I incline my head and contemplate the painful deaths of these children. May the earth be light in which we let them rest.
A Father, Hannes Says As he grew older, Hannes Neubauer began to collect maps. One of them was a poster from the Nazi era which illustrates the river systems of German-controlled Europe’s (Germanische Europa – that’s what it says): it is beautifully done, with the rivers drawn to look like long blood vessels, coloured black, red, blue and turquoise. They wind their way across a continent so bloated with annexed and occupied territories that the landscape characteristics cannot be made out. Look, here, Hannes says and points to the region of Mähren, which has been crossed by a strong turquoise line, here’s where the Nazis wanted to dig a canal to link the Oder and the Donau. They were going to use Russian POWs to dig it. If they had succeeded in linking the two rivers, all the waterways of Europe would have been interconnected in one great vascular system and they would’ve ruled over everything, not only the roads and railtracks and harbours but also the internal flow in our circulatory systems. Why do you think getting rid of us mattered so much to them? We didn’t occupy any space; we weren’t visible on their maps. But we prevented their blood from attaining purity, from running freely. Simply by existing, we cast a shadow of doubt over the obedient and pliable type of people they had hoped to foster. The ruling race wanted to invent a slave race. But they failed. We were the stain, the shameful last resistance that they had to conquer inside themselves and never managed to break down. We were the flaw in their system, the stumps at the ends that would never join up, the ghostly voice that whispered in the night to remind them that you will all remain other than you ought to have become, other than you were meant to be. Hannes said all this, and then explained that he had been one of the last inmates left at Spiegelgrund. When the clinical side of the institution finally closed down, he was moved to another hospital. It was on Kollburggasse, in Ottakring. He was allocated a bed in a ward full of other children who nobody had come to claim. He can no longer remember what the specialty of his ward was or for how long he was kept there, but he realises that they must have thought him very ill. A doctor came to see him several times a day and he was given medicines. A psychologist came along as well to talk to him. The psychologist was a kind young woman, quite different to Mrs Baar, who had tormented him for so long; however, even this sweetly patient creature gave up when she received no answers to any of her questions. He was given injections to make him talk but that only made him drowsy and even less willing to speak. The nurse who injected him also brought him food. You must eat now, Hannes, she said. You must grow big and strong. Her voice was warm and kind, and he deeply distrusted everything about her. The war is over now, she said in her treacherously gentle voice. Someone from the ‘administration’ visited at regular intervals, escorting an embarrassed-looking adult or a couple of them. It always went the same way. The ‘administrative person’ produced sheaves of paper and found some name or other to read aloud. The charge nurse pointed at a bed and the adult, or adults (mostly women, rarely men; sometimes a man and a woman together) sobbed loudly or howled, and rushed along to the bed where the child was lying, or else the child was forced to get up and walk obediently with lowered head towards his or her waiting relatives. Finally, the ward had emptied. Only Hannes was left. He had recovered a little by then and spent most of his days by the window, looking out. Windows had no bars in this place but were windows all the same. Then, he suddenly hears somebody come walking along the corridor and, when he turns, the nurse stands in the doorway and tells him, sounding happy and also a little relieved:
Hannes, your mother has come for you.
She steps aside and a strange being reaches out for him and advances as if she expects him to run straight into her arms. He lets out a dreadful scream and then something close to complete pandemonium breaks out. The nurse has to call for help and two male nurses come along at a run and in the end extract him from his hiding place under the bed. Later, an administrative person turns up and there is quite an argument. The strange woman is required to state again and again that her documents are correct. The last thing he remembers from that scene is how he was clinging to the door frame with both hands and how they had to loosen the grip of his fingers one by one to manoeuvre him out of there. Of course, everything is sorted out in the end. The strange woman, who is kind and patient and not at all like the repulsive monster he believed her to be during the first few days, takes him for a walk in the park one day and tells him things. Hannes’s real mother is dead, she explains. She died soon after Hannes’s father divorced her. The woman says that soon after the divorce, she married Hannes’s father. And that was the worst mistake of my entire life, she adds. His father told her that he was a widower and really seemed to be someone who needed the help and support of a woman. Though what he actually needed was someone to vent his anger on, daily. My father is a soldier, Hannes says. The woman understands. Yes, in a way, he was a soldier, she agrees. He worked for the armaments industry and spent day after day at a metal press, a huge machine where you had to put your whole head inside before you depressed the pedal that operated the pressurised air inlet, which in turn powered the entire machine. And, well, one day he forgot, put his foot on the pedal before he had time to move his body out of the way. He had the end he deserved, if you ask me.
You’re lying, Hannes says.
But then, people have been lying to him all his life. How is he to work out what is true and what isn’t? This woman is, as we know, understanding. She says that she did everything to convince the authorities that she must be allowed to give Hannes a real home. Where else would he be? By now, the woman had found a new husband called Heinz Rehmer who teaches in technical college, and Hannes Neubauer grows up with these two. But he can’t get over the lie. All the time, he sits poring over his maps and books, and thinks about what if. What if this or that happened or didn’t, then what? If they really had had time to complete that canal? If their shame had not existed? If his father really had been a soldier and come to take him away after the war as he had said he would? Or if he at least had had the sense to die properly, like all the others?
*
The Nameless Dead On Sunday 28 April 2002, the remains of the nearly six hundred children were buried, all retrieved from the ‘memory room’ in the cellars under the autopsy unit at Steinhof. The memorial service in the chapel in Wien’s Zentralfriedhof is attended not only by Hannes Neubauer but also several others from the ‘old’ reform school intake. Hannes is still in touch with some of them, for instance Walter Schiebeler (Miseryguts). Schiebeler tells Hannes that he recently went to see Pawel Zavlacky, who has got himself a place in sheltered housing in Simmering. I never thought the old fucker would hang on for this long, Miseryguts said. Adrian Ziegler is not present. When people he knows bring up the subject of Spiegelgrund, he usually says things like, I’ve put all that behind me long ago, though hardly anyone believes a word of it, because he still speaks about the place all the time and also carefully cuts out and saves everything he can find about the Nazi euthanasia project. On the day of the funeral, he and his son-in-law are off to pick up flower bulbs and manure from a wholesaler out in Schwechat. Adrian’s son-in-law is called Ewald. He and Missi run a small flower shop together in the 16th Bezirk and Adrian enjoys helping them by collecting goods or stacking sacks with compost and topsoil. During the few years when he worked, it was the simple, practical jobs he always liked best. In 1983, he finally acquires a driving licence, thirty-five years after the law forbade him to drive any vehicle. But his son-in-law does the driving; Ewald and Missi own a red SEAT Combi. The spring day is almost like summer; over the fields, the span of the sky is open and boundless, and a faint, light line of haze at the horizon erases the already ill-defined boundary between earth and sky. The wind blows down from the open sky and sweeps up dust and loose soil from the fields. The wind also makes the tall poplars shudder and creates swooping waves in the dense growths of willow
along the verges. They have just come out of the underpass at the Ostautobahn and are on their way towards Albern when Adrian turns round and remarks to Ewald that they were driven just this way from the youth prison in Kaiserebersdorf that time when they were sent out to clear the rubble left behind by the air raids. It must have been in March, in March 1945. Never, says Ewald, they always used POWs for that kind of work. Who did? Adrian asks. Why, the Nazis, obviously, Ewald says. They have discussions like this quite often: Adrian tells Ewald about something and the younger man says that it couldn’t possibly have happened that way. Ewald is a stubborn and argumentative type who believes he always knows best, even about events he hasn’t been part of. But he listens to Adrian good-humouredly and, on the whole, quite enjoys the company of his father-in-law. Adrian of course knows perfectly well that this was the road. He remembers clearly the strange sensation of being in the sharp light of an early spring morning, and how the mud and half-melted ridges of snow along the verge fused into a depressingly grey mist. He also remembers that Jockerl had been sitting next to him in the back of truck. Jockerl was dead but there all the same, pale and shivering with his knees pulled up close to his body. How can you remember seeing someone who was dead at the time? But it makes no difference to your memory if whomever you remember is alive or dead. By then, the tall grain silos at Albernen Hafen are towering up above the line of the forest. Please, turn off here for a while, he says to Ewald.
After the ceremony in the chapel, the congregation walks to the burial ground. By now there is quite a crowd: politicians in dark suits and journalists wielding microphones and TV crews with their heavy cameras slung over their shoulders. Of course, the camera-eyes are directed almost exclusively at the politicians and their wives, and the Mayor of Wien and his entourage. In the gaps between the dark-suited backs, Hannes glimpses a row of about fifty schoolchildren. Each child carries an enlarged photo of one of the murdered Spiegelgrund children and has raised it to head or chest height. The photographs were presumably taken by Doctor Gross because there are hardly any other ones. The urns are carried along an avenue lined with these faces. The names of the dead are read out aloud. Slowly and methodically, name follows name, but the reading voice is a little rasping or perhaps it is the wind rustling in the low trees and shrubs around the gravestones. Hannes cups his hand behind an ear to hear better:
Baumgartner, Herbert Bayerl, Wilma Becker, Anna
He tries to catch names he recognises. But those who get a mention are children from pavilion 15. Becker, Julius, he thinks, the boy with the scissors; but, of course, Becker’s name is not there. And the voice reads on:
Braun, Anton Brückner, Gertrude Brunner, Hilde Czech, Anton …
Please, turn off here, Adrian had said to Ewald and, without asking any questions, Ewald had swung the car to the right and driven down the long slope to the quayside. Down here, between the silos, it feels much warmer. The air flows and quivers in the roar of the engines as if the entire harbour basin were enclosed in barely transparent, curving glass. Tankers are reversing out towards the loading jetties, the drivers hanging halfway outside the opened cabin doors. They shout and gesticulate to each other but the noise is so tremendous that it is practically impossible to pick up any sounds other than the rumbling of the engines and the rattling of the crane chains as the heavy loads are swung on land. Two harbour workers in hi-viz vests stand with their legs wide apart, ready to grab hold of the long feeder tube from the one of the tankers, then they slowly guide the end of the tube to a gridded opening and, soon afterwards, the grain starts rushing down into the cistern while both men step back and light their cigarettes. Adrian looks around. He doesn’t recognise the place but it must have been here. And it must have been here in Albernen Hafen where dead bodies ended up after being carried downstream, all the dead who Uncle Ferenc had been talking about, the nameless ones who exist nowhere except possibly in the memories of some of those who missed them but never knew where they went after leaving their homes. He and Ewald drive past the long row of harbour store-buildings until the road ends at a turning circle. Two trucks with concrete mixers mounted on the back are parked here. The massive engines are idling while the mixers are being cleaned by two workers. One of them strides around, directing the jet from a high-pressure hose so powerful that it sounds like a gunshot every time the stream of water hits the metal shell of the mixer. The other one follows, using a broom with an extra-long handle to try to scrape off clumps of concrete that still stick to the metal. Both men are wearing brilliant orange overalls but their bare, tanned skin shows underneath. They’re just like Ferenc. Now, Adrian knows that he is in the right place and, for a moment, he feels almost happy. He gestures to Ewald to stop and climbs out of the car. Ewald wants to say something but knows he won’t be heard over idling engines and the concrete mixers, which are rumbling emptily. By now, it’s incredibly hot, as if the daylight itself has been heated and begun to melt in the diesel fumes and is pouring down into the narrow cleft between loading jetties and store buildings. On top of it, insects fill the air. Insistently buzzing flies and horseflies seem crazed by the greasy exhaust smell. Adrian tries to smack them with the back of his hand but it doesn’t help much. On the far side of the tarmacked area, two gateposts mark where a couple of roughly made steps lead down to a small burial chapel half-overgrown with shrubs and climbers. You see the graves first when you come down the cracked, mossy steps. Unlike a proper cemetery, the paths between the gravestones do not run straight and have no distinct outlines, but instead wind and probe, as if seeking the right direction on their own. Actually, these are not pre-prepared paths but tracks worn by the footsteps of visitors. On one of the long summer afternoons when Adrian and his uncle had been keeping an eye on the cattle down by the Hubertusdamm, Ferenc had told him of the forgotten, partly buried cemetery down by Albernen Hafen. They had been lying side by side on the rough, gravelly grass and looking up into the warm, empty evening sky, and the insects had been swarming over the riverbanks in big, black clouds, just as they do now. The river took many of them back, Ferenc had said. Especially when the plan was to control the flow by constructing a cut to make the river go where it does now, and then dam and drain the old river branches. Several of Ferenc’s relatives had joined the labour crews. Most of those who didn’t die from typhus during the digging years were taken by the water and either disappeared for ever or else surfaced with all the other drowned corpses just here, down at Albern. For some reason, one of the river currents created an eddy right there, Ferenc had said. The flowing water forms whirlpools as it always does when surface water clashes with stronger and very much deeper currents. Where many currents meet you’ll get a pool of still water, and in it a lot of rubbish from miles away upstream will tend to collect, like grass, pieces of wood, old boxes and even whole sets of furniture. And human corpses, of course. Lots of corpses. Some of them had been in the water all winter and were so inflated with gas that they seemed barely human. So, this is what happened: they were all buried where they were found, at the tip of the promontory. The graveyard grew quite large in the end. Not that the diversion digging was of any use, Ferenc had added. Even though the river was supposed to be regulated, it flooded its plains again and again and, after each flood, they had to strengthen the high-water dam even more and add a new cemetery on the land side of the old one, just to make room for all the new dead bodies that came floating along.
The banked-up ridge running along the shore to Adrian’s right is the latest attempt to stop the river from flooding this burial ground. There, the dead lie close to each other in disorderly rows, side by side because there are so many of them. Some graves are marked by a wooden board stuck in the ground that says Unknown, nameless. Or else, nothing, or only a date: 14/04/1931. Is that the day when the dead, one or many, were buried? But not all the graves are untended. Here and there, tree seedlings and weeds have been cleared away and fresh flowers put into an old paint-pot, or else the image of a saint has been l
eft on guard, or perhaps a lantern with a burnt-down candle placed inside a glass container stained on the outside by muck and dead insects. The boards or stones on some of the graves even carry inscribed names: Martin, it says on a wooden stick, and on a stone a bit further away, Hildegard. Adrian wants Jockerl to be written on a memorial and, at one point, almost thinks he sees a J, just a faint mark on a stone. When he tears the moss away it is another name and there are so many critters crawling around his mouth and nose that he hardly dares to breathe. And there are insects creeping and swirling on and around the back of his neck and head, and swarming around his forehead and eyes. Strangely enough he can hear the angry whining of their wings even though he can no longer hear the clamour of the harbour with its loading cranes and stores from only a stone’s throw away. The marshy, sodden ground of the graveyard is on another level, as if it belongs to a different world. Using what strength he still has, he clambers up the embankment, holds on to shrubs and roots until he stands in the sunlight at the top. Up there, the wind blows and the insects vanish as if by magic. In the glow of the setting sun, the branch of river spreads out in front of him, all the way down to the power stations at Freudenau. Turning to look in the opposite direction, there is Albern and its narrow harbour entrance, and there is Ewald, smoking a cigarette next to his bright red SEAT. In the middle of the river, a barge is chugging upstream as if moving across a floor of light. Someone shouts. It is Ewald. Adrian! he calls. Adrian sees his mouth opening and closing and his hand pointing to his watch. He turns back to the river for a last look. The barge has disappeared and only the shapeless expanse of water is left, in constant motion but apparently immobile, only reflecting the light from above as if from the unseen inner surface of the sky,
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