been asked to take on the honorary post as the society’s treasurer. He used to sit at the kitchen table most evenings after supper and run his index finger down the columns of paid and unpaid membership fees, or else he went to the sports ground and settled down alone on the empty coach’s bench with a stopwatch in one hand and a notebook in the other, checking his son’s lap times on the track below as Otto trained for the hundred-metre hurdles in the club championships. Into the light, then out of it.
*
Blood Anna loses blood. Warm, sticky, dark blood. When she pushes her hand between her legs, it fills her cupped palm. It is menstrual blood, as she knows perfectly well. What she can’t understand is why such a lot of it pours out of her. Headaches and nausea follow in its wake and she, usually such a good pupil at school, who hangs on the teachers’ every word and is diligence personified, has to askleave to go to the lavatory too often during lessons and must walk out while everyone in the class giggles and looks the other way. To tell her mother about this affliction is unthinkable. To her father, she says it is just nerves. But, in the end, it is the ageing printer, a shy and inhibited man with little idea of women’s health problems, who takes his young daughter to see the doctor. They learn that Anna is anaemic and needs to take the prescribed tablets. At school, she gets called Woodlouse because of her greyish, unnaturally pale skin, set off by greasy hair and teenage pimples. How she hates this physical self that grows and swells and wants nothing more than to wallow, languid and bland. She hides behind a wall of chilly self-control. She has few friends at school but stays top of the class. The healthy body that she never before felt ashamed to see in full sunlight has changed irrevocably into an alien continent. That is how she sees it. Like the school’s wall maps of Africa or South America. Her skin is like a coastline, long and thin. Beyond it, there are endless forests through which the blood flows, in narrow winding streams or in huge glossy rivers, only to end in internal lakes in cavities enclosed on all sides by the vault of a sky that has no inner or outer surface but exists only as the boundary of the truly boundless inner world. This childlike idea of the body stays with her even much later, when she has learnt so much more about human anatomy. When the migraines come, the headaches establish a hold over this alien continent, and when she sleeps, her dreams are inner seas and skies in which she travels. Unlike the world out there, it is pleasingly easy to move from one internal place to the next. Her feelings, which she is quite capable of concealing from everyone, can in moments transport her mind from the black bog of despond and self-contempt onto the high plateau of willingness to forgive herself. Pain, she soon learns, is another way of travelling.
*
The Healthy Don’t Shun the Light To be a nurse is no longer her vocation. Training has become a compulsion: the only way to make the alien continent her own while at the same time keep it at bay. Control it. She follows her father’s advice and takes a three-year course in domestic science and then gets a poorly paid job as nursery nurse at the children’s hospital in Leopoldstadt. If your background is ordinary, it is hard to land a good traineeship. It was only in May 1924 that she found an opening. Wien had been a federated state in its own right for a couple of years and the city council was under Social Democratic control. Now, the hospital in Lainz offers a three-year course leading to registered nurse status. Anna Katschenka sails through the preliminary exam. The training also includes voluntary work, and the following year Anna’s class is recruited to run the first aid station at the large sports championships held by the Austrian labour organisations at Trabrennbahn – the trotting course – in the Prater. Her
*
Blood Anna loses blood. Warm, sticky, dark blood. When she pushes her hand between her legs, it fills her cupped palm. It is menstrual blood, as she knows perfectly well. What she can’t understand is why such a lot of it pours out of her. Headaches and nausea follow in its wake and she, usually such a good pupil at school, who hangs on the teachers’ every word and is diligence personified, has to askleave to go to the lavatory too often during lessons and must walk out while everyone in the class giggles and looks the other way. To tell her mother about this affliction is unthinkable. To her father, she says it is just nerves. But, in the end, it is the ageing printer, a shy and inhibited man with little idea of women’s health problems, who takes his young daughter to see the doctor. They learn that Anna is anaemic and needs to take the prescribed tablets. At school, she gets called Woodlouse because of her greyish, unnaturally pale skin, set off by greasy hair and teenage pimples. How she hates this physical self that grows and swells and wants nothing more than to wallow, languid and bland. She hides behind a wall of chilly self-control. She has few friends at school but stays top of the class. The healthy body that she never before felt ashamed to see in full sunlight has changed irrevocably into an alien continent. That is how she sees it. Like the school’s wall maps of Africa or South America. Her skin is like a coastline, long and thin. Beyond it, there are endless forests through which the blood flows, in narrow winding streams or in huge glossy rivers, only to end in internal lakes in cavities enclosed on all sides by the vault of a sky that has no inner or outer surface but exists only as the boundary of the truly boundless inner world. This childlike idea of the body stays with her even much later, when she has learnt so much more about human anatomy. When the migraines come, the headaches establish a hold over this alien continent, and when she sleeps, her dreams are inner seas and skies in which she travels. Unlike the world out there, it is pleasingly easy to move from one internal place to the next. Her feelings, which she is quite capable of concealing from everyone, can in moments transport her mind from the black bog of despond and self-contempt onto the high plateau of willingness to forgive herself. Pain, she soon learns, is another way of travelling.
*
The Healthy Don’t Shun the Light To be a nurse is no longer her vocation. Training has become a compulsion: the only way to make the alien continent her own while at the same time keep it at bay. Control it. She follows her father’s advice and takes a three-year course in domestic science and then gets a poorly paid job as nursery nurse at the children’s hospital in Leopoldstadt. If your background is ordinary, it is hard to land a good traineeship. It was only in May 1924 that she found an opening. Wien had been a federated state in its own right for a couple of years and the city council was under Social Democratic control. Now, the hospital in Lainz offers a three-year course leading to registered nurse status. Anna Katschenka sails through the preliminary exam. The training also includes voluntary work, and the following year Anna’s class is recruited to run the first aid station at the large sports championships held by the Austrian labour organisations at Trabrennbahn – the trotting course – in the Prater. Her
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