Authors: Steve Sem-Sandberg
At last, the audience has fallen completely silent. All eyes are fixed on the lecturer who goes on to speak in his unexpected, almost unsettlingly personal way about how, on his way to Russia, he fell so ill his
entire body became paralysed. He not only lost both the motoric and sensory functions of his body but the sight in both his eyes:
I lived as if immersed in an alien darkness; I was in enemy territory and unable to know for certain if those who cared for my helpless body were truly my helpers or intended to push me further towards annihilation. While in that condition, three letters were read out to me, all from women who in different ways had learnt that I had been wounded on the field of war. The first letter was from a deeply religious woman who wrote that she remembered me in her sincere prayers. The second was from someone with no religious beliefs. She sent me a few colourful pictures in the hope that they might stimulate me to regain my sight. But the letter that moved me most was from a third person. She sent me her good wishes and added just a few words: You are a doctor of souls, she wrote, and so need no eyes.
She looks up. These are her own words, written to him. Now she suddenly recognises the
true
Jekelius behind the mask of a stranger. He is standing by the lectern, looking straight at her with his clear, open eyes. Of all the hundreds of people in the audience, he has picked her out almost at once. She can’t cope with meeting his gaze and looks down at her hands, clenched into fists.
These words gave me strength
, he continues after a pause which, to her, seems to last for ever. He goes on to tell them about how one of the doctors at the hospital in Lemberg had let him know that there was another soldier in the same ward, much younger then himself, who was also paralysed from the shoulders down. Jekelius requested to be lifted onto a stretcher trolley and wheeled along to this soldier’s bed:
When my stretcher stood edge to edge with the other patient’s bed, I turned my face towards this stranger, concentrated all my strength and hypnotised him. Once he was in hypnotic sleep, I asked the doctor and the nurse, who had come along to be near us, to lift the patient upright. As he hung there between them, looking lifeless, I told him to start walking. And the sleeping patient began to walk with small, uncertain steps. Supported by the doctor’s hand, of course – but he walked.
Now uproar begins to spread among the members of the audience.
Charlatan!
somebody cries.
Cheat!
Katschenka turns and spots an elderly man in one of the rows at the back of the hall. He is waving his arms and trying to get to his feet but is prevented by somebody next to him. A few rows still further back, she sees Professor Bertha bending forward with his head in his hands. Up there on the podium, Doctor Jekelius holds both hands in front of his face in mock distress, then scans the audience as if to imprint it on his mind.
A soul
, he says.
Now, what is that?
The soul can be defined as the sum total of our emotion, thought and will. The soul can also be defined as that which exists in the interval between desire and action. But then, ask yourselves the following question: does the soul cease to exist just because the body, for some reason, is paralysed and so temporarily out for the count and incapable?
Once again, silence falls in the hall. She sees Doctor Jekelius smile. His smile shows his entire row of teeth, like the grin of a salesman or a thief. There is also something self-satisfied about it. As if he knows that he has the audience under his spell from now on.
You will by now wonder, full of utterly justified doubts, or indeed anger, how someone whose body was paralysed from top to toe, who could not use his eyes to see with or his tongue to formulate the words he thought – how can he act at all? How, you ask yourself, could such a person, relying only on the strength of his will, make another man rise from his sleep and walk as if he had never been injured?
You ask: can medicine create miracles?
You, who doubt what I have just told you, consider this:
Not even the most skilful medical man can heal himself but, then, the art and science of medicine has never been directed towards the self. The most important word in a doctor’s vocabulary is neither diagnosis nor treatment, but … you. This single word means that the ill individual is seen and that a stronger soul can lift a source of suffering that has been too inaccessible or too daunting for the patient to touch. And, in that sense, a healthy soul will always be stronger than the most disease-ridden body. Perhaps the soldier whom I cured in that military hospital ward was suffering from one of the traumatic mental conditions that are such common consequences of war. One word was sufficient to loosen his self-applied fetters. In other cases, such as mine, perhaps the diagnosis will be different and other treatments used.
Nonetheless: you see me standing here before you and, once more, I can see; once more, I can move and I can speak. Ignorance and fear have made us think about illness in a way that is similar to how people during the Middle Ages thought about natural phenomena: as if illness was unchanging, and fundamentally incurable. But, for as long as the soul remains the stronger force, there will always be a way of healing bodily distress. The only questions concern the methods we use and how we regard individual human beings.
He turns to the part of the hall where she is sitting and, with a slight bow, indicates to the audience that the lecture is at an end. At the back, people close to the main door are on the move as if they couldn’t exit quickly enough. Around the stage, a crowd that is almost as large has gathered to press the lecturer’s hand and put to him the many enthusiastic questions they are bursting to ask. She finds herself standing alone in a sea of empty chairs. What should she do next? Leave the hall and seem to join his critics at the back? Or stay where she is until his ardent admirers finally let him go, in the hope that he will look at her and
mean it
, with a genuine smile that she knows is his own. As she waits just outside, she realises that her choice is already made. He knows it, too, and once he has allowed himself to be praised and questioned for half an hour, he comes to her in the foyer. By then, his face looks withdrawn and sombre again.
Sister Anna?
he says in a surprised tone that might be put on for her benefit or simply an affectation.
Have you, too, come here to denigrate me?
*
The Blind
During the years that followed, there were times when she could not, awake or asleep, visualise him in her mind. He might as well have made himself invisible to her or vanished into some sphere of reality beyond her reach. Sometimes, as she lay awake at night, her thoughts fumbled with the memory of him, as a blind woman would fumble with her fingertips on a familiar face, but without finding a single feature she recognised. His words, even the most significant and distinctive, were also gone. At least let me keep your voice, she said into the dark around her, but the voice that spoke in her mind had become indistinguishable from the crowd-pleasing tones of the speaker in Urania’s large lecture hall. That evening, he had asked where she lived and, when she gives him the street address he must have known after a year of addressing letters
to her, he suggests that they should keep company, at least for part of the way. Then he sets out on a route in almost exactly the opposite direction to her home: after descending the stairs in Urania, they stroll along the canal, first under the Schwedenbrücke and then Marienbrücke. She follows him obediently and, because he seems unwilling to speak, she starts unprompted to tell him about how things are going at Spiegelgrund. She mentions Illing’s ‘firm grip’ that increasingly controls the work, how the children are subjected to lumbar puncture as a matter of routine, even in cases without the slightest indication of any relevant illness. Jekelius snorts and says:
so, it would seem that the institution has been transformed into some kind of experimental laboratory?
She doesn’t comment and he anyway continues to speak, almost as if to himself:
Our people have never been faced with a more colossal task than at present but these career-mad medical men show themselves, as usual, to be more preoccupied with material status and greed for academic acclaim. Of course, all that is of minor importance. I had never thought that you would place such emphasis on trivial matters.
She puts her hand to her chest. She can’t understand what he means with her ‘placing such emphasis’ – she had only told him what was happening. It doesn’t matter because his thoughts are now elsewhere:
They had promised me a post as senior consultant on the condition that I left the clinical work at Spiegelgrund. Instead, they continue to persecute me. Many times, when I give my lectures, it has pleased them to turn up. Incognito, naturally. They always sit at the back and refuse to stand and be counted. For as long as I am in army service, they feel safe –hoping, no doubt, that they’ll be rid of me soon – but at the same time, they watch my every step. It’s fear that drives them. Fear that I will give their little secrets away.
He casts a sideways glance at her and realises that she is still at a loss:
By now, Sister Anna must surely know the full story?
What story?
she asks.
The story of the great love of my life
, he says.
We would have become engaged. But he stopped it.
He?
she wonders.
Our Führer, of course.
And she thinks: he’s out of his mind. She thinks it quite lucidly and soberly. His war injury (he still hasn’t said anything about what kind of injury) must also have affected his sanity. He doesn’t notice her silence and continues unconcernedly:
One single word from him could have rescued me. I wrote to his office and asked to be allowed to present myself in order to sort it all out but didn’t even receive a reply. That, despite all I have done for him. Or precisely because of it. Do you know, Mrs Katschenka, I think that he is frightened of me, too. We doctors are of course the masters of life and death. And I have learnt from a close relative of his that he – yes, even he, the otherwise infallible – has a relation who was kept in an asylum. Perhaps he was afraid of what he had ordered us to do, of the consequences?
When she had been referred to him and they met for the first time in his Martinstrasse surgery, she had told him about her foolish marriage to the fake doctor, the repulsive Jew Hauslich. Jekelius had looked deep into her eyes and told her that she had behaved in a way typical of her. Again and again, you search out that which harms you, he had said. You do so, because you believe that the only cure for the pain you feel is a still more severe pain. Your have a large wound inside you but can’t see it. He had said all that, precisely. Many times during the nights that followed their evening walk together, she would recall this and reflect that his diagnosis was
right. Only, this time, he was her wound. What she had thought she had found in him was just what had driven her to fling herself to the ground, time and time again, expecting that the ground, at least, would support her. And this was why, since that evening in Urania, she could never again get a grip on him, however intently she probed his entire being with her gaze and her memory. For her, he was no longer firm ground.
She tells him that she must go, that she regrets having to leave him but she really must go now. He doesn’t protest, just says a curt goodbye without holding out his hand. He walks away and turns right at the Gestapo headquarters on Morzinplatz. She notices that he limps a little on his right leg and asks herself if this is due to his war injury or if he puts on the limp because he knows that she stands there, looking at him.
Otto the Stroker, and Pelikan, the General
Adrian wakes because someone has stolen his hand. Luckily, the thief isn’t far away. He sits on the edge of the bed with the stolen hand on his lap and gazes happily at its former owner. The thief is called Otto but on the ward, everyone calls him the Stroker. The Otto-Thief-Stroker creature is between five and six years old, and an idiot, for real, like everyone else on this ward. Odd, since they’re all idiots, that they have such large heads. Otto’s head is permanently tilted to the side which makes him look as if he were peeping at you sideways on, with a smile that is both pleading and guilty, the smile of someone who knows he is a thief but is quite pleased all the same. Adrian tries to pull his hand away but Otto tightens his hold and starts to caress the hand with both his thumbs as if it were an animal that could be calmed by stroking. By now, Otto is grinning broadly. Adrian hasn’t the heart to disappoint him and lets the little boy keep his hand even though Adrian’s skin is crawling and prickling with discomfort. He has no illusions about where he has ended up. This is the pavilion Zavlacky and Miseryguts and the other boys in pavilion 9 used to speak about as
the other place,
where the ‘no-hopers’ ended up. Just like all the pavilions he knew, this one has a dormitory and a day room. Actually, there are several dormitories. One of them is for idiots who can’t walk on their own, and they don’t need any day room, of course. The nurses’ rules say that the dormitories must be silent. The day room for the mobile idiots is also meant to be silent but
that just about never happens. There is a piano in a corner and a boy called Felix sits at it all the time and plays and, when he isn’t actually playing, he nags the nurses to be allowed. Another boy, whom they call Pelikan, shuffles about, mostly along the walls. He spies on everything and listens out all the time. As soon as someone is heard in the corridor, he drags himself along the wall and makes a big show of opening the door, bowing deeply like some kind of servant to whoever is coming. This section consists of two wards or groups: one for girls and one for boys. The boys, both those who can and can’t walk, are on the ground floor. The ward for girls is on the first floor. Regardless of where you go on the ground floor, in the dormitory as well as the day room, you can hear the noises made by the girls upstairs as they scream or cry or rattle and bang with things they have got hold of. Mostly, it is like a ghostly echo of the screaming and crying and rattling and banging in the boys’ ward, but there are times when the sounds from above are enigmatic and frightening. It can be a dull monotonous whistling, as when a cross-draught sucks in winds through a room, or a long drawn-out grinding or chafing noise. Pelikan, who is an expert on sounds, stands with his ear to the wall for a while and then announces with conviction that they are constructing a ski slope up there. Or maybe a skating rink. Adrian has discovered that Pelikan is only able to express himself effectively and clearly if he keeps ramrod straight, like a general. When he does, complete harangues full of complicated, long words flow easily out of his mouth. When he sags, because he is told off by a nurse or the stiff leg he has to haul along makes him lose his balance, his store of words seems to empty instantly. Then, his face goes vague and confused, rather like a short-sighted person who has lost his glasses, but more than that, it becomes curiously mute, or somehow featureless. Adrian was a little scared the first time he observed this change. The
upright General Pelikan, in his fine uniform of words, really wants to be kind. He wants to help, to please you. Dragging his crippled leg, he leads Adrian by the hand to the best wall, straightens his back and reports on what is to be seen and heard from up there. For Pelikan, concepts such as here and there, now and then or, for that matter, inside and outside don’t exist. What is real to Pelikan is what happens to be in his mind at the moment of speaking. Now he explains to Adrian that the girls upstairs are decorating a Christmas tree. Pelikan is obsessed with Christmas trees. He asked Adrian straightaway if he had ever had a Christmas tree. Strictly speaking, the answer is yes. Adrian remembers very well when his dad took him to the market to buy a tree. His father was just going to see a business contact first, but as one quickie had followed another, the excursion ended with Eugen Ziegler reverting to type and staggering from one bar to the next. The money for the tree was soon gone. So Adrian shakes his head. He disliked Pelikan’s Christmas tree fixation from the start. Here’s where they put the Christmas tree, Pelikan says as they pass the piano corner. But now the Christmas tree isn’t here, he adds and looks quite miserable for a bit. Then, he brightens. It will soon be back, he says. Such is the power of Pelikan’s imagination that, for a moment, Adrian can almost see a large tree, hung with Pelikan’s many words, making its glittering and imposing progress through all the rooms, just like a living being.
*
Night Thoughts and Day Thoughts
Either Nurse Storch or Nurse Blei were in charge of the ward. Or else Nurse Erhart and Nurse Sikora. Sikora had mean, screwed-up eyes and Storch really looked like a stork. Her eyes were set close together and she looked at you in a sharply attentive way, as if she suspected you might sneak off any minute or do something bad. Blei was different. Unlike most
of the ward staff, who handled children like bundles to be lifted and put away as quickly as possible, Blei had round arms and strong, gentle hands. Everything about her was soft and smelled nicely of soap and clean, freshly ironed clothes. Every time Adrian saw her, he thought that this ward would have been the right place for Jockerl. He thought a lot about Jockerl these days. Of Jockerl’s face and how everything had frozen inside him as he stood wrapped in wet towels below the portrait of the Führer. Even Jockerl’s teeth had taken on a dead, greyish-purple colour and his eyes behind the drooping eyelids had looked like the backs of spoons: unseeing and shiny. If there had been any justice in this world, Jockerl should have been lying in this bed, not himself. He chose not to think about what had happened at Mödling, or about Guido and what the pedagogues and psychologists had said about him afterwards, about how he was abnormal. It was not worth bothering with all that because he knew he was normal. It was people like Guido – and Jockerl, too, for that matter – who were freakish, and the only reason why he was brought here to be among the idiots was that he had been exchanged for someone else who
really
should be here. If there had been any justice in this world, that person would be killed and not him. His problem was working out how to convince them that he was who he was and not that other boy they apparently thought was him. Another thing that was different about the idiots’ pavilion and the pavilion where he had been before was that this place was not the same in the day as it was at night. The days were long and uneventful. They sloped off towards the unavoidable darkness of the evening with mind-numbing indifference, as if even his own thoughts slipped away with the daylight. Nobody demanded anything from him. Even the psychologists were uninterested in his answers to the meaningless questions they asked him. During the day, the children around him
seemed almost harmless, despite all the yelling and sobbing and groaning. They had no idea about where they were and went through their incomprehensible rituals, and ignored him or claimed him for their own mystifying purposes, like Otto the Stroker, who never let go of Adrian’s hand once he had got hold of it and would quite happily follow Adrian wherever Adrian went. All that changed at night. Then, the idiots’ enigmatic activities became intrusive and worrying, and they behaved as if something hidden had been set free inside them. One special case was a boy that nobody seemed to have a proper name for and was only called Thunder. He could walk on his own but hadn’t been given a normal bed. Instead they kept him in a kind of bed-cage and placed it a little apart from the rest in the dormitory. Thunder would sit inside his cage with his legs crossed and stare straight ahead with unblinking eyes, although he often pulled a blanket over his head and peeped out from underneath it with one eye. Sometimes he disappeared completely. Thunder never uttered a single word but at nights he might start to roar.
Roar
wasn’t the right word, though. What he did was produce a sound that was like no other made by a human being. Later, Adrian would say that it was like the cellar was rising up through the building, making a brutal, bursting and shearing noise. Next, another sound could be heard from inside the clamour. It started as a faint whistle that slowly grew into a whimper. At the same time, a dull, rhythmical thumping began. It took some time before Adrian realised that the thumping was Thunder’s foot banging against the wall and the wailing, grinding noise was made by the bed-cage as it was propelled ever further across the floor by the powerful blows of his foot against the wall. By then, the main lights would be switched on and the terrified, confused children stood around watching as the duty nurse and a couple of assistants opened the cage and tugged at the blanket. For a
moment, they saw Thunder’s uncovered face, white and naked, and then a quick glimpse of a syringe. That was it. Just as quickly, the overhead light was switched off and only the bluish night-light would be left on. Then, a low humming noise would start up and it might be coming from Thunder’s bed or not. Adrian was always certain that it was Thunder who sang or, perhaps more likely, that his lost soul was forlornly exploring the room and making this beautiful, unearthly sound. The doctors and nurses seemed to be fascinated by Thunder. He once heard Nurse Sikora say it was like a small demon was lurking inside that boy. The procession of people in white coats always lingered by Thunder’s bed-cage. Once, doctors Türk and Gross turned up with Sister Katschenka in tow. She took notes all the time. But once the procession had left and the ward became quiet, they could once more hear the low, monotonous singing: it could be that Thunder was lying there, dreaming under his blanket, and all that was bright and shiny in the room was what Thunder’s dream looked like when seen from outside. Adrian also dreamt a lot during the few mixed-up, anxious nights he spent in the main dormitory in pavilion 17. One dream was about his mother. This was the first time he had dreamt about her since they sent him to Mödling the last time. In his dream, his mother no longer has a face and is composed only of lines, like the drawings they keep demanding that he must do, either of her or whatever gets into his head. A pair of slack, very red lips hangs in the middle of the restless tangle of lines that is meant to represent his mother. The lips attempt a smile, just like that time when she visited him in his old pavilion. And just like that time, in his dream he isn’t certain that she has come to see him. The reddened lips are swollen with humiliation and the mingled lines meant to be her limbs are twitching and waggling all over the place. Suddenly, it comes to him that his mother is
here to look for Jockerl. The protruding lips even seem to pronounce just that name. Jockerl, they say. The pointy name seems to suit the lips. And then, suddenly, the dormitory doors open. Even much later, he is unsure about whether the doors opened in his dream or really opened just as he dreamt about it. But whatever might be the case, he is suddenly convinced that it isn’t Jockerl they are coming to get. It’s
him
, Adrian. Before the full meaning of this insight has become clear to him, he is up and about, moving aimlessly in the semi-darkness between the beds. Other children are milling about everywhere: whining, anxious, lost children who are bumping into bedside tables and beds. His mother is also on the move and he hears the lines that make up her arms dangle and flap, the way hanging branches of trees hit walls and roofs, and later he cannot think what it was that forced him into motion and even what he was looking for, but the movement seems to calm his anxiety. If he can keep this up, move from bed to bed, they won’t be sure where to find him or even
who
they are after, and can’t come for him at night to exchange him. And he keeps on the move, restlessly, until the early dawn begins to light up the floor’s chequered pattern and the white beds become clearly outlined, and Thunder’s bed-cage as well, where Thunder himself is enthroned, his legs crossed, wide awake and not hiding under a blanket, but now he can hear sounds in the corridor as the nurses come walking on rapid cork heels, their quiet voices calling to each other, the rattling of utensils in the ward kitchen and the sluice room, and he fumbles among the resisting, alien bodies to get back to his own bed but it seems useless so, in the end, he comes across one child who shifts in bed to make room for him. Then the door opens wide and Nurse Storch stands in the doorway, in full uniform. She draws breath, takes two long steps, reaches him and pulls him out of the bundle of sheets he has tried to hide under:
Are you out of your mind, boy?
Why go to other’s children’s beds?
The day has begun outside and now Mrs Baar, the psychologist, is there again. She takes notes endlessly. Whatever he does or says, never mind the context or whether it is innocently meant or not, she writes it down. It must be quite a long list by now.
*
The Black Shoes
One morning, when he comes back from the washroom, he finds that Nurse Blei has put out clean clothes for him on his bed. It’s all there: shirt, socks, and trousers with braces. By the end of the bed, she has placed a pair of black shoes that are at least two sizes too big for him. She tells him that they actually belong to one of the other boys but she has removed the insoles for now and he can borrow them. He and Nurse Blei walk out of the dormitory together, carry on down the corridor outside the day room (so far, he hasn’t been allowed to be in there) and then down the stairs in the empty, echoing stairwell and out into the open air. This is the first time since Mödling that he has been outside. By now, spring has come. Despite the cloud cover, the light dazzles him. The trees are up to their ankles in muddy meltwater. When he drifts off towards the edge of the long, gravelled path, Nurse Blei reaches out for him and, for a while, he walks along with her freckled arm wrapped tightly around his shoulders. He senses the smell of her skin (do freckles have a smell?) and because only the two of them are there, he would have liked to say something nice, like how good it feels to be out walking together, but all she says is that he is to take care not to muddy his shoes. He looks down at the shoes. They are big and black and look completely alien in shape and appearance. Now, the insight comes to him. He knows where they’re going. He is to be killed. That’s why
Nurse Blei tells him to mind these shoes. It’s because they’ll want to use them for the next person who is made to walk this way. I don’t want to, he says. It won’t be any worse for you than for anyone else, she says and pushes him through the door. Pavilion 15 is smaller than 17, or perhaps it is just an impression caused by all the people everywhere. A flock of white uniforms and aprons pushing trolleys laden with sharp, clattering objects, and every time the doors open (and then slam shut) the harsh, sharp cries of children come from the dimly lit rooms behind them, together with a nauseating whiff of medicine and disinfectant. Nurse Blei wants him to climb the stairs to the upper floors but the shoes are so heavy and unwieldy that he has to strain his whole body to lift his feet and in the end Nurse Blei loses patience with him and slaps his face hard: