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for two weeks, presumably the time it took for the documentation about him to be shuffled by officials from one department to another until his adoption papers were cancelled, and then he was transferred to the old orphanage in Mödling. It was known as the Hyrtl’sche Waisenhaus and looked like a medieval fortress, a large brick building with high flat-fronted towers and a chapel in an inner courtyard. Very soon after the Nazis had taken over the government, the Waisenhaus was turned into a reform school for undisciplined children. Adrian was to be sent to Mödling twice. The worst tour was the second one,in early spring 1943. He does not remember much from his stay in the autumn of 1939, just large, draughty rooms and apparently endless corridors and stairwells, where they were never to be seen alone but always in a troop, singly or in pairs, in Einzel - or Zweierreihen , always on their way to somewhere, to the dining hall or the gym, with one of the older boys in the lead shouting out orders over the sound of angrily tramping feet that echoed down the deep shafts of the stairwells. During the first weeks, he was tormented by guilt. He had not deserved the care offered to him by the Haidingers, or by anybody else for that matter. He had no idea what Mrs Haidinger would decide to do with Helmut. Keep him or make him suffer an even worse fate, which would be Adrian’s fault? He didn’t know anything and the uncertainty pained him more than being pestered by the other boys, who remarked on his looks, his dark skin and oddly shaped ears. They used to ask what kind of glue he used to stick his ears so close to his head. One day, his group leader told him that he had to go to the office. The director, Mr Heckermann, seemed short where he sat ensconced behind his big desk. His moustache was kept narrow, probably not to outdo his lips, which were even narrower, and together the twin lines of lips and moustache made a shape like a small beak. Heckermann’s slightly frail, bird-like body could look threatening, as it did now, when he raised his shoulders and asked Adrian to state his surname. Scared, Adrian shrugged in instinctive mimicry as he replied in the firm, military style that everyone in the school was to use:
    Dobrosch!
    That ugly, insubordinate name had never sounded more repulsive. Like when one opens an old tin can and some rotting, stinking sludge pours out. For a moment Mr Heckermann looked disgusted, but then his moustache-beak opened again:
    You’re wrong there!
    What are you supposed to do when a person in authority asks your name and then says you’re wrong? Adrian closed his eyes, convinced that this was it, he was finished. You’re wrong because from now on, your name is Ziegler!
    When he said that, Adrian dared to open his eyes again, saw Mr Heckermann standing behind his desk, and in the next moment, as already mentioned, the grinning Eugen Ziegler emerged from a cupboard and stepped forward to hug his prodigal son.
    *
    Uncle Florian’s Warm Hands    It was a little like a baptism. At least, that’s how Adrian saw it. He had stepped out of his mother’s ineffective shadow into the radiance of his father’s name. Eugen Ziegler had abused Leonie Dobrosch constantly for ten long years; he had abandoned her and their children countless times, just as no one could have kept track of all the times he had come back home, drunk or broke and, hence, repentant. But when father and son left Mödling together, Eugen put his arm around his son’s shoulders and explained to him that nobody could separate them because, by now, his father and mother were married for real . This was his happy message and he had wanted to tell Adrian face to face, he said, but the paternal arm around the boy’s shoulders, meant to seem strong and protective, was actually no more than one long plea for support. Naturally, it was all because of the war. What else? Unless Eugen Ziegler could prove that he had responsibility for the