The Chosen Ones

by Steve Sem-Sandberg

  … now, let’s see what we’ll see, she says and holds up a pair of scissors.

  … scissors, Hannes says.

  She begins to cut. Fifteen pairs of childish eyes follow Nurse Mutsch’s brisk movements as she plunges the scissors into the parcel, cuts the coarse string, pulls the folded ends of the wrapping paper back and puts her hand inside. The parcel is so big that her massive forearm disappears. Then it re-emerges and she begins to line up her finds. There are little jars with preserved apricots and pears, and she twists the lid off one of them, makes pincers of her right thumb and index finger and extracts one of the halved, syrup-soaked pears, golden-grey and soft, and pops the entire piece in her mouth, then licks her fingers, not to miss a drop of the wonderful syrup. Her hand goes back into the parcel and out comes a box of original Manner Kex, the Neapolitan wafers layered with chocolate cream. Looking thoughtful, she opens the box and starts eating, slowly and systematically, crunching on one wafer after another. By now, all eyes have swivelled to fix on Julius. In the beginning, he just sat there, looking as scared as everyone else and unable to believe what was happening. But when Nurse Mutsch has munched her way through all the fruit in syrup and all the biscuits, and gone on to examine the warm socks the uncle had packed, and the handkerchiefs and the spare leather bootlaces, he gradually begins to shake. It is a strange fit of the shakes that starts at the top of his body, around his head and shoulders, but he manages to control it so that he sits still, or almost still, back straight and hands on the table as per orders, but the lower part of his body is less controllable, his hips rock on the seat, his thighs tremble and his feet rattle against the floor like drumsticks. Nurse Mutsch stares at him:

  What’s up, do you want the toilet?

  Julius opens his mouth as if to answer.

  Big or small?

  Julius opens his mouth again but Mutsch is too impatient to wait for a reply. She looks for something to wipe her hands on. There is nothing obvious nearby so she grabs one of the carefully folded socks from the parcel, uses it to wipe her mouth and nose, finds her bunch of keys and picks up a couple of the precisely measured strips of toilet paper that she keeps in readiness next to her place at the table and walks with firm strides to the door, unlocks it and holds it open for Julius who slowly, as if reluctantly, gets up from the bench and walks towards her,

  come on, what are you waiting for do you think we’ve got all day …

  and then the door slams behind them and from the corridor the others can hear Mutsch’s voice, muffled but still perfectly audible, then the keys turn in the toilet door lock. Shortly afterwards, the door to the day room opens again and Nurse Mutsch returns. Without a glance at anyone, she sits down and carries on exploring the parcel. When she can’t find anything more, she makes a bundle of the wrapping paper and takes the rubbish to the nurses’ cubicle. There’s a discreet knock on the door. Mutsch admits Julius, and as he walks to the table it is obvious that he has managed neither the small nor the big stuff but that everything is as it was before – except there is no parcel now, only Nurse Mutsch, who carries on staring at Julius and, next, slowly but surely, he starts shaking again and now Mutsch is ready for him.

  Do you want the toilet again?

  Julius shakes his head but by now there’s no telling if this means no, or if the disturbance of his body has reached his head, and Nurse Mutsch gets up and walks over to him to issue an order, get a grip on yourself, and next (when Julius still hasn’t managed to subdue his shakes) slaps the side of his head with the flat of her hand, his glasses go flying and no one allowed you to stand, she says when he makes a reflex attempt to pick the glasses up, and then sit down, she says as she bends to pick up the glasses before returning to her seat at the head of the table. She holds the glasses in her fist, her fingers wrapped around them so firmly that everyone can see how tightening the grip just a little would squeeze the thin frames to breaking point and the glass would be crushed. Please, Julius pleads quietly, and Nurse Mutsch goes, you just stay where you are, nice and proper, and you’ll get them back at the end of the quiet hour. Julius sits where he sits, trembling as hard as ever. One can almost hear the skeleton rattle inside him. He doesn’t put his hand up to be allowed to go to the toilet and Nurse Mutsch doesn’t anticipate any request by asking him if he wants to go. No need for that. A little later, the silence is broken by a liquid, rustling sound and soon afterwards they see a puddle spreading under the table, over which Julius droops, wet and still shaking like a rattle. Nurse Mutsch watches him with something akin to satisfaction. It’s when one doesn’t think before one acts that everyone can see what kind of a weakling one really is, she says with distaste, and even though she is looking in another direction no one fails to realise that she is talking about Julius.

  *

  Wake-up Call All days begin exactly the same way. At 5.30 a.m. punctually, their tutor or Erzieherin, Mrs Rohrbach, unlocks the dormitory door and steps inside followed by the day staff. Mrs Rohrbach blows on a whistle she has hanging from a strap around her neck and uses a short, rubber-coated metal stick they called ‘the clapper’ to bang underneath the metal bars at the ends of the beds.

  Aufstehen, heraus aus den Betten!

  Bettnässer vortreten!

  (Get up, out of your beds!

  Bed-wetters, step forward!)

  This was worst for the newcomers, who had not yet realised what shame can mean, and very bad also for those who were still naïve enough to imagine that resistance might not be entirely futile and in vain flapped about trying to grab what little there was to hold on to: bed-ends, door frames, basin edges. Your grip was of course removed sooner or later, one way or another. The day nurses used to work in the lunatic asylum and were as strong as bears. In the washroom, apart from the ordinary shower cubicles, there was also an old-fashioned, high-sided tub of cast-iron. A shower head at one end sprayed ice-cold water into the tub that was already full of wet linen towels. One of the nurses would drag the troublesome bed-wetter to the tub and the other one would stand guard at the head end. As soon as the child had been thrown in and tried to crawl out of the mass of wet towels, one of them would grab an arm or a leg, raising the limb for long enough to force the culprit’s head and shoulders under the freezing water again, and possibly get him entangled in the towels, which would soon block both his mouth and his nose. The term for this practice was ‘dunking’. As soon as a boy had been dunked, he was hauled up again and made to stand on the cold tiled floor, shivering, barely able to stay upright, as moist and shiny as an eel and with a face as blue as a plum. Jockerl was one of the boys who got dunked quite often. Jockerl’s bed was close enough for Adrian to pick up the sweetish, ammoniacal pong of urine, often before he had woken up properly, as if that smell could penetrate his sleep and reach into the place in his mind where fear had rooted itself. Soon he would hear Mrs Rohrbach hitting the bed with her clapper and next the screaming as Jockerl was pulled off his peed-on sheet and dragged into the washroom, and the slapping of the shower water against the side of the tub followed, and the boy’s desperate calls for help that ended in helpless gurgling as the water rushed in and choked him. But Jockerl was tough. Despite the beatings and clips round the ears that threw his little body like a wet rag from one tiled wall to another, he always managed to get through and find a place at the long row of wash-hand basins where the other boys were already getting on with brushing their teeth. Jockerl was a head shorter than the rest of them but always carried himself as straight as a spear and was often first back in the dormitory for the next stage, which was bed-making. At this point, Mrs Rohrbach positioned herself at the far end of the room with her back to the window and started clapping her hands to match her counting aloud … one two three four five six … and for Jockerl it was important to keep ahead of her every command. When Mrs Rohrbach called out twenty he had already stretched the sheet over the edge of the mattress, when she reached forty he had folded the blanket over the sheet and at sixty he had put his
toothbrush in the glass exactly where it should be, the glass lined up edge to edge with the right corner of the bedside table, and folded his towel, placed it on the middle of the three shelves, and put his indoor and outdoor shoes, laces untied, on the floor below. Julius Becker was useless when it came to practical things like these and Mrs Rohrbach had noticed that soon enough. Time after time, she would do rounds to check Julius’s bed. She wouldn’t say anything, only start, almost thoughtfully, to count again, just for Julius … one two three four five … and then she went on counting more loudly … six seven eight nine … and at ten she gave up and tore blanket and sheets from Julius’s hands and shouted:

  that’s not the right way

  don’t you know how to do it

  and he still couldn’t do anything right with his listless hands, even less keep his eyes and lips under control,

  you’re to begin again and get it right this time

  and Mrs Rohrbach started counting again … one two three four … but now she had the clapper ready and Julius knew what to expect. He faced up to his failure and before he had even lifted the sheet, fell crying to the floor in front of Mrs Rohrbach’s feet. So, with one firm grip under his chin, their tutor in good manners would pull him upright, then hit him with the clapper, one blow for each correct bed-making action he had failed to complete:

  … one two three four …

  And so it went on. Day after day after day. Always the same ritual, Adrian said.

  Those who had got away without punishments that day were made to stand and wait until everyone else had been dealt with and one of their guards came along to order them to line up for the march to the school pavilion. Sometimes Julius would join the rest of us, sometimes not, Adrian explained. If not, it was because they had made him scrub the dormitory floor or clean the toilets or sentenced him to four or six hours standing punishment. There was no loyalty among the boys. Each one of us had his own confusions to deal with. We kept getting punished for being careless but were actually as guarded and distrustful as old men. Alliances were formed though, some of them baffling. Like the one between Hannes and Jockerl. On their way to the school pavilion the boys passed the institution’s kitchen and, next to it, the central-heating boiler that spewed out disgustingly thick, black smoke from its chimney. One day, Jockerl asked what they might be burning in there and Hannes turned to him and said:

  They burn bed-wetters like you, didn’t you know?

  Even though he was in their section, Jockerl behaved in many ways like a small child. When he was told something, his face softened, melted somehow, and his eyes had an inward look, as if trying to visualise in his head what he had just heard. Miseryguts gave him a shove and said, hang on, it’s not your turn yet, and suddenly everyone laughed and formed a cluster around the little one, the most gullible of them all, and Jockerl blanched and became as pale as when they hauled him out of the bath in the mornings or when they gave him a Wickelkur, a wrap-up cure, and watching that is something I’ll never forget, Adrian said: they wrapped him in wet towels and made him stand in the bitterly cold corridor until all the towels had dried. It took fourteen hours. To cure him of his bed-wetting once and for all, they told everyone. That’s what they wanted us to believe. That what they persecuted us for was something that was already part of us.

  *

  The Führer’s Signature on a Piece of White Card A framed portrait of the Führer hung on the corridor wall. In those days, identical portraits were hung on the walls of all official places; the Führer, who gazed into the distance but had a steadfast look on his face, was seen a little from the side. His facsimile signature was placed below the image. Every single corridor in Spiegelgrund was graced by a portrait just like that, or at at least a similar one. If you were given a ‘standing-still’ punishment for six or fourteen or however many hours, you had to stand in front of the Führer picture and if you failed for just one second to stay straight as a post with your eyes fixed on the great leader, you were ordered to keep standing for double the number of hours. This was how the Führer came to form part of the jumble of stories that Hannes Neubauer wandered around and mumbled about to himself. The stories were all about heroes and their brave deeds. It could be about von Humboldt, who discovered the source of the River Amazon and fought battles with the Indians, or about wartime heroics, the kind of stories you read about in the copies of Der Stürmer that were lying around everywhere. The tabloid was packed with pictures of steel-helmeted soldiers who were always portrayed sideways on, like the Führer, but unlike him were toting automatic pistols. In Hannes’s versions, the hero was his father, who (or so Hannes would claim) kept being dispatched on secret missions to different places. What about your mum then? Adrian couldn’t resist asking (he had after all a special bond with his mother) and Hannes said that soon after he was born, his father had shown that shameless slut the door. You can’t trust women, Hannes Neubauer told them, all women are false and treacherous and greedy and only out for your money. So said the boy with the round head without as much as a flicker of his blue eyes, although this shocked even hardened types like Zavlacky and Miseryguts. Big words from such a little lad. Hey, is that true of Mrs Rohrbach, too? Zavlacky hazarded with an ironic smile. Satan’s handmaidens, the lot of them, Hannes replied promptly and added that they mustn’t worry. His father, an army officer of the highest rank, had already sent a message with a devoted courier to reassure his son he was on his way and Hannes must prepare to decamp. As time passed and his father failed to turn up, the preparations to leave changed more and more into priming everyone for a collective rescue action. His father would come not only for Hannes himself but also for his friends, whom he had trusted and confided in, and his father had therefore secretly selected to be set free as well. Meanwhile, they must all be ready to obey Neubauer’s commands. The order to make a break for it might come at any time and then they would move into a safe place which had been set up for them inside the mountain. What mountain is that? Zavlacky asked dubiously. What kind of warrior are you? Hannes replied, sounding just as dubious, and his little smile, playing in the ever-upturned corners of his mouth, hinted at the ongoing planning for the top-secret rescue action but also that it was all kept inside the ball of Hannes’s head, which was sealed like a bank vault, and that he would give nothing away unless he had decided in good time that the person he told was worthy. Though not even the normally self-contained Neubauer could always manage to keep himself under control. One day, when their teacher, Mr Hackl, had spoken with his usual engagement about all the sacrifices that their proud soldiery made while on the front, Hannes gathered some of his most trusted companions around him in the furthest corner of the area fenced in with steel netting that passed for their ‘schoolyard’, and showed them his scars. Most of them had already noticed the marks on his body and wondered. From a distance, they looked a little like rough skin or spots of dirt. But now they were allowed to observe him close up and realised that the blemishes were clearly the kind of scars that only a real fighter would sustain. Hannes showed off a deep gash left in one of his armpits once the doctors had cut out what he described as a lump. What such a lump could be no one quite knew, but Miseryguts actually probed the hollow with his finger and could confirm that there would have been room for an egg inside it. And everywhere on Hannes’s body, on his shins, under one elbow and across both his thighs, long scars ran like narrow winding ribbons or blood vessels. On his back and the back of his head, the healed patches looked more like the pits after chickenpox but Hannes insisted that these were burns from the time he had almost fallen backwards into a cauldron full of boiling tar. The top of his head was marked by scars from long slashes and there was a skin ridge down the side of his neck which he told them was due to a sliver of glass that his father had surgically removed using a kitchen knife and a cloth soaked in alcohol as the only anaesthetic, a necessary operation because if the piece of glass had been left it might have started to move around inside his body, maybe get all
the way to the heart;