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 Kapitän 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