilions 15 and 17 hold only psychopaths of both sexes and also younger children who are very ill or malformed, which means that they don’t just need specialised care but also constant supervision. And that is where Sister Anna will be nursing. Anna Katschenka points out her previous experience of dealing with severely ill children and takes the opportunity to mention her many years in Professor Knöpfelmacher’s unit. Matron smiles patiently, almost sadly, as she waits for Sister Katschenka to finish and then says: I’m afraid that there’s very little hope for these young lives. By then, they have reached the right place and the door is opened by a young nurse who introduces herself as Nurse Hedwig. Behind her, several other members of staff emerge from doors along a narrow corridor. Bertha introduces some of them by name and qualifications: Emilie Kragulj, Hildegard Mayer and Cläre Kleinschmittger. Kragulj and Mayer had worked before as psychiatric nurses at Steinhof but had been seconded to the children’s wards and had to relearn on the job. Same difference, Mayer says. Her tongue is as quick as her body is heavy. Nurse Kleinschmittger, Bertha continues, is the charge nurse for one of the wards for very young children. There are three types of patient in pavilion 15: infants, children aged less than three, and slightly older children, up to the age of six or seven. We employ tutors who are meant to instruct the third age group but, regrettably, most of the children lack the ability to learn even the simplest things. When Bertha has completed the sentence, Kleinschmittger turns to Katschenka and smiles. Her smile is meant to please but is tinged with nervousness. One might even read jealousy in it, a keenness to guard some spoken-for territory. Or else it is simply that she has no idea what she is supposed to say or doesn’t dare to speak at all. Meanwhile, Doctor Gross has descended the stairs, apologising loudly for having been delayed by a telephone call, and quickly takes the lead in what turns out to be an improvised tour of the premises. Like most of the pavilions on the site, number 15 is constructed around a central flight of stairs, which makes for an easy subdivision of each floor into two wards. Two doctors, Gross and Marianne Türk, who used to work at Steinhof, share the medical responsibility. Anna Katschenka is due to meet Doctor Türk later. She is a short, slim, middle-aged woman with something tense and withdrawn about her that marks her out as one of those doctors who set about their daily work with the kind of goal-oriented persistence that leaves no room for anything else – neither errors of judgement nor moments of compassion. Quite unlike Doctor Gross, who speaks with many vague but big gestures and who has already acquired the apparent distractedness often displayed by men conscious of their own importance, a manner that entails constantly changing subject and register and seems ultimately intended to make everyone they talk to feel insecure. Has Sister Anna worked with idiots before? he suddenly asks without stopping to listen to her answer. He moves on, as if the question had been quite beside the point, and instead opens wide the door to one of the wards and steps inside, immediately followed by Bertha, Kleinschmittger and Mayer, who seem to be swept along in his wake. The wards are not that large. Each long wall has room for five to ten beds, and the changing tables and basins. The bedsteads with their high end-rails are made of white-painted metal. Along the short walls, some beds enclosed in metal netting stand a little apart, presumably to make it easier to keep an eye on them. In one of the netted beds, a nearly grown-up girl is crouching, leaning a little forward. Oblivious of the staff, her jaws are grinding like millstones while her gaze makes helpless attempts to hang on to objects within her field of vision: a blanket, a pillow, the inside of the bed rails, which her fingertips explore intently as if investigating an enigmatic script. All the children, not only the infants, are in their beds. Gross walks from bed to bed, pointing this way and that. He could be demonstrating objects in a museum. She only catches fragments of what he says: idiocy … spastic diplegia … we have cages for epileptics as you can see here! He indicates the girl in the netted bed. For Anna Katschenka, the children are still nameless and suffer from nameless dis
eases. She sees bodies: bodies just lying there, the already exhausted attachments to gigantic skulls that sometimes look absurdly beautiful, the distended cranial bones covered with blond baby hair and fragile networks of pale-blue blood vessels. Some bodies have been preyed on by tumours until so emaciated that the skeleton is about to pierce the skin, the ribcage protruding through the loose skin-folds over chest and abdomen, the sharp edges of forehead, cheek and jaw bones stretching the weakened sphincter muscles around eyes and mouth. The bodies emit shrieks and odd noises which are everywhere, the alien sounds ranging from hoarse shouting to gurgling and cooing. A little boy with cleft palate groans like a rutting animal when they are about to pass him, and Doctor Gross stops and points: Cheilognathopalatoschisis. Alcoholic mother who abandoned the infant when she saw what it looked like. One can’t entirely blame her! With an exaggeratedly caring gesture, the doctor helps the malformed child to stand by supporting his right arm. The split in the boy’s palate is wide enough for them to see straight into the moist membranes of his gullet. When Gross touches him, the boy’s coarse, wild groans change into helpless gurgles and she finds herself looking into a pair of shiny blue eyes that express a lucid awareness more alarming than any scream. But most of the children are silent as they sit or lie on the beds, their fingers spread out or stuck between wet lips, their gazes dull or absently following the white-clad procession, and it seems as if the incessant sobs and moans that fill the large room from floor to ceiling don’t come from anyone in it but from somewhere far away, like a vast, distant wave of discordant noise that has taken tens of thousands of years to reach this place but is finally breaking through the dams and is about to swallow everyone and everything on the ward, the children in their beds and the professionals bending over them. But a slightly older child, whose skin has a doll-like pallor, lies on her back deep below the uproar, her face turned indifferently towards the murky surface high above her where space and voices blend. Her face has grown and suggests five or six years of age, a much too large head in relation to her short torso and thin but shapely limbs. Looking more closely, her every feature seems chiselled with extraordinary precision. Her hands, which rest on the coverlet, have slender fingers and pink, half-moon-shaped nails, and her doll’s face with its porcelain skin and pointed chin is given distinction by her small, lovely mouth that has a slight, almost ironic twist. Her eyes are a deep blue beneath their heavy, aristocratic lids, the sweep of her high forehead ends where a mane of thin blonde hair with a reddish shimmer grows from what Anna Katschenka’s mother would describe as ‘a perfect hairline’. And it is perfect. The thin, exactly delineated roots run like a neatly stitched seam across the forehead, along a line that is reminiscent of a Cupid’s bow. (Anna Katschenka has had to learn these finer points, as her own hairline is less than perfect.) This child is Sophie Althofer, Nurse Kleinschmittger explains as she stops by the girl’s bed and draws attention to her presence next to Katschenka by pretending to tidy the coverlet. Her mother comes in almost daily, she adds, at which Doctor Gross, who patently disapproves of nurses chattering while he is prepared to hold forth, clears his throat and loudly announces the diagnosis: Achondroplasia, combined with imbecility of the worst order. Not even the mother has managed to get a single, sensible word from this girl, he says as he turns to Anna Katschenka with a smile, as if to advise her against even trying. And then the performance is over. Matron instantly picks up the change of tone and addresses the group of nurses: Sister Cläre, will you show Sister Anna the practical side of things. Anna Katschenka follows Cläre Kleinschmittger into the corridor and then into the lavatories and shower rooms. Sister Cläre also demonstrates the sluice room and the correct places for washbasins and bedpans, then shows her where the first aid cupboard and the linen stores are, and goes through the order of towels and bed-linen items on the shelves. Anna stays in the sluice room afterwards and watches as Hedwig Blei, the young woman who opened the door when she arrived, busies herself with rinsing out bedpans. Nurse Hedwig is young and vital. Her arms are broad and strong, and there is a band of freckles across her nose. She seems unfazed as she upsets the hierarchical order, speaking to a superior without being spoken to first. Pointing to a jar of hand cream that she has put next to the sink, she says that people from the countryside know how to look after themselves and then explains that it is the same cream she learnt to use when she was younger and was asked to treat the inflamed sores on cows’ udders. Then, in reply to Anna’s question, she says, yes, well, I’m from Grünbach in Mühlviertel. You know, this cream is good for chapped skin on the hands as well. For a moment, the two pairs of hands are placed side by side on the workbench and young Miss Blei can’t refrain from asking, I can’t help seeing that Sister Anna perhaps isn’t married? And carries on, now energetically rinsing off bottles and glasses, so she doesn’t notice how Anna stiffens. Instead, Nurse Blei adds that a job like this is simply impossible to combine with having a husband and children, that’s what I‘ve always thought. Much wiser to wait! On their way out, they pass little Sophie with her pretty doll’shouse face that looks too mature, too clever for a child. Anna feels that the girl’s gaze follows her but Sophie’s pupils shelter below her elegantly curved eyelids. Her exquisite lips curl disdainfully.
*
Conditions of Service She did not know what exactly she had hoped for as she took up her new post because her expectations had been more linked to the person of Doctor Jekelius than to the work, but nothing had prepared her for having to nurse such badly afflicted children. It was not that she was unused to caring for ill children or, of course, for physically and mentally debilitated old people. The patients they were responsible for here were, however, so severely disturbed by neurological and other malformations that they fell outside the normal range. Her training had taught her to deal with injuries and common illnesses, but little or nothing about how to nurse children who had no control whatsoever over their limbs, who any second might attack her with wildly flailing arms, hissing and spitting and biting, or children whose inner torment was so terrible that they screamed all the time, unending ululations without any apparent relationship to the cause of their pain, let alone how they could be made better or even soothed in any way other than the morphine-based medication that was routinely prescribed in quantities that frightened her. She also felt that she was being constantly watched, which didn’t help at all. Every hesitation was recorded, every hint of her being ill at ease or put off by something interpreted as being unable to cope. Nurse Mayer especially seemed to see it as her duty to keep an eye on the new recruit. Even though she was formally Katschenka’s inferior, she had ways of showing that she disliked how she had been told to do something, or simply disliked being told anything at all, and indicated her displeasure by perhaps a raised eyebrow or a faint smile, before going about her tasks with studied slowness. Mayer was an old hand, as she put it, and like many of the other ex-psychiatric nurses, she handled the children in her charge as if they were insensate, pulling the screaming little bundles out of bed and carrying them under her arm like parcels, or perhaps more like small animals on their way to slaughter. Meanwhile, Cläre Kleinschmittger would hover in some doorway, her eyes flickering anxiously while her gaze stayed fixed on Anna’s every move. Their eyes never met and they never exchanged more than a few words, but Kleinschmittger seemed always to be surrounded by one or several colleagues such as Nurse Sikora, Erna Storch and Emilie Kragulj, and Katschenka saw them together more than once in a corridor or the corner of a ward, standing in tight little clusters, whispering together only to fall silent the moment she came past. Finally, her concern had become an incessant, deep-seated ache and, one afternoon, she knocked on the matron’s door and asked leave to take half an hour off work in order to speak with Doctor Jekelius. Doctor Jekelius is away on business, Matron Bertha replied curtly, and her tone suggested that it was an unheard-of impertinence even to mention his name. Sister Anna can of course talk to me if the matter is a practical one, or r
efer it to the personnel department. Anna Katschenka had by then realised that Doctor Jekelius’s role was not only that of medical director of the Spiegelgrund institution but that he also acted as the right hand of Councillor Max Gundel, who was in charge of the new department of public health. It had been Gundel who drove the decision to merge the city’s many children’s homes and reform schools into one institution: Spiegelgrund was his creation. Jekelius had been charged with overseeing that all children ‘who required special treatment’ were taken to Spiegelgrund, a responsibility that led to much arduous travelling. When Jekelius was not on site, the administrative side of his work was handled by Doctor Margarethe Hübsch. Doctor Hübsch was a robustly built, middle-aged woman with severe features. She wore her blonde hair pulled back into a strict bun, dressed for work in two-piece suits with the NS-Frauenschaft pin ostentatiously placed on the lapel, and greeted people with the German Heil, as was the rule by then but which Anna Katschenka found awkward. Anna was of course used to working within a framework of discipline that meant employees knew what was expected of them and what the limitations of their rights were. She had always been content with the clarity of this. However, she had now joined an institution run on militaristic lines, as if the hospital had turned into barracks, and it made her feel ill at ease. She was unused to the way her superiors addressed the staff. Doctor Knöpfelmacher had been firm and decisive but often ready with a kind, encouraging smile. Doctor Hübsch, on the other hand, was either formal, bordering on brusque, or else given to ice-cold sarcasm. Katschenka felt insecure and, always, there was Nurse Kleinschmittger, lingering in a doorway, as if looking forward to when Katschenka would make some mistake or annoy one of the doctors. Anna lay awake night after night, arguing with herself. She couldn’t afford the risks entailed in resigning. For instance, returning to Lainz would be out of the question. There was just one way out, as far as she could see. She told her mother one evening that she would be going out after supper to meet a friend, and set out to catch the 8 tram. That was the line she travelled on to work every morning but, this time, she stayed on board until the Alser Strasse stop and then walked briskly up the hill to Michelbeuern. It was only when she stood in front of the wide iron gate on Martinstrasse that it dawned on her quite the enormity of what she was about to do. It wasn’t just that she was being pushy (which was completely out of character, of course) but also that she clung to the belief that he would be able to put a stop to, or at least mitigate the effects of, the choice he had himself suggested that she should make when she had consulted him. The healer of souls needed no eyes. Would he be able to see that this particular post did not suit her? But she doesn’t get round to ringing the bell. Standing on the pavement opposite the gate, she is as incapable of stepping forward as of walking away. A few cars pass by. When the noise of the last one dies away she hears footsteps on the cobbled pavement. She turns. It is he. She recognises his light, vigorous gait immediately, despite the darkness. Suddenly terrified that he might catch sight of her, she slips into a gateway, the sound of footsteps grows fainter and when she dares to look he is gone. He must have turned the corner already. She runs the same way, well aware of what a pathetic figure she makes. The street in front of her is deserted. Did the ground open up and swallow him? And then she hears a car engine start. Just some fifty metres away, two powerful headlamps light up. The car glides out of the garage and, as it reaches the street, the light falls on a woman waiting on the pavement. The car stops near her, the window comes down and she bends forward to say something. It is Jekelius in the driver’s seat, Anna is certain of that. She has no idea who the woman is. Anyway, with a laugh, a small affected giggle, the woman gets into the car. They drive past Anna but neither one pays any attention to her. As she walks back to the Alser Strasse tram stop, she doesn’t feel disappointed, only empty. Her mother doesn’t ask where she has been. She knows that her daughter doesn’t have any friends and especially not anyone whom she might like to visit at this time of night.
The Chosen Ones Page 6