… and someone’s been up there, you take my word.
Before he had time to react, the door was pulled open and in the dark above him torchlight sliced the dust-laden air, seemingly at random, into rhomboid shapes full of lit, whirling specks. He couldn’t be sure where he was lying in relation to the jerky beam of light, or if he had been heard, but was aware that he had to stay by the wall. He pulled his arms and legs as close as possible to his body, and waited. A bit away from the sharp-edged light, another male voice called out but it was so harsh and deep it wasn’t possible to separate it from the grating noise made by an iron blade against stone. The caretaker or whoever it was who held the unsteady torch shouted back that he had to lock up first and then, from nearby, came the sounds of chains rattling and a lock clicking. Someone tugged vigorously at the door. The beam of the torch slid upwards as if by its own volition, reached the roof, and then became absorbed into the darkness at the same time as the footsteps on the stairs grew more distant. Adrian stayed lying with his face to the wall as if he was what he had pretended to be: a lifeless object that someone had dumped there. Then he sensed the chilly stickiness between his thighs. He had peed himself. Like Jockerl. He wasn’t the slightest bit tougher. He and Uncle Ferenc had picked up a bird once during one of the summers they had spent together herding cattle down on the floodplain by the Hubertusdamm. The bird had been lying on the mucky grass and looked squashed, as if someone had stood on it. The wing that wasn’t broken was flapping pointlessly in the air. When he held it, about to put it under his shirt, he felt the bird’s heart tapping lightly against the palm of his hand. The sun had hung so low over the river its light was almost white. Now, too, he saw the whiteness. There had been an alcove where they stacked the logs, between the cooker and the sooty wall in the kitchen in the Simmering Hauptstrasse flat. Ferenc advised him to put the bird there, and he had, then settled down next to the bird to keep an eye on it. He didn’t know what kind it was. Its plumage was speckled, its beak long and grey, and the downy feathers under its broken wing were brilliantly white. He had never before felt such a deep and terrible longing to get back to something or somewhere as he did now, when he remembered that sheltered place between the cooker and the soot-stained wall. When his mother had fired the cooker up, it was warm and he could lie there without being seen by anyone. Slowly, he would open the hand that held the trembling bird while, close by, Helmut was asleep on the floor, his sweaty hair sticking to his forehead, and their mother was getting ready to go to work. Then he’d hear her heels on the stairs and the door slam followed by the lighter sound of her feet on the flagged yard as she almost ran across it. The 71 tram came and went on wheels that rattled over the gaps in the rails. He opened his eyes and saw that the dawn light was already strong enough to pick out the shapes of the roof beams in the dark above him. When he made his arms relax their grip on his body, cold cut him like many knives. He breathed on his fingers and the back of his hands until he could move them normally before going to check the wooden door and actually see what he already knew had happened. They had locked him in. The padlock stuck through the hasp had been reinforced with a chain that had been threaded through the iron grid on both sides of the door. He pressed both palms against the upper part of the door. It swung a little on its worn hinges but didn’t shift more than perhaps a centimetre. Pushing his finger between the bars, he could just touch the lock with his fingertips. There was only one thing he could do: dig the hasp out of the warped old wood of the door frame. Sooner or later, it must give way. He gripped the cartridge between thumb and index finger, pushed it out between the bars and began to dig into the wood with its tip. His fingers were soon bleeding again. Then his hand contracted with cramps and he had to massage it, and warm it between his thighs before setting to work again. The light had moved from one end of the attic room to the other when he heard the thuds of the street door open and close several times, and shouts between people who came and went, their shouting multiplied by the echo in the stairwell. One of the voices was the caretaker’s, he felt sure of that, and he quickly backed away to be close to the wall. Too soon, darkness fell again but he had managed to gouge a big pile of woodchips from the door and made it possible to jiggle the hasp about. After a few more hours, it was completely loose. The padlock went with it and the door opened a little but was stopped by the chain that became taut when he tried to push his body through the crack between the frame and the door. The gap widened higher towards the top because the chain had been placed quite low down so, by clinging to the grille, and climbing up it, he succeeded first in getting an arm out, then hauling his body through the gap. By then, he was so exhausted by cold and hunger that he no longer had the strength to stay upright as he tackled the abyss of the stairwell. He crawled backwards down the stairs instead, negotiating one step at a time and holding on to the rail. The white-limed wall looked adrift in dark. The doors to the flats were all locked. No voices, not a sound came from behind them. By the time he had reached the bottom of the stairs, any guiding light from above had disappeared. He fumbled his way to the street door, which thankfully could be opened from the inside, and entered a world of shadows. There was no sky up there. Only a faint leaden sheen reached the street. Adrian kept close to the walls as if afraid that the pavement would give way in front of him if he walked too far out. Now and then, he heard the quiet swishing sound of tyres against cobbles but there would always be some time before he could see the dancing phosphorus glow from the cyclist’s lamp. He looked for lost coins in the telephone boxes but the small metal bowls for returned change were always smooth and empty. Actually, it was meaningless to look for money because food was only available in exchange for coupons and where would he get any coupons without a fixed address? And even if he had coupons and money to pay with, who would give him anything to eat? All you needed to realise that he didn’t belong to anything like a respectable family was a quick look at his face and his clothes. Slowly, the sky grew lighter and the buildings once more emerged from the murk with their closely spaced windows and strictly ordered patterns of panes. He was lying curled up in one of the telephone booths when a uniformed policeman spotted him and dragged him outside. Several passers-by, looking pale and upset, stood about on the pavement. No one stepped forward to kick or hit him. One man actually brought a blanket and spread it over him. The man wore an armband and a lamp on his forehead. He put his hand on Adrian’s shoulder and said in a kind voice that he was to lie still and wait. In the end, an ambulance arrived and he was stretchered into it. The sunlight filtering in through the opaque windows of the ambulance told him that they were on their way up the mountain but, when they stopped, he realised that they had pulled up outside the real hospital, the Wilhelminenspital. He was allowed to spend the rest of the day there, in a bed of his own. A nurse brought him a glass of milk and asked if he was hungry. Then a doctor, a proper doctor, examined him. When Adrian told him where he came from and what he had done, the doctor turned to the nurse and said:
He’ll be staying with us for today. Let’s wait before we inform the institution up the road about his whereabouts.
Then they took him to a large ward where several children were bedded down and put him in a bed, too. The sheets smelled clean and fresh and Adrian fell asleep there and then, an untroubled sleep as if the world no longer existed. The next morning, they came for him and took him back to Spiegelgrund.
*
The Bunker Naively, he had imagined that his escape attempt would lead to an inquisition session conducted by Mutsch or Rohrbach or one of his other usual tormentors. He was mistaken. Instead, after he had showered, they took him straight to the punishment block in pavilion 11, down into the basement, which seemed to consist mostly of narrow corridors criss-crossed by bulky tin pipes that gave off burping or gurgling noises. One of the corridors ended with a wide iron door closed by massive bolts. His male nurse escort pulled the bolts back and pushed him into a large room, as low-ceilinged as the corridor an
d lit only by an unshaded bulb in a wall socket. This was the Bunker. And there they all were: seated on one of the benches fixed to the wall he saw the master escapist himself, Zavlacky, next to Peter Schaubach (another Ybbs runaway) and, naturally, Miseryguts, whose head was sagging between his shoulders. None of them seemed particularly surprised to see Adrian turn up. Miseryguts was the only one who spoke but only to state the fact that it was totally insane to run away as Adrian had, in the middle of the night without food or water or warm clothes. No further comments were made. As Adrian would put it later, once you got as far as the Bunker, you were on your own, no one gave a damn and all bridges were burnt – jeer der duchbrennt muss sich um sich selbst kümmern. Even so, being a Bunker detainee brought a certain status. Once you had done time there, no one would try to get the better of you or make fun of you. Evening came. Two male nurses – or were they guards now? – carried a cauldron of soup downstairs. Because all the others had their own bowls, he had to be content with two slices of the dry rye bread that was handed out with the soup. No one offered to share their soup with him. Once the meal was cleared away, the guards returned to take them to their cells on the floor above. Adrian’s cell looked exactly like the lock-up one in his ‘old’ pavilion, with the one difference that here, two benches were fixed to the wall, not just one. When he realised that the other bench had no one assigned to it, it also became clear that his ‘treatment’ was not yet complete and, once that had dawned on him, he of course couldn’t sleep. He spent most of the night speculating about what they would do to punish him. In the morning, he could hear the guards walk along the corridor, unlocking the door to the dormitory where the other boys stayed, then the sounds as they got going, emptying their swollen bladders noisily into the pans, then running water into the basins. His cell remained locked. By mid-morning, they finally came. Doctor Gross and, after him, two nurses. Both ex-asylum nurses, that was easy to see: the same solid build as Nurse Mutsch and the same flat, gormless features. Adrian expected Doctor Gross to acknowledge him, not exactly with a greeting but perhaps with some sign that he had seen Adrian before. But Gross seemed not to recognise him and didn’t address him at all. The older of the two nurses told Adrian to lie on his back. When he didn’t obey instantly, they pushed him down on the bench with practised hands, and then shoved both arms behind the back of his neck. It hurt horribly. The humiliation felt worse still. They manhandled him like an animal. Gross sat down on the edge of the bench and placed the palm of his hand against Adrian’s chest. He held two syringes in his other hand, both about ten centimetres long, but with short needles. Adrian instinctively tried to twist his body away but the quick hands of the nurses had already gripped his kicking legs in vice-like holds while Gross administered the injections, first in one thigh, then in the other. One of the nurses swabbed the needle marks with a cold pad. That was all. What are you doing? Adrian asked pointlessly. Doctor Gross didn’t bother with an answer, just got up and left the room, followed by the nurses. Adrian stayed where he was for a while, feeling slightly nauseous. Nothing else. When he stood to walk over to the half-open door his head spun a little. In the corridor, a little further along, one of the guards stood looking at him with a watchful, worried expression. Because he didn’t want to be on his own in the cell but had no idea where else he would be allowed to go, he turned to walk towards the basement stairs. He saw from the corner of his eye the guard walk into his cell and come back with the institutional clothes he had worn the night before. With the clothes neatly arranged over his arm, the guard followed Adrian down into the basement and along the passage with the oddly slurping pipes. The iron door stood open this time, as if the Bunker welcomed him back. Inside, some twenty boys were waiting with their eyes fixed on him. I hardly felt a thing, he said cheerfully and, to prove it, took a couple of dance steps across the floor. Suddenly, a hideous, icy pain shot up from his legs, all the way into his pelvis. All the blood seemed to be sucked out of his head and he fell, face forward, with both his legs locked in cramp. For a moment, he had a vision of himself as the others must have seen him: his mouth gaping, his eyes staring blindly. He crawled around with his face against the floor, like an insect you have trodden on and almost crushed, and the pain was like nothing he had ever felt before, as if a rusty bolt was being hammered through both his legs to fasten them to the boards. The crowd of boys followed his torment with blank looks on their faces. They had seen it all before. The guard briefly stopped in the doorway before he quietly put down the bundle of clothes on the floor and left, as if he, too, had had more than enough of this spectacle and didn’t care to stay on for more. He barred and locked the door behind him.
*
Among the Punished With time, he would become familiar with the range of treatments that Doctor Gross and the institution’s other medics would apply to suppress any resistance. He had endured the sulphur cure, generally regarded as the worst. For two weeks afterwards, he could barely support his weight on his legs. Even when lying down on a bench, the cramps could start in his thigh muscles and spread into his hips and lower back. It made resting on his back impossible. As soon as he moved even very slightly, the contractions became so intensely painful that the tears streamed from his eyes. Helplessly, he screamed and flailed about, striking the cell walls as if desperately drawing attention to himself so that someone would come and help him. For several days and nights, he fought the pain as if it were a wild animal. He couldn’t sleep but sometimes went into inexplicable semi-comatose states. Finally, the pain died down a little. It didn’t go away but rather seemed to have retreated back down into his legs where it created a numb, unceasing ache. He still couldn’t stand. As soon as he tried to get up, his legs gave in as if made of rubber. Zavlacky and Miseryguts took turns to bring him food in his cell. It’s important that you keep eating, Zavlacky said with the weary assurance of someone who has endured most things. It was strange to see how much both boys had grown. Miseryguts had powerful shoulders, and Zavlacky, who looked more like a weasel than ever, had an Adam’s apple as prominent as a grown man’s. Whenever he raised his new voice, nobody doubted that he was in charge. He could stand, arms akimbo, and say things like has everyone here understood what I’m trying to tell you? or any questions? After a week in the isolation cell, Adrian was allowed to sleep in the same dormitory as the others. The boy who slept in the bed next to his was known as Gangly, and looked weird, with his long legs, skewed shape, strangely shifty eyes and yellowish horses’ teeth that showed when he smiled. Gangly moved just like Jockerl, in a jerky, evasive way as if any time expecting blows and kicks from every direction. Adrian tried to ask Gangly questions when the two of them were on their own together, but Gangly never replied. He only spoke when there were several people around and then compulsively, in long, incoherent orations. Gangly’s idea was apparently to distract his audience away from himself, as if the flow of words formed a wall he could shelter behind. And he kept smiling while he talked: a weird smile with his lips stretched over his teeth and a dull, submissive look in his eyes. Please don’t hit me, his eyes pleaded. All the same, Gangly was the one who made sure that Adrian got up in the morning and helped him wash and dress while the effect of the treatment meant that he couldn’t stand or walk. It was also Gangly whom Adrian had to thank for being taken down into the Bunker each morning and, when the guards unlocked the big door in the evening, it was Gangly who offered his shoulder for Adrian to lean on as he limped up the steep basement staircase. It was odd, the way we were left to our own devices, Adrian said later when he looked back on these days. As if running away once and for all turned us into a special category of boys. No longer ordinary inmates in a care home but not exactly prisoners, either. I never figured out what we were seen as. The male nurses or nursing assistants who looked after us behaved above all like guards, even though they wanted the title ‘Tutor’ – Erzieher. He remembers two of them especially well. Kohler was the one who had followed Adrian down into the basement after the sulphu
r injections and brought his clothes. The name of the other one was Sebastian. Because they had the same rota, they were often talked about as the collective Kohler ’n’ Sebastian. The boys were given daily tasks by Kohler ’n’ Sebastian. One morning, they might be told to scrub the basement stairs, or clean the kitchen and the dormitory, or make the beds. Everyone made their own first, of course, but then Kohler, or perhaps Sebastian, would rip everything up and order them to start again. It could go on for hours. If anyone objected, he had to stand in front of his unmade bed, as if in the stocks, while the others, boys who knew what obedience meant, were excused the rest of the bed-making. Then again, they might be divided into labour crews, and one crew left behind to carry out Bunker chores while the rest marched off to do straightforward jobs like ditch-digging, or sawing and stacking logs. It was usually Zavlacky who decided who belonged to which group and, for as long as he did it, the allocation of jobs went smoothly and without any conflicts. Adrian would later recall an occasion when one of their so-called tutors (someone who was neither Kohler nor Sebastian) had turned up in the Bunker to row them for not cleaning tools and returning them in good order to the shed, and then Zavlacky had stepped forward as if to physically defend his group. He went with the man to the tool shed and came back an hour or so later, looking as calm as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. No punishments were meted out either. In their previous pavilion, the situation would have been unthinkable from beginning to end because justice there bore no immediate relationship to the offence, but was no more than a device for maintaining a pre-determined, abstract order. Why this approach to discipline did not apply in the Bunker, Adrian never understood. Unless the fact that they were in the Bunker at all was seen as punishment enough.
The Chosen Ones Page 22