by Peter Nadas
Countess Auenberg was thinking how much the renowned scientist, with his conspicuous physical attributes, his build, the sensitivity of his features, and his incredible strength, not to mention his seriousness and levelheadedness, reminded her of her fiancé. She sighed to herself, my, my, a truly experienced man, a man’s man. The resemblance caught her off guard. But Mihály was much kinder. He had nothing to hide. And he was more open; but of course he was, since he had nothing to hide. At least, once the thought occurred to her, she hoped he didn’t.
She couldn’t stop comparing all the young men who came into her view with him.
Yet in vain did she tip the balance to Mihály’s advantage, because she couldn’t deny that she felt a similar attraction to male bodies she judged to be similar to his.
Her strong attraction to Mihály, demonstrating which was frustrated by prevailing etiquette, had often shaken her physically and made her dizzy for long minutes. The reason the same attraction failed to seize her now, a feeling she would certainly have found out of place, was that they had brought with them some of the coolness of the church’s interior. Occasionally, it was enough merely to think of Mihály and she’d ask for a chair or a glass of water. As if she were not totally there, at the place where in fact she was. As if it were not she who saw and sensed the other person. As if her conscience unexpectedly claimed that she sensed their identical being by her physical attraction, even though she knew well—vehemently protesting her own thought—that this was but an illusion, a sensory error, surely nothing else.
Just because she missed him so, after only two days she did not suspect him.
Or this strange man.
Schuer indeed deserved the accolades due his sex; he was indeed a man’s man. He had been seriously wounded twice in 1917 in the western campaign, on battlefields in Flanders, and once earlier, with lighter wounds, at the siege of Gorlice, in Galicia, and on all three occasions he had received the silver medal for valor, along with the title vitéz; for exceptional bravery, he had also been awarded the Iron Cross Second Class and First Class. At the end of the war he was honorably discharged with the rank of captain. Then, in truth, he was obliged to hide his experiences—Countess Imola was not mistaken about that—and his mind was much tortured by what he had to hide, even though he seemed to lead an orderly, cloudless life with his wife and three children in the sunny and lovingly tended directorial villa on Ihne Street.
With Germany’s enormous wartime collapse, he had to give up his plans for a military career, had to abandon the flag to which he had pledged eternal allegiance in the summer of 1914; he had no choice, he could not have continued. His earlier convictions evaporated or, rather, deserted him. Yet even after two decades, his war experiences pursued him in the form of menacing images, not picturelike images but mostly visions and apparitions. He could never tell whether he saw, imagined, or only envisioned in his memory the impact of the bomb that had lifted the torso of his machine gunner, along with muddy clumps of earth spraying the sky, high into the air from a spot now emptied and exuding only heat, and, while the torn-off arms flew off in different directions, the gunner’s trunk, pared down to its bare frame but still alive, was skewered on a tree branch.
Had that really happened; had he in fact seen it.
Put another way, fear of insanity quietly, almost imperceptibly transformed his patriotism, and his strict upbringing has not allowed him to speak of this terrible renunciation to this day, not even with his friends.
He has hardly any friends.
Because he could not afford to engage in what he might rightfully have assumed to be friendship.
On the one hand, a feeling of friendship doesn’t pick and choose solely among people of the same rank, or according to rank or title. On the other hand, neither religion nor tradition can explain the shy physical tenderness and cruel physical brutality he had seen and profoundly experienced in water-soaked trenches, among barbed-wire obstacles, in the miserable barracks of military hospitals, and in overheated whorehouses reeking of tobacco in small Galician towns. Everything was beyond what could be measured by any social standard. When he returned, neither his mother, coming toward him in her clouds of perfume, nor his father, having in his model austerity grown very thin, could have known anything about the wild animals dazed with hunger and thirst who wandered aimlessly in forests razed bare by bombs, and about the camaraderie patched together out of cruelty and brotherly feeling—yet their youngest son had seen it all and lived through it all.
Regarding him, they became unsuspecting.
He could not but feel that with his war experiences, with everything he had done for the homeland, he was basely misleading his parents, and that with the moral state of his inner life he was deeply disappointing them. He could not play the good boy for them much longer. He carried with him everywhere his life of lost innocence. Which is to say, he did not understand how he might come to love, passionately and irresponsibly, another person of any rank or sex—an injured comrade or an unkempt Ukrainian whore whom he twice used, with their smell, their weeks-old stench—if at the next moment he could hand them over to death without a second thought. He could not get over the dreadful shadows of his own bravery and steadfastness, over the mass slaughter that he had participated in from start to finish and that, for the first time in the history of warfare, technology had required as a condition for military victory. He always had to be conducting something—given his responsibility to others he had no choice—but what happened never turned out to be what he had intended. When five years later he returned to his completely unfamiliar civilian life, where to his great surprise everything was predictable, his difficulty was not in forgetting the fallen or the images of hand-to-hand combat, but in being unable to forget those of his own comrades who had been maimed by bullets and whom no one could help, or those who had gone insane and whom he had to shoot or have shot.
Willi, for example, who for two difficult years had been his orderly and whom he had been calling sweet little Willi ever since, even though the resourceful, round-faced, always grinning peasant from Eifel had been everything but sweet. He ate human flesh and not because he was hungry; he was fascinated by the taste and offered it to everyone, since they all, being cut off from their supplies, were starving; he did this because he had gone mad, or he went mad because he ate human flesh. Sometimes, when he was lost in these thoughts, Baroness Erika had to raise her voice and call her husband two or three times before he realized she had been invoking his name.
The barrel of the pistol raised for firing probably sobered up the madman for at least a second; with his arms spread wide, he clung to the slippery wall of the dugout, his alert eyes sparkling, hoping that Baron von der Schuer would not do it.
Not to him.
The baroness had to call him ever more loudly until he finally came around and not only saw but knew where he was. Luckily, the naturally lively little woman probably thought her husband was preoccupied with some scientific question. In fact, his thoughts ventured into areas not yet illuminated by the sciences precisely because he had been thinking of scientific questions.
He was looking for the basis on which he could build his science.
That he was a nobleman, scion of an ancient clan, raised to behave honorably and chivalrously, and that he had been entrusted with the lives and fate of others—these facts had lost their purpose and significance in the war he had left behind. There, bare undisguised fear of death ruled, a mere desire to survive; no discipline or self-discipline could spare anyone’s body from it.
He had not been afraid; his body was afraid in his stead. He began to search for God in this bodily fear, sitting inside the fear, desperate and full of doubts; he searched for God so that in the blood, snow, mud, and feverish shivering he should not falter or go insane.
In the mass fear and suffering, God seemed very different from the God of his hours of childhood gullibility and adolescent rebellion. This God probably had no place in human events, a
nd for Him to be absent He did not have to leave the stumps of bombed-out trees or bodies abandoned in their pain. In the absence of gullibility, Schuer wanted first to understand the body—easily offended, exposed to desires, subject to feelings, in which it is so simple to silence or snuff out reason and soul. For theological reasons he had confidence in the sciences of human anatomy and biology. He was interested in the body’s mechanics and chemistry; he had confidence, one might say, only in his apostate mind’s ability to reach a higher sense of bodily functions and then, perhaps, to find a god higher in rank or more ancient than the God of Christianity. He had once enjoyed reading Silesius, and because of him he fantasized about the god who lived separately in individual bodies, about traces of this god that had been left in each organism and could be measured by natural-scientific or mathematical means. He wanted to find that quality which everyone chatters irresponsibly about because it’s the primal reason for everyone’s existence, but which has no palpable sign either in history or in any form of man-made matter. He was so confident that in the body he would find this ancient sign, a trace of its origin, that he was ready to transfer his faith and conscience to science.
In this state of mind he enrolled in the medical school of the University of Marburg, where, after a few months spent in spiritual daydreams and mental convalescence, he could not avoid being entrusted again with a military mission. There might have been other candidates suited to the job—in those postwar semesters the student population was swarming with demobilized soldiers—yet they made him the commander’s adjutant because he had spent the most time in a staff position and in combat. General Walther Baron von Lüttwitz* was himself considered a very good-looking man, and he insisted on Schuer. He had kept his eye on this attractive, wealthy young man from a splendid family; frankly, he wouldn’t have minded if his daughter married him. As if he were saying to himself, yes, I would like to have my grandchildren come from this bright-faced, slightly indolent fellow. He evaluated the young man’s physical attributes with the reckoning of an experienced horse breeder. He was very proud that in his own case, past fifty, his muscles remained not only hard but also boyishly supple.
When a communist uprising began in Thuringia, at Lüttwitz’s wish Schuer, alongside his commander, led units of the Studentenkorps against them. Lüttwitz expected a lot from the difference in the condition of the two leaders’ musculature. Sometimes he’d grasp Schuer firmly by the shoulder, pat and squeeze him, or press his hard arms to feel what he saw. The homeland faces the greatest danger, godless civil war, brother against brother, as he put it in a famous public address. Armed bandits plunder, pillage and fornicate, murder, rob, ransack, and set things afire in ancient German cities.
Of which not one word was true.
In hours of need, everyone should suspend all personal concerns and devote everything to the cause of the nation.
Schuer did not have to suspend his personal concerns; on the contrary, in his heart he was happy about his new assignment, which he was to carry out alongside Frigate Captain Baron von Selchow, only a few years older than he. It offered him a good pretext, his intellectual doubts and devastating loneliness notwithstanding, to enter military service again and, on an apparently not too dangerous excursion, to reimmerse himself in a familiar milieu of simpler, rougher things.
Though cleansing operations and methodical house searches were not exactly to his liking, after the suppression of the rebellion and the temperate carrying out of the inevitable retaliations, he received the Large Cross, decorated with a saber, of the Order of the Lions of Zähring, Germany’s highest decoration for a soldier.
He could thank Lüttwitz’s silent intervention for this.
This police venture—it could hardly be called a military operation—which ended by early April with very few losses to his men, brought about a thorough change in Schuer’s life. Once the Spartacist uprising had been put down and republican forces throughout Germany had triumphed over the mostly monarchist advocates of a coup d’état, the Weimar authorities charged Lüttwitz with a long list of terrible crimes. To avoid arrest, he and his family escaped to Budapest, where the godless reds were routed by August and there was no fear of republican rule.
In truth, the change had already occurred on the early March afternoon when previously established units, six companies to be exact, assembled in orderly columns under Schuer’s single command, wearing their new pike-gray uniforms without stripes or chevrons, marched smartly on the Marbach highway to the Dammelberg. That is when, almost imperceptibly, many things changed in his life; thanks to some vision or realization, as it were, he found his ultimate vocation. They lit enormous fires, they sang as loudly and energetically as their throats would allow. Although his musicality, honed on several instruments, did not go to the point of his singing along with his men—he merely mouthed the words feelingly—Schuer unreservedly entrusted his body to the waves of shared sensual intemperance, while, his eyes blinded by the light of enormous fires, he observed the fields sunk in mist from the nearby river and the twilight-reddened walls and turrets of the imposing fortified castle of Landgraf, surveying simultaneously, as it were, the living, the historical, and the lifeless. The warm sensation of his left-behind but oft-missed wartime life returned generously to his limbs.
There were hardly any greenhorns among them. Almost all the men were officers, war veterans, athletic, strong, and healthy men who had survived their wounds and now wanted to study or to continue their scientific careers, which the war had interrupted.
Never again did he feel abandoned or alone with his wartime experiences.
He saw clearer than daylight that he hardly differed from these men in anything, and that was his good fortune.
He belonged, though in all probability had no individuality.
Or perhaps what liberal thinkers call one’s individuality in fact plays but a very small part in nature’s grand scheme. In itself, individuality probably isn’t worth a grain of rice. Among these wonderful men, individuality makes a difference hardly worth mentioning.
We are but samples, he thought with no small amount of fright.
In reality, the chosen ones of nature and divine Providence. Not only fit for reproduction—our dead would have been no less fit for that—but the most deserving of this purpose from a racial viewpoint, if one may put it that way, and all this has nothing to do with the individual soul or individual peculiarities. Who else should be multiplying if not these men who had withstood the crucible and survived.
What else could Providence have wanted when it so mercilessly destroyed our weaker mates.
This soul-stirring, painful realization overpowered him, though the great smoke and infernal noise might have played a part. In a nature suffused by divine Providence the theory of natural selection works more brutally than the power of Christian charity. Within decades, this brutal reality will turn Germany’s devastating defeat into a universal victory. And under the influence of this realization these magnificent men became for him like members of a blood alliance sworn to secrecy: the future of the nation may be entrusted to the contents of their loins.
He became alarmed at this pagan thought, but could not help thinking that the ancient God who cast off His Christian charity loved those whom He decimated.
Was not the treasure of the Holy Grail a secret code of advantageous racial characteristics, he asked himself, and he had no doubt about the answer.
Or rather, it seemed to him that God had taken off His Christian mask before him and would never again show His barbaric face to anyone. He shuddered to imagine seeing God face-to-face. Blessed be He, he would have said to himself, but right now he could neither pray nor express his gratitude; he could only think, very rapidly.
He was counting.
Altogether two generations, four at the most, and we’ll come out of this ignominy stronger than those who suffered fewer losses and who with their flawed individuals are now lording it over us. The enormity of this realization
made him falter, he had to lean on someone, and an unknown mate standing next to him instinctively hugged him, held him up with his strong shoulders.
Among noblemen, behavior like this was not a matter of course.
He felt gratitude toward his mate and more profound love than toward any woman, or than the love he should feel as a Christian toward a helpful fellow being.
When the fires had burned down to smoldering embers, the beer was running low, or the men were becoming short-winded or somehow seized by sorrow over the lost war and terrible peace, and suddenly they felt surrounded by memories of their fallen comrades, they formed a huge circle, standing shoulder to shoulder, opened the slits of their pants, triumphantly and ostentatiously thrust forward their hips to honor the ancient Germanic custom of high-arced cross-pissing before setting out on their dangerous mission, which demanded much good luck.
Contrary to all his earlier vows to preserve his seed until the day he found the person worthy of it, whom he would marry, as was only proper, that night, for the first time since his demobilization, Schuer went with the other men to a brothel. He knew he was breaking his vows, but he excused himself on the grounds that he was doing so not for himself but because of the others. He did think of the Lüttwitz girl, the charming and educated Andria, but felt no special pangs on her account. He knew and no longer had any doubts that Willi had had to perish at his hand because of Providence, so that only the strong and mentally healthy would stay alive. He was repelled by the thought of having to marry a girl with a congenital hip dislocation just because of the obligatory propriety prevailing among his peers, and now, for the first time in his life, he accepted his revulsion. Willi was backing away from him, backing away and looking at him as he walked cheerfully with the others on the nighttime street, quietly dreading a future that he happened to be avoiding. I could not have done anything else then, and I cannot do anything else now. He no longer had to justify or feel ashamed about his natural revulsion at the cripple.