School’s Out

(Germany, early 1990s)

“Frau J.! I need you for Herr B.!” The tone is urgent, and with an edge of excitement, at which the girl feels a pinch of foreboding, but she leaves the cloth to dry the bedpans on the steriliser and follows Frau S. down the corridor. Even before she enters the room, she knows that something is off, but her brain hasn’t yet arrived at the final conclusion. 

“You take the feet” Frau S. instructs and then it is all a matter of seconds, a smooth succession of steps: entering the room, arriving at the end of the bed, registering the soles of the feet pointing upwards, grabbing the ankle at the far side, and positioning her hand underneath the knee closest to her, the curtains are still drawn, why are the curtains still drawn, lifting and turning the body.

The girl has recently left home to train as a nurse-aid, and on her practice days she is now “Frau J.”. At 16, it sounds both ridiculous and intimidating to her.

She has quickly learnt the code of conduct, the rough jokes as a way of letting off steam, the unspoken competition to never feel repulsion, to never wear gloves, to lift even the heaviest residents by yourself. The male nurses all have tattoos and slap the female nurses’ butts and put their arms around their shoulders. The girl is always alert, to dance away from a stray hand or to have a witty comeback ready.

“You stay here,” and Frau S. is out the door again. The sound of the radio enters the girl’s mind now. It sits beside the bed on the wheeled locker, beside Herr B.’s head. Her hand shakes when she tries to switch the radio off without looking in its direction. She fumbles around and almost pushes it off the locker, but then her fingers connect to the right button and there is silence.  Beyond the silence, the mid-morning sounds of the nursing home she has learnt to distinguish by now. 

She has also learnt that most residents never have visitors, even those who have children. 

That they are torn out of bed at 6 am to sit in a wheelchair staring at a point in front of their feet all day. That cigarettes are rationed and withheld for the refusal to shower. That no matter who someone was in life before, here everyone becomes an alien hairless body in the end, with shiny translucent skin that smells rancid and of glycerine moisturiser. That some people hold on to their will with violence and some completely abandon themselves and give up all shame and self-protection.

She is afraid she will become like that someday. Sometimes she is afraid she already is that lonely now.

The girl appreciates her uniform. She is one of the quickest to change a bed, tucking in the sheets neatly, with “hospital corners.” She is already allowed to take blood pressure and blood sugar by herself, unobserved. She is trusted.

And even though she fears it’s presumptuous and she wouldn’t admit it to her friends, she is proud to be wearing it. To belong to a tribe. Learning things about human beings that not everyone might know. 

She likes to joke with Herr B. when she shaves him in the morning, with a brush and a blade. She shares her cigarettes with the residents who have been sanctioned, she sits with them in the smoking area, with other colleagues who secretly defy Frau S. Walking back home in the evening sun, some days the girl feels tired, but content, and everything seems okay just the way it is.

Residents die, of course, the girl knows that. Some have died since she works here, but during the night, and their bodies had been in a designated room when she came in for the late shift. Others never came back from the hospital. One woman stopped eating and drinking one day, as if she had made a decision. She got weaker and weaker and then died. One man had hallucinations and had talked to people who weren’t there.

The older nurses say this is not unusual- that the past comes back to haunt them. 

Some residents have nightmares. Maybe they dream about the war, about what they’ve seen or what they did. 

The girl had not liked that resident with the hallucinations, not the way she likes Herr B. 

That other old man had been condescending and harsh and treated her as if she were his maid. Some residents are like that, hard, bitter, no kind word for anyone.

Some don’t want to sit beside others at the dinner table, those who cannot help drooling and are eating with their fingers, like small children, small animals. The stronger residents would mutter under their breath: “That wouldn’t have been tolerated.”

Sometimes they say it out loud.

The girl is willing herself to look; she must look; she owes it to Herr B. And she doesn't want to be a coward. She is tough, she has already dealt with faeces in all states of aggregation, urine, blood, vomit. Pus, and saliva, lots of saliva, almost as much as faeces. (She has also swallowed sperm.)

The girl thinks that the nurses make this haunting of the past into something like a myth, judgement day. How could they be so sure? But when she had gone into the room of the man with the hallucinations, to change the bedpan or give him some water, she had imagined the room filled with ghosts, a procession of people the man had not treated well, maybe killed. She had stood at the head of the bed, and looked around the room, into the shadows. 

The older nurses were the age of her father and mother, some older.

At the girl’s home, they never talked about it. They never talk about anything. Everything happens in silence and leaves no visible marks.

When she finally looks, Herr B.’s body is different, rigid. His arms have bent under the weight of his body, and now that he has been turned over onto his back, they are frozen in a boxing position. Already his face is burned on the girl’s inner eye, even though she hardly looks, only takes quick, cursory glances. He has died with his dentures in his mouth, and with his face pressing down into the mattress, they have got stuck half in and half out, and the skin has tightened in a way that the line of teeth is visible underneath it. His eyes are open.

After Herr B. the girl is the one with nightmares. She feels ashamed. She does not want to think of a human being as some sort of monster. And she doesn't want to be scared in this way. She makes an effort to think of Herr B.’s face when he was alive, with dark rimmed glasses, a 1970s style. The hair still with some yellowish blonde left in the white, a grown-out haircut, a little too long.

The girl walks through the world for weeks with something twisting her insides.

She isn’t even sure what it is exactly. She tries to put it somewhere, to cut it down to size, to cough it up or swallow it down, to relieve the spot where it is stuck like a shard of glass, splintering her every breath. She jumps up and down, tries to dislodge it, tries drinking to wash it down, deeper, into a place where she can feel it and find out what it means- without being lanced by it.

One day, the girl sits with O. in the classroom in vocational school, and everyone else has gone home.  O. is also training to be a nurse- aide and has come to Germany from Bosnia.

They are supposed to work together on a presentation. It wasn’t their choice, the teacher had put the class into pairs. O. and the girl have never talked before. 

O. is a normal girl, fake nails in a rose colour, a gold necklace with some religious pendant. 

The girl herself is different - Doc Martens and a nose stud with a chain from ear to nose. 

Both of them have to take off their insignia for work.

They start talking, and when the janitor comes to close the school building, they have not done anything for the presentation. They stand outside, it’s time to go home, but they don’t. 

In Bosnia, O. had been hit by a stray shrapnel while walking down the road, it stuck in her back and she went to the hospital. She has a scar that goes all the way down her back.

The doctor motioned for her to lie on an operating table still full of blood from a previous operation. When she hesitated, he said: “What do you expect, it’s war.” O. did not see her mother for two years, and when she met her again at a train station in Munich, she didn’t recognise her at first. 

O. had been sent to live with her grandparents. One day, the people in the village were rounded up in the village square. There were snipers on the rooftops of the surrounding houses. O. and her grandpa and the other villagers had to jog around the square, round after round after round. From time to time, the snipers fired shots into the crowd at random. 

The girl asks: “Did they hit anyone?”

The girl and O. are standing in front of the school, it is dark now.

They take each other’s hands for a brief moment. 

They smile at each other, say goodnight, and go home.

The girl walks on again, for weeks, with that something inside, and something else, or maybe it’s more of the same. Sometimes she longs for a mark on her face, or on her body, so people can see. Like O.’s scar. 

Then she feels shame at that ivory tower wish. 

She tries to shield herself from all that knowledge while bursting at the seams with it. 

She knows she is not tough enough yet, and she needs to be even tougher, and she also knows that deep down, she is not tough at all. She just pretends. She pretends to be “Frau J.”.

The next week, the girl is on the late shift. Herr L. is the only one left after dinner time; he sits shrunken and hairless in his wheelchair. It is the girl’s task to feed him- although they are not supposed to say feed, but “assist with food intake,” just as they are to call the residents “clients". He is her last client of the day; they are alone in the dining room, and it is early enough, maybe 7. The late shift ends at 8 pm. The room has a twilight feel to it, despite the institutional ceiling lights. While she leaves Herr L. to feed himself at least a little, she clears the table and puts the plates and cups, and the cutlery onto the steel trolley beside the door. 

He is taking a long time, too long to let him do all of it. She would not be able to finish on time. Tasks are measured in units of time. Assisting with dinner, 10 minutes, toilet training, evening wash, 20 minutes, 1- 2 minutes for administering medication, changing an incontinence pad, 2-3 minutes. The girl gets the broom. She stands still for a moment, at the far side of the room, broom in hand, the old-fashioned radio is playing, on top of a sideboard. She hears a whisper through the music. The song is something old, with vocal harmonies, maybe from between the wars. 

A whisper, but words, softly spoken.

The girl looks over to Herr L. His blind eyes face the ceiling.

She sits down beside him. Puts her hand on his arm, the skin taut and with that glycerine sheen. He directs his eyes towards her, his head frozen in a position, the muscles atrophied - he whispers: “I love music.”

I love music, the words reverberate all around the girl. She had been told Herr L. cannot speak. I love music. Her chest expands, filled to the brim with the words, the music, with everything.

They sit and listen.

In the evening, in her rented room, the girl sits on the bed. 

She cleaned out Herr B’s belongings the day he died, his glasses, a case for them, a newspaper. Slippers with a coloured check pattern, all the men have them. A book with poems by an author she doesn't know.  No photos. A pack of cigarettes, almost full, he must have hidden them from Frau S.

She had taken the cigarettes and the poetry book. They sit beside her on the bedside table now, with another book O. has lent her, “Letters from Sarajevo.” The girl thinks of O, and Herr B. and Herr L. 

She thinks of the drink the little mermaid in the fairy tale must drink to become human. 

It slices through her like a rusty knife and then she is human. 

She is human, but mute, too. Or only until someone listens.

The girl lights a cigarette and blows out the smoke towards the ceiling. She follows the smoke with her eyes, winks, and waves her hand slightly, a toast, maybe, to Herr B.