By Esther Dischereit
Germany
‘CAUTION: Patient’s Property’ – it said on the plastic bag by the door, which someone had left ajar: ‘Surname: First name: Street: City: Room No.:’. The staff had deposited her clothes in the bag and locked it away. On a different door it said ‘Clean and Unclean’ , as if Jewish rituals had somehow found their way into this multi-storey hospital. The church bells, pealing on the hour, were extraordinarily loud. Somebody on the night shift wore a badge with a familiar name. It turned out that she was a relative, a cousin of her reclusive uncle, an intellectual, obsessed with books, whom the Nazis had deported him to a concentration camp. A man of honour, he had been made the heir of his Jewish publisher when the latter’s firm had been ‘Aryanized’, but had neglected to reinstate the owner afterwards. This part of the legend surrounding the company had passed into oblivion however, leaving only his own tale of hardship.
If she wanted she could always talk to the chaplain, the hospital psychologist had suggested. But they were hardly going to have a Jewish chaplain here, not any more. Not anywhere these days. The duty registrar noticed she had a Jewish name, and since they had come to mention it, asked where she had been born. ‘Just a few villages away, a couple of hours maybe, quite close really’ , she said. So he said: ‘I am only a year younger than you, and I have never met a German Jew. You are something special’. ‘Yes’ , she said, ‘hooray, we’re not dead’ . Although there was a lot of talk of dying and letting go in this place.
During the night, tossing and turning, she inadvertently touched the emergency button for the nurse. She sat up, quickly switching the button off again. In the morning she would claim to have slept well.
On the first day she had opened the fridge and stowed her things in it. As she was doing so, a jar fell over, the top coming off and pink yoghurt spilling into the bottom drawer, which contained several bottles of beer. She picked a fragment of glass out of the mess; the jar had broken. Wiping it up, she remembered the week-long training placement she had once absolved in an old people’s home.
Her class had gone abroad on an outing, an end-of-school trip, and she hadn’t gone with them. The alternatives had either been attending school or the old people’s home, so she had chosen the old people’s home, not realizing that training meant cleaning. She had been allocated several rooms to dust. In one elderly woman’s room picture frames of different sizes stood on the bedside table, ornate frames in gold and silver; smiling young (and not so young) men in uniforms with Wehrmacht-badges and SS-insignia were arranged on a glass table top, under which lay round crocheted tea-mats. She was already worried, not only in this resident’s room, about doing everything wrong, and when somebody spoke to her she knocked over a velvet-encased photograph, breaking the glass. She did not feel like admitting the incident to the woman, who had always spoken roughly to her, and so she returned the frame to its original place with the glass cracked. She felt the men might escape from their frames, crowding into the small room. She quickly pulled the door closed behind her and was gone. Perhaps she could serve the food or clean mirrors in the toilets – at least there wouldn’t be any photographs there. Later, she was asked to report to the ward sister; the old lady had complained. She claimed to know nothing about any framed pictures, or whether the glass had cracked. Perhaps they could give her a different room to clean. They could. But there were framed photographs in the next room, too, with wooden frames or frames with cloth covers. She was glad to return to school at the beginning of
The child with the big face leant over the banister. Her curls hung to one side, falling on her shoulder. They were light brown corkscrew curls. She resembled a child in a ‘Köllnflocken’ oat-flakes advert. She wore black patent leather shoes with buckles, white socks and a pink dress. The dress was drawn in far above her waist. It was much too short. The child’s head jutted above the parapet, the uprights pushing into her chest as she pressed against them. She had just been to the room of an old lady in the dark corridor behind her. There, a large magnifying glass lay on a newspaper, and a tin of biscuits stood on top of a wardrobe. Whenever the girl came in, the old lady, whom she called ‘Aunt’, reached up for the tin. She was not supposed to visit the lady alone. Why did the old lady live in a room in the dark corridor? Did somebody live behind the other doors, the ones that didn’t open? The child would never know, and she would never ask, because she ought not to have been there in the first place. She pushed her chest up against the uprights, so that the bars pressed hard against her ribs under her blouse.
She peered down past the tall storeys into the lobby below. Stone flags covered the ground floor; in some places the flags were worn. There was a man down there, lying on the floor, held by four policemen. Two of the policemen had his arms, another, pressing his knee on the man’s pelvis, was attempting to fixate one of his legs; the fourth had managed to pin down his other leg. The man’s limbs were splayed apart. He shook his head from side to side and banged his head on the floor, screaming ‘Mama’.
The policemen, as if fighting some wild beast, had managed to subdue the man and now had his arms and legs in a twist. They were quite unaware of the child high above them, watching from the top storey. Nobody was there to look after the man; nobody was there to hold his bag or even his coat or jacket. The child stepped back from the banister. The man cried out; the child ran down the stairs until she reached the entrance to the corridor where she belonged.
During the night the sick screamed behind their bars, and the noises they made carried beyond their windows. They were deep, guttural sounds, weirdly distorted, as if stemming from some place that had never seen a human being; doleful, bellowing sounds, sounds that rattled and rasped, escaping involuntarily from the bodies that made them. On the following day, shortly before lunch, her father, his doctor’s white coat unbuttoned, told them there had been a suicide. The child poked at her dry boiled potatoes with a fork and stared. Her father asked for a glass of wine, and a damp ring formed on the table-cloth around the foot of the glass. The child continued to stare at it even after the food had been cleared away and the glass was no longer there. The square white porcelain dish with the leftover, yellowed, quarter-cut potatoes had gone, too. Almost unnoticeably, the table-cloth had stained where the glass had left a ring – not much of one, because the wine was white.
On one occasion, the child went along with her father; she had been promised that Santa had something for her. Doors were unlocked for them, and locked again behind them. She stood between two barred doors. Behind one was a man she did not know, standing bolt upright with his hands clenching the iron bars. From the side, a powerfully built Father Christmas now appeared and addressed the child. At the same time the figure produced a switch, and let a heavy chain glide through his hands so that it struck the floor and rattled. A deep groaning sound issued from the unknown man. The child had the fright of her life, and with the doors locked behind and in front of her, was unable to escape. She could not understand why her father had not stayed. The Santa Claus and the unknown man in his barred cell were gigantic figures; to escape them she would have to become as small as a tiny mark on the old stone floor – like the mark left by the wine-glass, which had barely left a trace on the table-cloth.
She remembered the man’s gaunt face and bony hands, his sharp knees when he would sometimes lift her onto his lap and bob her up and down. Up and down and round and round, up and down and round and round – the man liked it when they laughed together, so he took the drain plunger and pressed it onto the linoleum floor in the wide corridor. Then he said: ‘watch this’, and with one jerk of the wooden shaft he lifted the brittle material off the ground, then – loosening the suction cup – let it drop back with a light slap. ‘Again’, said the man, and the child nodded. The heavy-duty sisal of the corridors left read weals on her knees when she knelt, creating landscapes on her skin. Once, her mother had come by and had forbidden him to press the plunger on the floor, or to lift her onto his
knee. ‘Aunt Lulu has escaped’, she suddenly said, and disappeared into the gardens, where far into the compound, in fact at its far edge, she was hoping to harvest her lettuces, kitchen herbs, gooseberries, blackberries, black currant, strawberries, cabbage, plums and pears. She was from the town, and did not find the work in such a large garden easy. She insisted the child come out and get some fresh air. To do so she had to cross a surfaced road where she encountered people whose skin was all white and puffy. Their heads would be tilted or skewed; some stopped and stared, others drooled and slobbered. She was not allowed to go with them, especially not to the neighbouring park. Often the men wore dark brown, pin-cord trousers and blue, labourer’s shirts; it was as if they had never worn other clothes or colours. Like their flat and the corridors of the mental hospital, the gardens too were spacious, enormous in fact, and bordered by impenetrable thickets. The branches of the brambles pricked her legs through her knee-socks, leaving scratches on her skin. There were bees, hornets and spiders, also worms and snails. A dog from a neighbouring garden would sometimes bare its teeth at her, and once it leaped over the fence, and its owner had trouble calling it off.
She could not make out whether the neighbour, its owner, had actually enjoyed the spectacle of his dog going after them and tearing her mother’s stockings. It struck her that he might have set the dog on her on purpose. As if the days of setting dogs on them were not yet over.
