Authors: Steve Sem-Sandberg
You really must continue to write to me, Miss Katschenka;
do promise me that, your letters have meant so much to me!
On the return journey, she feels mystified. She looks out over the bare fields that seem alternately to approach and to retreat from the train; sometimes station houses flit past, or lowered barriers behind which the odd vehicle and other road users are waiting, men and women on bicycles with their hands resting calmly on the handlebars. She sees all and everyone, as if reduced to gazing, and hardly dares to move for fear that the light she carries inside her might be extinguished
or lost among shadows. What might do it? Throughout the train’s shuddering progress runs an uncertain, misty trail made by a slight suspicion that she might have been used, that everything he had said, even that obscure remark about love, has been part of a scheme. At whom, if not at her, had his words been aimed? Was he perhaps using code to refer to something quite different – to some greater duty? Or was it about the land, the same land above which the swallows are whirling now, as she watches them and observes their blind trust that each beat of their wings will lead on to the next; she sits very still, too fearful to move a single millimetre in case her frail certainty fades into something else, and she remains still and stiff until the Traiskirchen stop, when a large group crowds into her carriage and the conductor comes hurrying along to check everyone’s ticket.
*
Healthy Children and Other Kinds
In June 1942, she is finally able to write to Doctor Jekelius that the Spiegelgrund board has found a replacement for him: a German doctor called Illing. Perhaps Doctor Jekelius is already familiar with this gentleman, at least by reputation? He is said to be excellent, she writes, and adds that Illing has brought his entire family with him. Not even Hilde Mayer has managed to find out the precise number of family members who have moved into the medical director’s residence on Baumgartner-höhe but a nanny seems to be part of the establishment. Only one day after Doctor llling introduces himself to the staff, members of his family are seen out on a brisk walk in the hospital park: in the lead, a young blonde nanny in a blue uniform and a neat apron, who carries the smallest child in her arms. These two are followed by three children, keeping in line as if pulled along on a string. At a guess, there is little more than a year between each one of them: a girl of about three, another of four or so, and a boy who looks between six
and seven years old. All of them carry garden tools: hoes and spades and buckets. As they pass the pavilions, work practically stops and everyone who can runs to a window to watch. Under the nanny’s supervision, Illing’s children spend the entire long and lovely afternoon near the top of the slope below pavilion 15 where they bravely dig a large vegetable patch, which they plant later that summer with potatoes and winter cabbages, all of course to contribute to the household during this time of scarcity and self-denial. With time, people develop a habit of stopping by to admire their monument to hard work and utility. The nurses battle to gain favour with the doctor’s steadily working children and become especially shameless when the nanny, a kind-hearted German woman, happens to be out of listening range. From inside pavilion 17, with its day room’s windows facing the garden, the activities of the new children are observed with endless interest. Look, Nurse Blei says, and lifts the dribbling Otto Semmler to a window. Look, the doctor’s children are playing outside again. Pelikan stands next to Otto and has made four fingers into a square on the pane. First, he presses his lips against the glass and then his whole face, as if the power of wishing could transfer the healthy little boys and girls, running and jumping, out of the garden and into his ever-confused mind. Anna Katschenka could easily have written a few lines about young Pelikan to Doctor Jekelius. She can’t help connecting the lad to their ‘excursion’. Which, incidentally, is likely to be the reason why she puts up with Pelikan despite all that, in her heart of hearts, she detests about him: his eager, busybody habits, like dragging himself along to open the door for her every time she visits, and his way of pressing his hot, wet mouth against everything, and of panting as if about to burst with animalistic, obscene excitement; she is repulsed by the voracious appetite that makes him devour any food in sight and by his small,
clinging hands, always with sticky palms, that she has to keep smacking and brushing away but which somehow always find other bits of her to attach to. But, when all that was said, she cannot but feel some pity for him and look at him as one of God’s creations that
almost
turned out well enough. He behaves as if the people and objects he seeks out so greedily are always just out of reach and he can’t stop himself from trying to get to them, to grasp his chances with big gestures as if ready to embrace the whole world. None of this ever amounts to much more than a staggering gait and imprecise, flailing movements and, sometimes, meaningless vocalisations: that repetitive, panting
Katsch Katsch Katsch
which greets her when Nurse Blei has put him in a wheelchair to push him along to the main lecture hall. These occasions are another Illing novelty. He gives weekly lectures for medical and nursing students about different physiological and, specifically, neurological defects and malformations, and analyses their causation in terms of racial biology, which means that he requires a steady supply of children to display. Pelikan has to put up with standing as straight as he can, in all his naked frailty, on the podium Doctor Illing has had constructed in the middle of the hall. Despite the unmistakable pain it causes him to have to stand upright, the boy carries out his task with the same beaming enthusiasm that he devotes to everything, smiling not only towards Doctor Illing, who keeps poking at his back with the wooden pointer and shouting at him to
straighten up
, but also towards the embarrassed female students who wriggle uneasily where they sit and pretend to listen to Illing’s hectoring voice, although Pelikan’s well-meaning, almost ingratiating smile begins to fade towards the end of the teaching hour and gradually becomes a grimace of pain so profound that his childish face is pared back to knotted muscles and visible facial bones around his helpless, sucking mouth and always pleading eyes.
When the lecture has ended, Anna Katschenka, who has managed to find an unrelated errand to carry out in the auditorium, busies herself with getting the boy into his clothes as quickly as possible and then back to the day room, although Hilde Mayer is ready with a comment, as always:
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.
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, part 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.