by Peter Nadas
Involuntarily they glanced at Siegfried.
The countess appeared to follow the man’s eyes, which absentmindedly looked at but probably did not see his only son. The boy remained an uncertain outline, a blurry blond spot with a concomitant, constant bitter feeling. No matter what he did, this boy would not realize the hopes he had for him. For a short while they both looked at him, looked at him with indulgence, as if he were their shared child, and there was something moving and reassuring in this for both of them. But the little boy did not notice their glances, because with angelically closed eyes he was waiting for his kid sister’s kick.
If not now, then in the next second it would come; he wanted to force the kick out of his little sister, he wanted it.
Or the other way around: the other half of one’s inherited stock may belong to a woman, but because of one’s upbringing one will consider oneself a man. Nevertheless, one is not a hermaphroditic mechanism—I say this to allay your fears, Countess—though every human being is close to being one.
If I’m not embarrassing you with this frivolous claim, I must say that one has a bisexual potential.
Racial purity is not a purpose in itself, let there be no misunderstanding between us about that, it is not an obsession but rather the biological prerequisite of the survival of the races.
He did not want to mention his proposal just yet; perhaps after he had finished his business with Karla, when the guests were leaving.
But he was on guard, observing the effect of his words, and he sensed boring into his side the destructive power, seething with jealousy and professional objections, of Baroness Thum’s tense silence. He was grateful to her for not expressing her hostility out loud, for not spewing out her venom. The reason he continued to speak so professorially, nicely cutting off and eliminating any possible questions and doubts, or veering off in different directions, was to keep the countess, who was very receptive to his ideas, from developing any misgivings about their future cooperation.
However, this game of playing it safe had little to do with professional reality.
To make the available data useful for purposes of national health and to use it to establish, at least retroactively, a new system of racial screening backed by the law, they needed as large a collection of data as it was possible to gather. We would need God’s data, he sometimes thought, annoyed at his own unpardonable way of thinking. And he had his doubts, because they had been operating a huge, expensive system on the strength of presuppositions—neither during their research nor retroactively could they justify the system on their meager available data—and since he believed their method of data gathering was inadequate, he had to consider the existing data irrelevant too.
We are confirmed materialists, this is what he thought, who try to grasp creation’s data in some material form. That is to say, his concern was that they conceived of human attributes as mere matter or as material manifestations.
This is nonsense; among sane people, this should be nothing but an object of ridicule.
The most important, strictly confidential sources of the palpable data were handled by Assistant Professor Mengele. Everything they regarded as so-called mixed or Jewish material. From Rome, however, they received data with which they could confirm African and south European sources of their comparisons, while from their colleagues in Oslo and Stockholm, where they had no independent institutions, they obtained data relating to Nordic peoples who had remained racially relatively pure. In his desperate hours, he saw clearly that not even another ten institutions and another ten generations would be enough to gather the necessary amount of data with which to confirm or reject a presupposition of any kind.
Budapest should long ago have been the center of research on Slavic and Balkan interbreeding. But he did not dare entrust his otherwise ready and willing Hungarian colleagues with the most confidential data, the research relating to the penis, vagina, and sperm stock.
Under the patronage of this woman, however, it might be possible to establish a German institute in Budapest paid for with Hungarian money, where he could quietly exile the baroness, and then he would not have to maintain an ongoing work relationship with Professor Orsós either.
But at the moment he feared not only the baroness’s professional judgment—her silence was hovering in the air—but also his wife’s rancor. He was guided by no inner conviction of any kind when he tried to do everything the way his wife wished.
Heredity and environment, these ancient movers of evolution and progress, he was saying, beaming with obligatory professional enthusiasm, are clearly separable. We must separate them.
There was no stopping now. He could no longer anticipate or comply with his wife’s wishes, which he did not understand himself.
I must stick with this pathetic little tone, this overly professorial little tone, he told himself, and he commanded himself to be patient.
It can be done nowhere but in the people’s state of Germany. The inherited stock and the conditions of a healthy environment must be guaranteed by nothing but the people’s state, which therefore must place the individual too under strict scientific supervision.
He burst into laughter. Except for Baroness Thum, nobody understood his expansive good mood, swollen with brutality and violence.
Yet Baroness Thum was busy with something else at the moment; taking advantage of the opportunity, she took a quick good look at Schuer’s teeth. She did not want to miss the chance. From this angle, she saw hardly any fillings. Although with such a brief glance she couldn’t catch every irregularity.
Of course, by now she’d had time to conclude that all three of Schuer’s offspring were idiots.
And anybody could see that the boy would be a pederast.
Maybe she should try to have a more thorough look at the roof of his mouth.
Today, the future of peoples can no longer be settled with conventional weapons, Countess, and if in the future, as part of your high office, you will be dealing with questions like this, you must keep this always in mind, that everything will be decided by the level and quality of the knowledge of genetics.
The maids had taken away the soup bowls and with great show and ceremony carried in, through the rooms, two large gravy bowls and on two great platters the elegantly sliced sauerbraten, garnished with steamed cabbage and gigantic potato dumplings, which at the Schuers was prepared according to the recipe of the famous clergyman’s daughter, with all the attention and love due to national foods. They had to keep it a secret from the master of the house that first the uncooked meat had been marinated for a week in a broth made with water, red wine, thinly sliced onion rings, and vinegar, spiced with bay leaves, pepper, and clove, and poured in the stone dish so as just to cover the meat. Several times a day, with ritual seriousness, they had turned the beef over in its bath.
Schuer laughed happily because to this day he could not help being happy about the circumstances he had just described. He could not get used to the wonderful thought that he’d a part in it; he was proud of it. He lived in a state that had adopted the findings of his science.
Think about it, Countess, he cried with rapturous boyish enthusiasm. The Führer is the first statesman in the history of the world who not only acknowledges and understands the achievements of research in racial purity and genetics, but has raised them to be the guiding principle in the administration of justice. For him, nothing is more important than a healthy nation.
Countess, please, perhaps a bit more gravy.
Which was a warning to the maids not to stand around staring but to make another round with the gravy bowls, and mainly a signal for her husband that it was high time to find another topic for table talk.
Oh, yes, Baroness, yes, please, you’re very kind.
Karla, dear, wouldn’t you like a bit more of this tasty sauce. Pass this to the baroness, will you. Our cook makes this exceptionally well. We’ll let the ladies have the recipe, unless of course you are already familiar with it.
Would love to have it, who could refuse such a generous offer.
Isn’t this the natural way, Countess. I can’t bear secret recipes.
Why should a recipe be kept secret.
Baroness Thum, however, rudely motioned to the maid that she could go, should not even come close with the disgustingly thick gravy.
And, as if happy about the unexpected silence and attention that she managed to provoke with her impoliteness, she turned toward Countess Imola and said loudly that she had known old Milton Bradley, he was a great mind, a great scientist, and a fascinating man.*
Schuer quickly and very expertly expressed astonishment.
Karla, you don’t say, I really had no idea you knew him.
They played this irksome little game all the time; to test the other, to see whether he or she could see the other’s closely held cards and, if possible, find a way to deceive each other. They could gauge the status of their altercation by the irritation shown on the other’s face. The goal was to drown the rival in a sea of contradictory information. This time, however, Schuer pretended to be surprised so he could come to his wife’s aid and shunt the table talk onto a different track, the conversation that he himself had initiated and steered so incautiously in its present direction. His wife did not appreciate scientific discussions at her table. With her good bourgeois attitude, she disdained miserable scientists anyway, had nothing but contempt for all of them, no matter how famous. They could impress her, at most, with their wealth. They always began talking innocently enough, but within a few minutes they would either speechify heatedly or arrive at details she did not consider it proper to hear.
Especially at the table, least of all at the table.
But, dear Otmar, I even told you about their summer home in Wyoming built right next to a loud rushing mountain creek.
How could you be so forgetful, Otmar.
But more important than anything else, he was among the first ones, perhaps the very first, to pay attention to the characteristics of pigmentation, those finely shaded differences. Indeed, in the process of definition one can grade the differences infinitely, and this is what enables us to describe racial peculiarities. If we are initiating the countess into our little professional secrets, I think we shouldn’t keep these details from her. The primary differences show up in the color of hair or skin or even eyes, and in a measurable way, provided one has determined the appropriate means and method of measuring. He could not have known it, old Milton. He did not find it. But I do know, because I have found it. He worked with, as it were, sensory methods.
He simply described what he saw on the skin. He had moving words for it.
If you study these details, Karla, I can say that you actually catch creation at its constitutional, or immanent, work. That’s what he said to me, verbatim. Now, please, you may imagine I was very interested in this, in catching creation doing its constitutional work. I’d say nothing could interest me more. This is how old Milton gave a religious or esoteric dimension to the issue, so we wouldn’t stand helpless in the face of creation. I was fascinated by him, by his America, by his world. Because of their Negroes, Americans can’t avoid posing these questions. You can see it for yourself, Karla. All human beings are put together of the same materials, but each one differently because of his or her particular line of heredity. We have to admit that the entire completed work cries out for an esoteric interpretation. The countess should also know that Bradley was of course interested primarily in bastards.
He examined things by looking at them from the wrong side, as it were. He’d notice a crude difference between two things for which he had no explanation. Well, he would say, let’s see what happens when these other different elements are intermixed.
And now she chuckled just as her boss had done earlier—a sign that, again, only she and her boss understood around the table.
Bradley could not have—please forgive me, Otmar, for arguing with you—but he could not have provided a definitive explanation and neither can we, she continued, wiping tears away. A person can have at best a definable idea. That’s the extent of one’s science.
Finding a trail in the jungle and following it.
Today the baroness discourses about philosophical questions of science in a very sentimental frame of mind.
Oh, not at all, answered Karla pensively; her response caused such a deep silence around the table that the gentle rustling of the maple trees could be heard.
Despite Bradley’s paternal advice, I decided I had better start out on a trail I’d found myself, not found by others, she continued quietly a moment later.
Karla, that’s a very heroic statement coming from you, Schuer exclaimed; now he wanted to end the scientific discussion yet was happy they were showing the countess their spiritual teases and professional tussles.
You’re making fun of me, Otmar.
On the contrary, I admire your insight.
An eye, as you know, has a definite cross section. It can be sliced in two; one can make up to fifty sections. That’s all. I’ve gone further than others in distinguishing among the parts, en tous cas. Nothing has interested me except these sections, she continued dryly; she was enjoying her scientific superiority.
I had no other ideas, but at least I had this one.
She was happy at least to have come between the other two, however briefly.
The sections gave more differential answers than old Milton’s exemplary literary descriptions.
But I don’t necessarily deserve credit, she cried.
Credit and scientific achievement do not necessarily go hand in hand anyway, Karla, Schuer remarked, if only for the sake of balance.
That’s correct, the baroness replied contentedly.
Schuer let her have this set of the match because he knew what still lay in wait for her.
Then there was another quiet spell, with all of them silent as people are when they turn inward for brief reflection. Baroness Karla had managed to wedge herself between them, which not only made their feeling of belonging together painful, but also called their attention to what they had done, and made them realize that because of Karla they would never again be this close, so innocently and unconsciously.
And who knows what else might have happened to them in this seemingly calm moment if it were not for the cry of pain.
Sieglinde shouted out a surprisingly short cry, like a strong groan of mental anguish, and everyone looked at her in surprise. As if they were acknowledging her personal existence for the first time, as she sat there in her dark-blue puff-sleeved little dress trimmed with rickrack.
She kicked me, cried the little boy, beside himself, by way of explanation.
Because he pinched me, the little girl said, and her cheeks flooded with tears, tears of moral outrage, he’s so mean, so mean, always mean like this.
But her self-discipline was functioning very well indeed; she spared them the sounds of crying.
Which made the little boy lose his inhibitions, and he began shouting desperately, she was the mean one, how could she be so mean, she should be ashamed because it was just the other way around, she was the mean, evil one.
Then the third one started to cry, as if some unprecedented unfairness had befallen her too.
The commotion might have lasted only as long as it took the children’s mother and Miss Bartleby to rise threateningly from their seats. The two older children, knowing their obligations, stood up, resigned and very pale, and the little one slid off her elevating pillows. The guests could not imagine that this sort of thing was happening at the table for the first time. But before his mother had grabbed him by the collar, the little boy was looking at what he’d left on his plate with some alarm.
As if he were expecting punishment for that too.
Except the guests realized not that he was looking at his plate but that he was about to collapse right in front of their eyes. Before they could rush to his aid, his pretty head knocked against the table and, with a gropin
g hand sweeping off napkins and utensils, he crashed between the shoved-aside chairs.
This prompted the two hesitating guests to rise too, and only Schuer remained seated for another few moments. Although in cases like this his upbringing required only that he remain calm, he also issued a contrary command.
Follow the ladies’ example, and if they are not sitting, you stand too.
The same scene again, said the baroness dryly. You will excuse me if I leave you briefly—Countess, Baroness.
Now Schuer stood too, but he did not lose his equanimity.
Oh, I’m so sorry, cried the countess with feeling, I am really very sorry.
Even though obviously no one needed to hear her sentiments.
Suddenly she seemed to sense the silence in the house.
With practiced movements Miss Bartleby and one of the maids picked up the helpless body and, while the other maid hurried ahead, carried it out—with no special caution.
Please, don’t let this upset you, said the man as gracefully as he could, let’s finish our meal, and with his spread arms he asked them to take their seats again. He gave no explanation for the strange event. Not a word.
Not a single sign of worry.
Which both ladies found strange.
Baroness Thum sat down quickly and politely, almost defeated. She smiled a little absentmindedly to herself, and raised her fork and knife. Countess Imola stood for an additional moment, as if bewitched, her gaze following the three women carrying the little boy through the enfilade of rooms, the little girls’ shoulders, in their rickrack-decorated puffy-sleeved little blouses, shaking with suppressed weeping. Echoes of her childhood, alive with loneliness, came crashing down on her. A childhood filled with sameness, uniformity; the way the two little girls’ shoulders in their identical little blouses trembled identically; it was as if Imola had also reached the end of uniformity’s magic.
Which was not a feeling, not a decision, not a thought; it was something that simply happened.