Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  If you ever blabber about my question to you, Jew, I’ll have your tongue cut out, and then I’ll have your head chopped off.

  But nobody ever uttered, or ever would utter, the certain question or request that the rabbi might reveal to someone. No allusions to it have been found either in Rabbi Ephraim’s notes taken in Bonn, which, of course, is more than understandable.

  However, they could not deceive the rabbi.

  Because of the prince’s words, the drinks, the music, the dogs’ barking, and mainly because of the postprandial gratification coursing through their entire beings, the good mood kept rising among the noble lords.

  The rabbi neither asked for nor received more than some fresh water.

  He was still hoping somehow to get through this ill-omened visit.

  Until the count of Cleve stood up and spoke for a long time directly into the prince’s ear. He spoke for about a quarter of an hour as if, in the midst of great giggles and guffaws, he were dripping poison in the royal ear. And Jan Willem, who was nicknamed the Wealthy because of his immense treasures, at first laughed at the deluge of words with which the whispering large-nosed count of Cleve inundated him; not until the count had stopped and, smirking under his large nose, contentedly strolled back to his seat did he summon the rabbi before him.

  In the silence that fell in the great hall, the lashes of the flooding river could be heard.

  Now, however, to everybody’s great surprise the prince addressed the rabbi by his name, as if the Jew too had a regular name like everybody else. He no longer needed his advice, the prince told the rabbi, and he could keep all his advice to himself, because he, the prince, had taken care of everything, he and the other lords had set the world aright. But just then Margit made a move on her stool and let out a painful moan.

  I already put your mushroom soup on the stove.

  Let your mushrooms be. Who’s interested in your mushroom soup now.

  How could I let it be. The good mushroom juice will boil away, and I still have to thicken it with flour, and I haven’t chopped the parsley either, the woman whimpered, yet she seemed to be nailed to the stool.

  Unless, with some luck, the fire’s gone out, oh, maybe I didn’t put in enough twigs.

  We’re still very far from the end of the story, listen, Gottlieb said, and he looked up for a moment to ascertain whether he could continue.

  Margit was of course paying very close attention not to the story but to him.

  Here comes the terrible turning point, Margit, because the ruling prince says to the rabbi that along with his entire family, the rabbi should move to the court. The prince would be glad to have him as his permanent counselor, and he wouldn’t even have to give too much advice. What a great honor that would be, you see, and the only condition of receiving this position was, Gottlieb read on in his book, happy to see that with the bowl in her lap and her lips parted the woman was affected by the story and was leaning forward, that the rabbi abandon the faith of his ancestors.

  Well, Margit, you can just imagine, that he should dress in civilian clothes, take off his hat to all the saints, and live his life with that name always on his lips and in his heart, the name of that big Niemand the goyim call their redeemer.

  When he reached this point, Gottlieb laughed aloud with pleasure at how infinitely ignorant and stupid the goyim were.

  Although Margit did not laugh along with him, the man’s joy did cause her some pleasure.

  In his haste, Rabbi Ammon replied by asking for three days to think it over, and begged respectfully that he be allowed to spend the three days in his home.

  Go, Jew, the ruling prince answered graciously and waved his hand as if, with this gesture, he had already forgotten what the count of Cleve had whispered to him. But he did not forget it, not by a long shot; when a week had passed, then another, and then a third, and the rabbi had still not returned, he sent after him.

  The mean, the vile, the godless man, how mean can such a godless man be, Margit said, this time referring to the prince.

  Don’t get excited, Margit, wait until the end. Gottlieb looked up again from his book.

  In that year, the floods lasted a long time and it took the prince’s messenger a good week to reach the count of Cleve’s city, Gottlieb continued softly. But when the messenger finally got there, the rabbi and his family were not to be found, and nobody could tell him where they might be. In great secrecy, the rabbi and his family had moved to the town of Pfeilen.

  Where in the world did they move to, asked Margit, irritated, and in her fear regarding the possible outcome of the story she pressed the bowl to herself even harder.

  To Pfeilen, Gottlieb repeated the town’s name.

  And where in the world is that. I’ve never heard of a town by that name.

  After all these years, what difference does it make to you, Gottlieb replied, and he slowly closed his book.

  It’s much more important that the Jews there dressed him in beggar’s clothes and he lived like that to the end of his life, enjoying the greatest respect of his people.

  Margit laughed a light laugh of relief, and Gottlieb laughed along with her. Which was such an exceptional event in their lives that they kept laughing together for quite a while, guffawing with the pleasure generated by their own laughter. That on the same night the count’s soldiers burned down the synagogue of Cleve, along with the houses of the ghetto, Gottlieb chose not to tell Margit. And that they put to the sword every Jew they could find.

  The Last Judgment

  Interrupting the usual early morning music, the loudspeaker called him to the south gate.

  Kramer to the south gate.

  And it cannot be claimed that he did not know what that meant. The people they called to the south gate they put away for good.

  The Niers flowed there, nice and slow.

  By nature, he was the kind of man who rarely thought there was any problem he could not solve or avoid. He was breathing more heavily, or rather he had the feeling that with his body grown heavy he should be out in the fresh air. This time there was no way out. He could not avoid it. For days, he had counted on the water’s slow current to sweep him away. They could hear shots from the direction of the river; it was surprising they wasted bullets on people. And there was one fleeting moment when he still hoped. The person he loved more than his life, more than his long-forgotten wife, more than all his incidental lovers—and he did remember them all simultaneously during this long moment, all of them—the person he loved even more than his children was standing only two steps away from him at the deep-brown, empty table of the Blockälteste, in the harsh light. A pale, fragile, but strong and nimble young man whose ambition and energy had given him a stooped back and who could get away with nearly everything and could afford not to be completely bald like the others. His shapely skull was covered with maddeningly rich hair, curly, golden, and ruddy.

  He was ordered to special details at least once a week. To sort clothing in the laundry building, which did not necessarily mean anything but sorting and loading clothes, though sometimes it could mean something else too. The camp had eyes for things like that, since close connections acquired a commercial value of their own. Eisele, an always well-dressed and very cruel man, the commandant’s deputy for supplies, personally managed the work in the laundry. At such hours, it was still dark outside. If the loudspeaker ceased, they could hear the intense bombardment. The potbelly stove was glowing red. Every breath of night dripped or cascaded down the small square windowpanes. He was chatting with someone, with Bulla, obviously doing business with him, explaining something very convincingly, his snow-white hands flashing in the lamplight.

  The boy might get away with it, Kramer thought.

  This was his first precise thought and perhaps the last hope of his life. He could not harbor resentment of the boy, because business is important for someone who has to live.

  The morning cauldrons still had not been brought.

  For more th
an two years now, he’d had no way of knowing whether members of his family were alive or not. Even political prisoners were forbidden to receive mail, and so it was all right if family members were alive and healthy, and it was even better if they were dead because an air attack had killed them all; they were easier to imagine that way, since he did not believe he would ever return to them. If God existed, he would have loved Peix more than God, but God showed himself neither in any person nor in any thing. He loved him enough as it was, did everything to love him even more, though he found no explanation for it and, as a result, could sometimes hardly suppress the disgust he felt toward the boy.

  Kramer’s oldest son should in theory have been at the front, and this Peix was exactly the same age. What he did not like to think about at all was that his son might be serving the Nazis. And he could also love this boy because or especially because secretly he hoped, quite ashamed of himself, that he had a greater chance of surviving no matter where he was. The front was somewhere nearby, they could hear the British cannons and were somewhat familiar with the strategic situation. All the working radios had to be surrendered to the authorities, but guards in the area brought superannuated sets to be revived by one of his comrades. He also had occasion to listen to the English news in the orderlies’ room, the Schreibstube. They were forbidden to pass on information they heard, lest the Nazis discover it. Not to yell and shout to the world that they were coming, they’re here already, down by the gardens. The bombers carefully avoided the camp, which showed the British knew well that except for human flesh there was nothing worth destroying in the one- and two-story barracks among the low pine trees. However, the two nearest small towns, the Dutch Venlo and the German Pfeilen, received their daily dose almost every morning and every night. Prisoners disturbed by the explosions yelled and screamed, which aroused emotions that had been dormant for months or even years; they cried for joy.

  When he looked at the boy, and he had been looking at him constantlessly for four years, eighteen hours a day, every one of his muscles, fibers, cells, and membranes told him, with a happiness that coursed through his soul, that this boy was his personal possession. This put him in the state of physical readiness one assumes when in love. Sometimes he wondered why, why was he not jealous or not more jealous, because when Peix came back from the laundry he felt no more than a dull thud or stab in his heart. No matter how exhausted he was, he wanted to start to wakefulness several times a night just to see the boy’s feminine face deep in sleep. Peix carried his mother’s face on his own, the face of an unknown woman, her milk-white skin and attractively ribbed full lips, and Kramer could not avoid the thought that he had known this woman. At night they often held each other, by chance and intentionally they would hug each other hard, pressing themselves to each other, or they gently touched and pressed each other’s hands. Kramer saw to it, took great care that they stayed together but never had to be squeezed into the same sleeping place. A night spent in deep sleep was one prerequisite for survival. He taught the boy more things than he himself could possibly have known. He realized that one creates not only one’s own sons, or that even if this boy was not the fruit of his loins, he would still make a man of him. And how could a man at the gate of some woman’s womb remember what he had done and when. He did not like remembering things like that; they had fallen out of his memory. He had been a prisoner for seven years; after the first long year in prison, this was the second camp he’d managed to survive in, along with Peix.

  It was not that it hurt, that what was in him still hurt, but that he could not comprehend his own situation, that he should perish now when he was so healthy and well fed. They had taken an oath about what they would do if they both survived, that is what cropped up in his mind now, where they would go. They swore to each other what they would do if the other one did not make it. He would be the other one. He also knew that in these last days his death would greatly endanger his comrades. It would be like a signal, the criminals would know they had come out on top again. Unless the British got here sooner, or the prisoners weren’t taken away and slaughtered, which possibility always existed, the camp would slide back to the condition in which they had found it when they’d arrived two years before. The camp commanders knew they would get nowhere without the communists because only the communists had some consideration for others, yet it was in their interest that the criminals hold a superior position. Indeed, they smashed or weakened the secretly always-rebuilt communist cells in which it was virtually impossible to plant spies. It was just such a measure that was being taken now, Kramer knew.

  It was not senseless, personal ambition that Kramer felt was ridiculous, not the eagerness of the will to survive, no, not that. One should stay alive at all costs, this he understood. He did not think the movement’s argument for breaking the criminals’ power was ridiculous, or at least for removing the threat of their superior force from the heads of many prisoners, ignorant men driven to bestiality. Surely reason allowed this much; at times he was even proud of himself. What he did find ridiculous was a man who, although identical with him, could neither comprehend nor avoid the last judgment. He and Peix could not go to Pfeilen to blow up the church whose tower they of course had never seen. They wanted to, so that those people could no longer ring the bell so peacefully and indecently every Sunday morning. He and Peix could not go to Paris together. Which they both had longed to do all their lives as ardently as small children wait for Christmas Eve. Maybe the little Huguenot, who in his former life specialized mainly in art treasures, would go there alone.

  Success would also be denied because in his heart he had always kept a place for tenderness. Should blame no one but himself.

  And then, dead silence in the barracks, for a brief moment, frozen stillness. The very same thing, although with a slight delay, in the noise of distant cannon fire that reached, separately, everyone’s consciousness.

  That Bulla might have betrayed them.

  Perhaps it was the low-hanging, heavy metal lampshades that were amplifying the fine humming of the strong lightbulbs. Several people had been beaten to death with these shades. The silence of about four hundred men; this too has considerable weight. During the last days, an even two hundred more had been let in, drawn from evacuees of one enemy-threatened camp or other; overall, there were now more than four thousand in the camp. Himmler ordered that these people be neither killed nor left behind to the enemy, an order that was impossible to carry out but from which one could deduce that the leadership was hoping for a favorable turn in the conduct of the war. There were so many dead that they could not be burned in the crematorium’s two small ovens. The bodies, like logs, were stacked in piles in front of the north gate. During the day when it thawed for several hours, the naked piles began to loosen and stink; the pale bodies slid and wobbled, while on-foot transports of exhausted people, screaming with hunger and filthy with dysentery, kept arriving. Kramer needed all his ingenuity and cruelty to ensure that they could stay together in the great congestion, at least in their sleeping places, and that they had something to eat; most likely, the kapos’ blows sealed the fate of several people who, unsuspecting, had wanted to crawl into those two sleeping places.

  The newcomers fell silent together with the old-timers.

  Many of them believed that König or perhaps Königer was the real name of the person who was now the focus of four hundred silent faces; even his orderly, who slept next to him, did not have to share his place with anyone. Some of them added the name Bear. Now they could see and hear that Walter Kramer was the name of this hulking, stentorian German who in the eyes of the camp’s veterans was king of the Pfeilen camp. Peix should have feared him too, because of his size and voice, but he did not.

  A simple locksmith, a man like you or me or anyone else. A kind and dedicated communist whom the Gestapo had arrested in January 1939 in the brilliant snow-covered mountains. Since then he’s become completely gray. For four months, they kept him chained to a cell wall, h
is handcuffed hands tight behind his back. If it hadn’t been for his guard who out of mercy regularly loosened his rope for a few hours and took off the handcuffs, his arms would probably have had to be amputated. They arrested his wife, who, after protracted torture, asked him to end the nightmare by making a detailed confession. Hearing the request, what else could he have done: he banished from his heart the woman who had allowed herself to be instructed by his torturers. If he had acceded to her request, he would have had to betray more than a dozen men. Maggots settled in his festering wounds and by the time the prison doctor was willing to take a look, they had eaten a good-size chunk out of his shoulder and thigh. He had a barely perceptible limp and he could now not fully raise his left arm.

  Of course they managed to get the information they needed out of other prisoners, his wife being one of them.

  He had too much to answer for; he killed without giving it a thought.

  By then he had been smuggling comrades across the Czechoslovak border, near Annaberg. These people had gone all the way to Prague or Moscow, or happened to be sent back from those cities with new assignments of illegal work. Kramer stayed mainly in Chemnitz and conducted operations from there, working with runners. He developed an entire network of smugglers and confidential collaborators whom he did not know personally but about whom he knew everything. It finally took a dozen agents to surround him and catch him. But not before he killed two of them. The last person he smuggled over the border was the young son of a Hungarian comrade of his named Kovách. He had to rescue him from the Wolkenstein hunting lodge, from a secret boarding school for boys well concealed in the Erzgebirge woods and used for genetic experimentation. He did not want to entrust this delicate operation to anyone else. But by then agents were following his every step. The child got across all right, a car was waiting for him on the other side, but Kramer was wounded in his shoulder and thigh.