Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  Which, at the castle of Fánt, was not an imaginable thing.

  To strip naked.

  The Auenberg girls were given baths separately; the strict morals with which they were being raised forbade them to see not only other people without their clothes but also one another and, if possible, even themselves.

  They begged their stepmother in vain to take their carriage and ride over to see the unfortunate little boy.

  We are receiving Karla with sisterly love, their stepmother instructed them, she may come to us anytime she wishes to visit her little boy. To judge her way of life or to forgive her sins is not our business, but we are not bound socially to her illegitimate child.

  This severity pained Imola no less than did thinking about her own mother, whom she could not, despite all her efforts, cast out of her heart. Sometimes she thought of the accursed little boy so she could tell herself it was his suffering that hurt her so much and not the yawning absence of her own mother. And Karla’s severely beautiful nakedness enthralled her for a lifetime; her sun-illuminated hair pinned up high on her head, the rich, dark pubic hair on the mound of her modesty so bright in the light reflected from the lake’s surface.

  To this day, it was enough to gaze at her blondness, winding and twisting in myriad strands on her magically cambered high, strong forehead to remember her mound of Venus.

  Actually, what on earth do you want of me, she suddenly cried, stifling her temper so forcefully that the demand sounded more like a plea. They could both hear the quiet street filling up with her voice, and they both disapproved of it. What reached her consciousness with a slight delay and surprised her was the kind of impossibility Karla was suggesting or, rather, demanding of her.

  But the shouting did not ruffle the baroness.

  I do, I do understand that you can’t give up even this invitation to lunch.

  What do you mean, even this invitation.

  Nothing, the way I see it, you cannot give up anything, and at your age that’s as it should be. At your age I couldn’t give up anything either. Even today, I can barely give up anything. A little feeling, a little love, today I hardly ask more than that from anyone, she said with a tense, constrained smile as she took out her key.

  She could have said that she nevertheless needed the emotions denied her.

  They had to take a few more steps to reach the garden gate.

  Their footsteps made the only sound; the street was deserted.

  But I’ve admitted it. How else can I put it—I’m terribly confused. I’m confused because of you, and I’m confused about my engagement. What else may I confess to you. That’s just what I’m asking, Karla, what should I do, what should I do against my passion, said Imola, suddenly plaintive and conciliatory, her voice stimulating her emotions to the point where self-pity almost made her burst into tears.

  Claiming to have a migraine, I’d only make myself ridiculous.

  In their language, this meant that during this short time she had managed to fall head over heels in love with Baron von der Schuer, a ridiculous and disheartening development.

  More precisely, this is how she was defending herself against Karla’s senseless attack. Karla was looking at her with genuine annoyance and a certain aversion—though her performance, in the psychological meaning of the word, was not senseless. She hadn’t really fallen head over heels in love with the man, yet she could not bear anyone keeping her from getting to know him more intimately. She wanted to see the peculiar similarity that linked him to Mihály, to the sculptor, or to all other men. At the sight of these grown men she almost fainted in little-girl astonishment. She did not understand a word of the situation. Which is why she so readily revealed her emotional vulnerability. This required great mental strength but it helped to jolt her temper to a new place. Her urge to weep was prompted by genuine, devastating fury. She was ready to hate Karla, and she did hate her for trying to keep her from doing something.

  She simply had to see whether this man would be good for her.

  Not that she needed anyone besides Mihály.

  Whether he would fit her.

  It was the same as when her domineering older sisters or enchanting stepmother discovered secret wishes of hers. Except that Mihály included all the others within him. Quickly, she had to confess her interest in another man, confess anything, so that she might stealthily reach her original goal.

  Of course, my dear, one cannot do anything against oneself, the baroness said airily and opened the garden gate.

  There stood before them, in the depth of the shady garden, a spacious, well-cared-for house built in the old German style, its walls covered with red and yellow climbing roses, with two large ground-floor terraces giving onto a thick green lawn. The overall impression was somewhat somber and uninviting.

  Silence reigned within its walls.

  In the basement, their lunch was waiting for them on the large stove in the dim kitchen; this Sunday, Baroness Thum’s housekeeper had gone on a full-day excursion with the League of German Girls, which she would not have wanted to miss for anything. Not only was she an enthusiastic and active member of the league but, as part of her secret commission, she was charged with keeping an eye on the baroness’s affairs. She had a secret key to the Chinese writing cabinet in which the baroness kept her antique godemiché. She had to report not only to Kaltenbrunner’s office but also to the office of Admiral Canaris, which monitored persons involved in militarily important scientific research.* For some time, the girl hadn’t understood what was in that serious-looking box; she kept returning to it, almost daily, to stare at it, scrutinize it, take it out and hold it in her palm. It couldn’t be that this pretty little something resembled that other thing, because she couldn’t imagine what use this mysterious something could be and for whom.

  Maybe it was part of the baroness’s science.

  Or a very valuable work of art, though it seemed useless.

  Whenever the baroness was away for several days on some scientific mission, her housekeeper would take it down to her room in the basement and in the dark, carefully listening for any suspicious noise, very cautiously introduce the object, guiding it inside. Afterward, she would wipe it clean on the sheet and each time solemnly promise herself never to do it again.

  Now the baroness herself was supposed to heat up the food, send it up in the dumbwaiter to the ground-floor dining room, where the antique table from the dining hall of a cloister had been set for two. They had planned to eat lunch and then spend the rest of the day together, just the two of them; they’d have been happy to wash dishes together, but everything turned out differently.

  After about forty minutes of dead silence, they both appeared in the living room, cheerful and well put together, ready to set out again.

  While they had rested in their rooms on an upper floor, darkened by closed shutters, and afterward while quickly dressing with practiced movements, they each reevaluated the internal proportions of their own emotional turmoil and that of the other woman, trying to get at the possible cause.

  Barefoot and in her slip, rubbing one sole against the other, Baroness Karla took a few minutes to plunge into the proofs of her popular educational booklet. The galleys were lying on the pearl-inlaid Chinese writing cabinet. She worried that because of this little booklet that damn Schuer would not appoint her to be the head of their sister institute in Rome. He thought she shouldn’t have accepted such a professionally dubious assignment from the Education Office of the SS. And later, in Lützow Street, they indeed would reedit the text so that it lost all its scientific ambition and credibility.

  The dark little inn with its blood-red little rooms where her admirer usually took her after concerts was, oddly enough, located in this same street, not far from the Education Office’s headquarters but on the other side of the street.

  In fact, what bothered Baron von der Schuer was that Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein, easily at home in office intrigues, had again outwitted him, gone behind his
back again, again gained an advantage; a few days earlier they had found themselves in an intense argument about it.

  But the Herr Professor gave his approval in writing, forgive me for reminding you of this, but with that approval I believe we both met the office’s requirement.

  Because you, Frau Professor, and not for the first time, presented me with a fait accompli.

  I reported to the Herr Professor well within the required time, and I requested permission for the publication in writing.

  When my secretary told you I’d be away for thirty-six hours.

  I demand that the Herr Professor retract this humiliating allegation, which is completely baseless.

  I suppose the strictly confidential purpose of my trip remained no secret for the Frau Professor, either.

  The Herr Professor now speaks of confidential matters of which I neither had nor could have had any knowledge.

  In that case, the Frau Professor would not have known where I was going with Assistant Professor Mengele and Professor Butenandt,* or how long we’d be away.

  How might I have known that, Herr Professor.

  That is what I’m asking you, Frau Professor.

  I ask you, Herr Professor, please, do not try to evaluate the reliability of your secretary by cross-examining me, and mainly by not trusting in my cooperation, because that would be very unfair to me.

  I have no reason to confirm or deny the claims of the Herr Professor’s secretary.

  On the contrary, Frau Professor, my perfectly reliable secretary informed me about what the Frau Professor knew when she showed up in my office and what she did not know.

  I have no reason to confirm or doubt your secretary’s claims.

  It would never have occurred to me to trouble the Frau Professor with a request of such a nature.

  And I can only repeat myself, but I am not keen on boring the Herr Professor.

  I have always found the Frau Professor’s politeness fascinating, yet I must call your attention to the fact that order must be maintained in the institute, and not only in formal terms.

  Thank you, Herr Professor, you may be certain that I shall not forget your hortatory words.

  But I suggest, having seen the proofs of your booklet, and let this be friendly advice, Frau Professor, that with one quick decision, like jumping into cold water, you correct not the proofs but the larger mistake of wanting to publish the booklet.

  They went fairly far with their insults, reaching great depths together, and they could not but enjoy this eternal contest; neither of them lost patience in the bout, and in this virtue they found each other.

  Take a deep breath, added Baron von der Schuer very quietly and obstinately, and either withdraw the shameful booklet or take your name off it. Otherwise, we shall not be able to solve this delicate problem.

  As if with these sharp words they were testing their origins and their manners.

  They could not afford to go too far, they had to be on guard because they each were aware of the not quite clean methodology of the institute’s research. They could not use against each other this secret, not even as a means of extortion. Against the outer world of science, they were bound together more strongly by their silence than by their tolerance—a function of their distinguished personal backgrounds—though neither of them could be certain that the other, eager to gain advantage, might not be the first to reveal the shared secret.

  They could not name their subjects or the source of their experimental data in every case, which is to say that in certain cases they had to list false sources.

  As a result, they had quickly and smoothly developed an argot which they used in the publication of their data. Of course, their silent agreement about this argot characterized not only the scientific communications and research documentation of Baron von der Schuer and Baroness von Thum, not just research done on twins or on the colors of the human eye. Their method seemed to spill over from one research area to other related ones. Several of their colleagues—in the Dahlem institutes and in public-health institutions elsewhere who were willing to be falsely listed as sources—used and understood the secret scientific language.

  Claus Clauberg,* doing hormone research, was probably the first to think of looking for subjects in a place where he could check and supervise them at any time, where he would not have to chase after propositi, then convince or reassure them. When he found the place, he thought it a bit awkward; he spoke of it to no one for a long time, but the results later justified his choice, even to himself. This encouraged him to share his secret with his colleagues, though he dared not tell his mother or his wife. He was the one who gave the idea to Adolf Butenandt, who wanted to transfer his extremely successful sterilization experiments with rats to a larger, human group than he had. Researchers at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute lunched together every Wednesday in the institute’s new dining hall, and there, amid the banter, Professor Butenandt complained to his colleagues about how complicated and humiliating it was to conduct experiments on the mentally ill.

  Schuer listened quietly, rather shocked by both the complaints and Clauberg’s temperate response to them.

  But Butenandt went on asking Clauberg questions with animated interest, curious about the smallest details; he wanted to be free of the mentally ill patients, who were neither funny nor innocent.

  Then a moment came when their give-and-take faltered in mutual embarrassment.

  Coffee was served in the large salon, where each of the three men rather abruptly—and separately—sought out the company of others.

  One cannot say that their serious doubts concerned only the scientific purity of their published data.

  But since they were constantly pressed for time in their research programs they were in no position to dismiss the idea: why couldn’t they consider these unfortunates as propositi, since they had to be isolated anyway because of their antisocial behavior. That was one side that had to be considered. The other side was that race-protection laws and measures promoting ethnic cleansing had loud and very positive echoes in the scientific world, even though the scientific hypotheses on which these laws and measures were based statistically had not been adequately verified. American, Scandinavian, and French researchers also had their own genetic-pathological hypotheses, and they earnestly hoped their governments would follow Germany’s brilliant example, so that they could raise their research from the level of scientific pastime to that of a national cause.

  Clauberg and Butenandt had reason to fear international competition, but since they were not overly ambitious, they wished only to speed up their research a little when they agreed to this dubious solution. Perhaps they did not fully appreciate that many things run on parallel tracks in the scientific world and therefore the effect of moral scruples on the result might on occasion prove fatal.

  So when Karla von Thum zu Wolkenstein unexpectedly showed her boss samples she had received from a hitherto unknown anatomical and dissecting center in the Weimar area, and without having asked for them, her face literally beamed. Of course Baron von der Schuer did not believe that it was a surprise—come, come, several dozen pairs of eyes without asking for them, come now, there are no coincidences like that—but it was clear to him that the baroness, in possession of such a rich supply and promises of even richer supplies in the future, would soon establish a new system for defining genetically the color of human eyes, a subject on which he had been working for more than five years, struggling with a constant dearth of human material. He decided immediately that he too would put an end to the era of dilettante improvisations.

  He wouldn’t be bashful anymore either.

  He’d take the matter in hand, organize it properly, and above all would accept the support that, with the intercession of his assistant at the university, Himmler had already offered him.

  Because of his foolish scientific attitude, he hadn’t accepted it the moment it had been offered.

  What idiocy.

  The richness of the po
ol from which he could now draw dazzled him, and for a long time it compensated for the missed opportunities of the past.

  At least it considerably calmed his doubts.

  Yet those doubts gained strength for a short while when the pastor of St. Anne’s Church in Dahlem, after several warnings by the authorities, was taken into custody and, if one could trust hearsay, sent to the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen. Pastor Niemöller had been his spiritual guide, one might say his paternal friend.*

  To be honest, many people, including some from the highest circles, had warned him to be more careful with his sermons.

  Schuer was sorry that he himself had never warned him, though he had always known he should have.

  And lately, thanks to her achievements, Baroness Thum was making herself independent, so much so that with the support of her highly placed patrons she was appointed full professor and he had to free her from some of her former duties at the institute.

  And this, no matter how noncompetitive he was, Schuer could not forgive.

  Even though lately the baroness had been behaving quite humbly, or at least she meant to, knowing that the means she had deployed against Schuer had not been above board. She told herself to be more moderate. She relied on the strength of their lifelong scientific complicity when she refused to withdraw the publication of the pamphlet, and she never considered taking her name off it; the booklet was supposed to be published within a few weeks with a print run of 600,000 copies, which would bring her considerable income.

  She felt no small satisfaction; her pettiness reveled within her.

  Schuer was considered not only a much more eminent scientist than she but also an exceptionally talented stylist; still, not one of his lines would ever reach as many readers as any one of the sentences in her little booklet. Nonetheless she tried reading the text once more with his eyes, while with Imola’s head she thought about herself.