Authors: Steve Sem-Sandberg
One morning, a transport arrives. A little boy with oddly large, protruding ears and a scared look in his eyes. Only one guard is there to escort him. After the child has been picked up, she spots the guard having a smoke while chatting with the mothers.
This must be the place where the children get the injections then?
My wife has a friend whose son they killed that way.
She and Nurse Kleinschmittger are walking past. It is just after their midday break. Both nurses stiffen but it is Katschenka who turns quickly and walks towards the man, who goes visibly pale and drops his cigarette.
How dare you say these things? This is a proper, respectable hospital.
She demands to see Doctor Illing, who makes a note of the incident. Then he asks her to describe as exactly as possible what the guard looked like. Can she remember his name? The child he brought in, what was its name? What did it look like? When Doctor Illing has written all that down, he shows his teeth in his notorious, tobacco-stained grin and, for the first time, directs it at Anna Katschenka.
It’s very good of Sister Anna to be so alert.
*
Interpreting Signs
At the beginning of October, Jekelius tells her in a letter that he will be moved on again. He does not say to where but she assumes that the censor has forbidden it and she takes for granted that he will be sent back to the eastern front. She has lived for so long with the thoughts of how he might be engulfed by the Russian winter that it takes a letter several months later, in which he mentions being paid in
Italian lira
, for her to realise that she has been wrong. Now she rereads all his latest letters and sees how often he has hinted at where he is and what he is doing. She has failed to notice. How could she be so careless? In one place, he speaks of a
donkey train
down the same narrow mountain road that he and his company are walking up and refers to the hollow sound of their hooves against the cobbles on a bridge. Do you really come across donkeys in Russia? Where are bridges cobbled? In Italy, or somewhere on the Balkan Peninsula. But hardly in Russia. Then he writes about the silence of the mountains, where he had camped with his company: a silence so profound that you can hear the melancholic notes of a solitary twittering bird ring out, all the way down from the sunlit western summits and into the dark, wooded valley,
without its song being disrupted by any other voices, from animals or human beings
. The otherwise scrupulous military censors have overlooked these little details. The letter is written on his usual lined sheets of paper. Even that time, the only one, when he first wrote to her with a
borrowed hand
, he had been using the same paper, which made her think that he carried a notebook with him wherever he went and tore out pages to write his letters. The thought appealed to her. In the letter that, from then on, she thought of as his ‘Apennine’ one, he also said that his years of running the institution, while still important to him, were retreating more and more into the background:
I have a feeling that, during my existence so far, I have led many different lives but also that the others – the earlier ones – become ever more irrelevant, shrivel and fall. Perhaps all that is old must shrivel until it is gone, in order that we should be able to discern what we are
truly
intended to do.
A few lines further down, he added that he lately had been able to go back to
practising my old trade
and that it gave him satisfaction. At first, she couldn’t think what he meant by his ‘old trade’. Then it suddenly came to her and she didn’t care to think about it anymore. Instead, she focused on the word
we
in the previous sentence. He had also written
on your behalf
about the necessity to look more intently at all that goes on around one – surely that was what he had intended with his story about the bird whose limpid song could be heard even at the bottom of a dark valley? There were periods when she was so preoccupied with interpreting all the signs in his letters and contemplating all the possible secret messages that she sleepwalked through her nursing duties. Meanwhile, nothing changed in the part of reality within which she was alone with herself. Even though Doctor Illing carried on killing children
like you’d be killing rats
(as Hilde Mayer put it), new ones kept arriving at an even faster rate than before, as if spawned by the war. Nature’s power of perversion is endless. In Doctor Gross’s ward for infants, there is a baby boy of three and a half months whom the nurses call Franzl (apparently he has no proper name), about whom Anna Katschenka knows no more than that his mother handed him over as a newborn, probably because she couldn’t bear the sight of him. The shape of Franzl’s cranium is strange, almost triangular, as it narrows to a forward point, like a fox’s head. All his limbs show pronounced webbing between the digits: so-called syndactyly. An amphibian child. Doctor Illing
palpates the angular skull with his thick fingers, then absently prods the joined digits while turning to the ward sister to ask her to arrange a time for pneumoencephalography as well as making the child available as soon as possible for an anatomical examination. A three-year-old girl called Marta Koller is in the next bed. Marta was born with an unusually strongly developed form of bilateral coronal synostosis that has caused the upper part of her cranium to form a protruding ridge. In sharp contrast to the grotesque, boat-shaped top of her head, the face below it is nice and ordinary, almost pretty, with alert brown eyes that follow Illing’s exploring hands with anxious interest. When one of the doctor’s hands inadvertently touches her cheek, Marta suddenly bursts into laughter. Her laugh is low and breathless, somehow secretive, but so infectious that even the usually grim-looking Matron Bertha allows herself a slight smile. The unteachables gather in pavilion 17’s day room, where a fourteen-year-old boy called Felix Keuschnig plays on the out-of-tune piano. His repertoire seems to consist of only a few simple pieces that he plays again and again. Every time Katschenka has a reason to visit pavilion 17, she catches glimpses of these over- or under-developed, malformed children as they run or lumber about, shrieking or bumping into each other or the walls, as if the piano-player’s tunes keep them and the world around them alive and the right way up, and so, if the song died, eveything would collapse. But even within the music, the world closes in on itself. It becomes tighter, note by note. The war is shrinking the world. The space of her own room at home, already circumscribed by domesticity, is dwindling, too. One day, when her brother was still on leave, he went along with his father to watch a football match: Rapid v. Admira Wien. For the first time in many years, Anna’s father was to be away from home and stay out for a whole evening. His face was bright red with delight.
But from that evening on, she felt that her father, too, began to disappear. He returned bare-headed and without his son, and had nothing to say about what had happened – not how the match had ended, not where Otto had gone to, not where he had lost or forgotten his hat. They never found that hat but, after searching for several hours, Anna came across her brother in a bar on Wiedner Hauptstrasse, surrounded by a cluster of lads still too young for army service and to whom he was speaking about something that made him fall abruptly silent the moment she stepped inside. He was so drunk he could barely walk but, behind the fog of booze, his face was naked and hard, as if the bones stretched the skin to breaking point.
You know nothing about what it’s like
, his naked face said to her. This was the only meaningful thing she could recall her brother telling her for the entire duration of his leave. By way of duty, or perhaps atonement of some kind, the institution’s children had been ordered to sing for the wounded soldiers in the reserved hospital pavilions. She endured one such ‘concert’ in pavilion 12: a gaggle of scrawny boys with stupid faces and hoarse, breaking voices who sang patriotic songs. The ‘upstart Krenek’ gave a speech in which he praised the soldiers for their courage, and their willingness to act and sacrifice themselves although everyone knows that they all are so-called psychiatric cases – that is, soldiers who either refused to rush ahead in the first wave like sheep to slaughter, or else were so shocked by the enemy bombardment that they cannot force themselves to speak a single word or stop their hands from shaking. Anna Katschenka, who is a calm, practical person with a strong belief in loyalty and hard work, has never been able to stand hypocrisy and affectation. She observes first the clumsy, delinquent boys trying to sing, then the bedridden human wrecks who once were soldiers, and then the nurses and nursing assistants who are crowded into the doorways,
trying to look as if they enjoy the performance and feel proud at the same time, while all that is truly on their minds is agony about the unending misery and the fact that, soon, there will be nothing left to eat. She goes on night duty afterwards and administers the last dose of the scopolamine Doctor Illing has prescribed for the amphibian boy. She checks the little patient a few hours later. His breathing comes in bursts and his lips, still full and red, are going pale. Then his eyelids retract slowly and he dies. She notes the time of death. It is 3.55 a.m. on a close night in June when all the windows are open, the air outside is buzzing with insects, and the radio announcer speaks of enemy air raids over Sicily and the Italian mainland. After the news, the radio plays marches, as if at a wake, and she holds her breath as she prays, something she hasn’t done for a long time, to the God she is convinced has long since turned his back on mankind: please save us.
*
The Victory of a Healthy Mind over an Unhealthy Body
Isn’t this by him, you know, your doctor?
Hilde Mayer asks one morning after unfolding a crisp copy of
Neues Wiener Tagblatt
on the desk. She has been looking at the patchwork of advertisements and points helpfully at the top right-hand corner of the page:
It’s him, Doctor Jekelius, isn’t it?
Under the heading
Lectures
, she reads:
In Urania, at 7 o’clock
A lecture by Erwin Jekelius, Doctor of Medicine:
‘The Victory of a Healthy Mind over an Unhealthy Body!’
For some reason it upsets Anna Katschenka even more that Jekelius turns out to be back in Wien than it did when she learnt that he was
called up. It feels as if a secret agreement between them has been broken. At first, she can’t think why he is here even though there are, logically, several possible answers to that question. He might be on leave or recalled for some consultation. It might be a family matter. Whatever made him not tell her in advance, she must now respect his silence. Unless, of course, the advertisement in
Neues Wiener Tagblatt
is his
very special way
of informing her. It is an idiotic notion, she knows that, but can’t quite make herself reject it. She decides not to attend the lecture but ends up going after all. The title of the lecture had made her expect a sophisticated, well-behaved audience of perhaps older colleagues and educated non-medical men and women, but instead a noisy, unruly crowd of quite a different kind are pushing through the doors. Many are youngish middle-aged women, hanging on the arms of spouses who appear to be flushed and stiff-faced with embarrassment and try to hide it behind coarse gestures and over-jolly bursts of laughter. Among the back-slapping men, she catches glimpses of a few faces she knows from Steinhof, among them Doctor Hans Bertha and a younger colleague. Both look very uncomfortable. They must have decided to go for places further back in the hall than she has, because this is her only glimpse of them before the door to the lecture hall closes. The loud-mouthed audience gradually goes quiet and everyone turns towards the stage. Next, something very strange happens. The lecturer steps onto the podium,
but it isn’t Doctor Jekelius
. Her first, confused thought is that he has employed the same device as he did in the Lemberg hospital when he ‘borrowed’ someone else’s hand to write for him. Has he borrowed an entire person this time and is this person going to lecture on his behalf? This one looks very much like Jekelius, has the same facial features and the same body. But he moves quite differently, seems awkward and jerky, and also laughs almost all the time, or at least when he begins
by telling some kind of humorous anecdote. She can’t catch what he says and misses the point. Still, the rest of the audience must feel as lost, because there are only a few laughs and most people are shifting uncomfortably in their chairs. Then he asks in a tone that sounds slightly less actorly:
what are the requirements for being a truly good healer of souls?
He launches into the answer to his rhetorical question:
In order to be good at knowing the souls of one’s fellow men and women, one must above all have the ability to engage deeply with the lives of others. Thus, for instance, Goethe has said that he, too, must be capable of carrying out the horrendous acts that he makes his fictional characters commit. In that sense then, Goethe might have been a compulsive offender, had he not taken the opportunity to act out his inclinations in writing. Just as I might myself have murdered in the most terrible ways and acted like a madman, had I not become a doctor. Experience of life is essential if one is to comprehend the lives of others and I now believe that one must, in particular, have lived through three overwhelming states of mind – great love, profound suffering and debilitating illness. A great love and the misery that follows in its wake are both recent emotions that I have endured. And now, in the ongoing war, I have experienced severe illness. Therefore, I think that I can with conviction state that the man who now stands before you is exceptionally well-equipped to conduct a discourse around the subject set for us all this evening.