The Chosen Ones by Steve Sem-Sandberg

she says, yes, well, I’m from Grünbach in Mühlviertel. You know, this cream is good for chapped skin on the hands as well. For a moment, the two pairs of hands are placed side by side on the workbench and young Miss Blei can’t refrain from asking, I can’t help seeing that Sister Anna perhaps isn’t married? And carries on, now energetically rinsing off bottles and glasses, so she doesn’t notice how Anna stiffens. Instead, Nurse Blei adds that a job like this is simply impossible to combine with having a husband and children, that’s what I‘ve always thought. Much wiser to wait! On their way out, they pass little Sophie with her pretty doll’shouse face that looks too mature, too clever for a child. Anna feels that the girl’s gaze follows her but Sophie’s pupils shelter below her elegantly curved eyelids. Her exquisite lips curl disdainfully.
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    Conditions of Service    She did not know what exactly she had hoped for as she took up her new post because her expectations had been more linked to the person of Doctor Jekelius than to the work, but nothing had prepared her for having to nurse such badly afflicted children. It was not that she was unused to caring for ill children or, of course, for physically and mentally debilitated old people. The patients they were responsible for here were, however, so severely disturbed by neurological and other malformations that they fell outside the normal range. Her training had taught her to deal with injuries and common illnesses, but little or nothing about how to nurse children who had no control whatsoever over their limbs, who any second might attack her with wildly flailing arms, hissing and spitting and biting, or children whose inner torment was so terrible that they screamed all the time, unending ululations without any apparent relationship to the cause of their pain, let alone how they could be made better or even soothed in any way other than the morphine-based medication that was routinely prescribedin quantities that frightened her. She also felt that she was being constantly watched, which didn’t help at all. Every hesitation was recorded, every hint of her being ill at ease or put off by something interpreted as being unable to cope. Nurse Mayer especially seemed to see it as her duty to keep an eye on the new recruit. Even though she was formally Katschenka’s inferior, she had ways of showing that she disliked how she had been told to do something, or simply disliked being told anything at all, and indicated her displeasure by perhaps a raised eyebrow or a faint smile, before going about her tasks with studied slowness. Mayer was an old hand, as she put it, and like many of the other ex-psychiatric nurses, she handled the children in her charge as if they were insensate, pulling the screaming little bundles out of bed and carrying them under her arm like parcels, or perhaps more like small animals on their way to slaughter. Meanwhile, Cläre Kleinschmittger would hover in some doorway, her eyes flickering anxiously while her gaze stayed fixed on Anna’s every move. Their eyes never met and they never exchanged more than a few words, but Kleinschmittger seemed always to be surrounded by one or several colleagues such as Nurse Sikora, Erna Storch and Emilie Kragulj, and Katschenka saw them together more than once in a corridor or the corner of a ward, standing in tight little clusters, whispering together only to fall silent the moment she came past. Finally, her concern had become an incessant, deep-seated ache and, one afternoon, she knocked on the matron’s door and asked leave to take half an hour off work in order to speak with Doctor Jekelius. Doctor Jekelius is away on business, Matron Bertha replied curtly, and her tone suggested that it was an unheard-of impertinence even to mention his name. Sister Anna can of course talk to me if the matter is a practical one, or refer it to the personnel department. Anna Katschenka had by then realised