Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  Gruber paid; he paid for everything.

  And he said that they no longer had any secrets from one another.

  Which Hans von Wolkenstein, no matter how hard he thought about it, could not understand. Indeed, theoretically nothing could happen to or among the boys that the counselors would not have known about or would not have recorded in their report notebooks. But he did not understand what kind of secret Gruber could observe on Sundays in a steam bath filled with loud men. Hans was sure that Gruber observed a physical phenomenon that, theoretically, they could observe too.

  And that Gruber would bring this observation of his into some relationship with the boys’ religiousness or faith. He did not dare ask anyone what Gruber had in mind. The body of anyone jumping from the Ochsensprung would first be smashed on the waterfall’s enormous ledges, but the water would carry the body farther, pushing and hurling it down to the next rocky ledge.

  The data gathered from the counselors had to be put into the pedantically documented system of parallel scientific examinations; all data had to find their proper places; there could be no information that, in relation to the expected research results, was not important or interesting. The pupils themselves readily accepted this principle; they knew better than anyone the generally accepted genetic norms and rules. They knew that none of them had a flawless Nordic origin, least of all Kienast. After all, this was the reason they had been brought together here, this is why they’d been picked. Gruber’s origin was different, however; he proudly told them that all his measurements were pure Nordic. Which they watched with great interest and suspicion. Being near him, they felt their own sense of inferiority strongly. The number of peculiarities about him was too many as it was.

  They distrusted him, if only because he still lived with his mother, who served them delicious streusel cake when she hosted them.

  They had to be here for the experiments; they could conclude that from Gruber’s remarks, but they never talked about this with anyone, never about anything like this.

  But why were they, and not their siblings, who were also thoroughly examined in outside clinics, at the school. They asked each other about their origins and defects; it would have made no sense to keep them secret. There were no Jews among them. At least they had no knowledge of any. Secretly they had to know everything, so they could have a better picture of their own situation. Or what about their parents, who had turned them over and exposed them to this continual examination when they themselves were the cause of their children’s dubious status. There is a kind of sexual or amorous heedlessness in the world that cannot be corrected. Kienast’s mother was Mexican, Christian but not Aryan. Something one could not see with the naked eye in her son, but the family was aware of it; they knew it would show up in her son or grandson, and the latent biological conformity filled them with a peculiar dread. If only because of Kienast’s truly spectacular epileptic fits. However, Kienast found it hard to imagine what would have happened if he’d been born not to a mestizo woman but to an Aryan one, whether it would have been better for him. Shackled by a certain physical hypochondria, the boys observed themselves and one another as if expecting some secret ailment to appear at any moment, or some racial impurity whose carrier they had become because of their parents’ mating.

  He loved his mother; how could he not, even though it would have been better to hate her since he could not forgive her his birth.

  And that she had let these people take him from her.

  Or if at least she had chosen another mestizo for her partner and not his father, or stayed in Veracruz so her son would not have been born here, as an epileptic.

  And now he had to be ashamed of his mere existence.

  And why do their parents pretend that this is a high-class boarding school for boys, as if they knew nothing else about the place.

  About what is happening here.

  And as if they, the boys, had only to discharge their filial duties. To satisfy their parents by doing well in their studies in all circumstances and by demonstrating exemplary behavior. Everyone knows that parents want to give their children the best of everything.

  Children have to be grateful to their parents all their lives.

  However, despite its well-kept appearance and exceptional status, there was something ominous and grave about this boarding school.

  Hans was glad that at least his father had finally disappeared from his life; at least he wouldn’t be around putting on airs. Sometimes he felt that in this harmlessly desolate landscape and in the rustically styled, bare-walled building there was too much yellow-brown, as if the earth itself had made the building’s substance so heavy; he was disgusted by all the gneiss surfaces glittering with mica. And the surroundings, or his family history, depressed him because here everything was damp, skin-colored, smelling of cold stone. Sometimes his conscience would be gloomy for weeks. He did not understand why he had to be born here or why he was born at all. The rocks, the retaining walls, the northern and western sides of the building wept all day long. At other times, under the influence of other glances, mainly from the eyes of strangers, this was a wonderful, idyllic landscape far from human settlements, a cozy human nest, an old hunting lodge in the primeval forest where everything was well cared for and lived in sensible harmony with nature and with its own nature.

  He would marry a blond, blue-eyed, pure Nordic woman and thus he might correct to some extent what his mother had ruined with her careless step.

  The others could not have known his family history. It was not clear where he had learned the story himself. The enormous soul-lifting mountain valley, as strangers enthusiastically called it, seemed to hover in a haze even in daytime; it was their family estate. He rarely managed to learn anything about his own history from his mother, but their old servants didn’t give a damn about the laws of inheritance and told him all sorts of things. The haze never left the valley. Outlines dissolved or disappeared completely in the morning or evening fog. One could not tell whether one was seeing mountain peaks or clouds above Frauenholz. At such times everything dripped, as if the plants or objects were weeping. Drops dripped from the leaves, remained poised on the tips of pine needles.

  Slowly, quietly, the gutters began to go pit-a-pat and then, as if it were raining, the increasing drops trickled from the wide, high-built roofs and gurgled ever louder.

  Scientifically based, vitamin-rich foods awaited the boys; smooth, unadorned raw furniture made of fine German oak and beech, all the furnishings and objects arranged with thrifty good taste; accommodating and friendly service personnel, and a warm pedagogical, educational staff radiating tranquillity, almost a friendly spirit. Teachers of special subjects were brought from Annaberg every morning on a special bus. The boys could choose from various private lessons or play different sports under these teachers’ supervision. They climbed rocks, boxed and wrestled, while others studied musical instruments or various living languages. Or simply sat at the brownish-red kidskin-covered tables in the ground-floor library. On the pretext of checking data for their papers, they sat under the light of the green-shaded lamps and secretly searched in handbooks and encyclopedias for the symptoms of genetic diseases from which they might be suffering.

  For some unfathomable reason, up here in the mountains botany became the most widespread passion among the boys. Spores, pistils, pollination, cross-fertilization; the rarely used terms themselves made a strong impression on them, along with dissemination, grafting, rooting, cutting and grafting of buds, the hotbed in the educational orchards, the sowing, dibbling, planting and transplanting in the cold bed, the phrase cold bed itself, the tree nursery, the winter and spring cuttings, the care of the saplings’ nursery, preparation of flower beds, planting on ridges and on hillsides. All these activities were attractive, extremely simple, and time-consuming, sometimes demanding protracted physical effort, at other times deep absorption and concentration. The activities deepened the boys’ patience and confidence regarding nature’s gr
eat processes, somehow supplanting religion, because it was from these activities that they had to project their vision not only to the following week but also to the following year or even to the lives of succeeding generations.

  Even if they were dealing with annuals.

  After a while they became so well versed in the life conditions of plants that at the mere sight of a given sample of a species they could review its entire growth season or even its entire life cycle.

  These moments were rewarding because of the weight of their knowledge. Still, their most permanent feeling was one of anxiety and ominous premonition. It sat at the base of their soul like a keel. As if hiding from their own probing looks, they were trying to discover how to satisfy the racial requirements that the accidents of their birth had kept them from fulfilling. And lo, they had barely returned from vacation—not all of them yet, adrift—and already one of them had put an end to it all.

  Schultze, one of their teachers, a world-famous expert on racial-biological measurements and measurement techniques, a very proper older gentleman with fuzzy silver-gray hair and cheeks made rosy by burst capillaries, had also come back to the school. A not easily approachable but very musical man, he mainly hummed and whistled to himself. Every month he spent a week, sometimes two, in his separate little room in the attic loft, full of instruments and implements that could be seen nowhere else.

  He ordered boys by name up to his office and he himself came downstairs only at mealtimes.

  Sometimes his word would tip the final judgment about a boy, but nobody, absolutely nobody, talked about this, not with the other boys and not with any outsider.

  They had to go up to him at impossible times.

  That is what the instructions were: they had to go to him whenever he called and no matter what activity they were engaged in at the time. There was nothing in the attic but two offices, convalescence rooms, storage rooms, and spaces for various discarded objects, kept in meticulous order behind locked doors and accessible only to the housekeeper.

  And to the unusual silence, which surprised everyone and immediately held them captive.

  Up here, one could hear, at most, voices or echoes of shouts from the other side of the brook, from the great meadow, or from the sports fields, squeezed in between high retaining walls and glistening with snail trails. Or Schultze’s singing behind closed doors; he often talked to himself in recitative, as if he were performing in an unknown large-cast opera.

  The boys would listen to the creaks of the floor or crossbeams while waiting in front of Schultze’s office.

  During the examination, Schultze kept his eye on the limb he’d chosen and his ice-cold instruments; nothing else interested him. Occasionally he’d jot something down but hardly ever said anything, preferring to point, indicating that a boy should turn this way or stand over there. Never looked anyone straight in the eye, probably wasn’t curious about the boys. The instruments clinked and clanged. If he especially liked something or was dissatisfied with a result, he would click his tongue.

  Let us now look at this marvelous distance, O Tibiale, wherefore hast thou receded so from Stylion.

  These were not Greek gods but measuring points on the human body.

  Or he would sing something like, O Symphyse, tremble not while from on high Omphalion keeps an eye on thee. These musical mutterings meant that the knee joint on a standing person with arms at his side was farther than usual from the wrist joint, or that the skin over the pubic bone should not tremble nervously, since he was doing nothing to it except, with his instrument designed for this sort of measurement, marking its distance from the navel. Not everyone feared him. The instruments were always cold, so even the bravest boys dreaded that first touch. In ordinary Latin dictionaries, the boys did not find the names Schultze used. They also worried that Schultze might touch their naked limbs and other exposed parts. Two life-size drawings of the human skeleton hung on the wall, with the measuring points of the body marked with numbers. One drawing, of the body in profile, had twenty-seven points; the other, a frontal view, showed twenty-eight points, all according to Braus. This mysterious name was written above both drawings in beautiful Gothic letters, but Braus could not be found in any of the encyclopedias.

  Schultze looked at the boys’ eyes while he took out the large leather case in which he kept instruments for assessing eye color. But the leather case so alarmed most of them—the imminent danger making their eyes ache in their sockets—that they quickly closed their eyes or buried their faces in their hands.

  In four black-velvet-lined cannonlike cases, glass eyes looked up at the ceiling. They were arranged in five rows, eight to a row, in trays that one could lift out of the cabinet. This meant that there were 160 differently colored and differently patterned glass eyeballs; under each eyeball, on a tiny copper plate sunk into the black velvet, the eye color’s number and letter designation was indicated. Schultze unpacked all this, bringing out all the velvet-framed cases and laying them side by side, the better to see his entire holding. At the bottom of the cabinet, on the last removable tray, there lay on the velvet bed a frightening instrument made of silver and resembling candy tongs, and a strong-smelling, hair-thin sandalwood fan.

  Schultze made his first determination with the help of the fan. Individual segments of the fan could be cleverly separated from the others and, along with small enamel panels that showed hand-painted images of the many different eyes, be held up to a living eye in order to identify its color correctly. Although he worked with a steady hand, in his professional excitement Schultze sometimes touched a real eyeball with these small panels lifted to the boys’ temples.

  Which of course was enough to make the boys wince.

  But Schultze would go on singing, don’t be so sensitive, you little fool.

  After this crude definition, he would reach for his ominous silver tongs, with which he could not only lift a valuable glass eyeball adroitly from its velvet bed but hold it with total confidence right next to a real eye. Throughout this activity, he shone strong lights into the boys’ eyes from the front and sides. And he preceded everything by dripping something into their eyes to keep them from blinking. If they resisted or blinked involuntarily, Schultze sang out that intrigue and scheming would not destroy the divine design, the gods cannot be tripped up, and the boys would get more drops in their eyes.

  For hours after the examination, the boys would wander about with numb eyelids and enlarged pupils or just sit motionless on a bench, heads buried in their hands.

  The light hurt.

  Or Schultze would sing, hark, hark, I need but a single secundum, lend me thy patience, Prince, I am on the trail.

  For the capital offense, the villain will pay forthwith.

  Sometimes the boys would keep rubbing their eyes to gain time.

  Don’t pick at it, don’t rub it, unless you want me to take it out with my tongs, my boy. What the devil, so it’s tearing, sang Schultze, and then they had to open their eyes obediently to receive the initial drop or the stabilizing drop or the drop against tearing.

  It was very quiet on this floor for another reason: right underneath, on the third floor, were the dormitories, two large and three smaller sleeping halls that during the day were off limits to everyone. All their windows had to be kept open regardless of the season. Even in the vaporous winter cold the halls were barely heated but, because of the high humidity, sometimes in the summer months they tried to moderate the temperature in the rather musty dormitories.

  On the second floor were classrooms and the so-called great hall with its two enormous stone fireplaces, thick chimneys, and a chandelier made of painted wood. One could still see, on the gilded rims of the small colorful plates at the base of the electric candles, remnants of guttering wax candles of former days. This large space with its coffered ceiling, painted with great artistry, had once been called the knights’ hall because of two full sets of knight’s armor standing at either side of the entrance. Everything here seem
ed to have been left where the Thum zu Wolkensteins, who had used them for centuries, abandoned them in somewhat poetic disarray, at which point the baroness turned over the building and the part of the estate that went with it for the protracted use of the institute.

  She did it mainly for political and scientific considerations.

  True, she received a rather high annual rent from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, but from the point of view of her career, it was more important that she have a safe place for her son. The part of the estate that officially belonged with the building included the broad valley with its fields in flower from spring to autumn; the watercourse, which at certain sections had been regulated; the loud waterfall and the woodlands of the gorges; and the pine and oak forests all the way up to the ridge from the Ochsensprung to Frauenholz, where only clouds roamed. Over the ridge, the baroness’s ancient estate continued in other forests, pastures, and fields, but in the land registry, this entire section was entered under an independent lot number. Baron Schuer now wanted to obtain ownership of the building for his institute, even if it had to be without the rights to the part of the estate that went along with it.

  But he did not talk about this at his first move.

  He was afraid that if he failed to take advantage of his situation with proper force and speed, Himmler’s ruthless protégé Wolfram Sievers would beat him to it—he might already have done so—and obtain the house for his own institute for research into Germany’s ancestral heritage, his own efforts on behalf of racial purification.* Several years of Schuer’s preparatory work would come to nothing; his was a scientific plan whose execution required at least another decade of research, if not two. He wanted also to somehow call the Führer’s attention to the fact that it was not propitious to have everything doubled in the Reich, and not only because of its costliness.