for heaven’s sake stop clinging on me all the time.
In the dayroom, the tinkling piano-playing stops and the child sitting at the piano, it’s that Felix Keuschnig, turns to stare at her with his mouth hanging slackly open. Nurse Hedwig, who sits on a chair next to Felix, looks at her with her wide-eyed, clear gaze but all Hedwig can see is the shame that Anna tries not to show and she thinks,
if you hear this, dear Doctor, please come back, just come, come, come.
Then it is suddenly February and Anna Katschenka cuts across the Gürtel to catch the number 6 tram at the Westbahnhof stop. At the back of the last carriage, she stands face to face with Edna Block, the secretary, who tries to hide behind her handbag when she spots Sister Anna. But there are no free seats in the front of the bus and Anna has no choice but to stand at the rear. And then she sees that Edna Block is crying behind her propped-up handbag. The passengers on seats nearby stare intently ahead or out of the windows, obviously disconcerted by this stranger in tears.
Sister Katschenka, you don’t know this. I’ve only just heard: Doctor Jekelius has been wounded in the field, he is paralysed. He’s in a military hospital and perhaps he’ll never be able to move again.
And the two windowpanes seem to join into one and she is back in pavilion 17, standing next to Pelikan while the boy rubs his face against the moisture on the inside of the pane and she sees once more the laundry workers hauling the big sacks of dirty laundry from the pavilion towards the last of the three carriages pulled by the institution’s little train engine that has stopped just outside, and she observes both men slipping on the hard, rough ice and, as they fall, lose their grip on the sacks which open, scattering dirty bed linen on the ground and allowing the wind to tug at the bloody sheets and blow them up into the trees so that, for a little while, the entire institution seems draped by soiled linen and she thinks that these lost souls should be content, happy that they’re still alive and able to stand on their own, helpless legs, watching as the outcome of their mistake flies away in the wind. She steps off at the next stop, unable to stand the presence of the weeping Miss Block any longer.
Letters
Herr Doctor Erwin Jekelius
The Lemberg Veterans’ Hospital for Reservists,
University Hospital, block II,
Room 4
Wien, 23 March 1942
Most Esteemed Sir,
Should you find it improper that a previous inferior should take the liberty to write to you, I humbly beg you to destroy this letter immediately. My intention is simply to wish you a swift recovery, as I have learnt from Miss Block, your faithful secretary, that you have been wounded in a field of combat. Miss Block has entrusted me with the address of the field hospital and also shared with me the essence of the reports you have sent her concerning your state of health. I understand that even a man armed with your strength of soul and body might feel lonely when so far away from family and friends and hence, with these few lines, I aspire to reassure you that many of us wish to send you our warmest good wishes as we know you are fighting on the most forward front line. As you will surely be fully informed about the recent notable events at the clinic, above all those of an administrative kind, I will not elaborate here. I must tell you that, many times in my thoughts, I have debated with you about how the clinic is currently managed and run. And however much is being said, I would like to assure you, Doctor, of my continued loyalty. At a time when I felt the courage to live had failed me, you did what I had thought was impossible and gave it back to me. As you have often said yourself, that courage to live is the most important gift that one human being can give another. With this, as ever, in my mind, I remain your grateful and eternally faithful,
Sister Anna Katschenka
Heil Hitler!
She had not expected an answer and felt alarmed when a letter arrived for her. At first, she could not believe that the letter came from him even though his name was on the envelope. It was written in large capitals in a hand that was not his. She thought that he might have died and someone had written to inform her. She made herself read several sentences, filled with a numbing cloud of anguish, before she recognised his inimitable way of expressing himself:
Most Esteemed Sister Katschenka,
Your kind letter arrived in the afternoon today. I cannot write as I am totally paralysed since several weeks back. My condition is the outcome of a war injury. However, I have now ‘borrowed’ someone’s hand: a kindly soul has agreed, for a reasonable fee, to write down as I dictate. As I remember once telling you, I was originally a member of the evangelical church and, according to its teachings, faith is central. Paul the Apostle insists that my hand and my foot, my spirit and my soul, and all that characterises me would not exist unless I believe that the Lord watches over me. To lose the sensation in one’s own body and mind is, given these premises, a hard challenge to one’s faith but I hope that this letter to you is proof that I have won through. Even though I may not have the hand and tools needed to write, yet I will write! Thus, once again, and as always, the human will proves itself stronger than the powers that set out to defeat it. In the same way, war constantly tests all our strength and capacity to endure. New challenges will and do face us daily, but only in such a furnace can our souls be toughened and our wills forged to steel. Just as Paul once saw it as his mission to help people to find the true faith, so I regard it my task as a doctor to ennoble and toughen the Aryan race until it is ready to fulfil its ultimate destiny. Thus, now as before, I must endure and defy adversity so that I can, with due strength and resilience, succeed in this task I have set myself.
Your kind letter has strengthened my conviction that my work has not been in vain. Soon, I will once more rise from my bed and I will then reward you, Sister Katschenka, for your loyalty and hard work.
You have, with your words, shown to greater effect than ever, that you are worthy of my trust.
Heil Hitler!
Dr E. Jekelius
*
Another Life A strange time began. She seemed to lead two lives, one in the pavilions with the monstrous children, and one with him. She carried on with the first life despite the shame she felt as all eyes followed her. She had never been one for trying to evade work or responsibility, not even to make a short private telephone call or to share a cigarette in the smoker’s hidey-hole behind the back entrance. She had nothing but contempt for people who, as she thought of it, ‘needed a break’ from the demands work made on them. As if the capacity to endure physical and mental strain – precisely the trait that once made these women see nursing as their vocation – had been nothing more than a mask worn at work that only stayed put for a few hours before it slipped. She articulated thoughts like these when speaking with him in her head as she sat on the tram on her way home after another stint in the pavilion. Oddly enough, he was around in the Fendigasse flat as well, ever ready for a confidential chat. She would discuss Hilde Mayer’s smile with him as she washed up after the evening meal and, even when she helped her mother with the ironing, he would sit at the narrow kitchen table, in her father’s usual chair by the window where he would fiddle with the evening paper and look at the rain dripping onto the garden below. The sudden return of Jekelius in her life surprised and frightened her at the same time. It made her feel as if her earlier existence had been dull and mute, without either surface or inwardness. Now, every place and moment had another dimension in which new events or observations demanded to be described to him. Often, her conversations with him began with something he had written in a letter but her topics could just as easily have come from elsewhere. New letters constantly arrived for her at her private Fendigasse address. By now, he wrote them himself and although his hand still seemed a little unsteady, at least to her, he assured her that his health improved daily. The paralysis that had struck him down was now over, he wrote. He could sit up in bed and even eat without assistance. She sat next to him, by the head end of his bed. He had described the wa
rd, so she looked around and saw a long narrow room with a row of tall windows along one wall and too little space for the nurses to push medication trolleys between the beds lined up on either side. One day in early April, he wrote to say that he was about to be transferred out of Wien, to Schloss Leesdorf in Baden, to convalesce. The Wehrmacht had just acquired the castle as part of the wartime hospital provision. Could she visit him there? In any case, it was clear that his period of convalescence would be short. He had already been told to await a new order to join up. His invitation stunned her at first. Would their intimate exchanges stand up to the cold light of reality? Would the sentences they had formulated, the lines of conversation they had spun between them while lying awake, he in his hospital ward in distant Lemberg where wounded soldiers cried out in spasms of pain or mumbled long, incoherent strings of words as the fever-frenzy raged in their bodies, and she in her bed, alone in the little room on Fendigasse, the very bed where she had lain as a young woman losing floods of blood and her sheer, unbreakable will to get up had been all that she’d had left to hold on to? But her life was still a matter of getting up and, unsupported, finding the strength and self-control to carry on. Then, one Saturday morning, she took the tram from the Opera House stop all the way to Baden. She found him on the garden terrace, resting on a reclining chair with a plaid blanket across his knees. He must have seen her when she arrived, escorted by the ward sister who had met her at the gate and briskly led the way along the corridor. He sat with his back to them but, even before the nurse had time to announce his visitor, he turned his head and asked: Nurse Gertrude, would you be so kind and see to it that we get another chair …? That was all. She stood in front of him as she had decided to do. Facing him, so that he could see her clearly. And he did observe her for a long time, with his large, heavy head tilted a little to the side but without for a moment revealing what he felt. Then his eyes flickered and fixed instead on two stone urns, ornamental markers of where the steps went from the castle terrace down into the garden. From where she stood, close to the edge of the terrace, the garden looked like a sea of voluptuous greenery. Birds flew constantly in and out and, each time another lot emerged, their throats seemed fit to burst with subdued twittering. Further down in the garden, the wind was grappling with the branches of the firs that formed a high wall of trees, so compact that it hid all view of the road. A nurse came with a chair. Anna thanked her and sat down. The administration has just moved in here, he explained apologetically, making a gesture that included both the castle building and the two trucks parked below the terrace where two men were unloading a batch of folding beds. As he twisted his body to point, she noticed that his right arm stayed immobile on the armrest. Apart from that, he looked remarkably unchanged. The large head was somehow heavier, perhaps, as if more effort was needed now to keep it upright. His speaking voice was as it had always been, soft and gentle and strangely rich. He had begun to tell her about Leesdorf’s earlier wartime designation as a reform school for girls. He had visited it while on one of his professional trips. Of course, such institutions are superfluous by now, he added. His arm stayed in its old position on the armrest. She wanted to ask about the paralysis, find out what injury had caused it and if he was still in pain; anything personal, to reduce the distance between them, a distance that had been increased by the way he had pronounced the words reform school. Still, it was obvious that he had prepared himself for what he talked about now, as if it mattered greatly to him not only to say it but also to say it in this particular way. They are conducting a court case against me in my absence, he said. It appears that they feel my presence in court isn’t needed, as if they could bring the case against anyone, because all that matters is that it is conducted at all. He had turned towards her (his right arm still immobile) while he said all this and the expression on his face seemed to demand a response from her. She thought that the set of his mouth was stern, some might say bitter, something she hadn’t noticed before. She looks down at her hands on her lap. Doctor Krenek … she begins. Doctor Krenek has been plotting against me for years, he interrupts her. Krenek is an upstart. Nothing he attempts or plans has any inherent originality or vitality. That man never does anything except in simple imitation or obeisance of what others tell him. I don’t know if Sister Anna has ever experienced, he says and, for the first time, there is something of the confiding note in his voice that she recognises from their one day together. The sensation, he continues, of once in your life facing something so immense that your soul or thoughts cannot even encompass it. I will give it its true name, he says. I will call it … love. And now, wide-eyed, he fixes her with his large, dark eyes. She stays still, fearful. She doesn’t understand what he is referring to, with whom (or what) he is in love. She registers a swift, tingling glimpse of the possibility that he is talking about her but that of course can’t be true and his absent gaze, lost in mid-distance, contradicts any such notion, as does the set of his mouth, once more reserved and stern. They know nothing, no one knows anything, he says and now she must do something, change her rigid posture or at least swallow or breathe out. She unintentionally moves one hand and, at once, his ‘paralysed’ right hand lifts from the armrest and takes her hand in a firm grip while his eyes, with their mild, penetrating expression, are again meeting hers, and he smiles:
You really must continue to write to me, Miss Katschenka;
do promise me that, your letters have meant so much to me!
On the return journey, she feels mystified. She looks out over the bare fields that seem alternately to approach and to retreat from the train; sometimes station houses flit past, or lowered barriers behind which the odd vehicle and other road users are waiting, men and women on bicycles with their hands resting calmly on the handlebars. She sees all and everyone, as if reduced to gazing, and hardly dares to move for fear that the light she carries inside her might be extinguished or lost among shadows. What might do it? Throughout the train’s shuddering progress runs an uncertain, misty trail made by a slight suspicion that she might have been used, that everything he had said, even that obscure remark about love, has been part of a scheme. At whom, if not at her, had his words been aimed? Was he perhaps using code to refer to something quite different – to some greater duty? Or was it about the land, the same land above which the swallows are whirling now, as she watches them and observes their blind trust that each beat of their wings will lead on to the next; she sits very still, too fearful to move a single millimetre in case her frail certainty fades into something else, and she remains still and stiff until the Traiskirchen stop, when a large group crowds into her carriage and the conductor comes hurrying along to check everyone’s ticket.
*
Healthy Children and Other Kinds In June 1942, she is finally able to write to Doctor Jekelius that the Spiegelgrund board has found a replacement for him: a German doctor called Illing. Perhaps Doctor Jekelius is already familiar with this gentleman, at least by reputation? He is said to be excellent, she writes, and adds that Illing has brought his entire family with him. Not even Hilde Mayer has managed to find out the precise number of family members who have moved into the medical director’s residence on Baumgartner-höhe but a nanny seems to be part of the establishment. Only one day after Doctor llling introduces himself to the staff, members of his family are seen out on a brisk walk in the hospital park: in the lead, a young blonde nanny in a blue uniform and a neat apron, who carries the smallest child in her arms. These two are followed by three children, keeping in line as if pulled along on a string. At a guess, there is little more than a year between each one of them: a girl of about three, another of four or so, and a boy who looks between six and seven years old. All of them carry garden tools: hoes and spades and buckets. As they pass the pavilions, work practically stops and everyone who can runs to a window to watch. Under the nanny’s supervision, Illing’s children spend the entire long and lovely afternoon near the top of the slope below pavilion 15 where they bravely dig a large
vegetable patch, which they plant later that summer with potatoes and winter cabbages, all of course to contribute to the household during this time of scarcity and self-denial. With time, people develop a habit of stopping by to admire their monument to hard work and utility. The nurses battle to gain favour with the doctor’s steadily working children and become especially shameless when the nanny, a kind-hearted German woman, happens to be out of listening range. From inside pavilion 17, with its day room’s windows facing the garden, the activities of the new children are observed with endless interest. Look, Nurse Blei says, and lifts the dribbling Otto Semmler to a window. Look, the doctor’s children are playing outside again. Pelikan stands next to Otto and has made four fingers into a square on the pane. First, he presses his lips against the glass and then his whole face, as if the power of wishing could transfer the healthy little boys and girls, running and jumping, out of the garden and into his ever-confused mind. Anna Katschenka could easily have written a few lines about young Pelikan to Doctor Jekelius. She can’t help connecting the lad to their ‘excursion’. Which, incidentally, is likely to be the reason why she puts up with Pelikan despite all that, in her heart of hearts, she detests about him: his eager, busybody habits, like dragging himself along to open the door for her every time she visits, and his way of pressing his hot, wet mouth against everything, and of panting as if about to burst with animalistic, obscene excitement; she is repulsed by the voracious appetite that makes him devour any food in sight and by his small, clinging hands, always with sticky palms, that she has to keep smacking and brushing away but which somehow always find other bits of her to attach to. But, when all that was said, she cannot but feel some pity for him and look at him as one of God’s creations that almost turned out well enough. He behaves as if the people and objects he seeks out so greedily are always just out of reach and he can’t stop himself from trying to get to them, to grasp his chances with big gestures as if ready to embrace the whole world. None of this ever amounts to much more than a staggering gait and imprecise, flailing movements and, sometimes, meaningless vocalisations: that repetitive, panting Katsch Katsch Katsch which greets her when Nurse Blei has put him in a wheelchair to push him along to the main lecture hall. These occasions are another Illing novelty. He gives weekly lectures for medical and nursing students about different physiological and, specifically, neurological defects and malformations, and analyses their causation in terms of racial biology, which means that he requires a steady supply of children to display. Pelikan has to put up with standing as straight as he can, in all his naked frailty, on the podium Doctor Illing has had constructed in the middle of the hall. Despite the unmistakable pain it causes him to have to stand upright, the boy carries out his task with the same beaming enthusiasm that he devotes to everything, smiling not only towards Doctor Illing, who keeps poking at his back with the wooden pointer and shouting at him to straighten up, but also towards the embarrassed female students who wriggle uneasily where they sit and pretend to listen to Illing’s hectoring voice, although Pelikan’s well-meaning, almost ingratiating smile begins to fade towards the end of the teaching hour and gradually becomes a grimace of pain so profound that his childish face is pared back to knotted muscles and visible facial bones around his helpless, sucking mouth and always pleading eyes. When the lecture has ended, Anna Katschenka, who has managed to find an unrelated errand to carry out in the auditorium, busies herself with getting the boy into his clothes as quickly as possible and then back to the day room, although Hilde Mayer is ready with a comment, as always:
The Chosen Ones Page 26