Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  We must help them as best we can so that they may take up arms against our greatest common enemy, Bolshevism.

  Many people say that tactical accommodation demands too much sacrifice, too much self-discipline, and is too risky. But we must play along with them without ever forgetting what we are doing. Our responsibility, said Elemér Vay, with his practical way of thinking rounding out the professor’s abstract argument, is to maintain a sensible balance between cooperation and resistance until the German element arrives at a point where it can carry out its far-reaching grand design.

  Et puis il y a toujours la Sainte Vierge, as the prince said in his inimitable way, to jovial laughter, concluding the dinner-table conversation.

  Blushing was becoming permanent on Madzar’s face, it ebbed and flowed on his milk-white skin.

  He walked away from the hotel with long strides, stood for some time in the hazy heat but could not calm down outdoors either.

  He watched the car receding in clouds of dust, absentmindedly greeted approaching and receding strangers a little way from the hotel, near the blinding white walls of nearby buildings. There was hardly a soul abroad in the stifling midday heat. He felt like breaking and smashing things; only when nearing the parental home did he slow down a bit. If at that moment his mother had appeared, he would have raged at her, he was sure, as his father used to rage. But reason told him he should enter the house quietly, very quietly. He had the urge to scream as he crossed the empty, dead yard. He went the long way around to avoid peeking from the corner of his eye into the workshop, whose doors were wide open for the expected guests, and to keep from rushing in to demolish the ridiculous furniture. He wouldn’t have had to do much to make the pieces fall apart, along with their puritan discipline.

  I am ruining my own life.

  In the summer midday, motionless silence settled over the city and the river.

  An occasional stray fly on the veranda window, shaded by the grapevine bower, provided the only movement. There, in the middle of the veranda, stood the table set for three awaiting Mrs. Szemző. The plates decorated with a cheap pattern, the vulgarly colorful and barbarically cut glasses, the cheap, polished-to-death cutlery. He took off his jacket, let it slip from his hand, he had no more use for it. Quietly he kicked off his ugly perforated shoes, careful that they made no noise on the stone. He gazed at these shoes made especially for festive summer events, but what he was really looking at were the indentations his father’s feet had created in them. He kicked off his pants, quietly. Last, he literally tore off the short-sleeved shirt, which had become drenched under the jacket. He remained half-dressed like that for a long time, in his father’s long underpants and his own milk-white skin.

  He could not sit down because the armchair made of willow twigs would make a loud cracking sound.

  Eventually he stopped wanting to sweep the settings off the table, as his father had done more than once at a Sunday lunch, or to smash everything to pieces.

  But there was no part of his body unacquainted with the joy of breaking things.

  And then his utterly humiliated mother would come and pick up everything from the stone floor and even be glad no one had beaten her. She has spent her life as my father’s servant and she’d be glad to become mine. Which would break his heart, he felt. He heard no noise from the corridor because she was probably waiting on the other side of the yard, in the summer kitchen, with all the food ready to be served.

  Would that God, that son of a bitch, might bring the heavens crashing down on this fucked-up world.

  As he carefully lifted his neatly folded work clothes from the top of the hope chest, he had to leave off with the cursing.

  He managed to cross the corridor silently and close every door of every room, always darkened during the midday hours, without a sound.

  No door handle clicked in the stillness.

  He lay motionless on the sofa for a long time.

  The mute summer sizzled through the cracks of the drawn shutters.

  He had spent his nights on this living-room sofa and maybe he slept on it now for a short time. Because suddenly he jumped up, startled, as if someone were about to kill him. He had to go to work, otherwise he would not finish on time, let others have a ball, and he quickly reached for his work clothes, as he did every morning. Both his feet were in the legs of his cotton pants when he remembered the previous night, Mrs. Szemző’s telegram, his own ridiculousness, and the arrival of all those people. With his pants pulled up only to his knees he sat back on the sofa, took the telegram out of his pocket where he had shoved it, blushing, the night before, and spread it out on his knees. In the dimness he had to lean close down to the paper, which made him look like a child. In his shame he then leaned farther forward, as if he had to vomit. In his shame he buried his face in his hands. He did not understand how he could have sunk so low. Because, although obscured by a convoluted style and labyrinthine phrases, everything was there, spelled out in the telegram.

  How could he have misunderstood it so badly.

  The previous evening he had seen not what was in the telegram, with the peculiar letters of the telegraph machine, but what he recognized from his ridiculous daydreams in those letters. How could he have made himself so vulnerable to this woman.

  So, that’s how low I’ve fallen.

  Of course, now he saw clearly how it had all happened. As if, locked in his body, he’d been forced to live simultaneously in several parallel worlds and, given the current tensions, had by accident mixed them up and replaced one with the other. And thus he had indecently revealed to Mrs. Szemző one of his hidden selves, which she, luckily, not being familiar with his other hidden world, couldn’t have understood.

  When he recalled these events long decades later, he sadly acknowledged that despite everything he had never been happier than he was during the next few days which the Szemzős spent in the city of his birth, and that he had suffered untold agonies in wanting the woman’s body so much.

  He could no longer tell himself he was not attracted to her.

  On a single occasion, they embraced each other in the afternoon quiet of the workshop, among the pieces of furniture in progress; then they could feel it.

  His happiness was brief, the kind one never comprehends except when unexpectedly one remembers it.

  Or, if he was happy sometimes, he may have felt it even more deeply and free of dramatics, but never so darkly and so lightheartedly as back then.

  Like Fine Clockwork

  Oh no, I wouldn’t dream of tearing you away from your dear Hungarian friend, how could I, replied Otmar Baron von der Schuer when he heard Baroness Thum’s feeble protestation, and amid the throng streaming from pretty St. Anne’s Church in Dahlem he stopped unexpectedly.

  Please forgive my thoughtlessness, he added, speaking loudly in the sunny, cheerful cacophony that followed the somber service. He had it easy, since he towered over the crowd, but the two ladies had to make quite an effort to resist politely the thrust of the human current around them.

  The late-August morning was redolent of resin; people who wanted to chat had to shout over the two bells ringing their farewell to the faithful.

  Which made a peculiar impression on them.

  Both of you are more than welcome at our table, nothing could be more obvious, of course, naturally, without a doubt. And he briefly bowed his handsome, smoothly chiseled soldierly head to Countess Auenberg, whom he had just met for the first time in his life. He sincerely hoped it was not for the last time; if she would be kind enough to oblige him by accepting such a hasty though heartfelt invitation, he said more quietly after the two bells fell silent, having sounded two small belated rings, please believe me, and above the human hubbub one could hear the singing of fieldfares, guarding their second batches of eggs.

  Countess Auenberg had no idea what she should believe and why the baron was padding out his speech so much, but that wasn’t what she was thinking about. Silent and bewitched, they looked int
o the depths of each other’s eyes, seeing through their cambered lights and reflections, which Baroness Thum did not fail to notice; indeed, their lack of restraint all but took her breath away.

  The fieldfares singing on high, the wrens whistling at shoulder level, and the flocks of sparrows twittering at ground level amplified their sense of the space around them.

  They gained a good insight into each other in a twinkling of the eye, as it were.

  Yes, surely, with pleasure, replied the countess with some reserve and also some confusion about the depth of their mutual gaze and the capacious feeling of her inner space. Almost with reluctance. Which she must have heard in her own voice, because she tried to balance it with bubbly but not completely convincing freshets of enthusiasm. She lifted her voice above her own sentiments because she saw clearly that Schuer was not at all the decent fellow he wanted the world to see him as. The throng was carrying them along the meanwhile, and each of her sentences sounded like her last. She’d be separated from the one she had just come to know. She hadn’t counted on being the guest of such an important scientist, an unhoped-for honor.

  But despite what she had seen in the depths of his eyes, she could not deny her attraction to him, and that made her edgy.

  She owed him her gratitude in advance, she said, accompanying her words with a nervous little laugh, which made her face even prettier, because she wouldn’t be able to resist flooding him with questions. The baron might not believe her, but she was greatly interested in race biology and genetics research.

  But Schuer found the countess’s enthusiasm neither amusing nor fawning; in fact, he did not believe she could be interested in anything, for in the depth of his soul he never seriously believed women would ever have a prolonged interest in any scientific topic or subject. For a moment he stared inexpressively at this shocking feminine phenomenon and then stopped listening to her altogether. Anyway, he had never heard of a family such as hers, which made him distrust the Hungarian woman with a German name. Regarding women, the most he was willing to concede was that they had patience for details or were good at collecting data. At any rate, he continued in an entirely different, rather soldierly manner as he turned to Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein, I must exchange a few very personal and at the same time strictly official words with you.

  You will understand, I’m sure, he added, but this too was more because of the presence of the foreign woman. The relationship between the baroness and him had been very tense, so he measured his words; they had to avoid arguing. Although it would not have occurred to the baroness that the unexpected invitation to lunch could be refused or that the baron might provide some explanation for his uncivil behavior. At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, the research workers were terrified of Schuer’s threatening countenance. There was actually nothing threatening in his appearance—on the contrary, everything about his mood, his manner, his attire was smooth, flawless, and poised—but with his perfection he reminded them of their own human imperfections, and almost all of them felt this.

  They hastened to satisfy his every wish.

  At this moment, Baroness Thum, with some anxiety, was hoping that her old wish would come true and that she would be sent to Rome. Her boss was not known for personal conversations or insignificant invitations, and given his high position, his house ran on a busy schedule and he had his share of social obligations.

  There could be no other reason for this sudden lunch invitation but that the professor wished to give her confirmation of her mission to Rome.

  At least the baroness could not think of any other.

  Indeed, in Schuer’s life obligation had a larger part than pleasure. Like fine clockwork, he was reliable, quick, dutiful to the point of humility because he wanted to satisfy his idolized father’s never-uttered demands for quality; and for the same reason he was diligent and painfully impartial in his judgments; it would be very difficult to accuse him of cringing before authority. He had the reputation of being a deeply God-fearing man, and in some way he may have been one. To this day, he feared nothing more than the withholding of love, though he himself was more likely to do anything than to express love.

  His pagan experiences had compelled him to be an even more perfect Christian.

  Whenever he agreed with the Nazi leaders, he was basically obeying the commands of his own conscience, expressing his own convictions, but he was far from agreeing with them about everything. Because he always kept a higher scientific or religious standpoint in view, his opinions had great persuasive power, which allowed him occasionally to resist or be blunt.

  The prestige of his science increased steadily, for it proposed many direct or indirect solutions to problems concerning growing human populations, problems to which the governments of fast-growing mass societies throughout the world, whether aristocratic or democratic, were but helpless bystanders. There was a need for definitive solutions to a number of provocative issues concerning population hygiene. And the more pressing the demands for his science became, the more rapidly did his career blossom. His fairness and selflessness were above suspicion, and with his powerful insights he unerringly separated the essential from the unessential and was excellent at managing and controlling things. He also had long experience. After his professor and mentor Eugen Fischer* retired, they could not have found a more energetic and ambitious man for the delicate job of running the world-famous institute.

  One might say he had the proper education and expertise to take the helm.

  Of course, his appointment would not have been even considered had his origin, traced back to the distant past, not been pure Aryan. He instinctively kept his distance from racist groups because of his deep contempt for the hoi polloi, and he favored neither absolutism nor anarchy, although he had an aversion to the physical proximity or even spiritual presence of Jewish persons. The characteristic traits of Jewish thinking disturbed his composure and indeed his entire mentality—their penchant for emotional exaggeration, their spectacular ideas, their fiery gesticulations, their scientific bluster, their effeminate features, and their hedonism—but he never talked to anyone about these reactions of his and in fact fought them heroically, mustering the full power of his Christian conscience, as if he were trying not to feel toward Jews what he felt about people beneath his rank, and he was loathe to wind up being influenced by other people’s extreme expressions.

  On his maternal side, he came from a noble Baltic family, on his father’s side from a no less ancient clan in Kurhessen, whose men traditionally became members of Hesse’s order of knighthood, the Althessischer Ritterschaft. His father had often taken him down in the mines, which were frightening but where they would walk for miles; Sundays were the days for these shared excursions, after church and before the traditionally late lunch. In mine baskets powered by horse-driven winches, they would be lowered hundreds of meters underground, and he learned, from his father’s instructions and also from the pressure he felt at the top of his skull and in his lungs, to gauge how far down they were at any given time. Heat and darkness ruled, yet strong, cool airstreams blew; the beams and support poles creaked in the silence. Dampness dripped everywhere but in some places water gushed in torrents only to vanish with strange gurgles into openings that looked like gullets of hell; at other places abandoned strippings might suddenly shift, with rubble slipping and slamming noisily into the tipcarts.

  The family was not simply in the business of mining; it exercised the Schuers’ ancient mining rights.

  Otmar and his siblings spent their childhood summers on their maternal grandfather’s estate, where early on, and not only in the mines but also on the land itself, the children learned how and why they should control and take care of others for the sake of their own family. The art of disciplining and being disciplined captured the boy’s imagination, one might say. This is why he felt a strong calling for a military career. He was lucky: just after he was graduated from school, the war brok
e out, and in September 1914, on the memorable day when news came from the western front that in the face of relentless German attacks, Albert, king of the Belgians, had been forced to abandon his carefully guarded fortifications in Antwerp, Otmar was able, in the company of other noble and enthusiastic youth—oh, how they would have loved to have been there at the siege of the fortresses! and then the road to Paris is free!—to join the Gersdorff Rifle Regiment of Hessen as a Junker ensign. It hardly needs mentioning that he was a volunteer, thrilled no end not only by deep patriotic feelings but also by the peculiar circumstance that had several hundred young men from the best families stripping to their birthday suits simultaneously in order to appear in that condition before the health commission.

  This was the first time for any of them that they had to stand so closely together, exposed to one another’s gaze in a mass of similar skin colors and bundles of muscles. Once they were free of their clothes, silence reigned in the enormous hall, the silence of bashfulness. At the news of successive victories, crowds of people gathered on the street outside, exulting and celebrating; complete strangers hugged and kissed. In the hall, the young men smelled one another in silence, and the thought occurred to most of them that from now on they knew something about one another that no one else did.