The Chosen Ones Read online

  *

  Portrait of a Father Eugen Ziegler took a great deal of pride in his appearance. Before going to bed, he smeared nut oil into his strong, dark hair and kept it in place by pulling a ladies’ stocking over his head. Whenever he might be coming to stay the night, Leonie always put a towel on the pillow to protect it from the oil. To Adrian, a towel on the pillow at bedtime meant that his father was on his way home. Though the towel on his father’s pillow was often untouched, he remembers how hopeful he would feel every time and then how overwhelmingly disappointed, because his father was a great one for making generous promises about the special things he would bring next time he came home. A toy car, perhaps, or a steely marble or a collection of colourful bottle labels that he had showed Adrian once, promising that, next time, he’d have got hold of another collection just like it for his boy. Then next time, and the next and next again. At times, if and when his father did come home, it could be grim. He often arrived so late at night that Adrian was asleep and never heard the noise of the door slamming. In the morning, his mother was lying half on top Eugen’s body as if she had tried to wrestle him down during the night or as if something inside her had broken and left her unable to move away on her own. Eugen Ziegler kept very quiet about himself and his relatives, which was strange for someone usually so cocksure and boastful. He had told Adrian that the name Ziegler had to do with his descent from one of the thousands of Czech labourers who had travelled to Wien to labour in the brick works – the Ziegelbrenners – without whom no houses could have been built in this city. Or so he said. Ziegler became his name because he was a Czech, and moulding and firing bricks was what the Czechs did. It didn’t take Adrian long to realise that this was no more than a tale. Sometimes, his father would speak of his work as a handyman in a railway station somewhere in eastern Slovakia, and how he had just happened to get on a train to Donetsk in Ukraine where he got himself a job at a steel mill and stayed for years. The revolution had just ended and thousands volunteered to go to Russia because they were fired up by Lenin. I’ve always been a communist at heart, Eugen Ziegler would say, beating his breast. This was sheer bombast. Ziegler had no heart but reckoned he could get away with pretending that he did or, at least, that being so handsome would make up for the defect. As Auntie Magda kept saying, Eugen’s looks made women turn their heads. Well, a certain kind of woman, Auntie Emilia would add. When Adrian asked her if his mother was one of these women, Auntie Emilia told him that Eugen had been different in those days. But if Adrian went on to ask more about what he had been like, in those days, the answers became vague and muddled because one wasn’t to speak about what had been. Still, it was fact that Eugen Ziegler spoke Russian, so there might have been a grain of truth in the story about running off to Donetsk. Once, he and Adrian almost paid with their lives for his language skills. It happened in the autumn of 1939, just weeks after Eugen had collected Adrian from Mödling and they were planning to start a new life. They lived in the 3rd Bezirk, on Erdbergstrasse, which is only a few blocks away from Rochusmarkt. Every day, Eugen would go to the pub to negotiate business deals and, every night, his oldest son Adrian was told to go and walk him home. On the slow, unsteady way back to Erdbergstrasse, Eugen, who was usually dead-drunk, would go on about how Wien was no longer the city it once was, the streets were crawling with Piefkes, he said, traitors and Nazi swine, and, once, when he saw two of them in Wehrmacht uniforms on the square at Rochusmarkt, he swayingly pulled up in front of them and, before Adrian had time to react, let out a stream of Russian abuse, all presumably meaningless to the soldiers. What they did grasp was that this man spoke Russian. Spitzel, a fucking spy, Adrian heard one of them snarl as he whipped the rifle off his back. Adrian grabbed his father’s arm and managed to drag him behind one of the remaining market stalls where they crouched, squeezed tightly together, and heard the two soldiers run past, rifles rattling against the buckles of their Sam Browns, the heels of their boots thumping on the cobbles, and then Eugen pulled his fingers through his hair and turned his face, stinking of alcoholic fumes, to Adrian and hissed:

  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 aw
ay. 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:

  and the red lady said, I’ll have him, he looks nice

  and the nurse said, in that case you must take the big one as well

  the red lady, oh no, I don’t want him, he’s too ugly

  the nurse, I’m sorry but we don’t separate siblings

  the red lady, well, too bad, if I have to I’ll take the ugly one as well.