How nice that Sister Anna has found a small charge to look after … Sister Anna who is usually so cold-hearted.
Of course, she doesn’t say that last bit. Not even Nurse Mayer would dare to be quite so rude but it is only too obvious that the thought hovers, fully formed, behind her grudging face and frosty, pale and ever-questing eyes. For sure, as soon as Katschenka has turned her back, the judgements on her flow freely. What else could they possibly be talking about in their spare moments in pavilion 17?
*
Intrusion One morning when she arrives at work, a man is waiting for her outside pavilion 1. He looks relatively young, perhaps about twenty-five, and is carelessly dressed in a worn grey jacket and muddied trousers. He holds his hat like a beggar would, upside down. Sister Katschenka! he calls out before she has had time to pass him by. In response to her question, he explains that he is there because he is waiting for a decision. What decision is that? she asks. About what has happened to my son, he replies and then, apparently having taken her question as an admission of interest, he unfolds, with fingers that tremble with tension, several documents that he tries to press on her. She refuses to take any of them or to be involved in this matter at all. She opens the pavilion door and hears how he follows her with stumbling steps.
Sister Katschenka? he calls again.
She is already on her way upstairs to the office. How does he know her name? Now, he follows her along the corridor. Around them, the typists’ constant clattering stops, one room after another goes silent, and the only sound is his coarse voice that insistently and shamingly repeats her name. Next, people stream out into the corridor and he is soon surrounded by agitated women’s voices talking across each other.
Decision? she hears Matron Bertha say. For goodness’ sake, man, can’t you grasp the situation? Either your son is dead or else you never had one!
After that, the man finally slinks away. Later the same day, Anna sees him standing among the mothers who gather daily at the tram stop across the road from the main entrance. They are the hard cases, the stubborn ones, who never take no for an answer but, day after day, persist in trying to deliver food or clothes to their children, or enquire about their letters to the board, letters in which they invariably demand information or make complaints. They mostly respect the ban on entering the hospital site but Anna Katschenka is always on guard. Sure enough: two days later, when she is in pavilion 17, Pelikan, clearly upset, tugs at her apron and when she turns round, the man stands there, only a metre or two away. It is the same man, wearing the same worn clothes with mud dried onto the hems of his trousers. The first thought that comes to her mind is indignant: why is this perfectly fit-looking young man not at the front? That is all she has time to think before he jumps at her. She hears the collective scream from all the children on the ward. Then the man’s heavy body is on top of her, his hands gripping her throat. She hears nothing and senses nothing except Pelikan’s moist lips sucking on the side of her face. She tries to push the boy away but it is no good, he goes on panting his Katsch Katsch Katsch in her ear until she finally gathers enough strength to throw them both off, the anxious boy as well as the appalling male weight on her chest and neck. By then, the intruder has already been seized by two of the asylum nurses, who bend and trap his arms behind his back. The face still suspended above hers seems as large as a horse’s head and, like a horse, his lips are pulled back from his teeth. Has Sister Katschenka no heart? he says. It occurs to her first much later that he never said which of the children was his. And then, that nobody bothered to ask.
A Letter
Dear Doctor Jekelius,
I want to tell you about a dream of mine. In it, I was standing inside a narrow room with walls so close and a ceiling so low that it was impossible to straighten out any part of my body. There was hardly any space at all. At the same time, common sense reminded me of the likely reason for the ache in my shoulders and back: I had spent the whole day bending over beds and, even on the tram afterwards, I had been forced to stand crookedly, crammed in between strangers while the carriage incessantly rocked and leaned this way and that. But in my dream, the cramped posture had grown permanent and, when I looked at myself, I had become a cripple. Nurse Sikora had been to see Doctor Illing that day. Her mission was to accuse me of neglect of duty. An unknown man had made his way into the pavilion without permission. However, in my dream, they had put me in a cage. While inside that cage, the ache inside me made me burst internally, as when the rendering cracks on a dried-out wall. But it hurt so terribly. I remember telling you about my husband, Mr Hauslich, the fake doctor. He complained once about how dry I was inside and how I wouldn’t open up to him. In my dream, I then asked you to help me, and your hand entered the cage, dear Doctor. Only your hand. I sat holding your hand in my lap. I was able to lift it to my face. I kissed it and wet it with my tears and pressed it down between my legs. But I couldn’t make the hand move, which frightened me terribly and, when in the end I woke, I feared that something had happened to you and that the hand somehow was a sign.
Tell me please, dear Doctor, is there any cure for me?
*
The Great Silence In September 1942, Otto comes home on leave. She and her father meet him off the train at Südbahnhof. Her brother has changed since she last saw him. His massive swimmer’s shoulders still bulge and stretch the uniform material but everything else about him avoids the two of them, or turns helplessly away. Even his face, once so fierce and determined, looks vague, almost dissolute. When she steps close to put her arms around him, his cheeks are still stiff from all the coarse, simple-minded banter he has been trading with the soldiers who were his travelling companions and who now walk off in different directions, waving to each other. Otto waves energetically back. Later, he sits at the table at home, a large stranger, and thoughtlessly eats the food his mother urges on him. Anna watches his hands as they move from plate to mouth to plate, and realises with obscure but total certainty that these hands have killed and that he has made up his mind to give nothing away, by pretending that these hands have nothing to do with him. He has decided to ignore them, just as he has decided to no longer use any words that would let him express what has happened to him. He doesn’t even know what such words mean anymore. And so, the great silence enters into all of them. It happens almost imperceptibly. Nonetheless, day by day, it is hugely invasive; on all fronts. Take the fact that, on the ward, Erna Storch turns the radio off as soon as the newsreader starts holding forth about the courage and will to sacrifice of the Fatherland’s armed forces, and about the tactical retreats and realigned front-line sections and, of course, the preparations for a great, decisive, final push that is allegedly soon to go full steam ahead but which will never take place, as everyone knows. And then there are the losses: the dead who are left behind but also the ever-growing stream of wounded men brought back home. After all, it is impossible to be silent about them. Some of the pavilions with even numbers, on the east side of the site, have been requisitioned to provide reserve hospital beds. In the darkness of night, severely injured or ill patients are brought in by military transport. The acrid smell of engine fuel still hangs in the chilly morning air when Katschenka and a small group of other nurses from the children’s clinic go there to help with the management of the new arrivals. Crowds of people mill around inside the refurbished pavilions. Screens have been rigged up in front of the windows to protect the patients and prevent rubber-necking but they can’t stop the noise, the sounds of fevered raving and screams of pain and despair, as if the men were close to a huge wound that has burst open just next to them and they can’t cry out loudly enough to make all these blind people see. It is almost a relief to return to pavilion 15. For one thing, the children are small and so much easier to handle. Doctor Illing has been insisting throughout that these children should be regarded as so many abscesses turned critical and that their ‘treatment’, as prescribed by Berlin, is nothing but a kind of hygienic intervention, par
t of a natural disinfection process. But however hard she tries, she can’t see the children in those terms. They are victims, she thinks, just as everyone else has become a victim of this dreadful war. Just as the war has ripped arms and legs off the young soldiers, and ruined their faces, so it has sliced the children’s nerve connections and caused their odd bone fusions, spasms and paralyses. The same agent, the monstrosity of this insane war, is the explanation for everything. She is convinced that if only the war would stop, the world would return to normal. Her brother’s former face would be back in place and the terrible cage in which she is forced to crouch, day after day, would explode and the bars give way so that she can straighten her back again. However, nothing stops. The children keep coming and so do their persistent mothers. She sees them every morning as she steps off the tram. There they are, waiting on the opposite pavement: more of them, it seems, for every passing day. And because they apparently have nothing to do all day except spread hatred and envy, they also chatter recklessly to passers-by.
One morning, a transport arrives. A little boy with oddly large, protruding ears and a scared look in his eyes. Only one guard is there to escort him. After the child has been picked up, she spots the guard having a smoke while chatting with the mothers.
This must be the place where the children get the injections then?
My wife has a friend whose son they killed that way.
She and Nurse Kleinschmittger are walking past. It is just after their midday break. Both nurses stiffen but it is Katschenka who turns quickly and walks towards the man, who goes visibly pale and drops his cigarette.
How dare you say these things? This is a proper, respectable hospital.
She demands to see Doctor Illing, who makes a note of the incident. Then he asks her to describe as exactly as possible what the guard looked like. Can she remember his name? The child he brought in, what was its name? What did it look like? When Doctor Illing has written all that down, he shows his teeth in his notorious, tobacco-stained grin and, for the first time, directs it at Anna Katschenka.
It’s very good of Sister Anna to be so alert.
*
Interpreting Signs At the beginning of October, Jekelius tells her in a letter that he will be moved on again. He does not say to where but she assumes that the censor has forbidden it and she takes for granted that he will be sent back to the eastern front. She has lived for so long with the thoughts of how he might be engulfed by the Russian winter that it takes a letter several months later, in which he mentions being paid in Italian lira, for her to realise that she has been wrong. Now she rereads all his latest letters and sees how often he has hinted at where he is and what he is doing. She has failed to notice. How could she be so careless? In one place, he speaks of a donkey train down the same narrow mountain road that he and his company are walking up and refers to the hollow sound of their hooves against the cobbles on a bridge. Do you really come across donkeys in Russia? Where are bridges cobbled? In Italy, or somewhere on the Balkan Peninsula. But hardly in Russia. Then he writes about the silence of the mountains, where he had camped with his company: a silence so profound that you can hear the melancholic notes of a solitary twittering bird ring out, all the way down from the sunlit western summits and into the dark, wooded valley, without its song being disrupted by any other voices, from animals or human beings. The otherwise scrupulous military censors have overlooked these little details. The letter is written on his usual lined sheets of paper. Even that time, the only one, when he first wrote to her with a borrowed hand, he had been using the same paper, which made her think that he carried a notebook with him wherever he went and tore out pages to write his letters. The thought appealed to her. In the letter that, from then on, she thought of as his ‘Apennine’ one, he also said that his years of running the institution, while still important to him, were retreating more and more into the background:
I have a feeling that, during my existence so far, I have led many different lives but also that the others – the earlier ones – become ever more irrelevant, shrivel and fall. Perhaps all that is old must shrivel until it is gone, in order that we should be able to discern what we are truly intended to do.
A few lines further down, he added that he lately had been able to go back to practising my old trade and that it gave him satisfaction. At first, she couldn’t think what he meant by his ‘old trade’. Then it suddenly came to her and she didn’t care to think about it anymore. Instead, she focused on the word we in the previous sentence. He had also written on your behalf about the necessity to look more intently at all that goes on around one – surely that was what he had intended with his story about the bird whose limpid song could be heard even at the bottom of a dark valley? There were periods when she was so preoccupied with interpreting all the signs in his letters and contemplating all the possible secret messages that she sleepwalked through her nursing duties. Meanwhile, nothing changed in the part of reality within which she was alone with herself. Even though Doctor Illing carried on killing children like you’d be killing rats (as Hilde Mayer put it), new ones kept arriving at an even faster rate than before, as if spawned by the war. Nature’s power of perversion is endless. In Doctor Gross’s ward for infants, there is a baby boy of three and a half months whom the nurses call Franzl (apparently he has no proper name), about whom Anna Katschenka knows no more than that his mother handed him over as a newborn, probably because she couldn’t bear the sight of him. The shape of Franzl’s cranium is strange, almost triangular, as it narrows to a forward point, like a fox’s head. All his limbs show pronounced webbing between the digits: so-called syndactyly. An amphibian child. Doctor Illing palpates the angular skull with his thick fingers, then absently prods the joined digits while turning to the ward sister to ask her to arrange a time for pneumoencephalography as well as making the child available as soon as possible for an anatomical examination. A three-year-old girl called Marta Koller is in the next bed. Marta was born with an unusually strongly developed form of bilateral coronal synostosis that has caused the upper part of her cranium to form a protruding ridge. In sharp contrast to the grotesque, boat-shaped top of her head, the face below it is nice and ordinary, almost pretty, with alert brown eyes that follow Illing’s exploring hands with anxious interest. When one of the doctor’s hands inadvertently touches her cheek, Marta suddenly bursts into laughter. Her laugh is low and breathless, somehow secretive, but so infectious that even the usually grim-looking Matron Bertha allows herself a slight smile. The unteachables gather in pavilion 17’s day room, where a fourteen-year-old boy called Felix Keuschnig plays on the out-of-tune piano. His repertoire seems to consist of only a few simple pieces that he plays again and again. Every time Katschenka has a reason to visit pavilion 17, she catches glimpses of these over- or under-developed, malformed children as they run or lumber about, shrieking or bumping into each other or the walls, as if the piano-player’s tunes keep them and the world around them alive and the right way up, and so, if the song died, eveything would collapse. But even within the music, the world closes in on itself. It becomes tighter, note by note. The war is shrinking the world. The space of her own room at home, already circumscribed by domesticity, is dwindling, too. One day, when her brother was still on leave, he went along with his father to watch a football match: Rapid v. Admira Wien. For the first time in many years, Anna’s father was to be away from home and stay out for a whole evening. His face was bright red with delight. But from that evening on, she felt that her father, too, began to disappear. He returned bare-headed and without his son, and had nothing to say about what had happened – not how the match had ended, not where Otto had gone to, not where he had lost or forgotten his hat. They never found that hat but, after searching for several hours, Anna came across her brother in a bar on Wiedner Hauptstrasse, surrounded by a cluster of lads still too young for army service and to whom he was speaking about something that made him fall abruptly silent the moment she stepped inside. He was so drun
k he could barely walk but, behind the fog of booze, his face was naked and hard, as if the bones stretched the skin to breaking point. You know nothing about what it’s like, his naked face said to her. This was the only meaningful thing she could recall her brother telling her for the entire duration of his leave. By way of duty, or perhaps atonement of some kind, the institution’s children had been ordered to sing for the wounded soldiers in the reserved hospital pavilions. She endured one such ‘concert’ in pavilion 12: a gaggle of scrawny boys with stupid faces and hoarse, breaking voices who sang patriotic songs. The ‘upstart Krenek’ gave a speech in which he praised the soldiers for their courage, and their willingness to act and sacrifice themselves although everyone knows that they all are so-called psychiatric cases – that is, soldiers who either refused to rush ahead in the first wave like sheep to slaughter, or else were so shocked by the enemy bombardment that they cannot force themselves to speak a single word or stop their hands from shaking. Anna Katschenka, who is a calm, practical person with a strong belief in loyalty and hard work, has never been able to stand hypocrisy and affectation. She observes first the clumsy, delinquent boys trying to sing, then the bedridden human wrecks who once were soldiers, and then the nurses and nursing assistants who are crowded into the doorways, trying to look as if they enjoy the performance and feel proud at the same time, while all that is truly on their minds is agony about the unending misery and the fact that, soon, there will be nothing left to eat. She goes on night duty afterwards and administers the last dose of the scopolamine Doctor Illing has prescribed for the amphibian boy. She checks the little patient a few hours later. His breathing comes in bursts and his lips, still full and red, are going pale. Then his eyelids retract slowly and he dies. She notes the time of death. It is 3.55 a.m. on a close night in June when all the windows are open, the air outside is buzzing with insects, and the radio announcer speaks of enemy air raids over Sicily and the Italian mainland. After the news, the radio plays marches, as if at a wake, and she holds her breath as she prays, something she hasn’t done for a long time, to the God she is convinced has long since turned his back on mankind: please save us.
The Chosen Ones Page 27