Murderer!
All those present catch their breath, awed by her recklessness. A moment passes. Then Klein starts laughing hysterically. She folds herself double, squirms, kneels and, with her hands raised in supplication, entreats the doctor … please, please … and, before Jekelius has had time to react, the other girls start laughing, too. Neither doctor says anything at first. Then, Jekelius orders the two nurses to hold the newly submissive Gertrude Klein steadily and asks Doctor Jokl to give him the scissors. Klein tries to pull free but Jekelius has already grabbed a bunch of hair at the back of her head and started to cut. Klein shrieks like a stuck pig and her three companions burst into tears. Jekelius drops the scissors to the floor as if struck with weariness and tells Jokl to carry on. Don’t leave a single hair on their heads, he says, then turns away and leaves the room. The last they see of him is his back in his doctor’s white coat. The shorn Gertrude Klein carries on screaming as if she could make floors and walls – indeed, the entire building – tumble down on top of him.
*
Reflections on Monstrosities Members of the clinical staff were given a gratuity for Christmas that year, a bonus on their wages. The size of the sum was between one and two hundred Reichsmark depending on grade; Anna Katschenka received one hundred and fifty marks. During a brief ceremony, Jekelius had explained that the money should not only be regarded as compensation for their testing, occasionally painful work, but also as recognition of the care and devotion to duty shown by the institution’s employees as they go about a task that was of crucial importance to the Reich. You are fighting alongside the men at the front, he told them. Thanks to your steadfast fight, the sick and unfit for life are made to retreat and make room for the sound of mind and body. He did not need to add that the gratuity amounted to an insurance premium: the authorities needed to make sure of their loyalty and silence. It was only too obvious. To Anna Katschenka, for one, speaking about her work to outsiders was unthinkable. Her mother wouldn’t have endured hearing about any of it and her father would have found it incomprehensible. Twenty years after qualifying as a nurse, Anna Katschenka still stayed with her parents in the old Fendigasse flat, where she slept in her girlhood room. Her mother never left the flat so Anna or her father had to cope with day-to-day business in the world outside. Father and daughter had entered into an unspoken treaty: at any cost, her mother must be protected from anything that might distress or offend her. This pact was especially critical now, when Otto, Anna’s brother, had been called up and sent eastwards as part of the big offensive against the Soviets. He was in the military engineering services and had so far seen little of the fighting, or so he had said in one of his rare letters to his family. On the other hand, his unit had been on the move most of the time, often in armoured vehicles but sometimes on foot. The only roads were forestry tracks. One day, he wrote, they had been forced to do a thirty-kilometre-long march with full load. After Otto’s call-up, his father spent more and more of his time by the radio in the sitting room. It was always on, though at low volume so that Otto’s mother wouldn’t pick up any troubling news. As if to signal his lack of interest, he mimicked ‘just happened to pass’ by standing near the radio and never sitting down on the nearby armchair to listen. He could stand there for hours with an unvarying, awkward smile on his face that just made him look anxious and tense. He and his wife never spoke about their son or about the war or anything that might be at all upsetting. The quiet mumbling of the radio in the sitting room reported new German advances. One morning in December 1941, it announced that German forward units had reached a line just thirty kilometres short of Moscow. During the month of December, the temperature in the interior of Russia never went above minus thirty degrees centigrade. Anna Katschenka imagined her brother ploughing steadfastly through the Russian snowdrifts, as if swimming through tall, rolling waves, but he sometimes disappeared and dissolved, encapsulated in snow and ice. Even so, from time to time, the ice melted, and all that they were forbidden to talk about, or that they forbade themselves to mention, penetrated the surface. At night, she could wake up feeling that her mind was terribly crowded. She saw images of ill-proportioned and malformed children, who jostled for her attention, saw their distorted limbs and huge, helpless eyes as they filled her head with their noises, the crazy babble of high fever or the heart-breaking, helpless songs they sang as if begging to be let out. Because they were all inside her, she had no face that could be turned away from them. She also had no hands to hide the face that she didn’t have. She had no defences against these moronic, monstrous children who pushed and chafed and fed on her, and she knew that if she made the slightest attempt to rid herself of them, the crowding and painful chafing would only grow worse. And so the monster children merged with the terrible devastation of the war. She carried it all inside her, aware of a guilt that couldn’t be redressed just as it couldn’t be dismissed, and nothing ever changed because nothing must be allowed to change. At such moments, she felt just as young Anna had felt when blood was flowing out of her: as if she was falling and, as she fell, she or her surroundings acquired a kind of weightlessness. Because she was weightless, the fall itself seemed to lack momentum. She was her own fall. Weightless, she fell day after day – for weeks, months and years – but didn’t have a sensation of time either since time, like her falling, had neither space nor direction.
*
A Flash of Lightning from a Clear Sky Nurse Kleinschmittger stands by the linen cupboard. She pretends to fold and sort face-cloths and towels. Seemingly, we’ll have to manage without your doctor for quite some time ahead, she says and her face looks strenuously buttoned up as if to prevent a sour smile from reaching her lips. Anna Katschenka doesn’t move, just turns Nurse Kleinschmittger’s word your over in her mind. Your Doctor Jekelius. He has received his military call-up papers, she says. Yes, Nurse Kleinschmittger replies, it was like a flash of lightning from a clear sky for us all. In an instant, Katschenka makes a quite instinctive decision. By not revealing with the slightest word or movement what she thinks or feels, she is refusing to give any part of him away to anyone else. She will not even offer them her own consternation at the news that he has left. But the truth is that, from then on, an empty hollow yawns inside her. Later, she will speculate that this void is at least one of the reasons why she is seen to receive the news so impassively. From then on, she has not the faintest idea why she is in this institution, a potentially fatal thought that must be repressed, come what may. It did indeed take her several days to find out what had really happened, apart from the basic fact that Jekelius has been called up, that is. And it would take several weeks before she learnt the full story of the four runaway girls from Edna Block, one of the head-office typists. The mother of one of the girls had lodged a complaint against Jekelius and Jokl for shearing her hair, claiming that the two doctors had exceeded their rights to order and administer physical punishments and, according to Block, several members of staff, notably Doctor Krenek, felt strongly that a case should be brought against Jekelius so that a court could establish once and for all what kind of principles applied to the institution’s work. What’s the use of a young girl without hair on her head? Edna Block demanded to know, rhetorically of course. Who would ever employ girls looking like that? And surely there is no hope of them ever marrying? Or taking up positions in domestic service. Which is what everyone is going on about, is that not so? It’s not in the end about how the girls have been behaving, or what they might have been guilty of, but if they can cope with the tasks set for them once we’ve let them out. Miss Block types away with restrained energy and, behind her quivering eyelashes, her eyes fill with tears. Anna Katschenka remembers her day away with Doctor Jekelius, when he spoke of Miss Block as a safe haven. Miss Edna would go through fire and water for me, he had said and jealousy had flapped its black wings inside Katschenka. She knew that Block, on behalf of Jekelius and the other doctors, handled the notifications to the Berlin committee. She also sorted and p
rioritised the documents that the clinic received in return. Perhaps it was one of these forms she was working on as she wound a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter and whispered confidingly across the roller: one might have thought there were other things to make a fuss about in this clinic than a few delinquent girls having their heads shaved, right? Don’t you agree, Sister Anna? And the doctor isn’t even here to defend himself!
*
In the Field of War There are ways to fend off adversity or personal loss. But how to fend off slander? Malicious words get under your skin and stay there like invisible wounds, oozing blood long after the hurt has been inflicted but inadmissible because, if you admit to bleeding, the inference is that the blow hit home (Your doctor, Sister Katschenka!). During the months that went by after Doctor Jekelius’s departure, she learns just how feeble and fragile her authority is. Nurse Kleinschmittger increasingly looks away impatiently when Anna asks her to do something and Hilde Mayer waddles past looking indifferent, hiding behind her large, self-absorbed smile. That smile of hers signifies a hold on certain higher insights of a nature that does not permit her to utter a single word of what she knows, but should she do so, her utterances would be such that, at a stroke, entire careers would instantly crumble to dust. So, despite the fact that no one knows anything for certain, the talk does incessant rounds in corridors and sluice rooms. About Jekelius. About how, already in the autumn, the very highest authority had expressed displeasure with his approach to managing the tasks demanded by his post, and how his use of a staff car for his trips has been cancelled and even expenses that have already been authorised are now rechecked and gone over with a magnifying glass. Anna Katschenka feels ashamed. So, it might be that he wasn’t the man we, or at least some of us, thought he was, she suddenly hears Hilde Mayer say from inside her greater understanding of things and, of course, with address to Anna. Possibly a swindler, or what? In pavilion 17, the boy called Pelikan stumbles or shuffles past on his twisted, inward-rotated legs. He presses his face against a window to watch two asylum patients in grey institutional clothes try to push a cart loaded with dirty laundry along a path lined by glacial ice ridges and long, murky snowdrifts, and she thinks of her brother Otto, the swimmer, who just in the same way struggles, striking out with both arms, to cross one wall of snow after another to reach Moscow. They don’t know their luck, she thinks as she, too, watches the two miserable laundry labourers who have, by going mad, found asylum and so been excused from having to fight for their country and their dignity. The Pelikan lad stands next to her with his face so close up against the window that his face is outlined in the condensation on the glass. Crossly, she grabs at his twitching arm and hauls him back into the day room, but Pelikan whimpers and resists, then tries to reach around her with his other arm, which she throws to the side again and again as if it were a lifeless object,
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