Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  It pained him that he would never again be German, that he could be.

  He let everything happen, endured it all, let them do whatever they wanted to do; let it be. This did not take much effort on his part since his mouth was filled with the sweet, familiar taste of the sticky sugared milk; let them have their way.

  He remembered the promise that he would get more after a bath.

  Wait, for the love of, are you blind, cried the monk who stood above his shoulder in alarm, watching what the other priest was doing to the boy’s terrible hooves.

  His foot is completely stuck in it.

  What do you mean stuck; it’s rotted into it, said the monk irritably, squatting in front of the boy and trying to hold the shoe so as not to soil his frock. He did not pull it to him completely, his face showed restrained disgust, but he did peek into the uppers, and then sent in his fingers, cautiously, drilling down. He reached into something soft and slippery, mud, filth, clotted blood, or bare, oozing bones.

  Should be cut off along with his foot. He looked up, grinning, he didn’t know what to do, he mumbled desperately, and he had nothing to wipe his fingers with.

  It’s a good thing you always know what to do.

  He concluded he had no choice, he must pull off the shoe with one swift yank.

  He looked up again at the other monk, but another grin would have been out of place.

  Are you holding his shoulders, he asked.

  Why should I hold his shoulders, retorted the other monk irritably.

  But then the boy spoke up too, because he really didn’t want to have any trouble.

  Truth is, he told them quietly, I shat in my pants.

  He would have liked to explain, to make them understand he couldn’t help it when he got stuck atop a hedgerow and two people were beating him, which actually helped him fall down on the other side of the hedge. But before he’d even finished his words the monks were already shouting, except it was not shouting but guffawing with no trace of jollity.

  You don’t say, shouted one of them, almost choking, this is fantastic. Shat in his pants.

  Who would have thought.

  For half an hour we’ve been enjoying nothing but the smell of your shit, you wretch, enthused the other monk, who hugged him from behind, pulled him close, buried his face and shoulders in the sleeves of his frock, as though dipping him into the homey fragrance of a lemon drop’s sweet filling.

  Hold the stinking Jew dog tight, don’t you dare let go of him, yelled the first monk.

  He came to only when in the lazily vaporous silence the large naked men were already standing around him.

  Both his shoes were there, on his feet, as if nothing had happened.

  Someone had brought some warm water and poured it into the shoes, but that had accomplished nothing, it poured right out.

  In the meantime the two monks had disappeared.

  He must be dreaming, should wake up; or could the earth have swallowed them up. Their absence made him think all this was really nothing but a dream and he was only replacing one painful dream with another. Instead of the monk who had been there before, now a large naked man was squatting before him, his long coal-black hair fallen over his forehead, knitting his thick, long-haired eyebrows a little distrustfully. He listened with his lively eyes set too close to each other, and he was speaking, kept speaking to the boy, who understood every word even though he couldn’t place the stranger’s language. As if he had never heard it.

  He said he was some kind of lieutenant, he mentioned his name too, some lieutenant in some army, maybe the Royal Air Force, and he was curiously waiting for him to say his name, and where he was born, where he was from.

  From where had he been deported.

  From where, indeed.

  The lieutenant’s lips parted halfway, he leaned very close, his healthy white teeth flashed encouragingly, but then his sweeping black lashes began to flutter with disappointment because in this unfamiliar language the boy could tell him only the number. The five-digit number, as it was, as they could see on his lower left arm; he showed it to them as his name. Why should he hide it, if they had given it to him instead of his name. Someone was holding his arm, held it down and drew his fingers across it as if to test the reality of the numbers, but seemed to be commiserating a little. Perhaps he could also say his name if he really put his mind to it, but he didn’t want to, and therefore he didn’t remember it, even though he thought about it. The lieutenant looked Italian, or at least not the way the boy imagined Hungarians looked. And he could not understand what a Hungarian was doing in the British Army.

  In the meantime the others came up with the idea of soaking the boy’s feet, with his shoes on, in a large bucket. The insane logic of recent events could not be broken by the demands of common sense.

  Everything continued in its own way. Until now they had used these buckets to throw cold water at each other. They were pleased with their idea. He laughed along with them, though he did not become as excited as they did. The water was undoubtedly nice and warm; at first it burned but he was glad to be among such attractive people. The lieutenant was only watching him now; he’d stopped asking questions. Then he noticed, in the midst of the general laughter, that one of the monks was standing with his back to him, not very far off, leaning his head on the white wet tiles, covering his face with both arms. As he watched the trembling shoulders, the boy was not certain they weren’t shaking with laughter, and he wondered who could have said something so funny or whether they were laughing at him.

  Finally he asked the naked man, whose black hair ran up from his belly in parallel stripes, something like water in a fountain, all the way to his neck, from where it fell back to frame his chest muscles, what they had done with his coat.

  It was odd that he could say anything in this unfamiliar language.

  The lieutenant showed him, there, look, they’re burning it right now.

  And indeed he saw that the other monk was shoving his belongings into the fire.

  He didn’t trust this lieutenant, because he wasn’t as white and red as the others, but skinny, as though he himself had been a prisoner for a few weeks.

  Don’t worry, said the lieutenant, you’ll get regular clothes from them, and they won’t let things get out of hand. True, they did delay a bit, but now they see the situation for what it is. They will retaliate. If he just listened, he could hear what was happening that very moment.

  And he could, very faintly, penetrating the old monastery walls, the sound of motorcycles being revved up.

  The lieutenant was nodding, yes, yes, an entire motorcycle company, flying like swallows, seventy-nine cycles all told, among them twenty-seven with sidecars, 123 men all told. It showed on his face what profound self-assurance and superiority his disciplined thirst for revenge was lending him. They won’t do anything extraordinary. All they really had to do was wall in two city gates; they studied the maps. The whole operation would take a very short time.

  He would have liked to beg and implore, don’t let them do it, to shout that nothing happened, victims, innocents.

  But the words drowned in him before he could shout them.

  How could he claim such a thing when not even one among them could be considered innocent. And then he would have tried to argue differently. The lieutenant could see that not everyone had been killed; after all, he, along with his twin brother, had survived. Only he could not talk about this either, he had to keep quiet about his twin brother, who had just killed a man named Döhring. He knew of this in his dream, oddly. But then is there anything I shouldn’t keep quiet about.

  In his agony, he began to throw himself about, he felt as if they had cut off his arms and legs, he shouted senselessly as one struggling to wake up.

  I can’t keep quiet about everything.

  He was shouting in vain because the attractive naked men lifted him up and put him in the tub while he could hear—and the dark-haired lieutenant even raised his finger to call
attention to it—that the swallows had flown away, the motorcyclists were gone. By next morning, the city would be walled in and the people of Pfeilen would have to perish. Over the empty Kloosterplein, clouds of gasoline vapor hover in the evening stillness. Everything comes to pass. It is impossible to prevent what has to happen, to stop anything. While several men were washing, scrubbing, and soaping him at the same time, and the noise, the cacophony increased again in the bathing hall, and everybody was talking, laughing, and shouting simultaneously, through the cracks in the walls and doors, unseen, thick gas was seeping in to mingle smoothly and treacherously with the chamomile-scented steam.

  And the attractive naked men now thought he had fainted because of the gas.

  The wretch is so weak, they said laughing, he can’t withstand even a little gasoline vapor. But he lost consciousness because of his premonition. He did not know who he was. Because of the staggering knowledge that while he was enjoying his bath, and he could not but enjoy it and even think of the promised sweet milk, the catastrophe had come to pass.

  He didn’t know what all this meant, who might be his people; he was searching for the meaning of his own dread.

  And then it occurred to him that it hadn’t been his grandfather’s shift but that of the religion teacher.

  What luck.

  He could see from above how they were approaching from two directions at once, in close formation, their headlights rending the early night asunder.

  He delayed no longer; the teacher of religion sounded the bell for the second time that day. He did it cautiously, barely touching the body of the bell with the blunt clapper, briefly; the penetrating sharp little sound could be heard over the dark town lying in ruins. This was followed by a terrible crack, bang, and snap, then a detonation, then a single resonance reminiscent of a bell ringing, but this was coming from below the ground. The earth, the entire half-dead little town and its distant environs, trembled, people were thrown out of their beds; even the thick monastery walls in faraway Venlo were shaking. For a second, silence fell in the bathing hall; the naked soldiers listened; only the noise of water rushing from the showerheads could be heard.

  The breakaway bell splintered all the beams below it; it lodged itself into the ground four and a half meters down. This made the market square, along with its heavy stone pavement and the houses around it, explode, rise up in the air, and then collapse into itself. The rectory collapsed too, and in place of the Lutheran church only a pile of rubble remained.

  Yet he knew it made no sense; there was no point in having such dreams. He should wake up. He would understand things all right when awake.

  All this lasted but a short time, and then silence reigned everywhere.

  Still, he was awakened by a scream, and he kept hearing the scream as he screamed to wake himself up.

  On the bedroom ceiling, the big city was buzzing in yellows and reds, as if it were not the middle of the night.

  And he still felt he could not talk about the things he should be talking about, and this increased and deepened his pain, no matter how hard he struggled. Whom could he talk to; he was alone during the day and alone at night. In his last dream, he was sitting awake and felt a pain as if, without anesthesia, his limbs were being chopped off, but despite all the pain he comprehended his dream, and that gave him a lift. He rose above everything. Even though his body was a mass of torn flesh from which blood poured in thick streams. He knew what happened to whom; he also knew what he had dreamed just now, or the night before last; he was glad to be able to separate out the various illusions. He could foresee what would happen in his dream, even though he awakened and his mind could not have been more alert. He saw the British motorcycle riders who, not caring that the church bell had just crashed down and that fresh corpses and perhaps injured living bodies lay under the marketplace buildings, were driving everybody outside. In the blinding beams of their headlights, they were having the two city gates walled up. This bleeding cannot be stanched. Here everyone must perish. Weighing matters while awake, I must witness my own death. He was looking for logical arguments with which to continue refining his knowledge. True, the church bell broke off and crashed, but not then and not like this. And it was also true that four years later Gerhardt Döhring returned from a POW camp, and looked maniacally for some paper box that he supposedly had given to his older cousin, Hermann Döhring, for safekeeping; but Isolde did not want to hear about any paper box, there had been no camp of any kind in the vicinity.

  But there was a camp; nobody denied that Gerhardt had been a guard and that he went mad in his search for the box.

  There was a camp, repeated a completely strange and indifferent voice, that he could not escape from.

  He was sitting in bed and felt that he had to tell these made-up stories and lie so stubbornly because he couldn’t tell who he was. Who am I, if there was a he who consisted of more than one person. It’s true, however, that Hermann Döhring was killed in front of his own farm that morning, though it never came to light who did it. It did come to light, of course it did. Almost everything comes to light. But then where have I come up with these twin brothers. Why am I accusing one of them of murder, and why do I say that the other was burned in the Revier, the sick bay. His dream invented this so that he could not distinguish between the twins and thus might freely shuttle between them. His dream invented the story because of his twin sister; because of her, he looked at himself as a girl, and to this day had been unable, and had not really wanted, to make a proper distinction between the two of them. This is the very reason I want to study philosophy and psychology so I can have an insight into these tricky things from both points of view. But what if I don’t understand, complained his dream in a weepy voice; he shouted that he did not understand, could not understand. Still, the knowledge stemming from his dream proved stronger. In his body, he felt their exhausted, condemned bodies, both their bodies. And that they were alive had become his only defense. Which means that I carry within me people who are not me, and with them I look back at times and places that could not have happened to me, or I can glance ahead into times that without me cannot possibly happen to anyone.

  This explanation made his head spin because he knew where he was; still, he did not understand it.

  And quite sensibly it occurred to him that perhaps I, the one thinking these things, am not me. Others might live in me, people I don’t know, or people who took their leave together with me when they died sometime in the past. As if in his dream he were searching for his this-worldly self among these people; but he woke up because of all the shit and felt that no matter how much he’d like to separate his self from all the others, he is not he, he cannot find himself, he has no self of his own, he has no self, he does not exist.

  At best, he might find his twin sister, and that was probably the reason he disliked her so much.

  He did not understand why he smelled the smell of shit so strongly, and then who was the one who smelled it.

  My dream filled up with shit. But he couldn’t accept his own empirical experience as the sole explanation.

  In his mind, he first tried to avoid the problem by looking at it as a philosophical one, but that did not even come close to explaining why he smelled the penetrating stench so realistically.

  This might not be the only explanation in the world, but it made him sense that someone else was here, sitting in the warm thick shit on the strange bed and thinking about empiricism. It was Isolde’s bed. I shat in bed, or maybe I’m dreaming this too. The crack of this somebody’s ass is full of shit, or rather in the soft puddle of the runny shit there is a harder, fatter sausage, right in the crack of the ass, inside the pajamas.

  It cannot be.

  And in that case, on the farm, it wouldn’t have been Döhring who shat in his pants when my twin brother killed him. Because I am Döhring. Or it wasn’t my twin brother who shat in his pants when they tried to yank him back from the top of the hedgerow and beat him with nailed planks a
ll over his head and his back. I don’t have a twin sibling. But of course you do. I am a different Döhring. One who sits in his own shit, like a small child. Although neither of us is permitted to do this anymore. They’d thrash you for doing that. The only reason my dream invented my twin brother was so that it shouldn’t be me, or so that I could kill myself, so that I shouldn’t be my own younger twin sister, or so that finally I’d have some excuse to kill her, so that I wouldn’t be the only victim.

  What nonsense you’re wasting your time on.

  He heard his voice bellow into the room glimmering with reflected nocturnal lights.

  He felt the watery shit dripping down his leg but did not dare jump up lest the fat sausage slip out. But what should he do then, what should I do, he yelled desperately to himself.

  He had never heard of able-bodied healthy adults shitting in their pants while asleep.

  As a saving idea, it occurred to him that it was only the natural effect of all that dry fruit, all those apples and prunes.

  A starving person should never take solid nourishment so suddenly.

  But he had to discard the saving idea too; after all, he couldn’t have shat in his pants because of apples and prunes he’d stuffed himself with in a dream.

  But he starved only in his dreams.

  And that, at last, made him conscious of having no further reprieve, conscious that there was somebody else here, somebody sitting in warm, thick shit on the strange bed. I’ve shat in my pants, maybe I’m only dreaming this too. And this other somebody has the crack of his ass full, which is to say this other person is sitting in the soft puddle of diarrhea, but there is also a harder, fat shit sausage in the crack of his ass; I am in my pajamas.