-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Readalikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
A Novel
by Steve Sem-Sandberg
The Tinker's Lad But they already knew all they needed to know. Mrs Haidinger wouldn't have him in the house and, once he had got his money back, Mr Pawlitschek requested that he should be allowed not to bring a charge. The thing was, who would be responsible? On paper, which was what mattered, the Haidingers were Adrian's parents. The boy was dispatched to the institution for abandoned children on Lustkandlgasse in Alsergrund, the Kinderübernahmestelle or 'KüST' as it was known for short. This time there was no chance that he would be stood on a bench like some circus animal and ogled and, with any luck, chosen by a lady in a red dress who bought you chocolates in Konsum afterwards. He was there for two weeks, presumably the time it took for the documentation about him to be shuffled by officials from one department to another until his adoption papers were cancelled, and then he was transferred to the old orphanage in Mödling. It was known as the Hyrtl'sche Waisenhaus and looked like a medieval fortress, a large brick building with high flat-fronted towers and a chapel in an inner courtyard. Very soon after the Nazis had taken over the government, the Waisenhaus was turned into a reform school for undisciplined children. Adrian was to be sent to Mödling twice. The worst tour was the second one, in early spring 1943. He does not remember much from his stay in the autumn of 1939, just large, draughty rooms and apparently endless corridors and stairwells, where they were never to be seen alone but always in a troop, singly or in pairs, in Einzel- or Zweierreihen, always on their way to somewhere, to the dining hall or the gym, with one of the older boys in the lead shouting out orders over the sound of angrily tramping feet that echoed down the deep shafts of the stairwells. During the first weeks, he was tormented by guilt. He had not deserved the care offered to him by the Haidingers, or by anybody else for that matter. He had no idea what Mrs Haidinger would decide to do with Helmut. Keep him or make him suffer an even worse fate, which would be Adrian's fault? He didn't know anything and the uncertainty pained him more than being pestered by the other boys, who remarked on his looks, his dark skin and oddly shaped ears. They used to ask what kind of glue he used to stick his ears so close to his head. One day, his group leader told him that he had to go to the office. The director, Mr Heckermann, seemed short where he sat ensconced behind his big desk. His moustache was kept narrow, probably not to outdo his lips, which were even narrower, and together the twin lines of lips and moustache made a shape like a small beak. Heckermann's slightly frail, bird-like body could look threatening, as it did now, when he raised his shoulders and asked Adrian to state his surname. Scared, Adrian shrugged in instinctive mimicry as he replied in the firm, military style that everyone in the school was to use:
Dobrosch!
That ugly, insubordinate name had never sounded more repulsive. Like when one opens an old tin can and some rotting, stinking sludge pours out. For a moment Mr Heckermann looked disgusted, but then his moustache-beak opened again:
You're wrong there!
What are you supposed to do when a person in authority asks your name and then says you're wrong? Adrian closed his eyes, convinced that this was it, he was finished. You're wrong because from now on, your name is Ziegler!
When he said that, Adrian dared to open his eyes again, saw Mr Heckermann standing behind his desk, and in the next moment, as already mentioned, the grinning Eugen Ziegler emerged from a cupboard and stepped forward to hug his prodigal son.
Uncle Florian's Warm Hands It was a little like a baptism. At least, that's how Adrian saw it. He had stepped out of his mother's ineffective shadow into the radiance of his father's name. Eugen Ziegler had abused Leonie Dobrosch constantly for ten long years; he had abandoned her and their children countless times, just as no one could have kept track of all the times he had come back home, drunk or broke and, hence, repentant. But when father and son left Mödling together, Eugen put his arm around his son's shoulders and explained to him that nobody could separate them because, by now, his father and mother were married for real. This was his happy message and he had wanted to tell Adrian face to face, he said, but the paternal arm around the boy's shoulders, meant to seem strong and protective, was actually no more than one long plea for support. Naturally, it was all because of the war. What else? Unless Eugen Ziegler could prove that he had responsibility for the upkeep of a family, he risked being picked up in the street and driven to the front line, or maybe even some worse place. As it was, the authorities had found him a job on the assembly line in the Floridsdorf locomotive factory. They worked round the clock out there, building locos for the Deutsche Reichsbahn. The job had strings attached, though: Ziegler had had to promise to take his wage packet home to his wife, hand over all the money and then she had to sign for it. Also, the factory foreman had apparently said that once is enough, Ziegler, if I hear you're coming to work pissed or not taking all the money home you'll be out on your ear. And even though his sobriety might have slipped some evenings and weekends, officialdom had the whip-hand and, throughout the war years, Eugen Ziegler dragged himself along to Floridsdorf every day and did his bit on the production line that was to build more than 1,000 engines of the type DRB Class 52. They lived in the 3rd Bezirk at the time, in a modern flat with a bathtub and a toilet, and had the authorities to thank for that as well. Ferenc still stayed in Kaisermühlen even though he had got a job in St Pölten, driving coal trucks for a haulage company delivering to businesses that weren't too pernickety about paperwork like orders and receipts. The job was dangerous because they had to drive at night with the headlamps off and might at any moment get caught by the police. Adrian's mother was beside herself with worry, but she worried even more about Uncle Florian. He had never been a problem for as long as he was with them. True, he could be confused at times and it could be confusing to talk to him because his speech was so slurred and rambling that it was hard to understand him. But he was a kind man, and if only he had some way to use his hands he was as precise and diligent as you could wish (but you always had to place whatever it was in his hands). For instance, it happened that Mr Gabel, the greengrocer, allowed him to come along on trips to the wholesaler out in Kagran. When they returned, Adrian remembers, Florian would be wearing tough gloves and an apron that made him look like a real stevedore. In the spring, he would help Ferenc with cleaning and waxing the boats in the marina at Alte Donau. Seated on a small stool, he would sit in the white sunlight holding the brush as delicately as if he were painting on a costly linen canvas. His sister, Adrian's mother, always used to say that Uncle Florian had such warm and sensitive hands. But after the eviction, all this came to an end. No work could be found for Florian. He stayed for a while in a hostel for single men in Brigittenau but could never settle down among strangers, and then his mindset and behaviour changed, he became restless and wandered in the streets, playing the fool, as his sister said. By the autumn of 1937, she had managed to find him a bed in the mental asylum in Gugging. The relief lasted only a few months, until the Anschluss. The old hospital board was replaced only weeks later and Florian was transferred to Steinhof, where he shared a ward with forty deranged men who sat or lay on their beds, sometimes tied down and screaming because there was no one who came to look after them. Leonie would visit her brother at least once a month, always on a Sunday. Adrian has a clear memory of how she would get dressed before the visit, standing in front of the mirror, something she normally did not do. She'd put on a grey, woollen cardigan and a beret. Her face always looked blurred with crying when she came back from Steinhof. She complained that the staff treated Florian worse than they would a dog and that her brother was fading away in front of her eyes, more and more at every visit. (The abyss that separated how they lived then, during that last, unreal year of freedom, from the insanity that was to take over, was so deep that it would take many years before Adrian managed to join up the two periods of time: the one that came before he was sent to Spiegelgrund and the other that began after he had become a registered inmate. He realised only then that the gravelled paths between the pavilions that he had to take to the school building every morning were the very same that his mother had taken on her Sunday visits to uncle Florian just a few years earlier. It was not only that it was the same place, but also that the Spiegelgrund staff recognised her when she delivered him, because almost all of them had been working at Steinhof as asylum nurses. In their eyes, his mother was one of those crazy women who would turn up at every which time and make nuisances of themselves by asking about husbands or brothers or children, even after it should have been clear to them that there were no more Steinhof patients left to ask about. It must have been how they looked at her when she came to visit him, Adrian, the only time she did. For one thing, she was dressed exactly as when she visited Uncle Florian, the same skirt and woolly, grey cardigan and worn coat and beret, so she had presumably stood in front of the mirror and prepared herself in the same old way, her eyes anxiously fixed on her reflection while she applied shiny red lipstick to her thin, pale lips.) In October or November 1940, Uncle Florian and forty-or-so other males had been herded onto buses run by the charity GeKraT (Gemeinnützige Krankentransport) and driven to Hartheim. Leonie Ziegler had not been informed of this. The official letter arrived several weeks later and announced that Mr Florian Dobrocz – some ill-educated clerk had either misheard or simply couldn't spell – had suddenly succumbed to pneumonia and, despite every effort by the staff, his life could not be saved. Adrian remembers when the letter arrived. The family was seated at the table. So far, one Sunday night after another, his father had sat down, calm and sober, at the carefully laid supper table and, every week, put up in silence with his wife's tearful face and endless wailing about dear Florian with the warm hands who was simply fading and receding away from her, but this Sunday he could take no more. Enraged, he stood up with such force that the table rocked and sent plates and glasses flying, then crashing onto the floor. He had had it with all the miserable moaning and groaning, he shouted, then he left and slammed the door after him. At first Leonie sat very still, then she hid her face in her hands and wept so wildly her shoulders shook. But it might be that none of this had happened by then. In March 1938, Helga was already born and, just over a year later, Leonie had become pregnant again with Hannelore, who arrived in February 1940. Adrian was a pupil in the school on Erdbergstrasse. Just as in the Münnichplatz school, it was understood that he was an imbecile and, as such, placed at the back of the classroom. By then, the other children in the class wore uniforms with a Hitlerjugend pin on the jacket lapel and, once a week, went off to a Heimabend at someone's home after school. When his classmates asked him why he and his sister never came to someone's house for these evening get-togethers, which after all were compulsory, he didn't know what to say. When Eugen Ziegler had received a document stating that he was wehrunwürdig, he probably felt a certain sense of relief, but for his children the fact that Ziegler was classed as unfit for military service meant exclusion from the Deutsches Jungvolk and presumably all other organisations with a link to NSDAP. Adrian was dead keen to wear the same uniform as the others. It wasn't because he was crazy about uniforms or the stupid Home Evening singalongs but because the uniform was the one thing that could stop his father from beating him up. All children in an HJ uniform were under the personal protection of the Führer, and no one could punish them except, of course, the Führer himself. At Spiegelgrund it grew quite boring, the way they kept insisting that the Führer was the greatest friend and protector of children. Adrian Ziegler had realised that long ago, and nothing that was to happen later would make him doubt that it was true.
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.
 (1).gif)
Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
