My Own Dear Brother

by Holly Müller

  ‘Murderers!’ came Moritz’s voice. ‘Murderers!’

  He kept calling, though Schosi couldn’t be sure which was dream and which reality. The ripples spread and travelled, the surface of sleep smoothed and closed above his head once more.

  Schosi barely noticed Moritz’s absence. He was shepherded by unseen hands to seats and bowls of food and back to bed again, always in the same echoing corridors, with flashing light through the windows and swinging doors and squeaking of the nurses’ black shoes keeping rhythm. He heard lots of talk, women’s voices. They spoke about Christmas and holidays. They spoke about food, potatoes and no goose this year, at least not a whole one.

  Schosi felt pressure on his arm and saw the needle push in. He wanted to struggle but he couldn’t feel his limbs and his brain was fogged, a dreadful aching in his skull. He felt icy breath on his legs, the ruffle of blowing air. Moritz was near by again, strapped to a mattress, still and white, hair scrambling across his features, his lips dark like a sealed wound. Schosi wrapped his arms around his body and drew his knees high, but still he shivered. Sleep tugged him downwards. He dropped like a stone.

  Ursula knocked on the door that belonged to Frau Wilhelm. Herr Esterbauer was at the post office. After he’d left, she’d dawdled a while in her room then dashed on to the landing with coat on and down the stairs to the floor below. She’d been thinking about an idea ever since the air raid. She knocked again, eager. She was just about to knock a third time when a bolt clacked, a chain rattled and the door cracked inwards. A long narrow eye, red-rimmed, peered through the gap. The door opened further.

  Frau Wilhelm wore trousers and a loose man’s shirt. She looked tired. Her face showed the unreadiness of someone who was expecting to be alone and was suddenly faced with conversation.

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘Sorry to disturb you.’ Ursula spoke in her most adult voice – she mustn’t be shy in front of the elegant woman. ‘My name is Ursula. You might have seen me in the cellar, during the raid, I mean.’ She was unsure if Frau Wilhelm would remember; she’d been far from sober and it was some time ago. ‘I just wanted to ask a question.’

  ‘Right.’ Frau Wilhelm sounded weary. ‘Come in then.’ She wandered into the flat leaving the door wide open.

  Ursula hesitated. This was uncommonly lax – slovenly even. Where was the woman’s hospitality? Should she not offer to take Ursula’s coat, provide her with a drink and something to eat, apologise effusively for the mess in the house, fuss her to a chair? This was so uniformly the case when she was invited into someone’s home that Ursula wondered whether the woman was indeed peculiar. Had she judged right? She was suddenly unsure. When Frau Wilhelm had spoken in the cellar – the defiant words asserted boldly for all to hear, their ring of truth – perhaps it had been momentary recklessness. She might be quite different to that normally, quite the opposite. Her heart began to patter as she stepped inside the tiny hall, found a hook beside the door and put her things there. Frau Wilhelm was nowhere to be seen. She passed through a kitchen where a single lamp burned atop a cluttered worktop strewn with onion skins and cups, the remains of meals clinging to a lopsided tower of dirty crockery.

  Frau Wilhelm was standing near the window in the spacious living room looking down at the courtyard. Ursula guessed at once that she did this habitually, that this was the spot where she stood and gazed and brooded. Frau Wilhelm gestured to two low and flaccid pieces of furniture with olive-green upholstery.

  ‘Sit down.’

  Ursula chose the smaller sofa that faced the window.

  Frau Wilhelm lit a cigarette. ‘Well?’

  ‘I wondered . . .’ The words dried and cracked. ‘I thought you might be able to help me.’ She had no idea how to continue, how to explain. Frau Wilhelm made no move, her thin back draped in the folds of her shirt. ‘My neighbour’s being kept in the Hartburg Hospital.’ Ursula shifted forward until she teetered on the very edge of the sofa. She glanced back the way she’d come, through the living-room doorway to the way out; she’d run if Frau Wilhelm showed disapproval or reached for the telephone. ‘Supposedly he’s been thieving. But it isn’t true.’

  There was no reply. Perhaps she was shocked at this brazen openness; perhaps she was frowning, suspecting treachery.

  ‘We’re here to get him out.’

  Frau Wilhelm snorted. ‘Good luck with that!’

  Startled, Ursula almost jumped from her seat. The woman was clearly in no mood to be helpful; perhaps she’d been drinking again. It would explain why she was so ill mannered. Ursula fiddled with her hem. She mustn’t back out yet. She must stay calm.

  After a moment, Frau Wilhelm flopped into the other seat with a worn sigh. ‘Sorry.’ She smiled. ‘I’m very solitary these days. I forget to be nice. Please carry on – I’m all ears. Smoke?’ She held out the tin.

  ‘No, thank you.’ Ursula wondered if she might borrow some of that poise, that serene air, if she were to accept. ‘My neighbour – he’s in danger.’ She swallowed. No sign of tension in the woman’s face – she must speak frankly now, for Schosi’s sake. Her voice trembled; she couldn’t level it. ‘You know they’re killing them?’

  Frau Wilhelm’s gaze steadied and met hers. She nodded.

  ‘Can you tell me anything?’

  ‘Not much. Though people talk.’

  ‘We’re not even allowed to visit. We’ve been going for weeks. Does anyone ever get out?’

  ‘I only know of one person released. A young woman whose boyfriend travelled the length of the Reich to fetch her. He persuaded them he’d be her guardian and in the end they had him sign a disclaimer and he took her out.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘An old man at my work used to be a gardener there. The boyfriend made them nervous, through sheer insistence. The Party don’t want another outcry.’

  ‘Outcry?’ Ursula pictured a hundred wizened faces at the hospital windows, all crying and shouting at the top of their lungs.

  ‘There was a lot of protest,’ said Frau Wilhelm. ‘A couple of years ago.’

  ‘And when did the boyfriend—?’

  ‘Last year sometime. But there’s only so far you can rely on such an approach – after all, it continues because the Führer wills it. Does it really matter what’s legal on paper? They sneak and lie and cover their tracks but they know they’re protected, right from the top.’ She blew a plume of smoke into the air; Ursula struggled to breathe, the windows sealed tight. Still, it was pleasant to be spoken to in this way.

  ‘Letters telling parents their kid died of pneumonia or appendicitis arrive after a fortnight in that place. Even if the kid had their appendix out years before and the parents know it’s a lie they can do nothing.’

  ‘I can’t even find out where he is. I was going to ask you.’

  Frau Wilhelm propped her face in her hand, pushing her fine skin into thin folds. ‘There are lots of different wards. How old is he?’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘Mentally deficient?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘I saw some youngish boys in a first-floor window. It could be there. I heard children playing another time near the same place. By the thick hedge that runs along the western edge of the grounds.’ She rose and returned with an old envelope, which she scribbled on. ‘If this is the main building and the main gate—’ She ran her pencil along the small road she’d drawn inside the grounds. ‘These are the buildings I walked past, three in a row and I think it was the one at the end.’ She tapped her pencil on to the relevant square.

  ‘Thank you.’ Ursula took the envelope and studied it. ‘Thank you so much!’

  ‘Will you go today?’

  ‘Right away.’

  ‘You’ll go with the man? The farmer?’ Frau Wilhelm watched for confirmation. ‘Not alone.’

  ‘Yes, with him,’ Ursula agreed, standing hastily. She was lying but it didn’t matter. She’d been to Hartburg many times. And now she knew exactly where to go. She
didn’t need Herr Esterbauer. She’d show him how much she could accomplish by herself. She’d rush there straight away, before it got dark. Even if it was just to see Schosi through a window, to know he was alive.

  ‘Do be careful.’ The woman helped Ursula on with her coat. ‘They need no excuse to lock you away along with your friend.’

  The warning fell on heedless ears. Ursula congratulated herself. To have some information! No longer at the mercy of the mean-minded receptionist who blocked the way and told them nothing.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said again. She shook Frau Wilhelm’s hand. ‘I’m so grateful!’

  The woman pulled away and opened the door. ‘Not at all.’

  Ursula stuffed the envelope into her coat pocket and clattered down the stairs to the courtyard, two steps at a time, springing like a kid goat, gripping the handrail; she bounded outside and across to the street door.

  Frau Wilhelm watched her go with a concerned frown.

  28

  Schosi dreamt very little, but when he did it was of Krampus. Sometimes it was in the hospital, a dark shape moving from doorway to doorway, pursuing him to a dead end, a room with a bath and a cabinet with a thousand shallow drawers. The drawers were open to reveal labelled glass slides containing pieces of flesh and brain, red and purple, like the offal of Herr Esterbauer’s slaughtered pigs. He was trapped, with his back pressed against the pipes, and the chains of Krampus dragged across the floor towards him. The basket creaked, heavy with its contents; Schosi saw the hands and feet of children hanging over the rim; they twitched or waved and the captives cried but couldn’t escape from where they were slung on the creature’s back.

  At other times he was in his home and his mama was nowhere to be found. The house was empty and the doors open wide and the windows too, and there was no way to keep Krampus out, no one to protect him. Krampus arrived and a fierce icy wind blew from its jaws like the cold fires of Hell. Schosi ached and his heart slowed to almost nothing. He hid in a deep hole in the middle of the house, but he couldn’t close the hatch and the roof was gone; there were branches above him that moved against the sky – they shimmered with snow and the nurse’s pinafore was the same colour white. The needle jabbed Schosi’s arm again and he sank.

  Ursula walked briskly within the Hartburg grounds. She’d almost reached the main building when Herr Esterbauer arrived, pounding up the grit behind her, beet-red and panting. He snatched her arm and swung her round. She ducked, expecting a cuff to the head.

  ‘You were going to go in’ – he was breathing so hard he could barely speak – ‘without me.’

  She shook herself free. ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘Where else? And anyway—’ He gulped air. ‘Frau Wilhelm. She told me. Saw me come into the courtyard and waited on the landing. Said you visited – went running off. What were you thinking? Talking to her like that.’

  ‘It’s fine. And now I know which building he’s in.’ She drew back from him. ‘She’s trustworthy – like us – I knew she would be.’

  ‘You knew no such thing! One wrong step, Ursula, and it’s the end for him. For us. I can’t believe you’d be so stupid!’

  She fought the urge to shout – something, anything. The main building sprawled close amongst the lanky trees. She mustn’t attract suspicion. ‘It’s not a wrong step! It’s better than no step at all.’ She set off along the path again; Herr Esterbauer hurried after.

  ‘What will you do? This is foolish.’

  She broke into a trot.

  ‘Ursula!’

  A guard emerged from behind the main building, quite far off. He wasn’t facing them. She darted into the bushes and squatted low. Let Herr Esterbauer be thrown off the grounds, she thought. She continued onwards at a crouch. But he might be arrested – she didn’t want that. She paused, looked behind. He was stationary, staring towards the main building, seemingly frozen, mouth ajar. After a couple of seconds he hurried on to the grass and joined her in the undergrowth.

  ‘So, this is it?’ he growled when he reached her. ‘We’re sneaking like thieves? If we’re caught there’s no excuse this time. You realise?’

  She shrugged, scurried off, her dress tucked into her underwear to free her legs. Herr Esterbauer struggled to keep up, his body bulky, his movements stiff.

  Another guard paced the gravel in front of the pavilions that Frau Wilhelm had drawn. Ursula withdrew the envelope. She could just about see the furthest ward where Schosi might be. Shielded by leaves and branches, they watched as the man crunched back and forth. He looked mostly at his own meticulously polished boots, lips moving as if counting his steps. One hand rested nonchalantly on his truncheon, the other swung flamboyantly. After five such lengths, during which time snow began to fall, he branched off down the narrower path that stretched in front of the three pavilions. To his left was a deep coniferous hedge – the one Frau Wilhelm had mentioned. After the guard passed the first pavilion, he turned abruptly out of view, presumably down a passageway between the buildings.

  Ursula stepped quickly out of hiding. Herr Esterbauer followed, eyes flashing in both directions. His tall, thick frame was utterly conspicuous compared to hers. She crossed to the smaller pathway and progressed fast along it, stooping to remain below the level of the windows. Herr Esterbauer, legs bent nearly double, coat wrapped around himself to prevent it flapping, came behind. At the turning the guard had taken, Ursula slowed and peered with half an eye around the corner bricks. No one in sight. Had he passed through into the hospital? Would he appear presently, ahead of them? There was no way to deduce it – they must trust to God. She sprang across the opening and continued. There was a sign protruding from the third building. It displayed the number fifteen. She could see the fenced-off area with toys strewn about where Frau Wilhelm might have overheard children playing. There was a miniature wheelbarrow mildewed green, building blocks swimming in rainwater on top of a small table, a meagre and dirty sandpit. Sweat prickled beneath her arms. the snow fell more quickly and more heavily now. She thought of Schosi in one of those high-windowed rooms, the fear he must feel every moment. She reached the gap separating the last two wards, again peeped stealthily for the guard. Herr Esterbauer grasped her arm, held her still.

  ‘Wait!’ His whisper was taut with anger. ‘Just you wait a moment! What can happen here? Except we get caught. This whole thing . . .’

  She kicked his shin as hard as she could and ran on.

  After trying two doors and finding them locked, she found a third, around the corner from the fenced area with the battered toys, a cobwebbed entrance. She pushed at it – it took some force because the door was heavy – but it was open. It moved stiffly inwards. She stared into the gloomy interior: it was difficult to make anything out. Should she explore a little more, find a window to check what was inside? She looked back down the pathway; Herr Esterbauer neared but thankfully no guard. If they didn’t act now they might lose their chance entirely. Schosi needed her to be brave, to be hasty. She glanced again through the gap, saw no one, took a breath. She slipped inside ignoring Herr Esterbauer’s hushed expostulation. She was in a long grey corridor. She immediately recoiled at the stench of illness. Behind her, Herr Esterbauer quietly entered, jowls flushed with alarm, reclosed the door and came to her side. He shook his head at her, jaw clenched. To the right was a flickering overhead light and to the left a corridor which ended in a window. They turned left, walking close together, an immediate truce descending. They passed open doorways and glanced into them. Two of the rooms were filled with cots containing small children of toddling age or thereabouts, another was lined with beds occupied by larger children and young adults – they looked very much handicapped, not able to move. There was no sign of Schosi.

  They reached a staircase. Frau Wilhelm had mentioned a ward on the first floor. Ursula beckoned to Herr Esterbauer and they ascended, treading carefully. The place seemed abandoned. Where were the staff? Once at the top, Ursula spied an opening into what looked like
a larger room. They crept to it. This dormitory was big with high windows barred on the outside. It was full of boys. They lay on beds, or sat up against the walls. They silently watched Ursula and Herr Esterbauer, apart from those who slept. Ursula couldn’t spot Schosi. A boy near the door hugged his knees and rocked like a wind-up toy; a cable of drool swung from his lower lip. Ursula wanted to ask him about Schosi but was too afraid to speak to him. She was repulsed by the boy’s dull eyes and skin; they suggested terrible sickness. The state of the children was even worse than she’d pictured when she’d tortured herself with imaginings. Panic began to drum in her body. They might already be too late. ‘He’s not in here,’ she managed to say despite the queasiness washing through her.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  A woman’s voice came from the corridor behind them. A nurse with arms stacked high with sheets.

  Ursula turned, shocked – she was sure she must look as ghastly as she felt; her face tingled as blood sapped from it and she leaned heavily on the doorframe.

  ‘We’ve come to collect someone,’ said Herr Esterbauer, attempting a polite smile.

  The nurse frowned. ‘Mein Herr – Fräulein, please come away from the dormitory, the patients mustn’t be disturbed.’ She moved towards them with hand extended to usher them away; the tower of sheets teetered unsteadily. ‘We’ll continue our conversation in the office, if you please.’

  They followed her – she put the sheets on a nearby trolley and trundled it around the corner. She abandoned it outside a narrow door marked Nurses’ Station and went inside with a beckoning wave. The office was cramped and edged with two skinny beds. The nurse took a seat at the desk and gestured that they should perch somewhere.

  ‘We’re here to collect Hillier Schosi,’ said Herr Esterbauer. ‘I’m his guardian.’

  Ursula clenched her teeth. She longed to escape the confined room to find Schosi. She forced herself to be still.

  ‘His guardian?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been trying to visit him for weeks, but I’ve been refused at every turn. I’ll be taking the boy into my care.’