Viennese family. However, Helena liked neither Brockhard nor his family, nor her mother's attempts to use her as a ticket back into the upper echelons of society. Her mother blamed the war for what had happened. It was to blame for Helena's father, Henrik Lang, losing his Jewish lenders so abruptly and thus not being able to pay his creditors as arranged. The financial crisis had resulted in him having to improvise and he had made his Jewish bankers transfer their bond holdings, which the Austrian state had confiscated, to Lang. And now Henrik Lang was in prison for having conspired with Jewish enemies of the state.
Unlike her mother, Helena missed her father more than she missed the social status her family had enjoyed. She did not miss, for example, the banquets, the adolescent, superficial conversations and the continual attempts to marry her off to one of the spoiled rich boys.
She looked at her wristwatch and scurried along. A small bird had obviously flown in through one of the open windows and now it was calmly sitting on one of the globe lamps hanging from the high ceiling and singing. Some days Helena found it incomprehensible that a war was raging outside. Perhaps it was because the forest, the tight rows of spruce trees, closed out all the things they didn't want to see. If you went into the wards, however, you soon knew that the peace was illusory. The wounded soldiers with their mutilated bodies and their battered psyches brought the war home to them. To begin with, she had listened to their stories, practically convinced that with her strength of mind and her faith she could help to lead them out of their misery. Yet they all seemed to tell more of the same nightmare story about how much man can and has to endure on earth, and about the degradation involved in simply wanting to live. Only the dead escape unscathed. So Helena stopped listening. She pretended she was listening as she changed bandages, checked temperatures and gave them medicine or food. And when they were asleep she tried not to look at them, as even then their faces continued to tell their stories. She could read suffering in the pale, boyish faces, brutality in the hardened, closed faces and a longing for death in the pain- contorted features of one man who had just found out that his foot would have to be amputated.
Nevertheless, she walked in today with quick, light steps. Perhaps it was because it was summer, perhaps it was because a doctor had told her how beautiful she was this morning, or perhaps it was because of the Norwegian patient in Ward 4 who would soon say 'Guten Morgen' in his funny German. Then he would eat breakfast while giving her lingering looks as she went from bed to bed, serving the other patients, saying a few encouraging words to each one. For every fifth or sixth bed she attended to she cast a glance back at him and, if he smiled at her, she would quickly return the smile and continue as if nothing had happened. Nothing. And yet it was everything. It was the thought of these small moments that got her through the days now; that allowed her to laugh when the badly burned Kapitan Hadler in the bed by the door jokingly asked if they would soon send him his genitals back from the Eastern Front.
She pushed open the door to Ward 4. The sunlight flooding into the room made everything white-the walls, the ceiling, the sheets-shine. That's what it must be like when you enter paradise, she thought.
'Guten Morgen, Helena.'
She smiled at him. He was sitting in a chair beside the bed and reading a book.
'Did you sleep well, Uriah?' she asked him cheerfully.
'Like a bear,' he said.
'Bear?'
'Yes. In… what do you call it in German when they sleep all winter?’
‘Ah, hibernation.’
‘Yes, hibernation.'
They both laughed. Helena knew that the other patients were watching them. She mustn't spend more time with him than the others.
'And your head? It's getting a little better every day now, isn't it?'
'Yes indeed, it's getting better and better. One day I'll be just as good-looking as I used to be, you'll see.'
She remembered when they brought him in. It seemed to contravene the laws of nature that anyone could survive the hole he had in his forehead. She caught his teacup with the pot and it almost toppled over.
'Whoa!' he laughed. 'Were you out dancing until the wee small hours last night?'
She looked up. He winked at her.
'Mmm,' she said, and became flustered because she was lying about such a silly thing.
'What do you dance here in Vienna?'
I mean, no, I wasn't dancing. I just went to bed late.'
'You probably dance waltzes, don't you? Viennese waltzes and so on.'
'Yes, I suppose we do,' she said, concentrating on the thermometer.
'Like this,' he said and stood up. Then he began to sing. The others looked up from their beds. The song was in an unfamiliar language, but he had such a warm, beautiful voice. The healthiest patients cheered and laughed as he pivoted round with small, careful waltz steps and the loose dressing gown cords swung with him.
'Come back here, Uriah, or I'll send you right back to the Eastern Front,' she shouted sternly.
He went back obediently and sat down. His name was not Uriah, but it was the name he had insisted they use.
'Do you know the Rhineland Polka?' he asked.
'Rhineland Polka?'
'It's a dance we've borrowed from the Rhineland. Shall I show you?’
‘You sit there nice and still until you're well again.’
‘And then I'll take you out in Vienna and teach you the Rhineland Polka.'
The hours he had spent in the summer sun on the veranda over the past days had given him a healthy complexion, and now his white teeth sparkled against his happy face.
'I think you sound well enough to be sent back already,' she countered, but was unable to stop the blush which had shot into her cheeks. She was standing ready to continue her round when she felt his hand against hers.
'Say yes,' he whispered.
She waved him away with a bright laugh and went on to the next bed with her heart singing like a little bird in her bosom.
'Well?' Dr Brockhard said, peering up from his papers when she came into his office, and as usual she didn't know if this 'well?' was a question, an introduction to a longer question or simply his way of speaking. So she just stood by the door. 'You asked to see me, Doctor?'
'Why do you insist on being so formal with me, Helena?' Brockhard sighed with a smile. 'My goodness, we've known each other since we were children, haven't we?'
'What was it you wanted from me?'
'I've decided to report the Norwegian in Ward 4 fit for duty’
‘I see.'
She didn't turn a hair. Why should she? Patients came here to become well again, then they left. The alternative was dying. That was life in a hospital.
'I passed on the report to the Wehrmacht five days ago. We have already received his new posting.'
'That was quick.' Her voice was firm and calm.
'Yes, they desperately need more men. We're fighting a war, as you know.'
'Yes,' she said. But didn't say what she was thinking: We're fighting a war and you're sitting here hundreds of kilometres from the front, twenty-two years old, doing the job a seventy-year-old could have done. Thanks to Herr Brockhard Senior.
'I thought I would ask you to give him his orders since the two of you seem to get on so well.'
She could feel him scrutinising her reaction.
'By the way, what is it that you like so much about him particularly, Helena? What distinguishes him from the four hundred other soldiers we have here at the hospital?'
She was about to protest, but he pre-empted her.
'Sorry, Helena, this is none of my business of course. It's just my curious nature. I…' He picked up a pen in front of him between the tips of his two index fingers, turned and looked out of the window. '… simply wonder what you can see in a foreign fortune-hunter who betrays his own country in order to curry favour with the conquering army. If you understand what I mean. How's your mother by the way?' Helena swallowed before answering.
