Pototschnik, Rusch, Wild –
You have visitooors …!
And so Pototschnik stood up and left; next, Rusch and Wild: tight boys’ backs, stiff with hope. Every time the door closed after them, Adrian told himself that he would never behave as soppily just because his name was called. But why sit there and hope for something that would never happen and, anyway, if, against all reason, it ever did, what good would it do? You thought all this if your special moment didn’t arrive. Perhaps Hannes Neubauer thought just the same. Or else, perhaps he thought about nothing of the sort: his special moment was of course due in another world, another time than the present. But then, one day, the wondrous, unimaginable thing happened: the door opened, Nurse Mutsch popped her head in and smiled:
Zie-eegler …! Visi-tooor …!
Adrian couldn’t believe his ears. Seemingly, Nurse Mutsch didn’t quite believe it either because when he came forward on trembling legs and bowed to get underneath the nurse’s arm that held the door open, she glanced at him with an expression of such deep distrust that he at first thought that the visitor was some person from an authority that had come to take him away to some even worse place. But it was his mother. She wore the same tatty, collarless coat as usual when she went visiting and stood squashed into a corner at the far end of the corridor. She had put on lipstick and when she smiled, her lips expanded into a big, bright red flower. But she wasn’t looking at him when she smiled but at Mrs Rohrbach who was just passing, sagging under the armful of folders carried pressed against her chest. Mrs Rohrbach returned the smile with an expression indicating that she had little time for that kind of thing. And: thank you, don’t worry, it’s alright, alright, not to worry, Mrs Rohrbach said to Adrian’s mother, who had leapt to her feet to try to open the door for the busy lady. By then Mrs Rohrbach had smartly freed up an arm and produced a key, and now the door opened and then slammed behind her without any assistance from Adrian’s well-meaning mother, who was left standing with hanging arms and pathetic flower-lips. This was the first time in four years that mother and son had been in the same room but Adrian’s mother seemed hardly to see him or, if she did, had no time for what she saw. She behaved as if her made-up lips and her coat added up to a kind of disguise which might be exposed for what it was at any moment, so she had to say as much as she could before it was too late. Her first subject was Adrian’s father, who had been sacked from his job at the locomotive factory after giving in to the temptation of sharing a bottle with a mate and who probably had to join the army unless there was some civil defence work to be done. Next, she spoke about Laura, whom she had managed to contact. Laura was in good hands but she had heard nothing about Helmut despite having been told that he was to be moved here, to Spiegelgrund, but now someone called Doctor Krenek has informed her that they have no record at all of a boy of that name and, she asked, has Adrian seen his brother or heard something about him? At this point, something thick and warm wells up inside Mrs Dobrosch, who can’t keep it down and then her entire face bursts into tears. Actually bursts. Like a stone, perhaps, that cracks from inside. And his mother stands there, helpless, her face broken to pieces and everything just pours out. She doesn’t even hide the mess in her hands. And inside Adrian, something changes. He wouldn’t have thought it possible but now he is ashamed of his mother. And, worse: a mute, quite useless rage grows inside him. How can he go on to tell her what he really wanted her to know? How can he speak about this institution where they kill children and the doctors choose which children are to die next and show it by popping a sweet into their mouths? And the chosen ones are taken to a pavilion where they are injected with poison or maybe get poison in their food and, when they are dead, their corpses are dumped into a body-cart with tall wheels and a green, arched roof which is pulled by Steinhof patients in grey asylum suits who perhaps don’t even know what a terrible load they are hauling along. But how can he speak such things to her drained and grief-stricken face that weeps for a child who is nowhere to be found? Adrian is reduced to helplessness and, when she opens her arms and takes a step forward to hug him, he feels even more helpless. The embrace she seems to offer him is no more than a pair of quivering arms and more sobbing. His mother looks to him for comforting, not the other way round. And her coat smells badly of damp and engrained dirt. She can sense how stiff he is and that he can’t help becoming still more unyielding, which of course makes her cry even more. Then, at last, Nurse Mutsch approaches with a look of uneasy concern on her face, places an experienced and protective hand on the back of his neck, leads him away with firm, determined movements and deposits him in the day room where a wild fight has just broken out. Nurse Mutsch stands in the doorway and roars you will stop this row at once, remember the visitors are still here! Everyone obeys until the door closes again. Finally, Pototschnik stands in the middle of the room with his arm triumphantly raised. He lowers it slowly, opens his fist one finger at a time and shows the empty bullet casing in his palm and they all scream,
… I want it I want it I want it …
Hannes Neubauer stands by himself. No visitor today either. He desperately wants that cartridge and Pototschnik sees it in his face. It’s a real Mauser cartridge, Pototschnik says. From an automatic pistol. And he comes closer, holding out his broad palm where the cartridge rests as if on a tray with its sharp end pointing straight at Hannes’s face and then he says:
Do you know why your mum never comes to see you, Hannes?
It’s because your mum is a whore, Hannes, a whore whore whore …
A WHORE! WHORE! WHORE! everyone in the room screams, Adrian is the loudest of the lot. His face goes red with the sheer thrill of saying a word like that out loud. Then Pototschnik suddenly turns and gives Jockerl the cartridge.
You take it, he says,
(and then, with his back turned to Hannes)
I don’t want it anyway.
*
A Secret Weapon It is late in the autumn now. To stand in for Nurse Demeter, who is on sick leave with a hurt ankle, Mrs Lauritz has been moved to their section. Mrs Lauritz is older than Mutsch and Demeter, and her face looks stitched together, like a patchwork. One part of her face might smile while another part looks scared or tense. But Mrs Lauritz’s body is slender and energetic, and it follows that she is very keen on outdoor activities. From the moment she arrives, they are to keep their rucksacks packed and always have at least one change of dry clothing ready. If, against all her plans, the weather really is so bad there can be no talk of open-air exercises, she makes them sit in the day room engaged in what she and Mrs Krämer call kit cleaning, which means that you take the laces out of your shoes, shine them and put the laces back, and keep repeating the task until Mrs Krämer feels you have spent enough effort on it. Adrian Ziegler is pleased to have these things to do because he has hidden the cartridge at the bottom of his rucksack. It’s of course the one Pototschnik gave Jockerl. Adrian has stolen it but nobody knows about the theft. Jockerl doesn’t. Obviously, Pototschnik doesn’t either. Jockerl is surely content to think the cartridge is still with the other worthless precious things he has collected and hidden in a space behind the drawer in his bedside table. Jockerl never pulls out the drawer to check his treasure because he knows that it would give away what he keeps there. That wouldn’t do, because nobody in pavilion 9 is allowed any treasures. Everyone remembers what happened to Rudolf Ortner. The first thing Rudolf did when he arrived in this place was to spread out his shell collection on a table in the day room: lots of differently shaped mussel shells that were beautifully ridged on the outside and bluish-white inside, or else coated in shimmering mother-of-pearl. Nurse Mutsch came along to admire it, too. When she’d had enough of the display, she swept all the shells onto the floor and trampled on them. The shells were crushed to fragments under her cork heels. In this section you can forget about personal belongings. Adrian Ziegler could only too easily imagine her face lighting up in a cold smile the moment she caught Pototschnik out for secr
eting real ammunition in some hidey-hole. Which was of course why Pototschnik had handed over the actual storing of it to Jockerl. Power-mad as Pototschnik might be, he was also a cautious, not to say cowardly operator who took no unnecessary chances. But they had failed to take Ziegler into account even though it’s well enough known that tinkers can’t resist anything that gleams and glitters. One night, said tinker slipped out of bed, gently eased the drawer in Jockerl’s bedside table out of its seating, pulled the cartridge out and then sat with it in his hand, twisting and turning it for several hours. Being up and about at night is risky because now and then the duty nurse comes past to check the boys through the peephole in the door. And the night-light is treacherous. It seems feeble but is in fact very revealing. So Adrian carefully bundles up his coverlet under the blanket to make it look as if it covered a sleeping body and sits on the floor in a place he knows is safe because the bed-ends block the sightline from the door. He sits there night after night, grinding the point of the cartridge against the heel of his boots. Of course, in itself the cartridge is useless, but just to hold it gives him an intoxicating sense of space and freedom, of being in control of his life, and reminds him of what Hannes feels when he guards the entrance to the Mountain. In these moments, they can both say: I know where you are but you know next to nothing about where I am and what I am doing. Sometimes, Adrian replaces the secret weapon in the drawer, sometimes not. If not, he sleeps, coolly holding the cartridge in his hand, even up to the time when Mrs Rohrbach comes along with her clapper to wake them up. One day, he goes as far as to hold the cartridge in his fist and say to triumphantly to Jockerl:
This is the last night you see me lying here,
you had better believe me, you little shit
(everyone calls Jockerl ‘little shit’);
and Jockerl looks in terror between Adrian’s clenched fist to his face, worn by lack of sleep, and doesn’t have a clue what kind of secret weapon Adrian has got hold of, is clueless about everything.
And the days pass, and the daylight takes longer and longer to arrive in the mornings and disappears ever earlier in the evenings. The rain that falls during the night collects in deep puddles on the gravelled paths between the pavilions and the puddles are still brimming when the morning comes. The morning wind sweeps through the tops of the trees in the hospital park, carrying the sour smell of damp stone dust from the old quarry. The boys in pavilion 9 have lined up, rucksacks on their backs, for a new day excursion. They shiver in the cold. This time, Adrian Ziegler has brought his weapon, stuffed deep in his rucksack, concealed like a riddle or a treasure trove or perhaps just something that sets him apart from the others and gives him a glimpse of colour in the greyness. This morning, it seems to Adrian that they are not so much walking as rising: ever higher towards the sky that slowly becomes brighter and clearer as the sun climbs up behind Gallitzinberg, like a sharp needle of glass. Level with the fire station, a horse-chestnut tree leans over the asylum wall, its leaves burning beautifully brown and yellow when the sunbeams strike them; a mighty, dangerous tree that, when the winds stirs its branches, leisurely scatters scores of small, angrily clattering chestnuts all over the place. The hard little fruits hit the boys on the path, too, and suddenly someone calls out about the chestnuts that are hitting his head. Before Mrs Lauritz has had a chance to respond, the boys have run off in every direction. Normally, no one would of course have dared to break the rules quite so flagrantly but Mrs Lauritz is new and not properly initiated into the strict routines introduced by Nurse Demeter and Nurse Mutsch, so even though Lauritz blows on her whistle … tweet-tweet-tweet! … no one takes any notice and she has to run around herself to try to sort out the boys, who are chasing chestnuts on the path. As ever, Jockerl is the first to spot imminent danger and self-sacrificingly runs up to tug at Mrs Lauritz’s sleeve:
It was me, Mrs Lauritz, it was me who …!
But Mrs Lauritz will not be diverted. She feels sure that she has seen ‘with her own eyes’ who is guilty, and acts before Pototschnik has had time to get out of the way. She grabs at the cauliflower head, gets hold of an ear and twists until the boy’s entire body is dangling from her hard, determined thumb-grip.
So far, it is all part of the traffic of dormitories and closed day rooms, a straightforward routine move of the kind that happens many times daily. But as Mrs Lauritz gets on with chastising Pototschnik, an older woman carrying a rough string bag full of shopping comes walking along on the other side of the road. When she catches sight of Lauritz with Pototschnik, who is screaming his head off, she puts her bag down and moves across the road while waving her arms in the air and shouting:
You leave that child alone! Have you lost what sense you ever had, woman,
going for a poor helpless child like that …!
Mrs Lauritz still holds on to the grimacing Pototschnik while she tries to get to terms with this utterly baffling situation: a complete stranger who dares to challenge her authority! But the woman won’t back off. She would like to make it clear that her husband is personally acquainted with the institution’s director, and Mrs Child-Molester had better state her name and employee grade so the husband can make sure that she is appropriately reprimanded. By now, many more people are joining in. Adrian notices that two boys are coming towards them. They look like brothers. The younger one pushes a bicycle and the older one walks at his side, looking a little doubtful. By now, Mrs Lauritz has clearly scented a potential threat because she goes bright red in the face, puffs her chest out like a bird and says:
I bring these children up in the spirit that my Führer has chosen and commanded!
Later, Adrian often speculates about what would have happened if he had legged it there and then. He was carrying enough for his short-term needs in his rucksack: dry clothes, a thermos of hot tea and the unopened packed meal that had been handed out that morning. And he had the cartridge, his secret weapon, as well. Still, he probably wouldn’t have got away with it. The road was long and straight, and all around were houses on sites surrounded by tall fences and walls. He wouldn’t have been able to run very far with his heavy pack before Lauritz or Krämer would have been snapping at his heels. Add to that the fact that Mrs Lauritz was furious. Still red-faced, she ordered her charges to turn round and start walking, leading the march at an exhausting pace. But Pototschnik was even more upset. As soon as Mrs Lauritz had turned her back, he jumped on Jockerl and stage-whispered so loudly that everyone, even those well away, could hear what he said: when we get back I’ll shoot your head off, you little shit. Only this time, Mrs Lauritz was on the alert and hit Pototschnik with her walking stick until, temporarily cowed, he made himself small and took his place in the line.
*
Jockerl’s Punishment The news about the incident must have travelled ahead of them because, when they got back, Doctor Krenek stood waiting at the door to pavilion 9. They were ordered to go straight to the day room without hanging up their outdoor clothes and stand at Habt-Acht – to attention – by their seats while Krenek lectured them on the subject of discipline and, more specifically, how they, whenever they were outside the walls of the institution, were to behave with the utmost propriety and, above all, never speak to any strangers. The fact was, of course, that none of them had addressed any strangers, or vice versa. It was their Erzieher, Mrs Lauritz, who had had words with that lady. But Doctor Krenek didn’t waste time on the finer points and, anyway, no one protested. Mrs Rohrbach stood at his side with the register open and read out their names. As soon as yours was called out, you had to step forward and empty the contents of your pockets for Doctor Krenek to inspect. He was patently satisfied when the odd innocent chestnut landed in front of him, or a pretty stone or bottle cap, but then it was Jockerl’s turn and, as Jockerl bent forward to show his empty pockets, Pototschnik started shouting in his familiar loud, shrill voice:
Hand back the cartridge you stole!
Jockerl showed no sign of hearing what Pototschnik was shoutin
g. He stood still, as if glued to the floor, not moving a finger until Krenek irritably shoved him forward and they could all see how Jockerl’s legs were shaking. Had he already checked his secret bedside store? Did he know that the cartridge had gone? Did he guess who had stolen it? The next name was called and Jockerl returned to his place. Pototschnik turned round to glance murderously at him. Jockerl said nothing, just stared straight ahead. And then, what they had all been half-expecting happened: a bubbling sound that fused into a faint but sustained trickle while the sweet, warm smell of urine filled the air. Mrs Lauritz fixed her stern gaze on Jockerl, who tried to hide the dark stain on his crotch by putting one leg across the other. Doctor Krenek had of course also taken in what was going on but only turned to the window, his hands clasped behind his back, and pretended to look outside, presumably in order to spare his poor staff further humiliation. Mrs Lauritz swung into action, walked swiftly along the line of tittering boys, grabbed hold of Jockerl’s arm and marched him out of the room. Doors were pulled open and slammed shut, then came the familiar sound of water splashing against the hard, enamelled sides of the bathtub. Jockerl was to have the water treatment. His screams echoed between the tiled walls but the sounds were unusual, with a tinny echo. Until, suddenly, silence fell, as if someone had put a lid on the tin. After that, nothing happened except that Doctor Krenek, who had stood by the window without moving, suddenly cleared his throat and walked out. A little later, Mrs Lauritz entered. Something had made the stitching that held the bits of her face together come apart but she didn’t say anything, just sat down to keep an eye on them as if nothing else had happened. Because nobody had told them anything different, they all kept standing. Dusk darkened the room until they could barely make each other out, and Mrs Lauritz even less. Adrian was preoccupied with his rucksack and the best way to get rid of the cartridge. Finally, he mustered his courage and asked to be allowed to go to the toilet. Mrs Lauritz shuddered as if her deep thoughts had been shattered and, perhaps because she wanted to avoid any more painful incidents, she unlocked the door, told him to go on his own and knock when he wanted to come back in. Then she closed the door and left Adrian alone in the long corridor, so dark by then that all he could make out was the clock hanging from the ceiling, but only its blank face and not its hands. He heard a rhythmic drip from the sink where the tap must have been carelessly turned off. Then he caught sight of Jockerl standing in the cocoon of sodden towels Mrs Lauritz and the nurses had wrapped around him. Jockerl looked so peculiar, frail and tense at the same time. Long, shivery shakes ran from his thin legs up to his neck, extended like a hungry bird’s. He seemed frozen to the floor. His head, hanging like a stone suspended from his angled body, looked different, no longer sad but transformed into that of a very old man whose skin has crumpled into stiff folds around his nose and mouth and whose unseeing eyes are hidden by half-closed eyelids. At first, Adrian thought Jockerl might be dead already but somehow still upright. Once he had thought that, another idea took over. Perhaps there was sly cunning, almost hatred lurking behind that rigid stare. Adrian slowly went over to the rucksacks that they had dumped in the corner, found his own and took the cartridge out. Then he gave way to a sudden impulse. The remorse for what he did would not give him any peace for the rest of his life. He bent close to Jockerl’s shivering, old man’s face, held the cartridge only a few centimetres from those dead, yet cold and condescending eyes and said:
The Chosen Ones Page 20