wake up, wake up, wake, you must stay awake
– and, in the end, he actually does wake up. He slides back into an awake state that is infinitely greater than any awareness than he has experienced before. As if he existed in a different part of space or simultaneously everywhere within it, he watches as the white-clad ones move around him, hears them speak to each other although he can’t make out what they are saying. He sees General Pelikan stand by the wall whispering, and it is as if he were close by, but on the other side of that wall. The whisper slides into his mind where it grows bigger and bigger, like an expanding bellows. At the same time, the thickness of that wall is reduced until it collapses into itself and becomes a small glass bubble, so thin-walled and fragile that by blowing on it you could make it crack and disintegrate. He understands that the wall isn’t the real wall but the pain that increases and explodes inside his head. His mother is walking somewhere beyond the pain, her long spider’s legs stretching, her red smile reddening. He screams to her,
mummy mummy mummy
but no one comes, the room is expanding as well, it is inside him and now there is nobody in it.
*
Line-drawn Mothers In every individual’s life, the time will come when certainty about what happened earlier fades and at that point, stories take over. Adrian’s time at Spiegelgrund had always been a gaping hole in his memory, and with what could he fill the hole except stories? As the years went by, he learnt to shape and exploit his narratives for his own advantage. His experiences inside the Nazi killing-machine made the normally tetchy and unapproachable Ziegler interesting in the eyes of his fellow prisoners. Adrian would tell them about his encounters with Doctor Gross and Doctor Türk, about the staff in pavilion 9, like Nurse Mutsch with her long dark hair and staring pig’s eyes, Nurse Demeter with her bony chin and Mrs Rohrbach, lady of the clapper and the whistle. He was sparing with details about some of the aspects of his time there. If he did mention anything about the weeks he spent with the idiots in pavilion 17, it was only to get a word in about Illing, the murderous doctor. Illing was strung up, of course, he would point out; they hung him just after the end of the war. At the time, quite a lot had been printed about it in Krone. Adrian used to believe that he was pretty good at telling it like it was while never going on so much it made him seem too talkative. But not saying too little, either, or he might come across as a weakling, perhaps even vulnerable – a mortal sin for a prisoner, who is always at the mercy of the powerful inmates. The big black hole inside his mind grew neither bigger nor smaller just because he stuffed it full of stories. But then something happened, He was doing time at Stein then, so it was early in the 1970s and after his long stay in Italy. They were a team who ate the midday meal at a particular long table nearest to the canteen wall. Above the table there had been a window that had been covered with black sheet metal held by clamps mortared into the wall. Presumably the window opening had been bricked up as well, so the metal sheet covered a solid wall. An older prisoner used to sit at the table in a particular place opposite Adrian. The old boy’s first name was Petter so he was naturally called Parsley – that’s Petersilie in German. He was an exceptionally short man who looked even shorter in his worn prison kit. But inside the clothes, his small body was constantly on the move and, while they were all seated at their table, Parsley’s buttocks and also his hands would shift about constantly on his chair while his lined, old man’s face would stay turned to Adrian and not move an inch while he listened to whatever story was being told. Until, that is, one day, when he pressed the restless palms of his hands against the tabletop and interrupted the flow of words. You’re lying, Parsley said. You’d never be sitting here today if everything you try to con us into believing was true. Adrian was taken aback. He knew what he had experienced. Still, he had never reflected on the possibility that what he was saying might be untrue. Anyway, if it was true, in what sense should one understand that? How to judge the actual truth in an account of events one barely remembers? But, as of now, he faces Mr Parsley, full of indignation, who insists that nobody should try to pump him full of fake stories, given that, if all these unspeakable things had really been done to a person, he couldn’t possibly have survived for long enough to sit here and talk about it. And perhaps that’s right. Perhaps it’s like this thing with the blocked window with the fixed cover; that is, there might be a window just like it inside Adrian’s head, a window no one can open and even if you managed to break through the outer covering, another wall would be all you found. But if there is nothing on the inside and nothing on the outside either, what is there left to talk about? Adrian bends across the table, looks in Parsley’s eyes and says, well now. Let me tell you about my mother. Everyone has had a mother, he adds, everyone can identify with a mum. But mine was only an invented mother, he says. She was a pretend figure made up of lines which he had drawn himself on sheets of paper and then painted with a little red colour in order to make the mass of lines look more like his mother, and that drawing was the only thing he had to show when the other Spiegelgrund children were visited by their (real) mothers. But, believe me or not: one day, that clumsy bundle of lines with a little splash of red in the middle had walked from Erdberg all the way to Baumgartner Höhe in Penzing to see Doctor Illing because she (the line-drawn mother) had by some means learnt that her son had been moved to pavilion 17. Now, you might ask yourselves, what’s so special about number 17? Well, the killer-doctor Illing had all failed children transferred to pavilion 17. Failed? Those were the children who hadn’t managed to show that they were useful and willing to work. If a child couldn’t prove his ability to work and so forth, the nurses straightaway stirred a deadly powder into the food they doled out. And that child died. It was ever so quick and easy, just like when you squeeze a poor little candle flame with wet fingertips and it goes out. But now this line-drawn mother stood in front of Doctor Illing and met his eyes in just the way Adrian had just met Parsley’s eyes. She told Illing that she knew something he didn’t, something her poor little son had told her one of the few times she had been allowed to visit him. The fact was (she said to Illing) that in one of the places where her son had been kept, there was also a boy called Julius Becker and apparently young Becker had managed to get hold of a pair of scissors. Obviously, the staff had been careless. One night, he stabbed himself in the stomach with the scissors and died. True, it was before Doctor Illing’s time but the story of what had befallen Julius Becker, a keen, decent boy who in no way deserved to die, had already been doing the rounds among the mothers who usually clustered around the 47 tram terminal, and wouldn’t Doctor Illing mind if something similar happened again; that is, would he care to deal with another boy (her son, for instance) who could no longer endure the conditions and decided to take his own life? The response was remarkable, in that Doctor Illing sat up and took notice. In his clinic, it was simply part of the routine to murder children (Adrian had himself seen the corpses being carried out and taken away in a cart) but the thought that one of the children should choose to take its own life was intolerable even to Illing because he was, after all, a doctor so it had to be on his say-so that someone was thought ill or well, fit to live or not. Besides, he had taken an oath that his section of the institution would be a model to all, and model clinics had no use for patients who try to control their own fate. So Doctor Illing called in a certain Doctor Krenek, who headed up the reform school part of the institution, where Adrian had been before, and made this Krenek extract the documentation on Becker, Julius. It turned out that the line-mother had been absolutely correct: scissors had been accessible on the ward and, mysteriously, ended up plunged into said young Becker’s abdomen. That kind of thing really mustn’t happen again. Meanwhile, Doctor Illing promised that he would check extra carefully the case notes of the line-drawn mother’s son. That was how they came to decide to do what they did, Adrian says. They had already shone a light into his brain and found only useless rubbish in there. Next, my kill
er-dose of medicine had been measured up and was ready in the medicine cupboard but, at the very last moment, my mother managed to get me out after all. That, despite her being nothing more than a red blob in the middle of a mass of lines. Now Parsley, too, sits still and listens. Bugger that, he says. But he isn’t referring to Adrian and his miraculous escape from the snapping jaws of the death ward. He is intrigued by the bit about Julius Becker. Now what I’d like to know is, he says, is that possible? Can you kill yourself with fucking scissors? Like that? Straight into your belly? And Adrian thinks about his mother. After the chaotic months immediately after the end of the war it would take several years before he saw her again. Laura had found a small flat for her in Meidling. Their father was gated (he had started to drink again). Adrian had also been told that he wasn’t welcome, because in Laura’s opinion, Adrian and his father were chips off the same block. Be that as it may, it was Christmas after all. She decided to be merciful and told all her brothers and sisters to come for a meal. Helmut joined them, too, despite no longer being in contact with his family. Laura had gone to his foster parents to find him, for her mother’s sake. Helmut was constantly on his mother’s mind and she never seemed to get over the fact that he had been taken from her. (It was obvious that Helmut was not really with them, though. In Laura’s place, he just sat in the armchair by the window and stared out into the street even when they were trying to talk to him. Adrian sometimes wondered if his younger brother was all there. Or perhaps you got that way after a lifetime of strangers tugging at you this way and that.) But, with Helmut coming, Laura couldn’t reasonably avoid inviting him and his father. Adrian can’t recall which particular institution he was on leave from that Christmas but, in the end, there he was, smiling ingratiatingly into the mirror in Laura’s hall. Laura had had a dress made for her mother as a Christmas gift. The material was thin silk crepe and all three of them were looking admiringly at it. Leonie wanted to try it on and he said that he would pull up the zip on the back of the dress. When he did, he saw how thin her shoulder blades were, as frail as an insect’s wings, and remembered the line-drawing of his mother he had done while in pavilion 17 and then, a final touch: Laura took out her own lipstick to add a little extra sheen to her mother’s lips, which meant that he suddenly saw his image of her completed: the mirror reflected the line-mother with her spidery legs and insect wings, and lips as red as sticky plaster. And then, the entire story flowed from him, just as he would tell it much later to Parsley and the other prisoners in the canteen. He spoke of Leonie Dobrosch, his mother who was made up of lines, and her visit to Doctor Illing and her announcement that, for sure, she would pass on what she knew about what was practised behind the reform school walls if the doctor didn’t deal with her incarcerated son promptly. And then, silence fell. Inside the mirror, the woman with the red lips looked simply embarrassed as she always did when she didn’t want to confront something that should demand her attention and, while Laura was clearing up cups and glasses in the sitting room, she (his mother) confessed that she hadn’t really worried much about him:
oh, Adrian, I never worried about you
and he, but what, didn’t you ever meet him?
and his mother, who?
and he, Doctor Illing?
And his mother muttered something about how she had found some doctor in the institution to talk to but she simply couldn’t remember what he was called and
Doctor Illing! he shouted
and Laura, don’t shout!
And in the mirror, he saw the red lips crack open in the same servile smile as the time she had visited him in pavilion 9, the only time she came to see him, and she had been so anxious to please that when Mrs Rohrbach had walked past with an armful of folders, his mother had responded to some deep-rooted instinct of domestic service and hurried along to open the door. At that moment, he knew that she would do everything she could to please him, too, never mind if it meant having to lie and pretend. But the truth was plain to see, namely that she couldn’t remember a thing about any pleading on his behalf. So she told him, when everything is said and done, I never was that worried about you, Adrian, but your little brother Helmut, he was never as brainy as you. And when his sister Laura returns to the hall to lead her mother to the laid dinner table, his mother looks simply grateful: someone has come to get her out of the uncomfortable situation she has suddenly been landed in, alone with a son who has been kept away from her for so long. Much later, when he had been given access to his case notes, he realised that his mother had told him the truth. His notes record only one visit from his mother for the period between 1941 and 1944 and she apparently did not ask about him but about Helmut, who had disappeared around that time but was later found to have been adopted again by yet another family. It meant that the story about the line-drawn mother who had threatened Doctor Illing was a lie from beginning to end. There had been no visits. There hadn’t even been a line-mother. If there was nothing to tell and nobody who was prepared to listen even if there had been something to tell, then – where to turn with all the unbearable things you remember? One has to be content that one survived, he said to Parsley as they got up from the table to return their trays and glanced one last time at the covered, bricked-up window that concealed nothing and led nowhere. And he thought that all he had done in his life was to stay inside the cranial cavity Doctor Illing had lit up for him, like a patient left sitting in the waiting room long after the surgery has closed but whom the staff have forgotten about for some reason.
*
Song without a Voice When he wakes up he is dead. At least, that’s what it feels like. As if he were no longer inside his body but has been left hanging in an ether-stinking, hollow space criss-crossed by voices that have nothing to do with him or are even heard with his own ears. He observes an arm lying on a bed. It is his arm. There is something wrong. However much effort he puts into raising his arm it stays lying there, stiff and immobile. And because he is not inside his own body he can’t raise his eyes either. He doesn’t know where his head is. The place where his head should have been is occupied only by pain, ice-cold, smooth and relentless. It feels as if he is still held by the sharp-edged steel clamps that they screwed into his skull to keep it still, although he isn’t aware of any screws. The dull ache in the muscles of his neck sometimes sends pulses of white, shooting pain straight into the back of his head. It causes a sensation of the cranial bone being about to break. He tries to wriggle just a little to move the place where the cramp might be starting but that only causes everything to slide and undulate and the nausea rises inside him like a wave of slurry. He would like to vomit but has no strength to do more than helplessly open and close his mouth. The nausea stays inside him, bathing him in cold sweat, leaving him in a sea full of shadowy bodies that move about somewhere deep below and then, from somewhere even further away, he hears a soft voice hum a song he vaguely recognises. It is a simple tune, a song for children, something about a fox that has stolen a goose but is told he must let go of the goose or the hunter will shoot him:
Fuchs, du hast die Gans gestohlen,
gib sie wieder her, gib sie wieder her.
Sonst wird dich der Jäger holen,
mit dem Schiessgewehr.3
Dawn is breaking, the moment has come when the light begins to take over the room but before it has acquired the weightiness of full daylight. Apart from the floating, white ends of the beds, he only manages to distinguish right-angled patterns like the white-painted grids over the windows and the chequered floor that disappears under the threshold and cupboards. The remaining darkness still swallows everything that is curved, like the bodies that must be lying there under the white coverlets. He is lying in the bed nearest the corridor wall. In the bed next to his, he sees a boy who he feels he has seen before. The boy is his own age or maybe a little older. He is lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, and his face looks strangely bird-like, with sunken cheeks and a sharp ridge of a nose. Even though the boy seems to
hardly breathe, the song is emanating from him. His singing voice is low and only slightly modulated but clear enough for Adrian to hear how it takes off for each repeat – gib sie wieder her, gib sie wieder her – and increases in strength towards the end of the verse – mit dem Schieeessgewe-ehr …! When one listens intently to a song or just the sound of a voice, one’s entire being is focused, wide open to the music. Even though he still can’t sense his body, Adrian turns towards the day room at the bottom of the corridor where Felix Keuschnig is playing piano and watches how Felix’s usually clumsy hands move across the keys on either side of his straight back. This is in pavilion 17 and the idiots are sitting about, on chairs or on the floor, surrounding Nurse Blei, lifting their hands and clapping and … gib sie wieder her! Nurse Blei sings and … GIB SIE WIEDER HER! babble the idiots and clap or try to clap at the same time or at least in the same way as she does. The very same Felix Keuschnig is now in the bed next to Adrian. Felix seems lifeless. How can this be? How can there be one Felix who plays and sings, and another one in that bed? Unless there are two of them, one in the day room and one here. It might explain why Adrian himself can’t move his arms and legs. Actually, he is not here but in some other bed, in another pavilion or somewhere quite different altogether. From far away, he hears the sound of the medication trolley being wheeled along. The wheels rub and grind against the floor, the bottles and jars rattle and clank against each other when the trolley is pulled across the threshold. Soon the doors are opened to let in a whole horde of nurses in white. His temperature is up again, he hears somebody say. It is impossible to work out if they are talking about him or about Felix or perhaps someone else in a bed further away. Because he can’t move or even focus his eyes, it seems to him that all voices come from every corner of the room simultaneously and that is too much for the heaving sea inside him: once more, everything tilts and the retching becomes uncontrollable and he finally feels he can’t contain any more of this blackness without bursting and being ripped apart. Hurry up with a basin, he’s vomiting again! He senses the surface of something hard and cold (metal, perhaps enamel) bump against his chin. There now, the voice says and out it comes, all that was in his stomach and then the stomach itself. He chokes on the thick, ripped-out, warm stomach lump, it suffocates him but he hasn’t the strength to resist. And the hard enamelled dish is there again and presses against his chin and he heaves and cramps and finally succeeds in puking out the whole black lump, dripping with chewed food and after it comes everything that is joined to the stomach, the long, fat gut tube is hauled out of him like a gross length of sausage. He feels the pain inside his belly as one segment after another is torn off from its attachments and then the gut is followed by all his other organs: a slippery, fat-infiltrated liver, the slender kidneys, lungs squashed into two foam-filled bags and then, when nothing else is left, his heart. He can feel the sensation of it pulsating as it works its way up his body and into his throat, where it sits like a slimy egg that beats and beats. Then he vomits it out as well. He has no heart any more, and he lies back, scraped out and emptied, as if sunk to the bottom of the room. Only the angry hammering on the piano and the alien singing are left. The light in the room is large and white and open. Felix thumps on the piano keys as if the instrument were the only thing still keeping him here, in this world. The white-clad ones try to pull his fingers off the keyboard but he is ahead of them every time and off playing on new keys. They try to get a hold on his long, slender, straight back but he is too slim and too agile for them. Adrian sees them push a stretcher over to the piano and, heaving together, tip Felix’s body onto it. But the piano has stuck to his playing fingers and follows him, tilts upwards and then falls to the floor with an enormous crash. Then, a sudden silence. A huge silence like a vast suffocation; he tries to scream even though he has no lungs left. He screams all the same and screams and screams. High up, somewhere near the ceiling, a door opens and a nurse enters. She comes walking down towards him, as if descending from the sky. It is none other than the ward sister herself, Katschenka. Her progress is slow, her movements measured and silent, as if she has all the time in the world. In the large white light, her face is expressionless and quite still. Nonetheless, she seems to be smiling at him and when she smiles, at the very instant her lips part to show her grey teeth, the room suddenly disappears and true silence falls.
The Chosen Ones Page 31