Otto the Stroker, and Pelikan, the General Adrian wakes because someone has stolen his hand. Luckily, the thief isn’t far away. He sits on the edge of the bed with the stolen hand on his lap and gazes happily at its former owner. The thief is called Otto but on the ward, everyone calls him the Stroker. The Otto-Thief-Stroker creature is between five and six years old, and an idiot, for real, like everyone else on this ward. Odd, since they’re all idiots, that they have such large heads. Otto’s head is permanently tilted to the side which makes him look as if he were peeping at you sideways on, with a smile that is both pleading and guilty, the smile of someone who knows he is a thief but is quite pleased all the same. Adrian tries to pull his hand away but Otto tightens his hold and starts to caress the hand with both his thumbs as if it were an animal that could be calmed by stroking. By now, Otto is grinning broadly. Adrian hasn’t the heart to disappoint him and lets the little boy keep his hand even though Adrian’s skin is crawling and prickling with discomfort. He has no illusions about where he has ended up. This is the pavilion Zavlacky and Miseryguts and the other boys in pavilion 9 used to speak about as the other place, where the ‘no-hopers’ ended up. Just like all the pavilions he knew, this one has a dormitory and a day room. Actually, there are several dormitories. One of them is for idiots who can’t walk on their own, and they don’t need any day room, of course. The nurses’ rules say that the dormitories must be silent. The day room for the mobile idiots is also meant to be silent but that just about never happens. There is a piano in a corner and a boy called Felix sits at it all the time and plays and, when he isn’t actually playing, he nags the nurses to be allowed. Another boy, whom they call Pelikan, shuffles about, mostly along the walls. He spies on everything and listens out all the time. As soon as someone is heard in the corridor, he drags himself along the wall and makes a big show of opening the door, bowing deeply like some kind of servant to whoever is coming. This section consists of two wards or groups: one for girls and one for boys. The boys, both those who can and can’t walk, are on the ground floor. The ward for girls is on the first floor. Regardless of where you go on the ground floor, in the dormitory as well as the day room, you can hear the noises made by the girls upstairs as they scream or cry or rattle and bang with things they have got hold of. Mostly, it is like a ghostly echo of the screaming and crying and rattling and banging in the boys’ ward, but there are times when the sounds from above are enigmatic and frightening. It can be a dull monotonous whistling, as when a cross-draught sucks in winds through a room, or a long drawn-out grinding or chafing noise. Pelikan, who is an expert on sounds, stands with his ear to the wall for a while and then announces with conviction that they are constructing a ski slope up there. Or maybe a skating rink. Adrian has discovered that Pelikan is only able to express himself effectively and clearly if he keeps ramrod straight, like a general. When he does, complete harangues full of complicated, long words flow easily out of his mouth. When he sags, because he is told off by a nurse or the stiff leg he has to haul along makes him lose his balance, his store of words seems to empty instantly. Then, his face goes vague and confused, rather like a short-sighted person who has lost his glasses, but more than that, it becomes curiously mute, or somehow featureless. Adrian was a little scared the first time he observed this change. The upright General Pelikan, in his fine uniform of words, really wants to be kind. He wants to help, to please you. Dragging his crippled leg, he leads Adrian by the hand to the best wall, straightens his back and reports on what is to be seen and heard from up there. For Pelikan, concepts such as here and there, now and then or, for that matter, inside and outside don’t exist. What is real to Pelikan is what happens to be in his mind at the moment of speaking. Now he explains to Adrian that the girls upstairs are decorating a Christmas tree. Pelikan is obsessed with Christmas trees. He asked Adrian straightaway if he had ever had a Christmas tree. Strictly speaking, the answer is yes. Adrian remembers very well when his dad took him to the market to buy a tree. His father was just going to see a business contact first, but as one quickie had followed another, the excursion ended with Eugen Ziegler reverting to type and staggering from one bar to the next. The money for the tree was soon gone. So Adrian shakes his head. He disliked Pelikan’s Christmas tree fixation from the start. Here’s where they put the Christmas tree, Pelikan says as they pass the piano corner. But now the Christmas tree isn’t here, he adds and looks quite miserable for a bit. Then, he brightens. It will soon be back, he says. Such is the power of Pelikan’s imagination that, for a moment, Adrian can almost see a large tree, hung with Pelikan’s many words, making its glittering and imposing progress through all the rooms, just like a living being.
*
Night Thoughts and Day Thoughts Either Nurse Storch or Nurse Blei were in charge of the ward. Or else Nurse Erhart and Nurse Sikora. Sikora had mean, screwed-up eyes and Storch really looked like a stork. Her eyes were set close together and she looked at you in a sharply attentive way, as if she suspected you might sneak off any minute or do something bad. Blei was different. Unlike most of the ward staff, who handled children like bundles to be lifted and put away as quickly as possible, Blei had round arms and strong, gentle hands. Everything about her was soft and smelled nicely of soap and clean, freshly ironed clothes. Every time Adrian saw her, he thought that this ward would have been the right place for Jockerl. He thought a lot about Jockerl these days. Of Jockerl’s face and how everything had frozen inside him as he stood wrapped in wet towels below the portrait of the Führer. Even Jockerl’s teeth had taken on a dead, greyish-purple colour and his eyes behind the drooping eyelids had looked like the backs of spoons: unseeing and shiny. If there had been any justice in this world, Jockerl should have been lying in this bed, not himself. He chose not to think about what had happened at Mödling, or about Guido and what the pedagogues and psychologists had said about him afterwards, about how he was abnormal. It was not worth bothering with all that because he knew he was normal. It was people like Guido – and Jockerl, too, for that matter – who were freakish, and the only reason why he was brought here to be among the idiots was that he had been exchanged for someone else who really should be here. If there had been any justice in this world, that person would be killed and not him. His problem was working out how to convince them that he was who he was and not that other boy they apparently thought was him. Another thing that was different about the idiots’ pavilion and the pavilion where he had been before was that this place was not the same in the day as it was at night. The days were long and uneventful. They sloped off towards the unavoidable darkness of the evening with mind-numbing indifference, as if even his own thoughts slipped away with the daylight. Nobody demanded anything from him. Even the psychologists were uninterested in his answers to the meaningless questions they asked him. During the day, the children around him seemed almost harmless, despite all the yelling and sobbing and groaning. They had no idea about where they were and went through their incomprehensible rituals, and ignored him or claimed him for their own mystifying purposes, like Otto the Stroker, who never let go of Adrian’s hand once he had got hold of it and would quite happily follow Adrian wherever Adrian went. All that changed at night. Then, the idiots’ enigmatic activities became intrusive and worrying, and they behaved as if something hidden had been set free inside them. One special case was a boy that nobody seemed to have a proper name for and was only called Thunder. He could walk on his own but hadn’t been given a normal bed. Instead they kept him in a kind of bed-cage and placed it a little apart from the rest in the dormitory. Thunder would sit inside his cage with his legs crossed and stare straight ahead with unblinking eyes, although he often pulled a blanket over his head and peeped out from underneath it with one eye. Sometimes he disappeared completely. Thunder never uttered a single word but at nights he might start to roar. Roar wasn’t the right word, though. What he did was produce a sound that was like no other made by a human being. Later, Adrian would say that it was like the c
ellar was rising up through the building, making a brutal, bursting and shearing noise. Next, another sound could be heard from inside the clamour. It started as a faint whistle that slowly grew into a whimper. At the same time, a dull, rhythmical thumping began. It took some time before Adrian realised that the thumping was Thunder’s foot banging against the wall and the wailing, grinding noise was made by the bed-cage as it was propelled ever further across the floor by the powerful blows of his foot against the wall. By then, the main lights would be switched on and the terrified, confused children stood around watching as the duty nurse and a couple of assistants opened the cage and tugged at the blanket. For a moment, they saw Thunder’s uncovered face, white and naked, and then a quick glimpse of a syringe. That was it. Just as quickly, the overhead light was switched off and only the bluish night-light would be left on. Then, a low humming noise would start up and it might be coming from Thunder’s bed or not. Adrian was always certain that it was Thunder who sang or, perhaps more likely, that his lost soul was forlornly exploring the room and making this beautiful, unearthly sound. The doctors and nurses seemed to be fascinated by Thunder. He once heard Nurse Sikora say it was like a small demon was lurking inside that boy. The procession of people in white coats always lingered by Thunder’s bed-cage. Once, doctors Türk and Gross turned up with Sister Katschenka in tow. She took notes all the time. But once the procession had left and the ward became quiet, they could once more hear the low, monotonous singing: it could be that Thunder was lying there, dreaming under his blanket, and all that was bright and shiny in the room was what Thunder’s dream looked like when seen from outside. Adrian also dreamt a lot during the few mixed-up, anxious nights he spent in the main dormitory in pavilion 17. One dream was about his mother. This was the first time he had dreamt about her since they sent him to Mödling the last time. In his dream, his mother no longer has a face and is composed only of lines, like the drawings they keep demanding that he must do, either of her or whatever gets into his head. A pair of slack, very red lips hangs in the middle of the restless tangle of lines that is meant to represent his mother. The lips attempt a smile, just like that time when she visited him in his old pavilion. And just like that time, in his dream he isn’t certain that she has come to see him. The reddened lips are swollen with humiliation and the mingled lines meant to be her limbs are twitching and waggling all over the place. Suddenly, it comes to him that his mother is here to look for Jockerl. The protruding lips even seem to pronounce just that name. Jockerl, they say. The pointy name seems to suit the lips. And then, suddenly, the dormitory doors open. Even much later, he is unsure about whether the doors opened in his dream or really opened just as he dreamt about it. But whatever might be the case, he is suddenly convinced that it isn’t Jockerl they are coming to get. It’s him, Adrian. Before the full meaning of this insight has become clear to him, he is up and about, moving aimlessly in the semi-darkness between the beds. Other children are milling about everywhere: whining, anxious, lost children who are bumping into bedside tables and beds. His mother is also on the move and he hears the lines that make up her arms dangle and flap, the way hanging branches of trees hit walls and roofs, and later he cannot think what it was that forced him into motion and even what he was looking for, but the movement seems to calm his anxiety. If he can keep this up, move from bed to bed, they won’t be sure where to find him or even who they are after, and can’t come for him at night to exchange him. And he keeps on the move, restlessly, until the early dawn begins to light up the floor’s chequered pattern and the white beds become clearly outlined, and Thunder’s bed-cage as well, where Thunder himself is enthroned, his legs crossed, wide awake and not hiding under a blanket, but now he can hear sounds in the corridor as the nurses come walking on rapid cork heels, their quiet voices calling to each other, the rattling of utensils in the ward kitchen and the sluice room, and he fumbles among the resisting, alien bodies to get back to his own bed but it seems useless so, in the end, he comes across one child who shifts in bed to make room for him. Then the door opens wide and Nurse Storch stands in the doorway, in full uniform. She draws breath, takes two long steps, reaches him and pulls him out of the bundle of sheets he has tried to hide under:
Are you out of your mind, boy?
Why go to other’s children’s beds?
The day has begun outside and now Mrs Baar, the psychologist, is there again. She takes notes endlessly. Whatever he does or says, never mind the context or whether it is innocently meant or not, she writes it down. It must be quite a long list by now.
*
The Black Shoes One morning, when he comes back from the washroom, he finds that Nurse Blei has put out clean clothes for him on his bed. It’s all there: shirt, socks, and trousers with braces. By the end of the bed, she has placed a pair of black shoes that are at least two sizes too big for him. She tells him that they actually belong to one of the other boys but she has removed the insoles for now and he can borrow them. He and Nurse Blei walk out of the dormitory together, carry on down the corridor outside the day room (so far, he hasn’t been allowed to be in there) and then down the stairs in the empty, echoing stairwell and out into the open air. This is the first time since Mödling that he has been outside. By now, spring has come. Despite the cloud cover, the light dazzles him. The trees are up to their ankles in muddy meltwater. When he drifts off towards the edge of the long, gravelled path, Nurse Blei reaches out for him and, for a while, he walks along with her freckled arm wrapped tightly around his shoulders. He senses the smell of her skin (do freckles have a smell?) and because only the two of them are there, he would have liked to say something nice, like how good it feels to be out walking together, but all she says is that he is to take care not to muddy his shoes. He looks down at the shoes. They are big and black and look completely alien in shape and appearance. Now, the insight comes to him. He knows where they’re going. He is to be killed. That’s why Nurse Blei tells him to mind these shoes. It’s because they’ll want to use them for the next person who is made to walk this way. I don’t want to, he says. It won’t be any worse for you than for anyone else, she says and pushes him through the door. Pavilion 15 is smaller than 17, or perhaps it is just an impression caused by all the people everywhere. A flock of white uniforms and aprons pushing trolleys laden with sharp, clattering objects, and every time the doors open (and then slam shut) the harsh, sharp cries of children come from the dimly lit rooms behind them, together with a nauseating whiff of medicine and disinfectant. Nurse Blei wants him to climb the stairs to the upper floors but the shoes are so heavy and unwieldy that he has to strain his whole body to lift his feet and in the end Nurse Blei loses patience with him and slaps his face hard:
Hurry up, we mustn’t keep the doctor waiting.
He has noticed this side of Nurse Blei before, seen her clear blue eyes narrow and the look in them become edgy and resentful. When Blei gets angry, her freckles pale and a kind of grin, all teeth, spreads across the lower part of her face. She directs it towards him now and he feels more frightened than he has been before in his life.
Upstairs, the layout looks identical to the floor below but is different in that there are no ill children around: only nurses dashing about, in and out through doors that seem to open and shut on their own. Nurse Blei shoves him through one of the corridor doors into a room where another nurse is waiting impatiently. She is older than Nurse Blei and looks fed up, as if she has been through this far too many times already. They pile into a very small room or cubicle, barely large enough for him and the two nurses. A wooden bench and a few hooks above it have been fixed onto one of the short walls. Here’s where you hang up your clothes, the older nurse says. And your shoes go under the bench. He bends down to undo the laces but his hands are trembling so badly that Nurse Blei has to help him. His face is level with the broad ribbon of freckles across her nose but her eyes are expressionless. At the opposite end of the room is a door without a handle. Adrian hears sounds from the other
side of the door: a distant mumbling on a single note, as when a lot of people talk quietly in a crowded space, and also a noise as if someone were pushing a heavy object across the floor. The people in there are presumably getting some kind of execution machine ready for him. What else could there possibly be on the other side of a door that is opened from the outside only? He starts to cry. Nurse Blei takes no notice. You’re to undress now, is all she says and when he can’t bring himself to do it, she and the other nurse together manage to get everything off him, his underpants and socks as well. When he is naked and shivering, the older nurse knocks on the handleless door. The last thing he hears before the door is opened from the other side is Nurse Blei’s hissing whisper:
Remember, not a word from you while the doctor talks!
*
The Anatomy Lesson The space he enters is surprisingly large. In front of him are rows of expectant faces. All young women, sitting side by side on rows of seats that remind him of the classroom, except they are raked and arranged in a semi-circle, like in an auditorium, so that they can all see him when he comes into the room. He has never felt his nakedness burn like this before. The women’s collective gaze starts off fires everywhere on his skin. He has nothing to shelter behind. Wherever he places his hands, in front of his sex or his face, he remains exposed. Not that the nurse who escorts him allows him any time for evasive moves. She shoves and drags him to the middle of the floor where Doctor Illing is waiting. Next to him is a wooden footstool. Doctor Illing is holding a long, thin pointer in his hand. It has a sharp tip, like a spear, and reminds him of a hooked implement Mr Ritter had used to pull down maps of foreign countries.
Adrian Ziegler is fourteen years old.
As you will observe, he is relatively well developed for his age.
The Chosen Ones Page 29