Hasenleiten He thought he was on his own at first, lying low and trying to keep out of reach of the authorities, but it didn’t take long to discover that there were many other boys who, like him, were homeless drifters and always looking for a lucky break. Some were his age, others older and already members of a gang. Then there were the boys who always seemed in transit from one institution to the next and were known as ‘spooks’ because you could never be sure which side of the fence they were on. Hans Blanker was one of them. He boasted of having escaped from four different Nazi camps where orphans and young people were used for slave labour. Several runaways sought out Blanker, hoping to find some kind of security by being with someone who had been through even worse things than they had. Then, one night when they were holed up in a cellar, the police arrived and arrested the lot of them. Afterwards, the word was that Blanker had been acting as the rat-catcher who lured the invisible children straight into the arms of the waiting police. Later, Adrian realised that he, too, had been suspected of being a spook and that he had been watched for a long time before he was contacted. During his first few weeks on the run, in May and early June, he stayed on the edges of the city, around Gerasdorf and Süssenbrunn, where he hoped to find jobs on the farms. During his time with Ferenc, he had learnt to handle a fork and a shovel, and knew how to make himself useful. He slept in stables and haylofts, and sometimes in the open air. The earth kept turning below him and star signs he had never seen before appeared in the sky. But however conscientiously he worked, in the farmers’ eyes he would never be anything other than a shifty, unreliable type. They suspected him of stealing. One night, he woke when three men (one of them was the farmer who was employing him as casual labour) marched an unwilling policeman along the edge of a field where the rye was already waist-high. It was the bright beam of the policeman’s torch that alerted him in time. He ran, slept for a few hours in an old linesman’s cottage in Stadlau and then, in the dim light of early dawn when what was left of the crescent moon hung pale and exhausted above the still-dark Prater forests, he crossed the river first by the Stadlauer bridge and then by the Ostbahn bridge. The river flowed so fast and huge under the railway bridge that its banks seemed to hold their breath to let it through. The cold mist of water vapour above the river swept everything along with it, his body too, as he crouched on the bridge. Now, he was almost back home. The tall chimneys of the generating station towered on the other side of the canal and next to them, the large gasometers in Simmering. Hasenleiten, the site of hospital barracks from the days of the empire, was further to the east, on the other side of Simmeringer Hauptstrasse. When the hospital moved out, the buildings provided shelter for the homeless and other drifters. Adrian’s father had often made his way there to buy cheap alcohol or just have a natter with his ‘mates’. Adrian remembers the lanes well, bone dry and dusty in the heat of summer and muddy ditches when the rains came, but always crowded with people. Back then, the whole area was fenced off with a barbed-wire fence. There was only one way in, a gate wide enough for horse-drawn carriages and trucks. There was a guard’s hut that would probably have a policeman in it now, so he couldn’t risk the gate. Instead he climbed the two-metre-high wooden fence and got in at the back of the most distant row of barracks. They looked even more tumbledown than he remembered and some had collapsed. Once, the long, low buildings had small front gardens where some of the inhabitants grew vegetables. All had been trodden into the ground and not a trace of greenery was left. Most of the windows were either broken, the remains of the curtains torn, or covered with thick boards. Solitary figures moved about here and there. Some stopped and stared openly at him. He tried to walk purposefully, stopped at one of the barracks and pulled at the handle of a door before noticing the padlock. To his surprise, the door opened anyway. The lock had been tampered with. Someone had stayed there, or perhaps still did and had left only for a short while. Dirty crockery was stacked near the sink and clothes, both men’s and women’s, hung in the wardrobe. Other items of clothing were thrown over the backs of chairs and on the unmade bed. The property, if that was the right word, had three rooms: the kitchen, the narrow room where the bed stood and, on the other side of the main door, a store or, better, a workshop. A carpenter’s workbench had been put in the far corner, with irregular rows of tools hanging on the wall above it. A low window to the right just inside the door was too silted up by muck and dust to let in much light. A kiln stood against the wall along from the window and its rusty chimney-pipe exited through a hole in the windowpane. The ashes in the kiln were cold but Adrian decided that he couldn’t trust that this place with its workshop was actually uninhabited. He sat down on the road outside the house and waited for a long time until the last of the evening light had gone. Since no one had come to claim the place, he crept back inside, spread some rags out on the floor under the workbench and fell asleep. Next morning, he woke to find a boy of his own age crouching by the workbench and staring fixedly at him. The boy had the bluest eyes Adrian had ever seen, so blue they looked almost transparent. Are you a Jew? the boy asked dubiously. Adrian must have looked shocked. Jews lived here before, you see, the boy explained. Can’t you smell them? Adrian hadn’t noticed anything special by way of smell, other than damp wood shavings, varnish and the stench of solvent-soaked rags. I thought you might be one of them, the boy said and the vague, guileless tone somehow went with his strangely luminous blue eyes. I mean, you might’ve come back to look for someone … or something. Who took them away, then? Adrian asked. The Nazis, of course, the boy said without blinking. Then he stood and sounded much more decisive when he spoke again. My uncle says, if you’re not a Jew, you can come to our house and have something to eat. This was how Adrian came to meet Leopold and his uncle, Karl Brenner. Mr Brenner was a middle-aged man, short but powerfully built. He had a bushy black moustache and always wore the same things, including a light overcoat and a cap with a black lacquered brim. He might have been a city porter once, Adrian thought. The Brenners lived on Kobelgasse, very near the St Laurenz church. When he arrived, a woman was already making soup for them. Poor lad, you must be starving, she said and moved the heavy soup pan from the cooker to the table. You sit down and eat now. But she didn’t bother to look at him and Adrian realised that they must have agreed on something between them, probably all three of them or at least Leopold and his uncle, because they didn’t say anything while they ate, just stared into their plates and spooned up the soup. After the meal, Leopold took him down to where the Ostbahnbrücke crossed the canal. Just a few hundred metres after the railway bridge, the tracks turned a shallow curve. After crossing the bridge at speed, the large freight trains had to slow down almost to a crawl for less than half a kilometre. On the curve, the trains would move so slowly that if you managed to get up the high embankment, and if you could sprint quickly enough, it was possible to catch up with one of the coal trucks at the rear, grab hold of the lowermost rung on the ladder and clamber up. Then you would have a few more seconds to shuffle or kick down coals before the engine driver started to accelerate. But there’s got to be at least two of you, Leopold explained. One who climbs into the truck, and another one who runs along on the ground to collect the coals and can warn of risks, like if the driver turns and sees what is going on, or if there is a guard on the train (it has happened more than once). Mostly, the driver doesn’t notice or perhaps doesn’t mind that much. The trains go past here several times every day. Of us two, who’d be the runner? Adrian asked, and Leopold said that he had to ask his uncle who supplied the buckets, but by then Adrian had of course already worked out what it was all about.
An Encounter from the Past At dusk, just as the light in the sky faded and the mists began to rise from the wetlands along the canal, they made their way to the Ostbahn railtracks again. Leopold walked in the lead with his uncle’s wheelbarrow full of rattling tin buckets and Adrian followed, ducking all the time to avoid being hit in the face by insistent low-hanging branches. When they arrived at the embankment, half a dozen boys had already gathered. Adrian had thought it would just be the two of them but before he had a chance to say anything, Leopold had started up the slope. It was so steep he had to use both hands to stop himself from sliding back down. The train was already on its way across the Ostbahnbrücke. They could hear the slight clicking noises from the rail joints. Then, the engine’s whistle sounded and the air vibrated with the shearing, grinding noise of the brakes. Adrian looked up and saw the engine approaching slowly, as if to show off its full grandeur. The last carriage hadn’t travelled more than one metre from where he stood when about a dozen heads suddenly emerged above the top layer of ballast on the track and boys started running past at crazy speeds. Some were hanging on to the ladders and hauling themselves up into the trucks. Adrian saw four or five of them, moving as if in a mad dance, outlined against the inflamed evening sky. Chunks of coal were raining down and the boys left below ran about on the embankment to pick them up. Among the boys, he recognised one as easily as if all the others had been tarred and only that one painted white. Adrian stood as if frozen to the spot and just stared. Get moving! Leopold shouted, grabbed two of the buckets and started to pick up coals with his bare hands, just like the others. Unwillingly, Adrian took a bucket and began. It was only a matter of time before he and the white one would meet up. Then Jockerl looked up from his bucket and met Adrian’s eyes. A shadow seemed to fall over his pale face. Then Jockerl bent again and carried on with the task in hand as if he hadn’t recognised anyone or there had been no one to recognise.
The Silver Knife Jockerl had grown, just like the other children. His frame was as thin and frail as before but he was taller and almost reached Adrian’s shoulders. On the other hand, he seemed to behave as he always had, still as jumpy when someone addressed or touched him. But at the same time, he couldn’t bear being left out when something important happened and would wrestle or squeeze himself into any crowd regardless of who was in it or where. Jockerl didn’t want to let on that he knew who Adrian was, even though they worked in the same team and didn’t compete with each other, as Adrian had at first thought. All the runners and pickers – as they were known – were under the command of an older person called the Silver Knife. His hair was streaked with grey and he was always correctly dressed in a three-piece suit and hat. He wore the hat at an angle calculated to have the brim shade his scarred face. A deep cut ran from his left ear across his cheek and ended at the chin, almost like someone in an adventure comic. The Silver Knife was domineering but spoke in a weak, nasal voice and hardly stressed any one syllable so that everyone had to come close to him in order to make out what he said. From his mouth flowed instructions about which trains to run for and when to expect them. The coals or briquettes the boys scraped together were stored in a tool shed at the back of Karl Brenner’s garden and in the cellar under his house, where several boys, including Adrian, also slept. Twice a week, late at night or early in the morning, a small lorry came bumping along on the potholed roads and then all of them had to work as a chain gang to load it with coal while the light was still low. Once the back of the truck had been covered by a large, black tarpaulin, they were allowed to troop into the kitchen where Gertrud or Mrs General, as she was also known, dished out potato goulash in deep bowls. Mrs General wasn’t Mrs Brenner, as Adrian assumed at the start, but another of the Silver Knife’s employees. When cooking utensils, crockery and cutlery had been washed, dried and put away, she walked to the tool shed that doubled as a coal store, hauled out her bicycle, carefully pulled on a pair of tight, white gloves and cycled away. It was the Silver Knife who decided who was to be a runner and a picker on a particular day and, for that reason, he usually turned up somewhere along the tracks about an hour before the train was due, gathered everyone around him and said you! in his dreary, whispering voice. Everyone held their breaths while the eyes under the hat-brim swept past their faces, the cowards trying to avoid his gaze and others meeting it anxiously until it fixed on the next chosen one. The runners were those who chased the train, clambered up and shoved coals off with hands or feet. The simplest and most effective way was by kicking but to stand made the runner’s job extra dangerous even if the train was moving slowly. If, as often happened, the driver took it into his head to brake (presumably to shake off the boys who crawled all over his train like bedbugs) or if the train suddenly jerked or became unstable for any other reason, one could easily topple off the trucks. The drop to the track was at least two metres, followed by another three down the sloping side of the embankment. Even so, the boys competed and jostled each other to get to stand in the place where the Silver Knife’s pointing finger would stop once his decision was made. You! signified that you had been moved to another, higher division, like a football player or a boxer. Adrian couldn’t help remembering the time at Spiegelgrund when they had been ordered to line up in the corridor and Doctor Jekelius had given that speech about how they all were the chosen ones and Doctor Gross had produced one of the boiled sweets he carried about in the pocket of his white coat, peeled off the wrapper and popped it into Julius Becker’s mouth and how, later, Julius had stabbed himself in the stomach with a pair of scissors and bled to death in the night. Adrian couldn’t think why that memory returned to him just then and wasn’t sure if he was alone in remembering things like that or if similar bits of the past came back to Jockerl sometimes. What did Jockerl actually remember? Anything at all? The days went by. They chased trains and searched for coal all along die Ostbahnstrecke. Now and then, the police came. Their orders were to ‘scatter’, as it was called, if the cops turned up, and then follow certain routines. They became steadily better at being in one place for a split second, only to vanish and materialise somewhere else. One June evening, they were getting ready to follow the narrow gravel path that made a shortcut up to Karl Brenner’s house when the Silver Knife came to meet them. Leopold had just gathered up the shovels and spades, put them in the wheelbarrow and was about to grab the handles when the Silver Knife put his arm around Adrian’s shoulders and said in his monotone, which this time sounded a little confiding:
I understand that you’re a Ziegler.
Adrian was holding two buckets brimful of coals, one in each hand. Had he been found out? The sharp tin handles cut into the palms of his hands but he didn’t dare to change his grip for fear of losing his balance or spilling the coals. The Silver Knife was moving off and all three of them walked through the little wood and up towards Brenner’s house:
I knew a Eugen Ziegler back in the old days;
a fine man, easy to get on with;
is he your father?
Adrian kept staring at the Silver Knife’s shoes, marvelling at how shiny and well polished they were despite all the muck and dust and mud they had to walk through every day but the real question was, how was he to understand the warmth that spread like a wave through his chest and into his whole body? He had done everything he could not to be recognised but the Silver Knife’s appreciative words about his father filled him with a mixture of pride and shame unlike anything he had felt before. From that day, Adrian’s position in the collective of coal pickers had changed. Karl Brenner showed a certain regard for him when they spoke together. When Mrs General placed the bowl of soup or goulash in front of him, there was a slightly respectful restraint about her movements and he no longer had to sleep in the damp cellar but was allowed to share an upstairs bedroom with the blue-eyed Leopold. In the evening, the Silver Knife’s trusted runners would meet up on the embankment. Some brought cigarettes and were keen to offer him one. Mostly, they just wandered about and smoked and told each other tales about a war that none of them had experienced. They saw themselves as real deserters by now, Schimmlern, or even as Politische (those were the ones the police were supposed to be after) and Adrian might fall back on his father’s overused line about how when Stalin and his boys come, I’ll join the partisans and although he had repeated that one to death and the words were meaningless, everyone laughed to show how they appreciated it. When the weather was nice, they went along to Simmeringer Haide to sit on the grass and watch the teams of local boys playing football. Sometimes they divided up into teams and played each other. Further out on the heath, between the football pitches and the canal, the Nazis had set up a prisoner of war camp. This was what some of the footballers had found out. As one of them pointed, Adrian looked at the high walls, the enclosing barbed-wire fence and the guards that could be seen coming and going. Strangely enough, he didn’t feel threatened or afraid. It was as if it didn’t have anything to do with him and didn’t arouse any feelings. Many years later, Adrian could clearly remember the long evenings of summer dusk vibrating with full-throated birdsong, the air rich with the lightly acidic smell of wild flowers and newly mown grass, and how, in the gathering dark, everything dissolved except their faces and made them look like great big lumbering animals rooting around on the football pitch. In the end, only Jockerl was left running with his legs kicking out in every direction, white legs – albino-white, Adrian would say later – so white that someone might have deposited a layer of frost over his skin and made him freeze in the middle of the warm dusk, until someone formed their hands into a megaphone and Jockerl! – fuck’s sake, give over, and then Jockerl! Jockerl! and Jockerl finally veered to the sideline and let his body slump on the grass and then sat with hanging head and his elbows resting on his knees while his white chest rose and fell like bellows, just as Otto Semmler’s had when he was close to death and lying in the bed next to Adrian’s in the gallery of pavilion 15: breaths far too heavy for so small a body. Adrian steeled himself and went to sit next to Jockerl. I’m really sorry about that thing with the cartridge, he wanted to say but perhaps he didn’t, perhaps he only heard himself say it inside his head. It could be that all he did was to hold out a packet of cigarettes towards Jockerl, pressed him a little to have one, as the others did when they wanted to confirm with a mate that there was an understanding or even a pact between them. And he wanted to say something about the fact that they were both outside now, meaning that what went on in there surely didn’t matter that much anymore. Perhaps it had also been best if Jockerl hadn’t said or done anything except being pale and exhausted, and just carried on breathing with his body hanging limply between his splayed knees, but he didn’t. He turned to Adrian and smiled, the same submissive, anxious, affectionate and despairing smile that had been on Jockerl’s face when Pototschnik was in a really mean mood and went for him, and Jockerl! Pototschnik’s voice was saying, you sad sack, I’ll kill you! All the time, Jockerl smiled and smiled. After a while, Jockerl packed up his smile and walked away, and Adrian, too, walked back to the room where he and Leopold slept. That night, it started to rain. At first, it sounded like small fingers tapping on the roof but, later, an ice-cold draught seeped in through the unsealed cracks around the window frame and the rain hammered against the walls and the roof, sounding as if someone with large, thumping fists wanted to get in at any cost. Within the noise of the rain, they heard a diesel engine coming close, car doors open and shut, and hoarse voices shouting loudly and urgently to each other. On the ground floor, Karl Brenner was having words with someone and then came the sound of many hurrying feet in heavy boots coming upstairs. The smell of leather and wet uniform cloth that invaded the room when the door was opened told him this was the police. A torch beam swept the room. Karl Brenner’s upset, breathless voice rose from behind the cops, saying I told you, it’s just my sons who’re sleeping in there. The door slammed shut again, there were more heavy boots stamping on the stairs and then they were suddenly gone. He stayed still, burrowed into his mattress, feeling like a frog at the bottom of a well. His heart was beating, fit to break the well walls down. Finally, there were voices from outside the house again. They seemed to be laughing, loudly and on a single note, though it might just have sounded like that because of the rain. The car doors slammed shut and, after a while, the engine noise grew fainter and faded away.
The Last Run It rains all night. It has stopped by the morning but the air is close and humid, as if the rain hasn’t quite given up. The trees in the small wood they have to walk through every day to get to the tracks are striped with dripping moisture, under a sky as smooth and pale as an eggshell. As always, the Silver Knife is already at his post by the embankment. Somehow, his name seems more right than ever. The shadow cast by the brim of his hat seems to cut his face in two. His voice remains, but only just. Even though the Silver Knife doesn’t mention the police raid last night, they realise that this will be their last run. Perhaps that is why no one steps forward when the pointing finger starts to move around the ring of tense, dejected boys and: you! Silver Knife is just about to say when Adrian steps forward and says Jockerl could be a runner! It’s meant as a joke because everyone knows how useless Jockerl is when he runs. The boys laugh and the Silver Knife laughs most of all, and puts his arm around Adrian’s shoulders and gives him a friendly squeeze. In that moment, all the laughing boys know that it is him, Adrian, who will be running tonight and he is taking it on to save everybody else but he will run so well that it won’t matter that this is the last time. Leopold, who himself used to run at least once a week, has taught Adrian the ropes. Start the exact moment as the first truck comes by and then keep a steady pace with the train or run faster if you can. The best thing is to put more power in at the start of the run because it’s when the engine driver enters the curve that he pays the least attention to what happens behind him. There’s a short ladder on the side of each truck. The bottom rung sticks out below the side of the truck. Try to grip the ladder as high up as you can, then swing the lower part of your body up and place your feet on the lowest rung. You’ve got to let go with one hand when you take hold higher up and then you can heave up and over using your body weight. Once you’ve steadied on your feet it’s just a matter of balance. When you’re there, standing upright and the train is racing ahead, the freedom you feel is like nothing else, Leopold had said and Adrian, lying on a mattress next to him in Mr Brenner’s house, often imagined that much-desired moment when he alone would be on the move and everything else left behind. But he knows it will be hard. His body is heavy, perhaps too heavy for his running speed. Still, if only he catches up with the truck he will have enough strength and stamina to hang on and climb up, whatever else happens. But once he is up there on the embankment, he has no time to think. The train is rushing towards him from the Ostbahnbrücke, as if shooting out from nowhere or as if it had been formed out of its own noise: the heavy, pulsating beats of iron against iron. A body of iron suddenly shatters the air with its howling whistle. Then, the shrieking noise of the wheels as the brakes slow them down: a sound like a huge iron ore crusher. By then he is already running, running like the wind, as the tall trucks roll past him in a strong current of dusty, oil-laden, burning-hot air that hits his face. He hadn’t reckoned with this, nor that the wet and slippery ballast along the edge of the track would make it so hard to put one leg in front of the other. His right foot slips all the time, his back curves forward and his groin takes the strain. He reaches for the ladder but it is touch and go because it ends much higher up than he thought. Or is the ballast base settling or sinking underneath him? He stretches his arms as far as he can and grabs the bottom rung. Just then, he hears a cry behind him and sees Jockerl come after him at a run. The boy’s pale face is stripped bare with effort and he holds out one arm, as if trying to catch up with Adrian to tell him something. By then Adrian is only halfway up and hasn’t got a very good grip but he still reaches out his free hand to Jockerl. Despite his clumsy, uncoordinated arms and legs, Jockerl has managed the incredible feat of keeping pace with the truck and even hangs on to the bottom rung of the ladder, his legs beating like drumsticks under his swinging body. Adrian can’t stop himself, he has to reach out with his arm as if to support the runner or at least offer a helping hand. At that moment, the entire train shudders but, instead of slowing down a little more, it increases its speed. Adrian sees the ballast rush past faster and faster. A wave of panic washes over him. He leans half his body away from the side of the truck and there, behind him but not all that far behind, Jockerl lifts his head and looks up at him. This is the first time their eyes meet. Hold on! Adrian wants to scream. Don’t let go! But just as their hands are close, Jockerl turns his head away, his arm shoots straight up like an exclamation mark while the rest of his body hangs in the air like a white, flapping piece of cloth. Then the air current weakens and lets go of him. There is a short, horribly dull thud as his body hits the truck behind and what is left of Jockerl is tossed in a wide arc up in the air and then disappears out of sight as abruptly as if the ground had opened to swallow him up. Adrian is already on top of the truck and is trying desperately to gain a foothold on the mass of loose, slipping chunks of coal. When he can finally turn to look, the train is taking a slight bend and he sees the other boys come running from all over the place to gather at one spot on the edge of the road that runs alongside the railway. Adrian stands there, helpless, on top of a mountain of meaningless coal. He knows he must jump, but where? The train is still gaining speed and around him the track is widening, one set of rails cut into another and the buildings grow denser. Already, he glimpses behind the next curve what must be the roof of the station house in Simmering. He knows that if he doesn’t jump now he will never get off this train. Flailing with his arms to keep his balance, he advances to the edge of the truck. Far down there is a chasm of shining rails. The beat of the wheels across the joints makes the side of the truck shake along its full length, and almost throws him off as he tries to climb over the edge. His feet are back on the ladder as the train gradually begins to slow down. At that moment, he sees in the distance an oncoming train. He stops hesitating and, with violent force, leaps away from the side of the truck. Instinctively, he curls up to make his contact area with the ground as small as possible but it doesn’t help much: he hits the sleepers with the left side of his body just below the curving border of the ribcage. For a few seconds, everything becomes flickering lights and a bleeding, pulsating sound. He thinks that he will lose consciousness and be run over by the other train. He hears its screaming brakes as if the sound were coming from somewhere inside him but somehow pulls himself out of the pain that presses him down and, with one hand against the side of his chest, crawls off the deadly track with only seconds to spare before the other train rushes past in a cloud of hot, oil-soaked air laden with trackside dust. Hidden behind the seemingly endless freight train, dragging himself along with a slowly spreading, cramped stiffness along the side of his body, he starts the slow walk back to where he has just come from, one metre after the next, while shouting at himself: why go back? Don’t do it, there’s nothing there for you, get away while you have a chance! But he can’t rid himself of Jockerl’s face, now so close he feels he could reach out and touch it. Why was Jockerl allowed to run? Or had the Silver Knife sent him to tell Adrian to cancel the run? He knows that he will have no peace until he has found out. And so, once more, the gap between sky and ground grows narrower, a gap that for one dizzying moment had seemed truly to open up around him. He has a vision of walking towards his own mirror image that slowly but tirelessly advances along the track, as if he and it were pulled together by an invisible cord. Then the figure suddenly stops and starts waving with an object held in its hand, and Adrian realises that he isn’t watching his own reflection but that it is Leopold who has come to look for him. The thing in his hand is a spade. He lowers it to the ground and then starts running down the embankment. Adrian sets off at a run, too, and stumbles, slips and slides down the slope. Leopold’s face is flushed, as if he had been slapped or as if he is burning inside. Quickly, he says, we must get him away from here. He points at the road where a police car has stopped. Two officers climb out and set out towards the embankment. Leopold pulls Adrian towards the edge of the ditch. Jockerl lies there, half-hidden behind some shrubs. The contents of the top of his head have spilt, a sloppy grey mess coated with blood and gravel. The rest of his face is still perfectly recognisable, its features distinct as if painted on and its eyes staring as emptily and helplessly as ever. Leopold has left the wheelbarrow on the roadside and is now pulling at one of Jockerl’s legs and signalling to Adrian to take hold of the other one. But Adrian can’t make himself do it, just stands as if paralysed, staring down at Jockerl’s strange miniature face. He can see the Silver Knife a little further down the road. He is turning round, a quarter-turn at a time. Like a weathervane: first a quarter-turn one way, then a quarter-turn in the opposite direction. Getting nowhere. Now the two cops have him in a firm hold with his arms twisted behind his back. Leopold lets go of Jockerl’s leg. Just then, a train goes by and envelops everything in a cloud of black dust and flakes of coal. Its insane howling noise thunders and crackles, forcing the two policemen to bend over until the last truck has passed and the train disappears up the bridge approach and then across the river.
Borstal
Adrian Ziegler’s mental development is average and there are no grounds to assume any psychotic condition or mental retardation at the time of examination. His grossly delinquent behaviour must therefore be due to poor racial stock and having been raised in a criminal and markedly antisocial family setting. Judging by the boy’s achievements in life so far, as well as by our clinical observations and assessments, it appears that well-intentioned and caring attention, as well as all attempts at forming and schooling his character, have had little effect.
Legally, one reached the age of criminal responsibility at fourteen. After having spent four weeks in the youth detention cells on Rüdengasse in the 3rd Bezirk, the court sentenced him in September 1944 to eighteen months in borstal for vagrancy, thieving and refusal to work. The sentence was based on the evaluation Doctor Illing had issued from the Spiegelgrund institution.
An ex-SS guard called Nowotny escorted him from the Rüdengasse police cells to the youth detention facility in Kaiserebersdorf. They walked all the way from Rüdengasse to the tram stop at Oberzellergasse and boarded the 71 tram together, the same tram that he and his little brother Helmut had travelled on once, accompanied by Mrs Haidinger who had picked them up from the Lustkandlgasse children’s home. He remembered how Mrs Haidinger had bought Helmut chocolate from the kiosk at Zentralfriedhof when they were waiting to change to the 73 tram. Mrs Haidinger had told him that he was too ugly to get anything. Now the ugly boy was getting on the same tram, chained to the former SS guard like a beast led to slaughter. And, although Nowotny had already given what little he had to offer to his Führer and the great leader’s army, he felt taking a prisoner from the police cells to the prison was a shitty job well below his proper status and so he shouted prison transport prison transport! as they were boarding and hit Adrian over the back of his neck and back to force him into the most remote corner of the carriage. It would have been hard to decide who of the two of them disgusted the other travellers more: Nowotny and his brutal treatment of the prisoner, or the prisoner himself, the deserter and layabout who had been lying low while decent people had obediently made sacrifices but now was hauled out from his lair to be properly punished. Deserters, wartime saboteurs and ordinary criminals were all incarcerated in the borstal institution in Kaiserebersdorf. Arguably, the saboteurs and other miscreants were in the majority, because all young people were regarded as deserters if they had failed to turn up for labour service or ignored the call-up to the Wehrmacht. It was tacitly understood that the prison guards could do what they liked with deserters. Adrian shared a cell for a while with a youth called Viktor Zobel. Zobel had psoriasis, which meant that his arms, back, chest and belly were covered with large, red, scaly lesions that itched terribly and were made worse by the coarse, dirty prison uniforms they were forced to wear round the clock. Even though Zobel did all he could to stifle his whimpers, the guards heard him. One night, one of them dragged him into the corridor and beat him senseless. After that, Zobel kept back the small ration of margarine that came with their evening meal and used it as an ointment for his wounds, though if his tortured moaning through the night was anything to go by it didn’t help much. The war will be over soon, he kept mumbling, as if the two phenomena were linked – the war and the wounds that gave him no peace. Adrian Ziegler spent a total of seven months in Kaiserebersdorf and all he saw of the sky in that time was a square grey area above the exercise yard where they had to line up in the morning, most of them wearing only wooden clogs. Sometimes snow fell from the square of sky and sometimes it did nothing but, as far as Adrian was concerned, it was just as cold all the time. In snow and ice and drifting rain, their bodies still stiff and sore after the damp chill of their cells, the prisoners had to stand waiting until everyone had been allocated work of some kind in a prison workshop or in the kitchen and its attached bakery. Adrian was sent off to the Hellhole, as they called the laundry in the cellar, presumably because it was the only place in the entire prison that was kept really warm. He and two other prisoners, Heinzl and Matthias, were supervised by a one-armed sergeant called Schwach. The other arm was left behind in Vitebsk, Schwach explained to the boys. Adrian’s job was to see to it that the level and pressure of the water in the two high-pressure vessels were kept constant and to top up with coal or water as required. Bringing the coal twice a day was the heaviest part of the job: it meant carrying the twenty-five-kilogram coal buckets, one in each hand, and tipping the contents into the purpose-built coal bunker. Every time he did it, the memory of Jockerl came back to him, the memory of how he had reached out his hand to the running boy and how Jockerl hadn’t been able to take hold of it or perhaps hadn’t wanted to and then plunged from the truck. It seemed weird, but Jockerl hadn’t even been mentioned in Adrian’s sentence, as if he truly hadn’t existed, or had once, but been erased from reality. All the same, Jockerl was always very much present inside Adrian. Like a second prison guard, he saw to it that there was no let-up from the memory, not even when dropping off to sleep because, as soon as Adrian became drowsy on his stool in front of the pressure gauges, there was Jockerl, his skin as white as ever, running along the train and Adrian was holding out his hand but Jockerl refused to take it. Over and over again, as if a film loop were running in his head. Unless the air-raid sirens went and he had to stop. The standing order on hearing the sirens was to put out the fires and remove all embers. As far as Adrian could remember later on, the bombing raids over Wien began at about the same time as his prison sentence, in September 1944. It happened that they had to douse the fires and run to the shelters several times a week. One consequence was that the piles of unwashed laundry grew bigger and bigger. One day, the boss of the provisions department at the army base turned up and demanded action. The soldiers couldn’t wait any longer for their clothing: uniforms, socks and underpants. Sergeant Schwach stated that in case of raids, his orders were to extinguish the fires and have embers removed. The officer turned to the prison governor and it was decided to start up a night shift in the laundry. Everyone who worked nights would receive an additional meal consisting of the leftovers from the kitchen at the barracks. As a result, the laundry staff were given bread and decent food, delivered by lorry nightly and in good order. It made existence in the hellhole almost tolerable. Apart from keeping an eye on the fires and the temperatures in the boilers, Adrian was given the task of going through the mountains of uniforms and greatcoats before they were laundered, looking out for things like coins or faded pictures of women and children. Once, he found a wedding ring and, another time, a cigarette case engraved with initials. His finds were requisitioned by Sergeant Schwach, who let Adrian have big pots of marmalade to spread on the black bread. When the night shift began, Schwach would ask if everything was under control so he could withdraw briefly and Adrian always answered that everything was fine (what else could he say?) and so Schwach went off for a kip, in a small space behind the large laundry pans where he had fitted in a bed. He kept a small radio receiver on a bedside table switched on. During calm nights, Schwach snored in his quarters while the radio, turned down low, was chatting to itself. Sometimes, the cry of a cuckoo cut through the broadcast to warn of another raid and the sergeant shot out from behind the pans with his hair standing on end and his braces dangling at knee height, shouting Feuer löschen! Feuer löschen! – which gave Adrian just a few minutes to put out the fires under the pans and, once he was sure that the ashes were dry and free of any glowing embers, sprint the eight hundred metres or so to the exercise yard, then cross it to the building on the other side and down the long, echoing cellar stairs to the shelters where he sat down among the others, seething inwardly because now it would take at least two hours to restart the fires and get the pressure up in the boilers. Now and then, they heard the dull thuds of exploding bombs, sometimes far away but sometimes so close the ground shook. Then, at dawn after a night raid, when he had just got the fires going again, a guard ordered everyone out into the exercise yard for a line-up. Adrian was so tired he didn’t know if he slept standing up. Every time he looked up at the square piece of sky, the light cut his eyes like a sharpened knife blade. A truck with armed guards in the back came to pick them up. For a short, senseless moment, Adrian thought they were all to be executed. Heinzl, whose face was ashen, sat opposite him, then a boy whose name he didn’t know, who was so frightened his knees were shaking almost too hard for his arms to keep them still. Next to the scared boy, Jockerl was facing him as usual, smiling his terrified porcelain smile. This was in February 1945. He remembers the white sky and the new layer of snow on the fields on either side of the road. The truck bumped along towards Albern where he saw the river for the first time, like a black slash through the whiteness. They passed burnt-down houses, buildings that had been flattened, and there the ground, too, was black, as if a huge wall of flame had travelled along the road, leaving only ashes behind. The truck stopped at one of the grain silos by the harbour basin. It looked unharmed but the adjoining buildings were in ruins. They were ordered into teams, given spades and told to start clearing the site. As he set to work, he heard a diesel engine throbbing somewhere behind him. He couldn’t work out why at first but then he realised that it belonged to a pump draining overflow water from the grain store via long hoses into the harbour. Though the guards were armed, they were not brutal: after digging for a couple of hours, Adrian’s team was told to take a break. They were given bread and sausage and, after the meal, he was even offered a cigarette by one of the soldiers. Adrian looked into the kindly face under the helmet and realised this was a young man, not much older than himself, even though he tried to make himself look as solid as possible with gestures and voice. It doesn’t matter what they do, soon river shipping won’t be possible anyway. The soldier waved the barrel of his rifle towards the black river that was rushing along between the white snowdrifts. The Americans have mined it all the way from here to Nussbaum, he said, then puffed up his cheeks and rolled his eyes upwards until they protruded like two white balls, and BAA-BOOM! he shouted meaninglessly and flung his arms out as if to mimic the explosion of a floating mine and, all around him, the other guards and the digging prisoners turned and smiled, white grins on their dirty faces. They carried on hacking and shovelling stone and pieces of reinforced concrete until long after dusk. Then the trucks arrived for them and took them back to the prison. The digging teams’ wet and filthy kits were waiting for him in the laundry. He had barely started throwing them into the boilers when the air raid began. In front of him, as if sprung out of the cellar floor, Sergeant Schwach rose up and shouted his Feuer löschen! Feuer löschen! in a voice that sounded as if large wounds had been ripped open inside his throat. This time, Adrian had no energy left to move out of the merciful warmth that enclosed him and nobody even tried to make him go anywhere. That night he dreamt about the river as he had seen it when he walked across the Ostbahnbrücke in the early light of dawn: like a huge wall of black water that grew taller and taller as if just waiting to come tumbling down over him.
Upstream The beginning of the end was an unmistakable bad smell. It stinks of cow shit, Heinzl said. It did. They had just finished yet another night shift in the laundry and from the other side of the ventilation grid they heard mooing cattle and something sounding like large wagon wheels grinding across the cobbles outside. From one of the windows in the stairwell, they looked out over the exercise yard and it looked like a marketplace, packed full of wagons loaded with every kind of furniture. Between them, cows, goats and pigs ambled about. Where the prisoners used to line up, someone had placed a fodder bin full of hay and a long tin tub that served as a water trough. They later learnt that Soviet companies had reached the edge of Münchendorf and the local farmers had spent the whole night trying to move themselves and their animals to safety. The decision to evacuate the prison must also have been taken that night. The order went from room to room: all prisoners were to line up in the yard. They had to stand along one wall, all three hundred and sixty-nine of them, hardly anyone above the age of twenty, packed so closely together that they had to contract their back muscles not to touch each other. The day was bitterly cold, with a strong wind driving rain showers that felt like hail against their faces. Above them, an armour-plated sky, covered with heavy, leaden clouds. After about half an hour, the prison governor, accompanied by two officials, came outside. He was in full uniform. Adrian had never seen him like his. It was hard to work out what he was saying, above the wind and the rumbling of the penned-in cattle and the shouting of the soldiers who were trying to inch two covered trucks towards the main gate (the drivers sounded the horns and hung outside the side windows screaming at the cows, who took no notice). Adrian picked up only a few words but remembers that the prison governor held a pair of black leather gloves and was slapping them nervously against his Sam Browne belt while he might have been speaking about heroic courage and the invincibility of the Germanic peoples and so forth. They had heard that kind of thing many times before. He also spoke of the delinquent prisoners who had shamed the native land. However, despite their evil deeds, he wasn’t leaving them to their fate at the hands of the Bolsheviks but would transfer them to safety. To the last man, he said. Or, anyway: in so far as he was able. Or, he might have said something quite different because now the wind was fierce and strong enough to tear the fodder bin from its wooden supports and send it tumbling across the cobbled yard. The noise was so violent it hit the shaved juvenile necks like a blow. When the hand holding the gloves pushed the governor’s hair out of his face one last time, Adrian noticed his cheeks, dark with untrimmed beard growth, were glistening with tears. The camp guard shouted Attention! and then they were made to walk back to their cells to pack and sign receipts for their possessions. Yet another convoy of army vehicles had arrived at the prison, and one of them brought the unit of military police detailed to escort them. They lined up again to be counted and, afterwards, the guards set about tying them together in pairs and then running a long rope from the front pair through to the last one. It took hours before all the names had been called and the ropes tied and secured. Finally, in the afternoon, the prison gates swung open and the prisoners marched off. They were like a manacled chain gang, bound by hands and feet, and guarded by a dozen armed men from the special police who walked along the line on both sides. For as long as he lives, Adrian will never forget this march and the journey on the river that followed. For one thing, he can’t ever get his head round why their tormentors were so dedicated to taking them all along on this mad exercise. Was it because they regarded the risk of them falling prey to the enemy as a greater threat? Or, was it that they had no idea what to do with them but brought them along by default or perhaps because they were simply property, just as the farmers tried to take their goods and chattels with them? But the prison governor’s face had been streaked with tears while he spoke. Could it be that he was convinced that even for lowlife like Adrian Ziegler or Viktor Zobel, the kind of people he and his comrades-in-arms had been trying to wipe off the face of the earth, there might after all be some freedom to find in the crumbling Reich? Or was the plan that they would all go down together, murderers and victims alike, still stuck with each other, the victims to their last breath remaining under the murderers’ orders? Still in prison uniforms and bound together, they marched towards the city. At first, they stumbled continuously on the ropes because their guards tried to make them move at too fast a tempo. Of that part of the march, Adrian only remembers the furious shouted commands, and that some of the boys ahead of him fell and were dragged along by the others or were brought to their feet with kicks and blows, still with their arms and legs hopelessly tangled in the ropes. They followed the canal in the direction of the generating station and the gasometers in Simmering, then carried on under the Ostbahn viaduct where he once (how long ago it seemed) had run coal for the Silver Knife. He stared fixedly at the ground to avoid having to watch Jockerl tug at the ropes. Not even the wind that swelled and flapped above them like the sail of an abandoned boat could carry away the sickly sweet stench of rotting cadavers. There were dead cows and calves everywhere, in the fields and the muddy ditches. And in the canal, too, where dead bodies that had been stopped by rubbish or tree roots now floated in the water by the banks with their legs helplessly sticking up above bellies distended like fat balloons. The closer they got to the centre of the city, the more terrible the devastation. Near the slaughterhouses in St Marx, whole city blocks had been flattened to the ground with only the odd gable or chimney stack still standing upright, pointing stupidly towards the sky. A burning stench of fire, diesel and decay filled the air. They passed a few horse-drawn carriages that must have received direct hits from shrapnel bombs because the entire vehicle had burnt, including the animals. Some of the carbonised horse cadavers had no heads, others had spilt their innards on the street. Live animals, sheep, calves and pigs, were wandering among the torched ruins, paradoxically liberated by raids aimed at killing the lot of them. At St Marx, the column suddenly stopped and was then ordered to carry on over the Stadionbrücke. The wind was so strong at the centre of the bridge that those up in front found it hard to keep up the quick-march tempo or even to keep upright at all. The wildly impatient officers walked up and down, shouting, swearing and hitting prisoners with their rifle butts. As they crossed the Prater, along the full length of Meiereistrasse they had to move at a jogging pace and weren’t allowed to stop once. They came to a sudden, involuntary halt on Handelskai, causing the rope to tighten so abruptly that Adrian almost fell. When he turned to look he saw that one of them, perhaps five or ten boys back along the line, had managed somehow to wriggle out of the loops of rope. His clogs were left on the quayside, looking sad and pointless. One of the guards pulled at the slack ropes. Then, very quickly, shots rang out: three sharp cracks in succession. Over by some harbour sheds, he saw the runaway, whose leg had been injured, struggle to sit up and drag himself behind the sheds. His naked, hopeless face was raised in desperation as two of the policemen ran towards him. One of them stopped just about a metre away, raised his rifle and shot once. The boy jerked and sank into a heap. Whispers flew between the prisoners in the column, giving the runaway’s name, Adrian thought it was Alois Riedler, but before the name reached him properly, the officer in charge of the column started to shout at them. He was a large bulldog of a man with chins like car tyres stacked on his broad shoulders. Adrian, who was too exhausted to raise his head, didn’t bother to look at him. They set off again, keeping closer together and moving with tired, shuffling, resigned steps. A tugboat was at anchor by a jetty just below the Reichsbrücke. It had two long barges attached, one at each side. The wind was blowing hard, making all three boats seem to fight to stay pointing in the same direction. At the far end of the jetty, a tall, thin man in a light overcoat was waiting for them. The man would later introduce himself as Mr Rache, a schoolteacher. If that was true information or not, and how this man had come to take on the responsibility of three hundred and sixty-nine inmates from Kaiserebersdorf, Adrian would never find out. Mr Rache had a list with their names inside a folder, and proceeded to call them out in a loud voice while the pages fluttered in the wind. One by one, the boys stepped out onto the jetty. Adrian’s name was called and Rache looked up from the rustling pages and glanced at him with empty, utterly indifferent eyes. Then he said a number to the guard, who pointed with his rifle at one of the barges. Near the barge, a young woman wearing a pale blue dress and white sandals was handing out a blanket and a small flask of water to everyone in turn. Adrian would later call this woman Miss Santer, though he was as vague about why as about using the name Rache for the man. With her white sandals and her long, tousled hair flying in the wind, Miss Santer looked as if she came from another world: maybe an actress, maybe somebody’s secretary, but definitely not a prison guard. The cargo hold was unbearably hot and stank of stale bilge water, rotting ropes and diesel fuel. Mr Rache let down a large bucket at the end of a rope and shouted to the boys to secure it and use it as a latrine. The tugboat engines were thudding and pulsating below the waterline. He heard shouts from on deck and for a brief moment, the hatch framed the young woman’s face, wreathed in her flying blonde hair. The barge was turning through a semi-circle and he had time to glimpse the Reichsbrücke under a swiftly sliding sky. So, they were going upstream. The woman’s face vanished from the hatch as if the wind had carried her off. Heavy boots trod the deck above them and the hatch cover was shut and screwed down. The hold became pitch black. There were three loading hatches but while the barge was on the move, only one of them was propped open enough to admit a tiny strip of light and it wasn’t the same hatch each time: first, aft and, later on, either at amidships or stern. Each time they stopped and the position of the ventilation slit changed, a wild tumult broke out because the strongest and most ruthless fought with hands and feet and whatever they could use as weapons (things like rope stumps, bailing-out buckets and old oil cans) to get themselves close to the only air gap. A fight to the death, if necessary, to gain a little fresh air and brief glimpses of the open sky. Adrian took one look, gave up the idea of fighting and withdrew to what he reckoned was a reasonably safe place by one of the bulkhead walls. A bucket fell over, it might even have been Mr Rache’s latrine bucket; someone screamed loudly for a long time and a new fight started to shut the screamer up. Then for a while, the hold became completely quiet. Adrian could sense the bodies around him, the warmth of backs and thighs pressing against him. The original sickening smell of mouldy wood and rotting water was thickened by the bitter stench of urine and shit from the presumably overturned latrine bucket. He remembered Uncle Ferenc’s stories about people who had been pulled along by river currents and drowned. Would he be one more of them? If that young soldier at Albern was to be believed, the river was mined, probably all the way up to Nussbaum. Or higher still. And if the mines were carried by river currents, they would be meeting them any time now. To distract himself from the mines, he tried to calculate where their barge was in the convoy by listening to the monotonous beat of the tugboat engine and the blunt waves slapping against the hull. He guessed that they were in the first barge. Sometimes, all the boats moved out into the main channel, which could be felt from the gentler, more rhythmical wave movement and heard from the steadier rumble of the engine. Now and then, the engine sound became slower and more uneven, then cut out and restarted on an odd, almost quivering note as the noise level sank until all that was heard above the coughing motor was the anxious splashing of water against the hull. He had a vision of the tugboat veering off mid-river and slowly making its way towards the bank. It was the first time they had stopped. No one in the hold had a clue why they were going towards land or what they might expect. Adrian fell to thinking about young Miss Santer, she of the blonde hair and white sandals and long, lovely legs. Then he thought of the bodies of the terrified boys crowded down there, where the air already stank of their waste and the hatch lids were screwed down like coffin lids. And suddenly, his whole body started to shake. To control the shakes, he pressed his hands flat against the bulwark just above his head. The surface of the steel plate was interrupted by two nuts. He touched them, then used his nails to scrape the paint off them while the barge carried on rocking on its own small waves. A ceaseless but faint buzzing sound was coming from somewhere far away. It rose and fell, as if reluctant to approach them. On deck, people were running. Suddenly, it felt as if a giant hand had grabbed the barge from below: it reared and there was a detonation powerful enough to drown the screaming in the hold. Was this a mine? He looked around but could see nothing except eyes and mouths gaping with terror. Viktor Zobel crouched as if in spasms at Adrian’s feet. He bent down to try to help his old cellmate and then the barge rose again. Zobel was now no longer below but above him and vomit sprayed from his mouth like a fountain. Blinded and footloose, Adrian fumbled for something to hold on to but the bulkhead plate with the two nuts slipped away from his hands. There was a burst of firing from a machine-gun position somewhere close by. So they hadn’t struck a mine, then? Adrian bent over to try to find out if they were taking in water and glimpsed, he thought, Jockerl’s shiny porcelain teeth scattered over the filthy hull. Another powerful detonation tore at the barge and nearly upended it again. He had time to hear the swooshing sound, as massive volumes of water were pushed aside, and then the entire ship tilted until it pointed straight down towards the riverbed and he crashed against the bulkhead wall. The pain hit him at the same time as the icy certainty that he would die. It was not so much a conscious thought as his body’s intuitive grasp of a reality that couldn’t be perceived by his sight and other senses: this cold, stinking place was the final boundary and on the other side was death and beyond death there was nothing. It was as if the dreams about the Mountain that had filled his head all the years in Spiegelgrund had come true. This cargo hold was inside the Mountain. This was what they had been travelling towards all the time. Or, perhaps, towards the torrents of water that whirled past underneath the most remote cavity in the Mountain, which would be cracked open by the bombs falling on them or the mines lying in wait near the banks. And then they would actually have to do what they had already practised thousands of times in the dreams: help each other to sink into the dark, deep, swift-moving water that flowed so powerfully below. They had to push each other’s heads below the surface, just as he had pushed Jockerl’s head under in the dream, until they had all drowned. When they were all disposed of and the barge’s hold empty, the journey could finally continue as planned. While waiting for this, there is only one thing to do: stay as still as possible. Try to stop his runaway thoughts. Concentrate on objects in the ceiling. A rope. A metal eye. Two nuts in the bulkhead, covered in thick white paint. The scratches in the paint made by his nails. Ahead of him, the back of a boy’s neck, its tendons tense like a terrified animal’s. Viktor Zobel’s flame-red face, vomit dribbling down his neck. Someone gets up, slowly and cautiously. In that instant, the distant tugboat engines start thudding and the light slapping of water against the side tells them that they are once more on their way to the main channel. But now, it will never be the same again. Fear of death is lodged in the very walls and every bump against the side of the barge awakens it as if the hull were covered with living skin and the regular beating of the engine were the sound of their own pulse, slowing down and speeding up and slowing again as they make their way through the swift waters. When the hatch was opened again, twenty-four hours had passed and the convoy had pulled up at Stein. All he grasped was the place name that was passed on in whispers from one boy’s parched lips to the next. The engine noise died down and Miss Santer’s windswept hair could be glimpsed through the hatch against a fragment of clear blue sky. They were allowed out of the hold for the first time in two days and nights. All three boats had pulled up along the quayside and he was able to confirm, with eyes that stung and ached in bright sunlight, that his guess had been right and that his barge was the first of the two. The tugboat swayed on its anchor just ahead of them, swinging to and fro in the silvery, glittering light reflected off the waves. In the dancing light, he saw Mr Rache talking to a sturdily built, shortish man who was probably the tugboat captain. Along the quayside, special police in field-grey uniforms stood at the ready, their rifles pointing towards the barges. They weren’t taking risks even though none of the prisoners could reasonably be in any shape to resist. They stood clustered together on deck in their stinking clothes. Mr Rache exchanged a few words with one of the guards and then picked half a dozen boys to help with carrying water and provisions from the prison. Around Adrian, several of the boys said they’d soon be joined by more prisoners. Stein was one of the largest prisons in the country and where would the inmates go from there? But when Rache returned a few hours later, he was still escorted by the policemen, who didn’t bring any more prisoners with them. The boys who served as porters were hauling a cart loaded with large drums of water. Food was handed out: sausages smelling strongly of acetic acid preservative, and Schwarzbrot, the black rye bread. Everyone had to queue to fill the water flasks they had been given in Wien. For a while he stood close to Mr Rache, looked into his face and could have asked him where they were going and how long it might take, but their ferryman’s face was reduced to a mask of contracted muscles and blank eyes. Then, the dull thud of the tugboat engines started up, the exhaust fumes drifted across the water and they were ordered to go below. At least for a while, it seemed possible to travel in mid-stream. Despite the oven-like heat, the crowded, unwashed bodies and the increasingly evil stench from the latrine bucket, he managed to sleep a little, with his head pressed against the familiar bulkhead plate. Soon, though, he woke to the sound of running feet on deck (like blows with a club just above his head) and shouting voices that seemed to be answered from somewhere on land. They pulled in to the bank again. The hatch was opened. Outside, night had come. Miss Santer’s face flitted past but there was already a fight brewing at the open hatch. People were struggling blindly to get up on deck and at least steal a quick look at what was going on. He managed to get out by supporting himself on the shoulders of some boys who were squashed too tightly together to move and saw, as if in a nightmare, the fortress-like building of the hospital at Ybbs come drifting towards him out of the dark. The past, in this majestic shape, had returned to attack him. A heated discussion was going on between Mr Rache and the solid little captain, who absolutely wanted the prisoners to stay in the hold. They compromised in the end. The prisoners were allowed on deck, but only so long as they stayed completely still. The cold up there felt biting and almost unreal in contrast to the hot, repulsive air below. He sat with his arms around his pulled-up knees, watching the long hospital buildings with their sheds and walls emerge through the hazy dark. Not a single light was visible in the main block, as if the whole place had been evacuated. But the hospital staff must have come from somewhere because here they were, their small torches gleaming like fireflies in the dark. In that ghostly, wavering light, he saw two boys carried off the other barge and stretchered up towards the huge, dead-looking hospital. Some of the prisoners were handed torches as well, but then the guards turned up and waved with their rifles to make them go back below. The hatches were screwed on again and, as the boats chugged back out into the river channel, something inside his belly turned over like a large animal and he had to shout out that he needed the latrine. A light flickered between the bodies and, from the uncertain shadows, a hand reached out to support him and usher him to the bucket. It was upright but had fallen over so many times it was surrounded by a grim pool of urine and faeces. The wavering torchlight picked out a boy squatting with his naked feet in the filth, his hands gripping his stomach with an expression of unfathomable suffering on his face. Adrian pulled his pants down, straddled the bucket and emptied his entire gut in one massive, disgusting rush. There was of course nothing you could wipe yourself with. Exhausted and still nauseous, he made his way back to his place by the bulkhead and lay there, probing the nuts in the plate, scratching the paint with his nails and trying to calculate the distance between Ybbs and Linz. So, if their speed was fifteen knots, how long before they arrived? If one included a factor for the speed of the current going the other way? He tried to hold the numbers in his head but couldn’t even visualise the outlines of the figures. He fell asleep. Or thought he slept. But he was woken over and over by the same noise, a fearful coughing of the engines that then went back to quiet regularity. Twice, it was a false alarm. The third time, it was for real and panic had already broken out in the hold. He heard one boy screaming exactly like an animal, in long, stuttering howls. At the same time, someone tugged at his arm and a voice very close by was saying please, please, help me. The torchlight searched and then picked out the boy he had seen squatting by the latrine. A length of gut dangled between his legs. He stood and held that thing in his hand, trying to push it back in but fell over when the barge suddenly jumped against the waves. When the light found the boy again, he was lying on his side, curled up and with the loop of gut still hanging out. His face was a pale mask. Someone shouted from further along, help help! and hammered with what looked like a broom handle against the middle hatch cover. The hatches stayed shut. They heard the engines cough, then fall silent. The only sound was the splashing of water against the hull. The convoy had moved to the bank again. Fast footsteps passed above them. Open up! Open up! It was the same voice as before and the boy thumped at the hatch cover again. There was a violent crash and the entire barge made the same heart-stopping dive as before. It was followed by a long series of massive explosions that made the barge pitch this way and that, up and down in an insane dipping movement that slowed and then quickened again after the next wave of bombs. Across the racket he still heard the stubborn plead please, help me, but it was becoming fainter and more monotonous. Everyone hung on to what was closest at hand, a piece of rope, an iron stanchion. In the dark, Adrian could hardly distinguish his own body from all the others that were lying near or partly on top of him. He felt others slipping or crawling on him, their feet or sharp elbows pushing into him as they tried to get up. Everything was becoming less distinct now, as if all the bodies in the hold were fusing into a single being. He was sinking deeper into foggy togetherness, ever more deeply as the shouting and movements died down and when he next opened his eyes, everything around him was quiet. At first, he thought he was dreaming. Not a sound from anywhere. No slow, empty engine sounds, no creaking plates below him, no trickling of the wake flowing along the hull. When he raised his head to look out over the dark sea of bodies around him, no one was moving. Then the hatch just above him opened. A shadow fell into the hold, sharply outlined by the light from above. Someone called something. He turned. In the slanting light he saw a hand lying, palm upwards, with its fingers lightly curled. The hand seemed to be cut off at first but then he realised that it was attached to an arm which was a single, large, bleeding wound. The blood had flowed and clotted in the pool that reached all the way to a head. It was Jockerl’s head, the same mask-like bloodied face, the same staring, rolled-up whites of his eyes, the same pale porcelain teeth. Seems there are some dead’uns down there, he heard one guard say to another in a sober, almost indifferent voice. Booted footsteps. Someone fetched a ladder. The two guards clambered down, guns rattling against their belts. Mr Rache followed their heavy uniformed bodies, pressing a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Above it, his eyes looked around, as pale and expressionless as before. Adrian sat stock-still next to the ladder, suddenly frightened that they would drag him away even though he wasn’t dead yet. The guards tramped about and turned bodies over with their rifle butts. Some boys crawled away like crabs, one (perhaps the same one) screamed in pain, some cried for help. The dead bodies were pulled along to the hatch and then up on deck. Because he was so close to the ladder he saw that one of the corpses had his guts hanging out. The boy’s body was stiff and lifeless but his naked feet with small splayed toes seemed almost touchingly alive. The corpse was hauled up the ladder and he heard it being dragged across the deck to the railing and tipped overboard, making a dull splash followed by a short but intense wave motion that caused the barge to rock like a cradle. Then, another splash. And another. He counted four, then five bodies. Immediately afterwards, the tugboat engine started up again as if it had been waiting only for the barges to be rid of some of the ballast. The journey continued. He had no idea of how long it took or how far they travelled but when he emerged from his semi-comatose state, the engine had stopped, the hatch had been opened and the ladder was in place. This time there were doctors among the guards patrolling the hold. Real doctors in real white coats. Somehow, the hold seemed more spacious around them. Their voices resounded more strongly. Or perhaps he just imagined it. He heard one of the medics, an older man with a white moustache, ask Mr Rache where these youths were meant to be taken. Someone else raised his voice and said that they should be hospitalised, the lot of them. Simply not transportfähig, the first one said, or maybe it was the second one. To the remarks, Rache replied (his voice was sharper, more piercing than Adrian had expected): that’s none of your business. I’m just obeying orders. Anyway, they were all taken up on deck. The nurses helped those who couldn’t climb out on their own. They had reached Linz. The quayside was packed with Red Cross staff manning tables and primitive sickbays. They lined up for food, a bowl each of rice soup and a piece of bread. He wolfed it down without being aware that he ate. They stayed there for a little more than a day and a night. Adrian watched as the crew loaded water and provisions. When they set out again, all the hatches were left open and groups of them were allowed on deck. Miss Santer was standing aft, watching the swilling water as the tugboat ploughed along. She was wearing the same dress and sandals as before but had put her hair up. The sky was overcast. They seemed to be pushing on into some alien, threatening part of the world, and the landscape reinforced the feeling of menace as it rose taller and closed in on them. By the end of that day, the mountain ridges were obscuring the sunlight and they travelled among darkening rock faces. The only sounds came from the engine, strangely harsh and choppy inside its own echo, from the water that splashed and rushed along the hull, and from the birds that rose above the racket and swept past under the dark grey sky in a lacework of white wings suddenly flung out into the gathering night. This is all he remembers. The next day, they chug past Passau and arrive in Germany. Here, or perhaps at some other stop, the medical people must have come on board again, because the ladders are back, lifeless bodies are hauled up, dragged across the deck and heaved overboard. By this stage, he is long past caring. Exhaustion has invaded his body and his mind feels as clear as water and utterly empty. Thinking is no longer possible. All he does is sit and finger the two nuts, following the crack that his nails have worked into the layer of paint. Except, by now, the crack has deepened into a cut. Then, one day (the seventh day? Or the ninth? Or the eleventh? He lost count long ago) they arrive at Regensburg. An officer materialises in front of him and yells at him to stand up. He smiles stupidly and leans against the bulkhead to steady himself. But however hard he tries, his feet seem to slip and his knees fold under him as if made of rubber. The man grabs him under the armpits and, with the help of someone on deck, he is dragged up through the hatch. On the quayside, Mr Rache stands around puffing on a cigarette as if totally unconcerned about the macabre load that is hauled or led out of the barges. Miss Santer is perched on a bollard further along, busy fixing her make-up. The reflexes from her pocket mirror dance on the oily harbour water. When she has put her mirror away and clicked her handbag shut, her lips are as red as his mother’s once were. They are taken to the local state prison, though that was something he learnt much later. From that morning, all he remembers is a large, white-limed building with several wings, which towered over the railway station opposite. Inside it, he struggled to get up the steps in the large, dim stairwells. He remembers iron doors that opened and then closed behind them, the echoes of yelling voices through seemingly endless corridors and the large cells they were shoved into, twenty or thirty at a time. While he slept that night, he seemed still to be travelling on the river, as if the hard floor beneath him was rocking and swinging up and down. But it actually had. When he woke up next time, it was still night. Now, the floor shook and trembled, and his mouth was full of grit. Someone (he didn’t know who) tried to pull him closer to the wall but it was shaking, too. Then, finally he realised that they were in the middle of an Allied bombing raid. Getting out was not worth thinking about. He looked out through the barred window and saw that station building on the other side of the square was burning. The freight train pulled up on the tracks further away was on fire, too, and inside the tall flames one could make out the dark outlines of the trucks. Black smoke was rising towards a spookily rust-coloured sky. His first thought was that the prison was on fire as well and they would burn to death locked up in it. But the cell door stood open. In the corridor outside, a cloud of stone dust welled forward like a gigantic, grey tongue. Soon, their cell was also filled to bursting point with dust that hurt your eyes and scorched your lungs. In the end, the air became unbreathable and they all sat with their heads between their legs, waiting for the floor to open under them like a trapdoor. Finally, the building stopped shaking. But the terrible clamour did not cease: the air-raid sirens were howling and from somewhere they heard a noise as if a large bulldozer were hard at work. It was only afterwards that he realised the demolition noise came from buildings that collapsed and burnt. The prison itself seemed not to be hit. Where the suffocating dust was coming from was a mystery. Viktor Zobel was the first to move. He took off the dirty bandage that he kept wrapped around the sore on his leg, the bad one that he used to rub with margarine, and tore the strip of cloth into pieces that he wetted under the tap and handed out to as many of them as possible. With the filthy, wet cloths pressed against their noses and mouths, they made it down the stairs and out into the street. The dawn was more unreal than any he had ever seen: inflamed and red behind a plume of black smoke still rising from the ruins of the station building. Further away, in the marshalling yard, freight trucks were also burning and giving off more black plumes. Sirens howled all the time, by now from fire engines and ambulances that kept arriving and spewing out firemen, nurses and soldiers. No one took much notice of them at first. It took several hours before a police officer ordered them to go back to their cells but he obviously couldn’t be bothered with the gang of dirty, poorly clothed young men watching from outside the cordon. They were a distraction, no more. From then on, the guards stopped locking the cell doors. The assumption seemed to be that they might as well stay there for their own safety. One morning, the tray with bread and water that used to be placed outside the cell door was not there. The prisoners conferred for a while and then decided to send one of them off to reconnoitre. After a quarter of an hour or so, the scout returned, shouting and waving and very agitated. The Negroes are here, he shouted, the Negroes! The others followed him nervously. The prison seemed abandoned and there was not a guard in sight. Outside the main entrance, a jeep stood parked, and inside it sat four men in unidentifiable uniforms. Only one of the four, a man sitting next to the driver, was actually black. The two in the back of the jeep were talking all the time but the black man in the front seat smiled and waved and handed out cigarettes. Adrian took one and the Negro lit it for him, protecting the flame with his cupped hand, which was white on the inside as if the blackness had been painted on. What’s your name? he asked but Adrian didn’t know, or perhaps he didn’t understand the question.