The Chosen Ones by Steve Sem-Sandberg Read Free Book Online Page B

politics.

     
     
    Doctor Jekelius     He inspired confidence from the start. At first, she thought it was just a matter of the way he observed her and addressed her, but later she realised that his entire being contributed to the impression he gave. The way he moved was so remarkably graceful and relaxed. Like an animal, on his guard but never self-conscious. Several years later, when he was hounded and became the target of a hate campaign, and even some of his especially loyal colleagues began to distance themselves from him, whether out of cowardliness or an acute sense of fear, he was accused of being a fraud. Still, she felt certain that someone who inhabited his body with such confidence and was so trustful of all its senses couldn’t possibly defraud anyone. It is easy to lie in thought or speech, but the body doesn’t lie. Later, when the preliminary investigations started up, she felt not the slightest need to try to cover anything up, and spoke quite openly about how she came to look for a post in his clinic. Back in 1939, she had spent a long, anxious year on the nursing staff at the home for the elderly in Lainz. Doctor Herz, the Minister of State in charge of the home, committed suicide immediately after the Nazi takeover. Professor Müller, head of the medical department where she worked, was forced to leave. The staff kept changing, one wave after another. Anna Katschenka, who had never before doubted her own competence, began to feel inadequate, and her sense of insecurity made her subject to recurring fits of depression and an unending series of headaches and stomach upsets. She worried thather new superiors were in some indefinable way displeased with her and thought her poor at her job. To her, loyalty and trustworthiness were central ideals. It mattered very much to her that the authorities should regard her as worthy . Her medical problems, she would confess to Jekelius, were rooted in the fact that she lived in fear. Of course, she feared that she would be sacked for political reasons. More than that, she dreaded what the consequences would be of no longer belonging, of not being seen to exist in her own right, of not being needed. It was relevant that both her father and her brother had been forced out of posts at various points in time after the Patriotic Front came to power in 1934, and that the survival of her family now depended on her alone. When her physical symptoms became unbearable, she turned to her superiors, and Doctor Dipold, a consultant who had taken over from Professor Müller as medical director, had recommended her to get in touch with Doctor Jekelius. Jekelius himself had changed his place of work and taken on the post of senior consultant at the Steinhof alcohol and drug rehabilitation clinic. However, he had kept his former practice going and still saw patients for a few hours in the afternoon at his Martinstrasse surgery in Währing. The patients had to ring the bell at the garden gate and cross a paved terrace edged on both sides by great trees whose crowns had come to join, forming a shadowing arch. Almost like a pergola. Because it was a warm summer’s day, the surgery window was open and they had their first long talk against the background noise of sparrows flying in and out of the leafy canopies outside. She had been quite worried about that first encounter. Maybe he would be contemptuous, even displeased when he realised that his patient was a registered nurse. He might have taken note of this but she couldn’t tell. Instead, he enquired meticulously about her previous jobs and muttered approvingly if a familiar name of a professor orconsultant turned up. He smiled when she finished her account, and went on to say that she must surely regard him as the oddest of all the doctors she had met. This claim put her on the back foot. Why so? she asked. Because of my accent, he said. It’s from Siebenbürgen, my whole family is from there. (True, his precise High German had