Parallel Stories: A Novel Page 12

  How old are you, asked one of the monks curiously.

  The question was so unexpected that, no matter how hard he thought, he could not answer it.

  Don’t tire him out, said the other monk. He can’t be more than fifteen.

  Or maybe he just can’t call out of his dream to tell us.

  I think he has to be a little older than that.

  It was odd that he could not understand the simplest things.

  His grandfather had taught Döhring that the devil always wears a disguise and never sleeps. Or even if he stops to rest sometimes, a cautious person never leaves hatchets, knives, sickles, or scythes unguarded.

  When the basket was filled with firewood, he put the short-handled hatchet among the freshly chopped wood, as was his wont, and took the basket under his arm. He kicked the door open with his knee. Nothing fatal happened in that instant. The flinging door of the shed covered the boy with the sharpened stake, crouching and waiting for him, and almost hit him on the forehead.

  Döhring did not look back, because the door worked on a spring and would shut automatically behind him.

  Unsuspecting, he walked toward the house with his basket.

  And the boy did not immediately follow him, because he was certain that here indeed was that German, either someone who looked just like him or the man himself, though he had had no contact with the prisoners until the last few weeks.

  But then he had revealed himself to them.

  He took after him only when the familiar figure had almost reached the open door of his house.

  He found himself facing the ones coming downstairs from the upper floor.

  Because they had found nothing in the house. This calmed them down, though at the same time the mute house with all its possibilities upset them. Their mouths and hands were full of dried apples and prunes, their pockets stuffed with them too. Up in the ice-cold bedrooms fruit stood in open sacks and baskets; they had stuffed themselves with fruit, kept on chewing. Here is the bad egg, look, one of them yelled in an incomprehensible language, his mouth full.

  He didn’t think he’d find us here too, added the other in German, which is to say, in the language spoken at the Niersbroek camp, and it sounded most like German.

  At the sight of the two live prisoners, Döhring was not only deeply surprised but about to turn around because he sensed, rather than heard, footsteps behind him, but just then a mighty blow hit his head. A single dark flash that scattered in bursting sparks. This seemed to make him feel lighter, but he did not understand what was happening, and then he received the second blow. He no longer felt the basket with the firewood in his arms, but he saw from close up the faces of the two unknown figures, and that made him feel like laughing.

  And before it grew completely dark with the third blow, the sense of being light was the last thing he comprehended, that the burden of life was being lifted from him.

  This time, it would have been better to have left his short-handled hatchet in the shed: this became his last sensible thought as the light of the sparks slowly faded into pitch darkness. He knew it was superfluous to think of anything else, he was already dead, even though he was still breathing and thinking. Sprawled among the firewood, he gave the impression of wanting to rise from his death.

  But you can see there is no more, one of the monks explained kindly, and enjoyed the pleasant fragrance emanating from his body.

  The monk had a scent like lemon drops when their honeyed contents burst in one’s mouth.

  Both monks wore thick white frocks.

  They tried to take the lukewarm mug from him; he did not want to part with it. The mug reminded him of something from the past, from the distance of eight long months he did not exactly remember of what. They tried to peel his fingers off the mug handle and make him stand up, but he insisted on remaining seated, pressing his soles hard to the floor of the unknown room. This made the monks laugh, as if they were enjoying his mulish stubbornness. And he tried to laugh along with them as they were laughing at him. He understood well that for his own good they could not give him more of the sugared milk and that they had to move on, go to some other place, yet his response turned into whimpering. He did not want to be taken from here. And he was profoundly ashamed of this.

  He whimpered and implored them, begged them and beseeched them to give him just a tiny bit more.

  Until he disappeared, that squat British officer had spoken to him in French, and with his words he delicately thrust out and retracted his red lips under his red mustache so that he looked like a snuffling Easter bunny looking for more to eat.

  The bunny just popped into his mind for no reason; he wasn’t sure it wasn’t a dream.

  The Dutch monks addressed him in German, informally, while he kept crying and pleading in his own mother tongue, almost as if he did not want them to understand.

  Which helped him a little.

  He had to overcome something within himself, something he would have liked, in vain, to hide from them; they understood that.

  And then he relented; let them take him, let them do what they wanted, as if he had been dissolved in the strange bodies and the familiar smells. The two monks laughed at this too, their Adam’s apples bobbing; they were enjoying themselves, and their double chins were trembling. They took him along white, sparkly corridors, their steps echoing. They descended an endless spiral staircase; this too seemed like something in a dream. Occasionally a tall window passed by; bluish fog was rolling in the twilight outside. He no longer felt himself, only the steps under his feet, though he could see his feet walking on the spongy cream-colored stone, his soles brushing along the chipped, worn-out parts that made walking even harder. The tall window kept returning; they were going down, but always to the same landing; the fog was outside where nothing ever wanted to end.

  Suddenly he reached the ground floor and they were leading him farther along a corridor where it was dark, though just below the vaulted ceiling were small, grated windows. There was a great hubbub and he was blinded when they opened the dark, strap-hinged doors of the bathing hall. In the thick steam, in the midst of shouts and splashing, he could see nothing between the thick white columns but a vast whiteness at whose bottom red fires were burning, dark hair, and glistening patches of faces, drenched dark hair on white bodies. In booths partitioned by white walls, white bathtubs stood under the vaults; white tiles sparkled, light coming from under white lampshades illuminated everything through the steam; hot water dripped from brass faucets and gushed from the many showerheads; fires blazed in large copper drums stoked by naked men, their buttocks spreading as they squatted before the flames; firewood was brought in from somewhere outside. They were bending toward and away from the heat, whispering, the British soldiers were soaping and scrubbing one another, shoving and jostling together with the Dutch monks under the hot water, shouting and drying themselves, throwing ice-cold water on one another with wooden buckets, some of them screaming as they sang.

  In the meantime, the helpless, large-bodied German, after having fallen on his face, lay before them on the green grass: their prison guard.

  It felt good to see his huge limbs twitching, now this one, now the other, as if he wanted to get up but couldn’t.

  Or maybe he didn’t get up lest they hit him on the head for the fourth time.

  You’re in a big hurry, aren’t you, said the second prisoner.

  Nobody inside, said the third figure reproachfully, and you had to waste him right away.

  Would have been enough to stun him.

  Now he won’t tell us where he put the money, that’s for sure.

  The asshole left us only his gun, we saw it as soon as we walked in, on the table, to have it handy for him, ausgerechnet on the table, peaceably explained the former, who produced the pistol from his pocket full of dried fruit.

  Before putting the weapon to use, he had to clean off the prunes sticking to it.

  Now that we’ve gotten this far, he added, grinning, m
aybe we should try it out on him.

  None of them would make a decision without the approval of the youngest.

  The one with the pistol handed the prunes to him.

  To the one who had been standing above the body, watching, mesmerized by what he had done.

  Perhaps contemplating all the many things he would still have to do. This was not his first murder, and he had the premonition that killing would fill him with great contentment. After stuffing a few prunes into his mouth, and while beginning absentmindedly to chew them, he raised the sharpened stake, which they had pulled out of the ground at the edge of a meadow, and plunged it into the nape of the lifeless man on the ground.

  No need to make noise with your weapon for no reason, he said to his comrades, while he paused in his munching.

  Although it slipped a little, the stake did pierce the skin and made a popping report when it reached the spine, but it slipped on the cartilage. The stab was not powerful enough to make it straight through the sinews and muscles. The strength of his arms and shoulders might have been reduced by his having bitten down on a sharp plum pit, removing the flesh of the plum with his tongue, letting the smoky, honey-sweet taste, which he had not experienced for so long, engulf his entire mouth.

  It was interesting to see how his two older buddies were serving him.

  They put the short-handled hatchet helpfully into his hand.

  He missed with his first blow, which made them all laugh simultaneously.

  Instead of the stake, he almost hit his own hand. With his second blow, however, he hit the stake fully on its flat end.

  Although the vertebra did not give—on the contrary, it returned the blow—the slippery wet fibers of muscle and sinew finally led the stuck tip of the stake to the space between the third and fourth vertebrae, where the gap kept widening and, after the third and fourth blow, was ripped open completely. He must have been bleeding internally, because around the stake’s dark, splintering pulp appeared a translucent liquid, barely stained by blood. With his fifth blow he tore through the windpipe, they heard a peculiar bubbling, perhaps rattling sound, and the stake became lodged in the frosty ground.

  In the end he shat in his pants for us, said one of the older prisoners, though he remained alone with his laughter.

  In an instant, the smell rose to their nostrils.

  All the more reason for them quickly to abandon the pinioned, stinky human remains.

  They hurried, did not even close the door behind them. They immediately found hunting outfits, ammunition, work clothes, warm socks, boots, striped and checkered flannel shirts. Not everything was freshly laundered, and so along with the clothes they put on the cooled-off scent of strange German male bodies.

  They would have liked to move on before darkness.

  They found nothing of value. As to money, only five imperial marks in a wine-red purse in a windbreaker pocket, even though they looked everywhere, turned everything over, while they kept eating and searching, eating and searching.

  Everyone in Their Own Darkness

  It’s a lot of hooey, the whole text, every bit of it, said the man standing stark naked in the door of his cabin.

  He had been leisurely drying himself for minutes.

  Now he would wipe his neck, now his ears, while turning his head to the rhythm of the words, and often he would reach between his legs with the thick towel.

  It’s of no interest at all, I don’t understand why you bother with it, came the second man’s irritable reply.

  Who’s interested in a text like that today, added the third man quietly.

  I see that, of course I do, how wouldn’t I, but it’s impossible not to notice what they’re doing, continued the first speaker, who might have been the most restless of the three. I think it’s worth keeping an eye on these comrades.

  He gently and quickly wiped off his testicles, then rubbed his luxuriant pubic hair, maybe a bit too vigorously, and when he was done with that, he returned to his shoulders and neck even though there was nothing left to dry there.

  Oh, André, my dear, the second one started again, a large, blue-eyed man with pale gray hair, who was irritated not so much by the affected lecturing tone as by the nature of the prevarication. It doesn’t interest anyone, believe me, not anyone. Not even you.

  You mean you know better than I do what interests me, called out the naked man from the cabin; his body was thin as a blade.

  A long silence followed.

  You’ll be surprised, but it happens that I really do, growled the gray-haired one benevolently.

  He spoke with a slight foreign accent, as did the man continuously drying himself—who sounded sort of English and stammered nervously like a little boy—but the voice of the gray-haired man was more German, powerful and reliably manly. According to his birth certificate, he bore the high-sounding name of a well-established family from Erzgebirge, without the title of baron, and not only because in Erzgebirge titles and ranks had been done away with, but because he had been born out of wedlock. Hans von Thum zu Wolkenstein would have been his honorific, and this became the object of much jesting, especially since, according to his official documents, he had the simplest possible Hungarian name, János Kovách. They called him Hansi, or Hansi Wolkenstein, a name that had a good dose of childlike kindness, about the same amount of loud contempt for Germans, and a portion of truth, since in his childhood the name on his documents had been simply Hans von Wolkenstein. His mother, Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein, had tried to soothe the indignation of the Thum family by leaving Thum off the birth certificate.

  Since the Middle Ages the Wolkenstein family had lived mostly on its name; they had not in fact been in possession of their magnificent fortified castle since the sixteenth century.

  His close-cropped hair was indeed, for his age, surprisingly grayish white, his eyes offensively blue. Opposite his friend’s cabin, wrapped in his light blue bathrobe, his large white terry-cloth towel wound around his neck, he was stretched out to his full length on a wide bench, leaning his head against the hairless thigh of the third man.

  He looked like a large wild animal, a kind of lazy cat, and occasionally he could not hold back caustic remarks. His friends thought him cynical because of his biting remarks, and perhaps he was.

  Or he may have chosen this allegedly manly pose, sometime in the past, as a permanent defense.

  The intimacy with which he rested his head on the third man’s hairless thigh obviously meant more than a chance physical contact.

  This third man, with his friend’s prematurely graying head on his thigh, sat at the very end of the whitewashed bench, a bit squashed against the backrest, and was looking impassively out the window giving on to the pool, which meant he had to twist his entire upper body uncomfortably. He had no bathrobe on, and one could see from his skin that he was a bit chilly. Maybe he should have put something on, but that would have meant tearing himself away from this minor bodily contact.

  Every mid-September, here in the Lukács Baths, large glass panels were put back between the columns supporting the upper floors, and in May they would be taken out again. In the open courtyards, the two swimming pools were surrounded by rows of wooden cabins on several floors, just as arcaded corridors surround a cloister courtyard. In summer it seemed that what one saw and heard was a cloister of bees: bathers swarming in great clusters around the sunlit multitiered beehives. As the nights grew cooler, the stairs leading to the cabins on the upper floors were closed off; in winter, snow settled on the corridor railings. But the sight was no less fascinating now. From the springs of Saint Luke, medicinal waters of various temperatures keep bubbling up, the warmest close to sixty-five degrees centigrade, the coldest seventeen degrees on the average, and the bath attendants mix them so that the water flowing into the so-called men’s pool is no more than twenty-one degrees. Those unable to swim can splash around in the warmer water of the women’s pool. But the moment the outside temperature drops, the open pools begin
to fog up, steam, nearly smoke; on overcast winter days, such a thick fog settles on the enclosed space that swimmers are always apologizing for bumping into each other.

  The vapors were fairly strong now too; a gusting wind picked up small clouds of steam and carried them along, or simply whisked the vapor off the surface of the water, which at once became blistery and ruffled. While the storm raged like this over the pool, the long hands of the clock on the opposite wall of the yard were making their indifferent rounds. But one could see the passing seconds only until another gust slapped the next burst of a shower against the clock’s convex glass cover; then the clock grew hazy for a while.

  It was getting to be half past nine in the morning.

  This third man was interested neither in the exact time nor in the spectacular display of the spring storm, and even less interested in what his friends were going on about. He made no effort to be polite, did not pretend to be interested. With other people, he was usually rather indifferent or at least very reserved, but this time he took strong offense, which he did not bother to hide; this may have been one explanation for why he chose to turn away from them, however uncomfortable it made him. The previous evening, when they had had supper at the Fészek Club, they had taken him aside and told him that today, as soon as the pools opened, Viola would be there with her husband; he should be at the Lukács by six.

  He must catch her, they explained, before she went in the water or, they suggested, when her old husband disappeared in the showers.

  He had overslept, had had to run, but he’d gotten there in time.

  It wasn’t that his friends had played a trick on him—it wouldn’t have been the first time, and he understood why they would—but in this instance he could not forgive them. Something, he could not exactly tell just what, had become too much for him. They simply wanted to lure him away from the Sports Baths so that he’d be with them and not alone, and mainly not with that silly goose he had been living with for a while. Viola did not come at six, or later, only the elderly dentist arrived; Viola was nowhere to be seen, which did not put him in a bad humor but, on the contrary, relieved him. And that is how he surrendered to hopelessness, which had been waiting for him with open arms. All three agreed that Viola, although a little loud, was an entrancing woman. His friend swore up and down that she had promised to come, they weren’t lying, he must believe them, but of course she was unpredictable. And he despised this place where every morning the crème de la crème of Budapest came together. He did not believe them. Viola was anything but an entrancing woman.