Parallel Stories: A Novel Read online

  Thus far, no one had had a chance to compare the student’s statements with the coroner’s opinion.

  Nor had anyone asked what the hell such a seemingly well-situated gentleman was looking for at night or at dawn in the disreputable park, or, if he had not been a corpse for very long, why was it that the snow on his arms and shoulders had not melted. Anyway, the detective still had many other things to take care of in the other case, of the patricidal girl. He also knew there was no point in racking his brain before he had all the forensic evidence in hand. The mother did not take the blame upon herself as an act of self-sacrifice but because it was her only chance for an acquittal. If her daughter admitted her deed, the mother could be punished for continued complicity. Sometimes it was better that Kienast put his cases to sleep in his mind, letting them continue working on a solution by themselves. And when in the afternoon, half-asleep and tired, with barely enough energy to mail some of the completed reports to the Public Prosecutor’s Office and to the Federal Investigation Department very quickly, his glance fell on the young man’s name again: Döhring.

  Interesting, how these deeply neurotic characters enroll, if they can, to study psychology and philosophy. Which rather harms than improves their chances. In a few years, they become much smarter, but this does not necessarily make them more aware of their own problems.

  He laughed aloud, and when he saw the young man’s address, Fasanen Street, he added several contented nods to his self-contented laughter. The young man has no worries, can go about getting educated with no fear of going to the poorhouse, he thought to himself, and then he quickly put the freshly opened file into an envelope—that is to say, assigned it to his current cases.

  And early the following morning, the student, just as he had planned before, took the train out of the city.

  The Creator Wanted It This Way

  Whenever he left the city, he always felt as if he were giving up something for good, as if he had irretrievably left something behind. He paid little attention to these passing feelings, though he did register them at some level, because they offended his life principles.

  He had nothing but contempt for sentimental people; he rejected emotions. Not to mention a kind of involuntary and irrepressible trembling that confused him completely. It reminded him of disorders and agitations he had otherwise carefully ejected from his memory. He had no idea where the trembling came from or how it left his bones and muscles, but he decided that the previous day had been much too emotional for him and he had better forget the whole thing. He didn’t want to bother with the act of forgetting either. To be precise, he was busy trying to forget about forgetting things.

  From his present point of view, the city looked like a vast and bleak shunting yard. His train clattered across switches; birch trees were growing between abandoned tracks.

  If he had taken his feelings seriously, if he had not rejected them, if he had allowed them to work on him at their own pace, he would have had to let his own bitterness and loneliness come too close, everything that caused his unhappiness and that he could not and would not want to acknowledge.

  He had lived in the city for two years but had neither friends nor acquaintances. How else could he explain this except that this was the way he wanted it to be.

  He did not say that yes, I am a prematurely embittered, rather sad person and the reason I chose to study these sciences is to steel myself against constant suffering, to give my mind some means to battle my gaping doubts, and perhaps these studies will help me find out what makes me suffer.

  Listen, people, he would have shouted, all day long I pretend that everything is all right, but that makes me suffer even more. Help me, somebody, anybody, come, knock on my door, break down my door, anytime. No, he did the exact opposite. He allowed his feelings to come close in his mind only so that his mind would keep lifting the burden of his soul. In this way everything went on its predetermined course in a normal fashion. He told himself that a person was condemned to be solitary from the outset, every person was lonely, and people deceived themselves most when, given their reproductive urge, they looked for an excuse to establish a lasting companionship and then claimed that in the other person they’d found their famed happiness. Let them look to themselves. That would turn into their greatest grief. They know this in advance, still they go ahead. He is the more fortunate for having no inclination toward such self-deception. He can see that others do nothing all day but hate, miss, desire, adore, and possess one another, while he desires no one, misses no one, gets along fine by himself, and therefore has no one to torture or hate. A profitable situation: he can afford to observe dispassionately what those unfortunate ones, defenseless against themselves and everybody else, are doing to one another.

  He really did not feel sorry for them.

  Döhring’s manners were cool and negative enough to keep people from seeking his company; of his exterior, one could say it had nothing irregular about it, but it was more impassive than exciting or interesting. He had contempt for everyone, including those dead authors whose books he was fond of reading. The lives of these writers were full of all sorts of disgusting and chaotic matters that left their traces on the immortal works. This was an area he would not enter, even though he had no partner to discuss the issues about which he thought often and passionately, because no one had ever asked him his opinion on this or that subject, let alone shown need for his tenderness.

  He kept looking out the window until the train pulled away from the city.

  As if trying to restrain himself or hoping that these wet gardens, sooty walls, cheerless railway yards, and dreary backyards would detain at least his gaze, would not let go of it. How characteristic of him that all this time he kept open on his lap the book he was about to read. As if sending out involuntary signals saying, please, I’m a busy man, do not bother me needlessly.

  He could not turn his head away, he could not let go of the city.

  He was afraid that in his absence, while away from the city, they would accuse him of something. He was thinking not about what he had done or failed to do, what his imagination was doing or what was happening to him, but about the possibility that while talking to that detective he might have put some things the wrong way. Not only had he left himself exposed, but with his chattiness he might have unleashed a mass of immeasurable and unpleasant consequences. Yesterday’s nervous fever left no external trace, perhaps a slight cold; he was sniffling a bit. An observer would see a stern, calm, tall young man who was daydreaming, but yesterday’s fever had spread throughout his cells, flooding and infecting an important center of his brain. It had devastated the uniquely constructed, delicately built inner world in which until now he had lived in complete isolation; it had enlarged and inflated certain objects of his memory and imagination, leaving barely any space for the incoming outer world. When he got on the train and opened the door of his compartment, he automatically greeted those sitting inside; when a few hours later he rose, he said good-bye in the same automatic way.

  One of his travel companions, a young woman, was fascinated by Döhring’s motionlessness, but he did not even notice her.

  He got off in Düsseldorf, where he had to wait for his twin kid sister, coming from Frankfurt, and he had four full hours until then.

  Usually, when she finally arrived, the entire station and all its trains would be echoing with the repulsive throng of harried, rushing and pushing people.

  They traveled home rarely, but these journeys had their own rhythm, which until now he had never thought of violating. The hours in Düsseldorf were as if the family, the neighborhood, everything familiar was gradually accepting him back. Even though he did not want to be reaccepted anywhere. He feared his twin kid sister—if only she were not a girl—who was much too close to him; he did not want his family. He would have liked to break out, but he could not have said to where. Out of this familial net that forever held him down and pulled him back, out of the circle of women. Under the lenses
of the security cameras, people, including him and his sister, were moving among the lockers in the left-luggage section; how laughable they seemed. Everyone was looking for the most secure locker, from which no one could steal anything. Döhring demonstratively threw his things into the first available empty locker. Shards of a broken beer bottle crunched under his feet; in a corner a homeless man was exuding his stink, probably the one who had dropped the beer bottle, and now was snoring drunkenly.

  And then, taking the usual route, he headed for his aunt’s apartment; she usually had a sumptuous breakfast awaiting him.

  These were their hours together, for which they both mutely prepared.

  It was a ten-minute walk, but when he reached her street he did not turn into it.

  An act with which he broke the continuity of a long-standing game harkening back to the dimness of unconscious childhood. The essence of the game was to assume that the beautiful aunt was his favorite aunt and, in defiance of their rather primitive and petit bourgeois family, the two of them would ostentatiously adore each other. As if in his effort to preserve his independence, it was his duty to adore not his kid sister but his aunt. The aunt was indeed a spectacular phenomenon: entertaining, cheerful, well off, in her fifties, who had worked for decades in the fashion industry, representing a reputable Italian international firm, and who had lived an almost ascetic, relatively liberated life. She traveled widely all over the continent, where at remote locations she kept many people with unusual skills busy: pearl stringers, linen weavers, lace makers, braid makers, and braid trimmers. The aunt’s need was probably greater for a favorite nephew of whom she could expect a great deal but whose existence did not demand the kind of responsibility she would have had to accept for a child of her own; and since at the time she would not dream of giving birth to a child, she lured her little nephew into this endless game. In fact, she separated him from his twin. She offered him the spiritual and financial aid that would help him leave the family nest, free him of tribal restrictions and take him into the big wide world.

  At any rate, they played the dangerous game of such a move being possible.

  The aunt lived near the Hofgarten in a very expensive apartment, and from the three windows of her dining room one could see the giant trees of the ancient park. It was not very cold that day in Düsseldorf, but the sky was dark and the wind screamed among the bare trees. Döhring took himself into this familiar park. He forgot about his twin sister, of whom, because of his own rebellion against the family, he always thought reluctantly; he forgot his aunt, the sumptuous breakfast, his deadlines and commitments; or more precisely, all of these were pushed to the edge of his consciousness where he could barely reach them.

  Only one thing interested him: the dead man, the man’s death, or death itself; what he had seen with his own eyes, and how he could make no proper accounting to anyone of what he had witnessed. He kept walking, not caring about anything, and that felt good. He knew where he was, knew what he should do, but was becoming indifferent to everything that moved or lived around him. Or rather, independent of his thoughts, he was preoccupied by one question: whether he was seeing a corpse on the bench, at the bottom of a hedge, among the trees. All he saw was an occasional squirrel and a wild hare here and there. As if the dead man still had a chance and the chance was a direct function of Döhring’s alertness. As if the abandoned parks of the world had been entrusted to his care and he had to search through all of them. He was also interested in knowing how the dead man would find his relatives, or how his relatives would find him. Does he have anyone at all. Would his fate take a better turn in the end, now that he had to perish in a public park in such awful circumstances, and what could he, Döhring, do about it. And what does death mean anyway; how could he put right what he had done. Or what he had failed to do. The possibility that he could still do something both excited and tormented him, something he kept on neglecting every second simply by not being where he was supposed to be, or, more correctly, the opportunity had passed irretrievably and others were acting in his stead, doing the things he should be doing.

  He should not have left the corpse.

  At the same time, he knew that the questions were so dangerous it would be best to forget them. After all, one does not find a corpse in the park every day. If he had found the corpse in that park, he surely would not find one in this park. A catastrophe is a single occurrence; it cannot happen twice. Though there is no rule that says one catastrophe cannot cause another. He kept hoping he would forget it all, because he wanted to; he had come here to forget it. He wants to. At most, he could find another, completely strange corpse. The wind seemed to be sweeping his creaking steps from under him on the pebbled path, the sensation of his steps. But he noticed that the reason he could not keep his mind on anything but the familiar corpse was that he was busy telling himself to forget it all. He kept turning over in his mind how everything had happened, what he had or hadn’t done, because he wished to recall most accurately the very thing he wanted most to forget and what he should tell the detective. And this thought filled everything with the corpses he would find. He did not understand why he had done what he’d done; he was not even certain it was he who had done what he had, and whether he was the one who every moment was neglecting something that should be done.

  He understood nothing, he was merely seeing a movie about himself that got stuck at certain spots and then flickered up and continued at some other location.

  And then, in the stormy, booming, bare wintry park an enormous absurdity arose in his mind, bringing him to a halt.

  He did not even notice he had stopped, because what he was thinking was that the Creator wanted it this way.

  I am his most faithful foxhound.

  He had never thought he had a Creator, or that this world had a Creator whom he might or might not know. Nor had it ever occurred to him that the Creator might want something from him. Nobody would do it except me. He saw clearly what he had to do; the thought made him feel very light, relieved, perhaps even a little happy. He also liked the role of the foxhound—the sniffing, the tireless running, the frequent spurts of urination. He felt the smell of the nearby river. Or the nearness of the large body of water, the mighty Rhine river, for some mysterious reason suddenly became significant; he could not see it from the park yet the wind filled his nostrils with the water’s cold scent. Because of it, he could hardly breathe, as if he had too much air. Now at last he reached the end of his brooding and confusion. He realized what he had to do, and that made him feel wonderful; he enjoyed himself as much as he enjoyed all the smells in the air around him.

  He has no choice, he cannot leave anything unclear, he must confess everything and he will.

  This urge had the strength of a calling.

  He could see himself, with the fallen quarry in his chops, running toward his master; he could not tell whether it was a man or a woman because it was the Creator and the Creator has no body. He also estimated that putting his decision into action would require additional strength, and this need had a direct connection to the powerful smell of the river, to all the other scents, to his surging vigor and to a surplus of air.

  He must retrieve the prey. As if he had told himself he must acquire the river.

  He was standing in the middle of a pebbled path under a sky continually revealed and concealed by swift-moving clouds. He must turn himself in. Although nothing could make him change his mind, the anticipated deed proved a little painful, in advance. To bare his breast. He feared being exposed again to Dr. Kienast’s persistently penetrating, almost melancholic, provocative countenance. Along with all the life-threatening dangers facing him, he also felt a desire for the dead man’s body. He could no more break free of the trusting pair of brown eyes than he could of the figure of the unknown corpse, the gentle, white, bladelike stripes of snow, the magical coolness of the discovery.

  He was still breathing, lolling on the bench, his arm dangling, and snow falling on him.


  He walked to the river, though he did not cross the wide road, did not go down to the shore, only looked at it from afar. Thus he signaled to himself that all this is not nearly final, he is only gathering strength; now he has to attend to a very different, interim but very important matter. From here he could truly see on what a vast lowland, vanishing into infinity, and under what a vast sky the city had taken roots. As far as the eye could see, low plains everywhere; on the plane of the sky, clouds moving on their way; on the earthly plane, cars speeding in two directions; on the river, heavily laden barges progressing majestically, hulls deep in the water. The river was filled to its brim, the windblown surface spread out thickly and reflected grayly. He stood in the wind for a long time, unaware of time’s passing. The aunt had been waiting for him for an hour and a half while he continued loafing and looking around, thinking that only a few minutes had gone by. He was enjoying the world’s booming, noisy, coolly fluttering fullness, emptiness, denseness, and flatness. The wind that had come up over the river clashed behind his back and rumbled through the park’s trees. But its rhythmic booming was sliced across by the even murmur of the city, punctuated by plaintive horns from tugboats. And they echoed long under the mute clouds rolling over one another; the openings between the clouds left behind a few quick or lazy light spots on the ground. As if beams of spotlights had been turned on or dragged across the landscape; it turned bright, became overcast or unexpectedly darkened as if twilight were approaching; and then glittering across the huge surface for a second, sky, water, and earth throbbed, the armor of vehicles dazzled, and then everything grew dim again. Nothing had ended. Probably his hunger reminded him it was time to put his plan into action. He remembered the set table at his aunt’s, the sumptuous breakfast. He turned around, started back, but did not continue on the promenade, under the trees, but turned into the quiet side street where elegantly reticent windows looked out on the park.