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A Novel
by Steve Sem-Sandberg
If you ever get matey with one of these Nazi swine I'll kill you, you hear me?
It would take six long years before the Nazis were run out of Wien but when it finally happened, a new life also opened up for Eugen Ziegler, incredible as it may sound. Earlier, his business deals had to be managed hand to mouth. 'Business' had always been hugely important for him. No day would pass without his doing deals and Adrian couldn't remember him speaking about anything else. Much later, Adrian would recognise more than a little of this in himself. My father, he said, was incapable of living with what was closed or already decided or concluded in some way. He existed in the present and for the promise of something to come. When the business was done and he was left facing the results, so many tons of brown coal or cubic metres of logs, he had no idea how to handle the goods he had acquired, or even how to transport the stuff. When he turned up at home, it was never to see me or Helmut or even our mother, whatever he might claim at the time, but to persuade Uncle Ferenc to fund the delivery of his brown coal on time or the down-payment on something he was after, Adrian said, and the rows with my mother broke out every time because he kept trying it on with Florian or Ferenc, and Leonie refused to allow either of her brothers to do business with Eugen. You don't know what you're doing, she would say. Leonie, who always stepped into the breach, was the one who got hit. When Eugen Ziegler beat up his woman, he went about it in a properly systematic way. First, everyone else was ordered to leave the flat. They gathered in the yard to wait while the screaming Leonie was hauled from wall to wall. The punishment could last from about twenty minutes to more than an hour, with increasingly long breaks in between bouts. Then the beating seemed to be over, until they heard a terrible scream and it started all over again. If in the end Eugen was too drunk to storm out in a rage, he collapsed exhausted in a corner while Leonie limped around, picking things up and tidying as always. Adrian remembered the time when his father had ordered a schnitzel and a beer to be brought from the restaurant across the street. Abusing Leonie must have made him hungry. Without a word, the table was laid with a white tablecloth and they all stood around watching the head of the household eat his supper. He ate as methodically as he beat his woman, but something about the way he brought fork and glass to his lips showed that he was out of his head with drink. Before going away, he emptied the coffee tin of the money Leonie and Ferenc had saved up for the rent. He left afterwards, without a word to anyone.
I know it's no fault of yours, Mrs Dobrosch, the landlord, Mr Schubach, used to say when Leonie went to see him the next morning and, with an ingratiating smile on her lips, asked him to be allowed to wait with the rent. It's that man Ziegler, a bastard who doesn't know how to behave decently. But, you know, this can't go on.
Foster Home And they were evicted in the end, on a day in May 1935. Adrian remembers that it poured with rain. Ferenc and Florian had carried the sticks of furniture the family still owned down to the yard: Leonie's bed, the bed all the children had slept on in turn, and the much-hammered kitchen table, always glued together again by Florian; the chairs, and the wardrobe for Leonie's dresses. She had packed Laura's, Adrian's and Helmut's clothes into a large suitcase. They had nothing to cover their things with and it rained so hard that the drops bounced many centimetres up in the air when they hit the wooden surfaces. Adrian still remembers this. Their neighbours had come out to watch from the galleries outside the flats. And the boys with whom he and Helmut used to drift around the streets. Now, they stood still and silent, just staring. Next to them, their fathers in their vests, leaning uncaringly against the railings with thin fags squeezed flat between their fingers. Everyone was waiting for Eugen to drive into the yard in the lorry he claimed to have got the use of, but he didn't come, with or without a lorry, and finally Leonie had had enough of being stared at, told her children to come along and walked away. Laura went to stay with Auntie Emilia, who in the nick of time had managed to rent a room in a flat on Taborstrasse. Adrian and Helmut were led by their mother to the children's home called the Zentralkinderheim on Lustkandlgasse. She told them afterwards that she nearly fainted on the way there and simply had to sit down on the pavement outside the entrance to a railway station, the Franz Josefs Bahnhof. A man had come along to ask if the lady was feeling unwell and then he fetched a glass of water for her from a nearby café. Which was the only ounce of kindness anyone showed me during that entire time, his mother said. He can't remember any of it and has little memory of what it was like in the Lustkandlgasse institution, despite he and Helmut spending almost all of the summer there. He stayed close to his little brother all the time, in the playground and when the food was served. Everybody liked little Helmut, who was blond and merry. Ein hübsches Kind. The nursery staff was keen for them to wash properly and, one day, they were helped to dress neatly and comb their hair before being brought into a large room with walls covered in white and black tiles. There were tall benches along the walls and, on these benches, children stood lined up. He and Helmut were to climb up onto a bench and Adrian was told to hold his little brother's hand tightly and wait obediently for his turn. Suddenly, the room filled with strangers. He was so scared his legs felt like jelly and his one thought was that he mustn't pee himself now that all these high-ups were around. The strangers walked slowly along the benches and examined the children carefully. One of the ladies who stopped in front of Adrian and Helmut wore a red dress with a white lace collar. She scrutinised Helmut from top to toe and turned to the nurse:
Excerpted from The Chosen Ones by Steve Sem-Sandberg. Copyright © 2016 by Steve Sem-Sandberg. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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