Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  From the dark City Park, the spring breeze with the fragrance of wet trees pounced on us freely.

  Then something perplexing happened again, something I hadn’t counted on.

  Hans von Wolkenstein

  He was but a tiny spot in the landscape, the boy about whom they had spoken in Baron Schuer’s study. The one with blond hair streaked so noticeably with strands of dark brown.

  An ant, a hard-shelled little bug, no more than a naked worm that anyone might absently crush underfoot.

  A little boy with brilliant blue eyes and close-cropped hair, slightly sluggish movements and a slouchy walk, who had no extreme thoughts or unpleasant feelings about himself. He was not grinning now, but he wasn’t bothered by premonitions. Nothing indicated to him that something might be out of the ordinary in the universe or that any danger was lurking.

  Although the other boys could not help worrying about the regular racial-biological measurements, he wasn’t even fazed when one of their mates jumped off the Ochsensprung at dawn and died instantly. He often irritated his counselors with his constant grins. Which the others enjoyed no end: that he had the courage to grin and, when the counselors cautioned him that now you really have nothing to grin about, my boy, that he responded by grinning even more foolishly. Perhaps he found their displeasure comical, perhaps he was glad to receive more than the usual share of attention, for which he was willing to do much, because he liked to playact and clown around. The others thought him daring. They admired and feared him. They wouldn’t have dared behave as he did or approve of behavior like his.

  The counselors assumed that since the other boys laughed at him, the community’s severe judgment would affect him.

  But that was not the case; on the contrary, the boys laughed in sheer enjoyment. Involuntarily and communally, the boys were also laughing at something they shouldn’t have laughed at. Progressing carefully, step by careful step, Hans led them to unruliness; he was unruly on their behalf, which gave him enormous pleasure, always to go further than the others would ever dare and thus to lead them to sedition. The counselors failed to notice that the laughter was a shared and organized display of insubordination, a veritable rebellion. Or rather, they noticed it only when it was too late. They should have recorded every occurrence in all its aspects and manifested forms.

  From a genetic viewpoint, they regarded a proclivity to rebellion as an important telltale sign.

  The baroness also thought it outrageous that a person should be grinning all the time, unable to look at anyone without grinning.

  Hans, you are behaving preposterously, my boy, your behavior is simply impossible, that is how she chided him.

  But her son listened to her less than to anyone else.

  Every year several boys tried to throw away their lives; only the childish methods or the results differed. But Hans took nothing seriously—the baroness had reason to worry about him, for it didn’t matter what she told him; he did not care about her motherly pain and sorrow, did not listen to her chiding or warning; she might as well have talked to the wall.

  He’d follow her with his wide-open, slightly wondering, incredulous eyes as if out of curiosity, so as to fix in his conscious mind her every gesture; emotionally he remained far removed from everything. In this the baroness recognized herself in him, and when that happened she fell silent, contented. Even though it was the boy’s father who looked back at her with those rebellious, challenging eyes. It was as if, relinquishing their ritual sentimentality, the three of them had suddenly become closer. And none of them could deny their shameless intimacy.

  This was Hans’s fourth year in the boarding school. Had they not opened this school, his mother would have had a problem finding a place for him. Several times during those years, he had lived through a peculiar hour or day, such as today, but unlike the other boys he found nothing to object to in the leap to death, not even the first time. At most its finality surprised him rather benignly. Those boys had saved their integrity, which everyone else loses several times an hour until they’ve used up their last reserves. He appreciated the suicide boys’ perspicacity, their consistency. In the depths of his soul he approved of them, considered them superior to those, including himself, who were willing to endure their lives simply to stay alive. He put a good face on his life, since he didn’t want to make his own or anyone else’s life more difficult by whining or complaining; he became fate’s disgraced conspirator, and with his entire physical being he suffered from existence.

  He constantly felt that the raw materials of his body, his organs and limbs, had been put into the wrong skin, and the soul that was added was inappropriate to such a skin or such flesh. He profoundly disdained those who spent their lives eagerly fulfilling their filial duties and paying naïve respect to their parents. No matter what. Anyone can deceive people like that and make them do anything. In his eyes, those boys were laughable creatures. Still, in his disdain he failed to overcome his deeply rooted religious presentiment that perhaps the devil had tempted the boys when they threw themselves into the depths.

  And now another school year was over. During the short summer vacation he had to stay here, could not go to Berlin. And, because of her work, the baroness could not come to Annaberg.

  While roaming about alone during these three weeks in the enormous Erzgebirge landscape, he thought a lot about these matters. But even in retrospect it did not occur to him to be horrified, as others were, by the suicides. At most he found it ridiculous that some of the boys miscalculated the direction of their jumps or changed their minds at the last minute and were caught on the first rock and were injured but did not die. Or those whose plans were faulty to begin with. They were ready to throw themselves onto the tracks of the narrow-gauge railway, the idiots, when they knew the train had to slow down before the viaduct and would only cut off an arm or a leg.

  Occasionally the feverish desire to free-fall seemed to spread like an epidemic among the boys. It was safest to jump off the viaduct. As if every school year demanded a living sacrifice to frighten the rest of them and make them forget their own attraction to it. As if the suicides were offering up their mangled bodies to their mates. And to have one successful attempt, several boys had to try it; there were always more of them prepared to do so. Whether as dead or as wounded, the boys who made the attempt were never seen again. There were no funeral services or memorials; the counselors conducted no investigations that might have revealed who had assisted the suicides in their preparations.

  Alone and unnoticed, it would have been hard to do anything. Obviously everyone had accomplices, and this kind of friendship was no less a threat to society than a collective rebellion. Baron Schuer himself viewed this infectious inclination with some anxiety, but after consultation with pedagogical and psychological workers from sister institutions he concluded that, statistically speaking, the phenomenon was not extraordinary or worrisome. It was necessary to take certain risks in an experiment of such scope.

  They did not reprimand the survivors in terms of religious morality either; instead, things continued as if nothing had happened. For the living survivors who had helped other boys to kill themselves, this lack of reprimand, especially the lack of religious reproof, marked a kind of limit on their own impunity.

  A certain stillness, an unnamed shame, filled the empty spaces. Among the boys who missed their self-destructive mates, anyway. Being silent made forgetting harder. One of the priests at St. Anne’s should have commemorated the unusual events—at least from the pulpit in Annaberg, when on Sunday morning the counselors accompanied the boys who showed up for early services. Every Sunday, those counselors turned the simple act of preparing to go to church into an elaborate procedure, using it to see who were the believers, who the dissemblers, who might go just for the fun of it and then during the service end up scandalizing the town with their giggling. Hans showed up for services, but not because in his faith he wanted to follow his mother’s example. Yet the priests, whose rela
tionship with the demonstrably pagan counselors was obviously strained, never mentioned the events in any sermon. It was impossible that they did not know of them, but one couldn’t tell this by looking at them. Hans had the impression that the communal silence resembled the behavior of a free valence in a world of chemical compounds, forever dangling in the empty universe in hope of combining with something.

  After all, the the ones who had perished were flawed specimens—this must not be forgotten for even a moment. A pagan thought, and Hans did not understand how the priests could approve it.

  He imagined that their departed mates had the free arms of the living boys in their grip.

  And when it happened again, the physics teacher, Gruber, would take them the next day to the viaduct to explain again the laws of free fall, sometimes several times over. He did this each time a suicide occurred, using the very same expressions on each occasion, yet the boys never tired of his lectures. Whether the act had been successful or not, the poor fool had come to grief forever, Gruber explained as if for the first time. One group of boys was made to stay at the bottom of the viaduct while another group, led by the good-looking young teacher, clambered up to the railway embankment among the pine trees, and from there to the viaduct’s central pier; after they had performed the experiment the groups changed places. The teacher’s opinion was that the boys could understand the dazzling regularity of uniformly accelerating motion and the strictly physical character of human life only if they measured and experienced them from both perspectives. All they needed for the experiment was an authenticated means of measurement, an authenticated lead weight, and two authenticated stopwatches. The measure of uniformly accelerating motion differs only slightly at every geographical location; up to this point, it is easy to understand the premise. At the select location where we live, for example, the contiguous crust of gneiss strongly but uniformly modifies the motion. It is a general rule that the speed of a given body, while falling, changes equally in equal intervals. According to Gruber’s authenticated measurements, in the Wiesenbad gorge the speed was 980,839 centimeters per second. If, therefore, at the dropping of the accurate lead weight, the speed is zero, then in the second second of the fall it will be 980,839 centimeters per second, in the next second 2 x 980,839 centimeters per second, and so on; after t seconds it is t x 980,839 centimeters per second. From here on, only a few could follow the good-looking young teacher’s explanation, according to which, in plain words, speed is proportionate to time and it is therefore easy to figure what sort of resistance the body, falling at the given speed in the given time, will encounter when hitting the ground.

  The boys, who did not understand the logic of the calculation and would have liked not to think about the smashed body, about the boy whom they may have loved or sometimes hated, but who still hoped they’d do the measurements rights, at least mechanically right, usually watched the good-looking teacher rummaging with both hands in the pockets of his smock while moving his buttocks in odd ways. Walking back and forth in front of them, what was he looking for and what was he finding. Sometimes he became so involved in the explanation of the physical world that he stopped involuntarily, lifted something from his pocket, and looked at it a long time with innocent eyes, though he probably could not have said why he had taken it out and what it was he was seeing. He had in his pockets pieces of chalk, a pencil sharpener, an eraser, a ball of carefully rolled-up string, and a pendulum; the latter two went together. One could fit the waxed red loop of the string into the hook on the pendulum. Hans, for some inexplicable reason, particularly envied the teacher this clever little instrument. Or, in his absentmindedness, the teacher would reach into the depth of his pocket and at the same time stick his butt out and reach between his legs to scratch. The boys knew perfectly well what he was scratching, and they said he was scratching his balls. They happened to know he suffered from some skin ailment that might have been caused by venereal disease. Occasionally, he’d lift the wings of his smock and, reaching into his pants pocket, rearrange his testicles in a more comfortable position.

  He would halt his explanation while his symmetrical face with its handsome little mustache took on a dreamy look.

  The crushed bodies were taken not to Chemnitz, nearby, and not even to Dresden, but to distant Leipzig, directly to the university clinic where, after thorough autopsies, the families could receive them in sealed coffins. On this brand-new day, fallen on them from the bright blue sky, their hands messy with fine woodland dirt, the boys were standing in the botanical garden.

  One of them, named Kienast, happened to know that the researchers in Leipzig and Berlin were especially interested in the brains of the suicides.

  You’re making this up, Kienast, said one of the older boys hesitantly. I’d say you’re talking nonsense.

  And they know how to make clean work of it too, continued Kienast, as if he had not heard the older boy. If there’s anything left of the head, they saw around the dome of the cranium and take it off, like the lid of a pot.

  They don’t do that differently with others, so what’s so special about it, if you wouldn’t mind telling us.

  Listen, I know exactly how they get to the valuable brain.

  That’s not what I doubt.

  And they have to get to it.

  Come on, my little friend, they can’t suck it out with a straw through the ears or the nose.

  But I know how, the bookish Kienast kept repeating stubbornly and was hurt when the other boys laughed at him again.

  He was from Leipzig and his father was indeed a prosector, employed not by the university clinic but by the municipality. More precisely, he made very ingenious dissecting instruments, and Kienast claimed that this was a family tradition, because the whole family was made up of inventors. He often picked his nose, and the others said that he seemed to have invented nostril mucus. The older boy, known to be Hans von Wolkenstein’s best friend, had great prestige. In the boarding school, the boys conversed in exceedingly polite and bookish tones, but there was much cruelty; in fact, they concealed their brutality and cruel behavior behind politeness and dry argumentation. They would not burden one another with openness. At times they wove their sentences so circuitously and archaically it was as if they wished to hide their longings and desires from one another. Even in their loud skepticism, they never went too far. Now they were laughing mainly because of the tension suddenly provoked by the extraordinary event. The way adolescent boys laugh to stimulate one another to continued laughter. Some of them were gliding between higher and lower registers; others simply neighed. It was hard to imagine that someone who only yesterday had knelt right here to fish mole crickets carefully out of fresh horse dung and throw them into a bucket of water was now lying on a marble table, having become the object of scientific research.

  What makes the brain so precious is that you can make vertical or horizontal cross-sections of it. I wish to note that it’s your privilege not to believe this, insisted the one called Kienast, shouting over the laughs.

  There was no malice in the boys’ assault of laughter; they treated Kienast’s foolishness, and even his obvious character weaknesses, with indulgent love. He was a shitty little character, but they liked him, and for quite some time he had been under their protection. Whenever he was gripped by an epileptic fit, they literally formed a wall around him, cleverly diverting the counselors’ attention from him. They could not bear letting his secret be discovered; he became the pledge, as it were, of their secret resistance.

  They preferred to overlook his shitty little quirks.

  Kienast was small, fragile, incredibly mean and aggressive. It had become clear that even epileptics were not removed from the boarding school, because the researchers were just as curious about their behavior patterns as they were about every other deviation, though by law epileptics had to be sterilized. This was no laughing matter, and that is how he had become the silent object of their resistance. He probably tried to balance his threatened st
ate with zeal, while the others did the same with their manliness.

  It hurt his pride that his physical misery, whose origin was unknown to him, made him dependent on his mates.

  And then they progress cell by cell; in retrospect, they can find out the guy’s personal secrets.

  He had a complete story, told with quiet shuddering, about how different people had committed suicide.

  It was strictly forbidden to go near the railway that crossed the pine forest unless a counselor went with them, or to the enormous viaduct bridging the Wiesenbad valley or, higher up, the Ochsensprung, a rocky ledge barely protruding from the oaks that clung to a steep slope above the waterfall, from where, according to legend, because of a shepherd’s pact with the devil, the Wolkenstein estate’s entire herd of oxen had sought refuge in the depths.

  On paper, the counselors had to note every infringement. However, they mainly obeyed the school regulations by noting down when someone, or more than one, had violated one. Their aim was to gain a realistic picture of the various rebellious tendencies thriving among the boys and of their secret movements. On several occasions, when it was Gruber’s turn to wait for the small group of boys in front of St. Anne’s, he would take them not directly back to the boarding school but first to the municipal baths in Hauer Street, into the steam section and afterward to the beer hall on Johannis Street frequented mainly by miners dressed in their Sunday best; the boys ate there, and the older ones also received big glasses of beer.