Parallel Stories: A Novel Read online

  With their glow, fires lit up the low-growing forest, which still somewhat concealed the camp from unwanted and unauthorized eyes.

  Searching for anything potable, the living were roaming about or, hardly differing from the corpses, lying about in the smell of burning hair and scorched nails.

  Although they felt no hunger, they had an obsessive image of some moisture that must be found in the fibers of dead muscles.

  He was surprised to have hit on this unexpected idea.

  On tree branches, icy dew collected every dawn. On the mossy partitions of the barracks, fog settled every evening. Some moisture could be sucked from the moss, the branches could be licked, but there was no water anywhere. They could anticipate how sweetly moisture would spread all over their tongues.

  Because the electricity had not been cut off, nobody made it across the gate or fences alive.

  In such a short time and in such cold, flesh would not dry out, that’s what he thought to himself too.

  A boy a little older than he, crouching by the wall of one barracks, was trying to figure out how to cut the electricity in the fence, how to create a short circuit. Because beyond the electrified barbed wire the Niers river rolled lazily along, its waters strained clean by its sandy bed. He stared at this boy, in his heart feeling great warmth toward him while they discussed the electricity, but he had no idea from where he might have known him. He looked at him from afar, from close up, but he didn’t dare ask, because he was afraid of being mistaken and then it would become clear that he was the victim of a terrible delusion.

  Maybe they should dig out one of the fence’s supporting poles, which, with its weight, would yank out or snap the electrified wire.

  While they were talking, he seemed to have heard the gurgling of water near the grassy shore.

  But even for that, they needed a spade, a shovel, anything.

  They’ll dig with their ten fingers.

  And then he couldn’t stand it anymore and asked.

  No, not him, it’s possible that he knew not him but his twin brother, the one who burned to death along with the others, answered the older boy, but his twin brother wouldn’t have survived anyway, he was getting so damp for weeks but was unable to urinate, and when he succeeded a little, just imagine, he peed blood.

  They should get up and go look for something. They won’t get anywhere sitting around here making plans.

  The continuation he dreamed the next night. Everything remained the same. The misty grayness was the same. Although he knew he was dreaming, his mind did not spare him, it allowed the sticky smell of flesh to cross the spreading smoke; the nearby gurgling of the slowly flowing Niers remained the only hope.

  He was amazed that in the meantime the boy, who unfortunately was not his twin brother, managed to create a short circuit, and only a lone church candle placed on the long shiny walnut table illuminated the Pfeilen council chamber. When anyone raised his voice, every word reverberated loudly under the dark brick vaults.

  All sorts of familiar things.

  Throughout the centuries, council members had grown accustomed to the echo in the council chamber; they certainly took it into account in their speeches, but now none of them wanted to hear his own voice multiplied or magnified many times over. Rather softer, as soft as possible, soft so that the unavoidable would be no weightier than necessary.

  The burning ditches must be extinguished, covered over. The bodies left behind must be buried.

  But nothing happened the way they discussed it in softer-than-soft tones, or in the way the secretary, in thrifty phrases, noted it down.

  Early the next morning about fifty people gathered on the square in front of the city hall. Besides the four councillors and the secretary, all in the upper age bracket, there were hardly any adult men among them.

  At the same time, at the edge of the Niersbroek apple orchard, three ungainly figures appeared, their heads wobbling on long bare necks as they walked.

  He knew they were Hungarians, like their three forgotten bicycles.

  The light stripes of their clothes and caps flashed among the low, wet tree trunks, velvety with gentle moss. They looked pitiful, not the way they would look later, in the movies, and they were aware of this. At their slightest move, foul smells poured from their mouths, their bodies, and their rags; they couldn’t ignore it. This peaceful late winter seemed unreal, as did the smells, the forest, the trees, and the fact that in this external world probably nothing had changed. One of them fell back to urinate behind a tree; this boy, familiar from somewhere, or maybe the twin brother of the one who stayed alive, leaned his forehead against the tree and also on his heavy, sharpened stake cut from an oak tree; each of the other two men had one just like it.

  These two immediately took cover behind the drying shed.

  People with pitchforks, spades, and shovels, women in turbans and boots, little girls in black coats, shivering wide-eyed teenage boys in their fathers’ short fur-lined jackets, energetic old ladies in their shabby fur coats pushing their creaking wheelbarrows were all about to start from the square toward Nordwall when high above them the bell began to toll.

  The tolling lasted only a moment; by the time people had quieted down and stopped there was only silence again.

  The religion teacher had merely knocked the clapper against the bell’s majestically heavy patinated body and then stopped it immediately.

  This was the agreed signal.

  He could not have finished urinating yet, he urinated for a long time and it was painful, he urinated blood and it hurt him, he moaned quietly, he was still at it when the distant sound of the bell was heard, and a man stepped out of the house wearing long johns with some of the buttons undone. In one hand he carried two empty enamel buckets, in the other a short-handled hatchet and an empty wooden basket. His striped shirt was open on his chest, and he had on thick felt boots. He pretended he was checking the weather, the sky, the horizon, but in fact he was taking furtive looks in every direction. They did not understand why a person who has things to wear does not put them on. He probably has a fur jacket and a coat, which they will take away from him.

  Whatever the man was afraid of, he expected it would come from the opposite direction. Therefore, before heading for the well, he listened in that direction.

  His fly has been open since last night when it became warmer and warmer by the fireplace; he’d spread out, chewed on some prunes, then taken his prick out of his long johns. It had a powerful smell because in light of the impending evacuation the enlisted men’s showers were no longer heated. He had to work for a long time before his pleasure took the edge off his anxiety and he stiffened properly. He spat into his palm, spread the saliva, sweetened by the prunes, around the bulb of his penis, making it even more sensitive to the hard surface of his palm. By then everything was coming together just fine. He licked the taste of his prick from his palm and wasn’t bothered by the strong smell of his ass either. But he wouldn’t dare reach into his hole yet. He was always a bit afraid of reaching into soft shit, but his rectum seldom remained unclean. It had grown light enough by the fire for him to see himself grow darkly erect against the flames, his purple bud open and then close under the folds of skin; but it wasn’t so light that he would have to be ashamed. And now he could do everything nice and slow. No need to hurry. If it got dry, he made it more slippery with his spittle, but the excitement had already squeezed out the fore liquid, the liquidum seminale, also known as seminal fluid, through the wide-mouthed urethra, which made it slippery and increased his pleasure. With the tip of his finger, he could reach a little into his urethra, but that turned into a terribly painful touch, too deep.

  He could be satisfied with his cock.

  His cock had a nice curve. There were women whose clitorises were located unusually high; his wife was one of them.

  He didn’t mind; at least he could feel each time that he could satisfy even those women.

  That’s how they lived with each ot
her.

  To prevent everything from falling to pieces, he had to put up with her. It hadn’t occurred to her for half a year, for example, that the girls should wash the drying racks, holy shit, he had to swallow this kind of thing each and every time, he had to put up with her. Before getting married, he would never have thought that things would be this way. Even though older men had always told him, laughing their heads off, don’t ever get married, buddy. Whenever he got involved in some little adventure, he was glad that thanks to his experiences with his wife, he had an easy time of it with other women. His daughters inherited their idleness from her, from whom else would they have. Their clits, as far as he could tell, were locked between their large swollen labia down there pretty deep. Maybe it was her laziness, her slowness, that had made him fall in love with the damned woman. She got excited very slowly, it took her forever to come.

  All he had to do was slide it upward when he pulled out, and then he could enter again, but he had to do it for a long time, evenly, and to keep sliding it.

  He did not notice that this was what he was doing for himself now.

  He was used to it.

  He kept jabbing the swollen rim of the head with one of his fingers held apart for just that purpose.

  This is what is on his mind; he doesn’t want to think about anything else. When he pulls it out, he slides it up and gives the clitoris a twist on the thick rim of the bulb. Has to be careful not to come as a result of his active imagination, but his breathing is becoming heavy. He wants to prolong it. He searched his mind for women of whom he had more innocent memories. He saw only female limbs, could not imagine anything else, only gaping cunts as he filled them with his cock, there were no faces, no whimpering, nothing belonged to them anymore.

  He didn’t need anyone or any fantasies anymore. With his other hand, before it was too late, he crawled into the crack of his ass, getting stuck in his slushy long hair, but with a forefinger he quickly found the way in through the wrinkles of the sphincter muscle made slippery by the heat.

  It was too late, he couldn’t quickly stop anymore, he whimpered, let out long howls, remembered the burning men, there was no point anymore in pulling and tugging the petrified head of his prick. Before the sperm shot up, all he could do was yank back his legs and lean forward so he wouldn’t soil his underpants or shirt. The movement took away some of the pleasure, but the tremendous sight added something. It erupted with more strength from somewhere deeper; his mouth was set to howl not only from the usual self-gratification—and the beastlike bellowing stuck in his throat—but also from astonishment.

  With what power was each stroke bringing out of him what enormous amounts. True, he hadn’t had an ejaculation for at least five weeks. He shuddered, grew stiff, held his member as if it were a stranger, and screamed. A veritable puddle collected in front of the fireplace, the reddish flames threw a dim light on it, and fresh jolts made additional splashes.

  In the generated heat, he scrubbed his hands.

  Then the several days’ accumulated exhaustion finally came crashing down on him; he did not even clean up the place, did not close his fly, and in the morning he awoke with his stiff large-headed cock in his hand, just as he had dropped into bed with it the night before. Or he must have grabbed it later, because first he had somehow pulled the quilt over him.

  It’s a good thing they didn’t surprise him in this brute sleep of his.

  Now he carelessly left the door of his house open.

  He put the buckets down by the well, careful that the handles made no noise. One is very seldom afraid of what is about to happen. His plan was to heat water in the kettle and, since he had the chance, not only give himself a thorough wash but also clean the drying racks sticky with prunes.

  They always dried the apples first.

  He had to be careful not to let the rack absorb the smell of the other fruits.

  In the silence of the foggy forest only a gentle dripping noise could be heard. He crossed the grassy yard and closed the shed door behind him to muffle the thuds of chopping wood as much as possible.

  The three men did not immediately recognize him in his long white underpants, but they could hear him whistle as he worked.

  The two men wearing prisoners’ uniforms looked at the third one behind them, and they understood each other.

  From the distance, they heard the screech of a pheasant.

  The youngest of the three sneaked behind the door of the shed, ready to strike when it opened; the other two, bending low at the waist, ran to the house and, clinging to the wall, gained entrance in an instant. They couldn’t have known whether there was somebody else in the solitary forest lodge standing there in the middle of a long, not too wide clearing, surrounded by bare fruit trees. They half expected to find a family at breakfast inside.

  Döhring, however, had not wanted to endanger his family, at least not in this period of transition. Things would sort themselves out later.

  Because he was branded under his armpits, he decided it would be best if for the time being he stayed by himself.

  The religion teacher who that morning relieved the bank director in the tower shouted down to the people that there was no big trouble, no reason to be afraid, but some group was approaching, that’s how he put it, probably from the outside. Yet he also thought that no one had stayed alive out there. There are about twenty-six of them, I’ve counted them twice already, he shouted. The oddest thing was that they were coming in close formation, just as they had once been marched out to work.

  In close formation, twenty-six of them, he shouted.

  People on the ground could not see the religion teacher in the open tower, but he could see them, small white faces above the darkly shining stones, turning toward him. Even their shivering reached him, but he chose to look through his field glasses again. The shivering was his own. He could see there would be trouble after all. They held things in their hands, sticks, boards.

  As soon as they reached the first houses, they moved right in.

  Who could have anticipated this. This meant that the camp guards had left behind not only corpses but living prisoners as well.

  Get going, he shouted down to the square.

  But those on the church square did not understand where they were supposed to go, they wanted more precise instructions from above. The other people were already entering a second house, but the religion teacher was so paralyzed with fear he could not make any corrections. Or rather, for long moments he had to cope with the thought that the fate of this village of Nordwall, with all its inhabitants, was now in his hands. That meant nothing but trouble. Had he called out to them immediately he might have been able to save some of them, but he kept quiet, and they all had to perish.

  They kept coming on the road, in files of three; three of them veered off at the third house and entered it.

  They had already drunk from the water of the Niers; what they wanted now was food, warm clothes, money, and revenge.

  When the religion teacher from the tower hysterically made people understand what they should do, since some were already jumping out the windows of the first houses, they quickly took off toward Nordwall. By the time they got there, panting and exhausted, the village was in flames, and although some tenants managed to get out at the last minute, others, beaten to a pulp and frozen in their own blood, were awaiting a fiery death. Seeing this sight, the townspeople knew no mercy. They knocked milk mugs out of the mouths of some; some they tore away from pantry shelves along with fruit jars clutched in trembling fingers; they took some prisoners out of clothes closets from among hidden furs or biscuits, or caught them when, trying to escape, they got stuck on fences or high hedges.

  They beat them to death with spades and shovels; they pierced the hearts of twenty-five of them so they would never rise again. Some resisted fiercely, and many of the townspeople, despite their numerical superiority, were left on the scene badly wounded. The twenty-sixth got away. They couldn’t find him, or the
religion teacher miscounted. But they did not give themselves enough time to see to the wounded, help put out the fires, and calm down a little. In the heat of killing, they piled fresh corpses on handcarts, pushcarts, wheelbarrows, on any old conveyance; they were proud that there were so many corpses and that they were the ones who had produced them. The corpses were dripping with blood and slippery with splattered brains, there were too many ears, noses, truncated parts; hastily they collected what they could find and then pulled, tugged, dragged their burdens to the burning ditches to be done with the job before dark. The damn ditches were far from here, and they had already lost a lot of time.

  They reached the camp in the afternoon. It was impossible to tell whether humans or animals had picked and gnawed so brutally at the corpses lying on the deserted roads.

  To be honest, nobody tried seriously to answer this question.

  The important thing was to burn the corpses as soon as possible so the ditches could be covered over and the land above them properly plowed.

  The sole escapee who survived was picked up by a British patrol near Venlo, among the greenhouses of St. Thomas Monastery, and at this very hour he was regaling them with the story of his escape while they fed him with lukewarm sweet condensed milk, covered him with a blanket, though his whole body kept shaking uncontrollably.

  Slowly, slowly, motioned the British officer, there’s plenty more where that came from. Take small sips. You’ll get more, but first we’ll give you a bath, put you in a nice warm bed. In the meantime, I’ll bring somebody who speaks your language.

  So until that time he saw not him but his twin brother.

  He screamed in his sleep that he did have a twin sibling, after all, and it was a boy.

  Yes, he mixed them up.

  From which he gathered that, luckily, the other boy had made a mistake. His twin brother could not have burned to death if he reached this place and was still alive. Because of this final realization that put everything in its place, a happiness of enormous proportions and unknown source gripped him, though he knew he was dreaming; still it was as if he were rescued, because at least in his dreams they were both alive.