I understand that you’re a Ziegler.
Adrian was holding two buckets brimful of coals, one in each hand. Had he been found out? The sharp tin handles cut into the palms of his hands but he didn’t dare to change his grip for fear of losing his balance or spilling the coals. The Silver Knife was moving off and all three of them walked through the little wood and up towards Brenner’s house:
I knew a Eugen Ziegler back in the old days;
a fine man, easy to get on with;
is he your father?
Adrian kept staring at the Silver Knife’s shoes, marvelling at how shiny and well polished they were despite all the muck and dust and mud they had to walk through every day but the real question was, how was he to understand the warmth that spread like a wave through his chest and into his whole body? He had done everything he could not to be recognised but the Silver Knife’s appreciative words about his father filled him with a mixture of pride and shame unlike anything he had felt before. From that day, Adrian’s position in the collective of coal pickers had changed. Karl Brenner showed a certain regard for him when they spoke together. When Mrs General placed the bowl of soup or goulash in front of him, there was a slightly respectful restraint about her movements and he no longer had to sleep in the damp cellar but was allowed to share an upstairs bedroom with the blue-eyed Leopold. In the evening, the Silver Knife’s trusted runners would meet up on the embankment. Some brought cigarettes and were keen to offer him one. Mostly, they just wandered about and smoked and told each other tales about a war that none of them had experienced. They saw themselves as real deserters by now, Schimmlern, or even as Politische (those were the ones the police were supposed to be after) and Adrian might fall back on his father’s overused line about how when Stalin and his boys come, I’ll join the partisans and although he had repeated that one to death and the words were meaningless, everyone laughed to show how they appreciated it. When the weather was nice, they went along to Simmeringer Haide to sit on the grass and watch the teams of local boys playing football. Sometimes they divided up into teams and played each other. Further out on the heath, between the football pitches and the canal, the Nazis had set up a prisoner of war camp. This was what some of the footballers had found out. As one of them pointed, Adrian looked at the high walls, the enclosing barbed-wire fence and the guards that could be seen coming and going. Strangely enough, he didn’t feel threatened or afraid. It was as if it didn’t have anything to do with him and didn’t arouse any feelings. Many years later, Adrian could clearly remember the long evenings of summer dusk vibrating with full-throated birdsong, the air rich with the lightly acidic smell of wild flowers and newly mown grass, and how, in the gathering dark, everything dissolved except their faces and made them look like great big lumbering animals rooting around on the football pitch. In the end, only Jockerl was left running with his legs kicking out in every direction, white legs – albino-white, Adrian would say later – so white that someone might have deposited a layer of frost over his skin and made him freeze in the middle of the warm dusk, until someone formed their hands into a megaphone and Jockerl! – fuck’s sake, give over, and then Jockerl! Jockerl! and Jockerl finally veered to the sideline and let his body slump on the grass and then sat with hanging head and his elbows resting on his knees while his white chest rose and fell like bellows, just as Otto Semmler’s had when he was close to death and lying in the bed next to Adrian’s in the gallery of pavilion 15: breaths far too heavy for so small a body. Adrian steeled himself and went to sit next to Jockerl. I’m really sorry about that thing with the cartridge, he wanted to say but perhaps he didn’t, perhaps he only heard himself say it inside his head. It could be that all he did was to hold out a packet of cigarettes towards Jockerl, pressed him a little to have one, as the others did when they wanted to confirm with a mate that there was an understanding or even a pact between them. And he wanted to say something about the fact that they were both outside now, meaning that what went on in there surely didn’t matter that much anymore. Perhaps it had also been best if Jockerl hadn’t said or done anything except being pale and exhausted, and just carried on breathing with his body hanging limply between his splayed knees, but he didn’t. He turned to Adrian and smiled, the same submissive, anxious, affectionate and despairing smile that had been on Jockerl’s face when Pototschnik was in a really mean mood and went for him, and Jockerl! Pototschnik’s voice was saying, you sad sack, I’ll kill you! All the time, Jockerl smiled and smiled. After a while, Jockerl packed up his smile and walked away, and Adrian, too, walked back to the room where he and Leopold slept. That night, it started to rain. At first, it sounded like small fingers tapping on the roof but, later, an ice-cold draught seeped in through the unsealed cracks around the window frame and the rain hammered against the walls and the roof, sounding as if someone with large, thumping fists wanted to get in at any cost. Within the noise of the rain, they heard a diesel engine coming close, car doors open and shut, and hoarse voices shouting loudly and urgently to each other. On the ground floor, Karl Brenner was having words with someone and then came the sound of many hurrying feet in heavy boots coming upstairs. The smell of leather and wet uniform cloth that invaded the room when the door was opened told him this was the police. A torch beam swept the room. Karl Brenner’s upset, breathless voice rose from behind the cops, saying I told you, it’s just my sons who’re sleeping in there. The door slammed shut again, there were more heavy boots stamping on the stairs and then they were suddenly gone. He stayed still, burrowed into his mattress, feeling like a frog at the bottom of a well. His heart was beating, fit to break the well walls down. Finally, there were voices from outside the house again. They seemed to be laughing, loudly and on a single note, though it might just have sounded like that because of the rain. The car doors slammed shut and, after a while, the engine noise grew fainter and faded away.
*
The Last Run It rains all night. It has stopped by the morning but the air is close and humid, as if the rain hasn’t quite given up. The trees in the small wood they have to walk through every day to get to the tracks are striped with dripping moisture, under a sky as smooth and pale as an eggshell. As always, the Silver Knife is already at his post by the embankment. Somehow, his name seems more right than ever. The shadow cast by the brim of his hat seems to cut his face in two. His voice remains, but only just. Even though the Silver Knife doesn’t mention the police raid last night, they realise that this will be their last run. Perhaps that is why no one steps forward when the pointing finger starts to move around the ring of tense, dejected boys and: you! Silver Knife is just about to say when Adrian steps forward and says Jockerl could be a runner! It’s meant as a joke because everyone knows how useless Jockerl is when he runs. The boys laugh and the Silver Knife laughs most of all, and puts his arm around Adrian’s shoulders and gives him a friendly squeeze. In that moment, all the laughing boys know that it is him, Adrian, who will be running tonight and he is taking it on to save everybody else but he will run so well that it won’t matter that this is the last time. Leopold, who himself used to run at least once a week, has taught Adrian the ropes. Start the exact moment as the first truck comes by and then keep a steady pace with the train or run faster if you can. The best thing is to put more power in at the start of the run because it’s when the engine driver enters the curve that he pays the least attention to what happens behind him. There’s a short ladder on the side of each truck. The bottom rung sticks out below the side of the truck. Try to grip the ladder as high up as you can, then swing the lower part of your body up and place your feet on the lowest rung. You’ve got to let go with one hand when you take hold higher up and then you can heave up and over using your body weight. Once you’ve steadied on your feet it’s just a matter of balance. When you’re there, standing upright and the train is racing ahead, the freedom you feel is like nothing else, Leopold had said and Adrian, lying on a mattress next to him in Mr Brenner’s house, often imagined that muc
h-desired moment when he alone would be on the move and everything else left behind. But he knows it will be hard. His body is heavy, perhaps too heavy for his running speed. Still, if only he catches up with the truck he will have enough strength and stamina to hang on and climb up, whatever else happens. But once he is up there on the embankment, he has no time to think. The train is rushing towards him from the Ostbahnbrücke, as if shooting out from nowhere or as if it had been formed out of its own noise: the heavy, pulsating beats of iron against iron. A body of iron suddenly shatters the air with its howling whistle. Then, the shrieking noise of the wheels as the brakes slow them down: a sound like a huge iron ore crusher. By then he is already running, running like the wind, as the tall trucks roll past him in a strong current of dusty, oil-laden, burning-hot air that hits his face. He hadn’t reckoned with this, nor that the wet and slippery ballast along the edge of the track would make it so hard to put one leg in front of the other. His right foot slips all the time, his back curves forward and his groin takes the strain. He reaches for the ladder but it is touch and go because it ends much higher up than he thought. Or is the ballast base settling or sinking underneath him? He stretches his arms as far as he can and grabs the bottom rung. Just then, he hears a cry behind him and sees Jockerl come after him at a run. The boy’s pale face is stripped bare with effort and he holds out one arm, as if trying to catch up with Adrian to tell him something. By then Adrian is only halfway up and hasn’t got a very good grip but he still reaches out his free hand to Jockerl. Despite his clumsy, uncoordinated arms and legs, Jockerl has managed the incredible feat of keeping pace with the truck and even hangs on to the bottom rung of the ladder, his legs beating like drumsticks under his swinging body. Adrian can’t stop himself, he has to reach out with his arm as if to support the runner or at least offer a helping hand. At that moment, the entire train shudders but, instead of slowing down a little more, it increases its speed. Adrian sees the ballast rush past faster and faster. A wave of panic washes over him. He leans half his body away from the side of the truck and there, behind him but not all that far behind, Jockerl lifts his head and looks up at him. This is the first time their eyes meet. Hold on! Adrian wants to scream. Don’t let go! But just as their hands are close, Jockerl turns his head away, his arm shoots straight up like an exclamation mark while the rest of his body hangs in the air like a white, flapping piece of cloth. Then the air current weakens and lets go of him. There is a short, horribly dull thud as his body hits the truck behind and what is left of Jockerl is tossed in a wide arc up in the air and then disappears out of sight as abruptly as if the ground had opened to swallow him up. Adrian is already on top of the truck and is trying desperately to gain a foothold on the mass of loose, slipping chunks of coal. When he can finally turn to look, the train is taking a slight bend and he sees the other boys come running from all over the place to gather at one spot on the edge of the road that runs alongside the railway. Adrian stands there, helpless, on top of a mountain of meaningless coal. He knows he must jump, but where? The train is still gaining speed and around him the track is widening, one set of rails cut into another and the buildings grow denser. Already, he glimpses behind the next curve what must be the roof of the station house in Simmering. He knows that if he doesn’t jump now he will never get off this train. Flailing with his arms to keep his balance, he advances to the edge of the truck. Far down there is a chasm of shining rails. The beat of the wheels across the joints makes the side of the truck shake along its full length, and almost throws him off as he tries to climb over the edge. His feet are back on the ladder as the train gradually begins to slow down. At that moment, he sees in the distance an oncoming train. He stops hesitating and, with violent force, leaps away from the side of the truck. Instinctively, he curls up to make his contact area with the ground as small as possible but it doesn’t help much: he hits the sleepers with the left side of his body just below the curving border of the ribcage. For a few seconds, everything becomes flickering lights and a bleeding, pulsating sound. He thinks that he will lose consciousness and be run over by the other train. He hears its screaming brakes as if the sound were coming from somewhere inside him but somehow pulls himself out of the pain that presses him down and, with one hand against the side of his chest, crawls off the deadly track with only seconds to spare before the other train rushes past in a cloud of hot, oil-soaked air laden with trackside dust. Hidden behind the seemingly endless freight train, dragging himself along with a slowly spreading, cramped stiffness along the side of his body, he starts the slow walk back to where he has just come from, one metre after the next, while shouting at himself: why go back? Don’t do it, there’s nothing there for you, get away while you have a chance! But he can’t rid himself of Jockerl’s face, now so close he feels he could reach out and touch it. Why was Jockerl allowed to run? Or had the Silver Knife sent him to tell Adrian to cancel the run? He knows that he will have no peace until he has found out. And so, once more, the gap between sky and ground grows narrower, a gap that for one dizzying moment had seemed truly to open up around him. He has a vision of walking towards his own mirror image that slowly but tirelessly advances along the track, as if he and it were pulled together by an invisible cord. Then the figure suddenly stops and starts waving with an object held in its hand, and Adrian realises that he isn’t watching his own reflection but that it is Leopold who has come to look for him. The thing in his hand is a spade. He lowers it to the ground and then starts running down the embankment. Adrian sets off at a run, too, and stumbles, slips and slides down the slope. Leopold’s face is flushed, as if he had been slapped or as if he is burning inside. Quickly, he says, we must get him away from here. He points at the road where a police car has stopped. Two officers climb out and set out towards the embankment. Leopold pulls Adrian towards the edge of the ditch. Jockerl lies there, half-hidden behind some shrubs. The contents of the top of his head have spilt, a sloppy grey mess coated with blood and gravel. The rest of his face is still perfectly recognisable, its features distinct as if painted on and its eyes staring as emptily and helplessly as ever. Leopold has left the wheelbarrow on the roadside and is now pulling at one of Jockerl’s legs and signalling to Adrian to take hold of the other one. But Adrian can’t make himself do it, just stands as if paralysed, staring down at Jockerl’s strange miniature face. He can see the Silver Knife a little further down the road. He is turning round, a quarter-turn at a time. Like a weathervane: first a quarter-turn one way, then a quarter-turn in the opposite direction. Getting nowhere. Now the two cops have him in a firm hold with his arms twisted behind his back. Leopold lets go of Jockerl’s leg. Just then, a train goes by and envelops everything in a cloud of black dust and flakes of coal. Its insane howling noise thunders and crackles, forcing the two policemen to bend over until the last truck has passed and the train disappears up the bridge approach and then across the river.
Borstal
Adrian Ziegler’s mental development is average and there are no grounds to assume any psychotic condition or mental retardation at the time of examination. His grossly delinquent behaviour must therefore be due to poor racial stock and having been raised in a criminal and markedly antisocial family setting. Judging by the boy’s achievements in life so far, as well as by our clinical observations and assessments, it appears that well-intentioned and caring attention, as well as all attempts at forming and schooling his character, have had little effect.
Legally, one reached the age of criminal responsibility at fourteen. After having spent four weeks in the youth detention cells on Rüdengasse in the 3rd Bezirk, the court sentenced him in September 1944 to eighteen months in borstal for vagrancy, thieving and refusal to work. The sentence was based on the evaluation Doctor Illing had issued from the Spiegelgrund institution.
An ex-SS guard called Nowotny escorted him from the Rüdengasse police cells to the youth detention facility in Kaiserebersdorf. They walked all the way from Rüdengasse to the tram stop at Oberzeller
gasse and boarded the 71 tram together, the same tram that he and his little brother Helmut had travelled on once, accompanied by Mrs Haidinger who had picked them up from the Lustkandlgasse children’s home. He remembered how Mrs Haidinger had bought Helmut chocolate from the kiosk at Zentralfriedhof when they were waiting to change to the 73 tram. Mrs Haidinger had told him that he was too ugly to get anything. Now the ugly boy was getting on the same tram, chained to the former SS guard like a beast led to slaughter. And, although Nowotny had already given what little he had to offer to his Führer and the great leader’s army, he felt taking a prisoner from the police cells to the prison was a shitty job well below his proper status and so he shouted prison transport prison transport! as they were boarding and hit Adrian over the back of his neck and back to force him into the most remote corner of the carriage. It would have been hard to decide who of the two of them disgusted the other travellers more: Nowotny and his brutal treatment of the prisoner, or the prisoner himself, the deserter and layabout who had been lying low while decent people had obediently made sacrifices but now was hauled out from his lair to be properly punished. Deserters, wartime saboteurs and ordinary criminals were all incarcerated in the borstal institution in Kaiserebersdorf. Arguably, the saboteurs and other miscreants were in the majority, because all young people were regarded as deserters if they had failed to turn up for labour service or ignored the call-up to the Wehrmacht. It was tacitly understood that the prison guards could do what they liked with deserters. Adrian shared a cell for a while with a youth called Viktor Zobel. Zobel had psoriasis, which meant that his arms, back, chest and belly were covered with large, red, scaly lesions that itched terribly and were made worse by the coarse, dirty prison uniforms they were forced to wear round the clock. Even though Zobel did all he could to stifle his whimpers, the guards heard him. One night, one of them dragged him into the corridor and beat him senseless. After that, Zobel kept back the small ration of margarine that came with their evening meal and used it as an ointment for his wounds, though if his tortured moaning through the night was anything to go by it didn’t help much. The war will be over soon, he kept mumbling, as if the two phenomena were linked – the war and the wounds that gave him no peace. Adrian Ziegler spent a total of seven months in Kaiserebersdorf and all he saw of the sky in that time was a square grey area above the exercise yard where they had to line up in the morning, most of them wearing only wooden clogs. Sometimes snow fell from the square of sky and sometimes it did nothing but, as far as Adrian was concerned, it was just as cold all the time. In snow and ice and drifting rain, their bodies still stiff and sore after the damp chill of their cells, the prisoners had to stand waiting until everyone had been allocated work of some kind in a prison workshop or in the kitchen and its attached bakery. Adrian was sent off to the Hellhole, as they called the laundry in the cellar, presumably because it was the only place in the entire prison that was kept really warm. He and two other prisoners, Heinzl and Matthias, were supervised by a one-armed sergeant called Schwach. The other arm was left behind in Vitebsk, Schwach explained to the boys. Adrian’s job was to see to it that the level and pressure of the water in the two high-pressure vessels were kept constant and to top up with coal or water as required. Bringing the coal twice a day was the heaviest part of the job: it meant carrying the twenty-five-kilogram coal buckets, one in each hand, and tipping the contents into the purpose-built coal bunker. Every time he did it, the memory of Jockerl came back to him, the memory of how he had reached out his hand to the running boy and how Jockerl hadn’t been able to take hold of it or perhaps hadn’t wanted to and then plunged from the truck. It seemed weird, but Jockerl hadn’t even been mentioned in Adrian’s sentence, as if he truly hadn’t existed, or had once, but been erased from reality. All the same, Jockerl was always very much present inside Adrian. Like a second prison guard, he saw to it that there was no let-up from the memory, not even when dropping off to sleep because, as soon as Adrian became drowsy on his stool in front of the pressure gauges, there was Jockerl, his skin as white as ever, running along the train and Adrian was holding out his hand but Jockerl refused to take it. Over and over again, as if a film loop were running in his head. Unless the air-raid sirens went and he had to stop. The standing order on hearing the sirens was to put out the fires and remove all embers. As far as Adrian could remember later on, the bombing raids over Wien began at about the same time as his prison sentence, in September 1944. It happened that they had to douse the fires and run to the shelters several times a week. One consequence was that the piles of unwashed laundry grew bigger and bigger. One day, the boss of the provisions department at the army base turned up and demanded action. The soldiers couldn’t wait any longer for their clothing: uniforms, socks and underpants. Sergeant Schwach stated that in case of raids, his orders were to extinguish the fires and have embers removed. The officer turned to the prison governor and it was decided to start up a night shift in the laundry. Everyone who worked nights would receive an additional meal consisting of the leftovers from the kitchen at the barracks. As a result, the laundry staff were given bread and decent food, delivered by lorry nightly and in good order. It made existence in the hellhole almost tolerable. Apart from keeping an eye on the fires and the temperatures in the boilers, Adrian was given the task of going through the mountains of uniforms and greatcoats before they were laundered, looking out for things like coins or faded pictures of women and children. Once, he found a wedding ring and, another time, a cigarette case engraved with initials. His finds were requisitioned by Sergeant Schwach, who let Adrian have big pots of marmalade to spread on the black bread. When the night shift began, Schwach would ask if everything was under control so he could withdraw briefly and Adrian always answered that everything was fine (what else could he say?) and so Schwach went off for a kip, in a small space behind the large laundry pans where he had fitted in a bed. He kept a small radio receiver on a bedside table switched on. During calm nights, Schwach snored in his quarters while the radio, turned down low, was chatting to itself. Sometimes, the cry of a cuckoo cut through the broadcast to warn of another raid and the sergeant shot out from behind the pans with his hair standing on end and his braces dangling at knee height, shouting Feuer löschen! Feuer löschen! – which gave Adrian just a few minutes to put out the fires under the pans and, once he was sure that the ashes were dry and free of any glowing embers, sprint the eight hundred metres or so to the exercise yard, then cross it to the building on the other side and down the long, echoing cellar stairs to the shelters where he sat down among the others, seething inwardly because now it would take at least two hours to restart the fires and get the pressure up in the boilers. Now and then, they heard the dull thuds of exploding bombs, sometimes far away but sometimes so close the ground shook. Then, at dawn after a night raid, when he had just got the fires going again, a guard ordered everyone out into the exercise yard for a line-up. Adrian was so tired he didn’t know if he slept standing up. Every time he looked up at the square piece of sky, the light cut his eyes like a sharpened knife blade. A truck with armed guards in the back came to pick them up. For a short, senseless moment, Adrian thought they were all to be executed. Heinzl, whose face was ashen, sat opposite him, then a boy whose name he didn’t know, who was so frightened his knees were shaking almost too hard for his arms to keep them still. Next to the scared boy, Jockerl was facing him as usual, smiling his terrified porcelain smile. This was in February 1945. He remembers the white sky and the new layer of snow on the fields on either side of the road. The truck bumped along towards Albern where he saw the river for the first time, like a black slash through the whiteness. They passed burnt-down houses, buildings that had been flattened, and there the ground, too, was black, as if a huge wall of flame had travelled along the road, leaving only ashes behind. The truck stopped at one of the grain silos by the harbour basin. It looked unharmed but the adjoining buildings were in ruins. They were ordered into teams, given spades and told to start
clearing the site. As he set to work, he heard a diesel engine throbbing somewhere behind him. He couldn’t work out why at first but then he realised that it belonged to a pump draining overflow water from the grain store via long hoses into the harbour. Though the guards were armed, they were not brutal: after digging for a couple of hours, Adrian’s team was told to take a break. They were given bread and sausage and, after the meal, he was even offered a cigarette by one of the soldiers. Adrian looked into the kindly face under the helmet and realised this was a young man, not much older than himself, even though he tried to make himself look as solid as possible with gestures and voice. It doesn’t matter what they do, soon river shipping won’t be possible anyway. The soldier waved the barrel of his rifle towards the black river that was rushing along between the white snowdrifts. The Americans have mined it all the way from here to Nussbaum, he said, then puffed up his cheeks and rolled his eyes upwards until they protruded like two white balls, and BAA-BOOM! he shouted meaninglessly and flung his arms out as if to mimic the explosion of a floating mine and, all around him, the other guards and the digging prisoners turned and smiled, white grins on their dirty faces. They carried on hacking and shovelling stone and pieces of reinforced concrete until long after dusk. Then the trucks arrived for them and took them back to the prison. The digging teams’ wet and filthy kits were waiting for him in the laundry. He had barely started throwing them into the boilers when the air raid began. In front of him, as if sprung out of the cellar floor, Sergeant Schwach rose up and shouted his Feuer löschen! Feuer löschen! in a voice that sounded as if large wounds had been ripped open inside his throat. This time, Adrian had no energy left to move out of the merciful warmth that enclosed him and nobody even tried to make him go anywhere. That night he dreamt about the river as he had seen it when he walked across the Ostbahnbrücke in the early light of dawn: like a huge wall of black water that grew taller and taller as if just waiting to come tumbling down over him.
The Chosen Ones Page 34