His Majesty's Hope(3)
In the distance, church bells tolled the hour.
“Children!” Elise said, clapping her hands together. “Stop! That’s enough!” They looked over at her, angry.
The boy with the clubfoot took their momentary distraction as an opportunity to burst through the circle and make a hard right into an alley, staggering as fast as he could with his crutch. The children picked up rocks and flung them after him but didn’t bother to give chase. “Are you going to the parade, Fräulein?” one girl called to Elise.
“Nein,” she replied. “I have to work.”
“Too bad!” the girl called back, skipping and laughing, as the boys slapped one another’s backs.
Walking away, Elise shook her head. “Gott im Himmel help us.”
Elise took one of the many bridges over the Spree and arrived at Charité Mitte Hospital damp with sweat.
She went to the nurses’ changing room. It was small, with walls of gray lockers and a low wooden bench. There was a poster on the wall, of a handsome doctor and a mentally disabled man in a wheelchair, with the caption This hereditarily sick person costs the Volksgemeinschaft 60,000 R.M. for life. Comrade, it’s your money, too.
Elise slipped out of her skirt and blouse. She kept on her necklace with the tiny gold cross, a diamond chip in its center. The door opened. It was Frieda Klein, another nurse. “Hallo!” Elise said, smiling. Shifts were always better when Frieda was working.
“Hallo,” Frieda replied. She put down her things and began to change. “Gott, I wish I had breasts like yours, Elise,” she said, looking down at her own flat chest. “You’re the perfect Rhine maiden.”
“I’m too fat,” Elise moaned. “As my mother loves to remind me. Often. I wish I had collarbones like yours—so elegant.”
Whereas Elise was curvaceous, Frieda was thin and all angles. Whereas Elise had dark blue eyes and chestnut-brown curls, Frieda was blond and pale. And whereas Frieda was phlegmatic, Elise had a habit of speaking too quickly and bouncing up and down on her toes when she became excited about a finer point of medicine, swing music, or anything at all to do with American movie stars. The two young women, friends since school, had both wanted to be nurses since they were young girls.
They put on their gray uniforms, with starched white aprons and linen winged caps. “Do you mind?” Elise asked, indicating the back strings on her apron.
“Not at all,” Frieda said and tied them into a bow. She turned around. “Now do mine?”
Elise did, then slapped Frieda on the bottom. They laughed as they walked out together to the nurses’ station to begin their shift.
In an examination room that smelled of rubbing alcohol and lye soap, a tiny blond girl in a hospital gown asked, “Will there be blood?”
The only picture on the wall was Heinrich Knirr’s official portrait of Adolf Hitler—the Führer’s figure stiff, his hard eyes gazing impassively over the proceedings.
Elise smiled and shook her head. “Nein,” she answered. “No blood work today. The doctor just wants to take a look at your ears. To make sure the infection’s gone.”
The girl, Gretel Paulus, was sitting on a hospital bed. She held a small brown, well-loved teddy bear and spoke with a slight speech impediment. Her thick lower lip protruded and glistened with saliva, her tongue overlarge. She had a round face, pointy chin, and almond-shaped eyes behind thick, distorting eyeglasses.
Elise smiled. “What goes ninety-nine thump, ninety-nine thump, ninety-nine thump?”
Gretel shrugged.
“A centipede with a wooden leg, of course!”
That won a weak smile out of the young girl. Elise took an otoscope from the cabinet, cleaned the earpiece with alcohol, and then put it to the girl’s right ear. Then the left.
“Nurse Hess?”
“When it’s just you and I, you may call me Elise.”
“Elise—why do my ears always hurt?” Gretel wanted to know.
Elise knew all too well that ear infections were common with Down syndrome patients. “It’s just something that happens sometimes,” she said, putting the otoscope away and returning to rub the girl’s back. “And you feel better now, yes? The medicine worked?”
“If I feel better, why do I still have to see the doctor? The new doctor?”
Gretel didn’t miss a thing, Elise realized. “His name is Doktor Brandt. And he wants to make sure you don’t have any more ear infections.”
The door to the examination room opened, and in walked Dr. Karl Brandt. He was relatively new to Charité, one of the SS doctors who came in the late winter of 1941, with their red armbands with black swastikas, and their new rules and regulations. Young, handsome, with thick, dark hair and impeccable posture, Brandt radiated authority.