Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

When he looked at the boy, and he had been looking at him constantlessly for four years, eighteen hours a day, every one of his muscles, fibers, cells, and membranes told him, with a happiness that coursed through his soul, that this boy was his personal possession. This put him in the state of physical readiness one assumes when in love. Sometimes he wondered why, why was he not jealous or not more jealous, because when Peix came back from the laundry he felt no more than a dull thud or stab in his heart. No matter how exhausted he was, he wanted to start to wakefulness several times a night just to see the boy’s feminine face deep in sleep. Peix carried his mother’s face on his own, the face of an unknown woman, her milk-white skin and attractively ribbed full lips, and Kramer could not avoid the thought that he had known this woman. At night they often held each other, by chance and intentionally they would hug each other hard, pressing themselves to each other, or they gently touched and pressed each other’s hands. Kramer saw to it, took great care that they stayed together but never had to be squeezed into the same sleeping place. A night spent in deep sleep was one prerequisite for survival. He taught the boy more things than he himself could possibly have known. He realized that one creates not only one’s own sons, or that even if this boy was not the fruit of his loins, he would still make a man of him. And how could a man at the gate of some woman’s womb remember what he had done and when. He did not like remembering things like that; they had fallen out of his memory. He had been a prisoner for seven years; after the first long year in prison, this was the second camp he’d managed to survive in, along with Peix.

It was not that it hurt, that what was in him still hurt, but that he could not comprehend his own situation, that he should perish now when he was so healthy and well fed. They had taken an oath about what they would do if they both survived, that is what cropped up in his mind now, where they would go. They swore to each other what they would do if the other one did not make it. He would be the other one. He also knew that in these last days his death would greatly endanger his comrades. It would be like a signal, the criminals would know they had come out on top again. Unless the British got here sooner, or the prisoners weren’t taken away and slaughtered, which possibility always existed, the camp would slide back to the condition in which they had found it when they’d arrived two years before. The camp commanders knew they would get nowhere without the communists because only the communists had some consideration for others, yet it was in their interest that the criminals hold a superior position. Indeed, they smashed or weakened the secretly always-rebuilt communist cells in which it was virtually impossible to plant spies. It was just such a measure that was being taken now, Kramer knew.

It was not senseless, personal ambition that Kramer felt was ridiculous, not the eagerness of the will to survive, no, not that. One should stay alive at all costs, this he understood. He did not think the movement’s argument for breaking the criminals’ power was ridiculous, or at least for removing the threat of their superior force from the heads of many prisoners, ignorant men driven to bestiality. Surely reason allowed this much; at times he was even proud of himself. What he did find ridiculous was a man who, although identical with him, could neither comprehend nor avoid the last judgment. He and Peix could not go to Pfeilen to blow up the church whose tower they of course had never seen. They wanted to, so that those people could no longer ring the bell so peacefully and indecently every Sunday morning. He and Peix could not go to Paris together. Which they both had longed to do all their lives as ardently as small children wait for Christmas Eve. Maybe the little Huguenot, who in his former life specialized mainly in art treasures, would go there alone.

Success would also be denied because in his heart he had always kept a place for tenderness. Should blame no one but himself.

And then, dead silence in the barracks, for a brief moment, frozen stillness. The very same thing, although with a slight delay, in the noise of distant cannon fire that reached, separately, everyone’s consciousness.

That Bulla might have betrayed them.

Perhaps it was the low-hanging, heavy metal lampshades that were amplifying the fine humming of the strong lightbulbs. Several people had been beaten to death with these shades. The silence of about four hundred men; this too has considerable weight. During the last days, an even two hundred more had been let in, drawn from evacuees of one enemy-threatened camp or other; overall, there were now more than four thousand in the camp. Himmler ordered that these people be neither killed nor left behind to the enemy, an order that was impossible to carry out but from which one could deduce that the leadership was hoping for a favorable turn in the conduct of the war. There were so many dead that they could not be burned in the crematorium’s two small ovens. The bodies, like logs, were stacked in piles in front of the north gate. During the day when it thawed for several hours, the naked piles began to loosen and stink; the pale bodies slid and wobbled, while on-foot transports of exhausted people, screaming with hunger and filthy with dysentery, kept arriving. Kramer needed all his ingenuity and cruelty to ensure that they could stay together in the great congestion, at least in their sleeping places, and that they had something to eat; most likely, the kapos’ blows sealed the fate of several people who, unsuspecting, had wanted to crawl into those two sleeping places.

The newcomers fell silent together with the old-timers.

Many of them believed that König or perhaps Königer was the real name of the person who was now the focus of four hundred silent faces; even his orderly, who slept next to him, did not have to share his place with anyone. Some of them added the name Bear. Now they could see and hear that Walter Kramer was the name of this hulking, stentorian German who in the eyes of the camp’s veterans was king of the Pfeilen camp. Peix should have feared him too, because of his size and voice, but he did not.

A simple locksmith, a man like you or me or anyone else. A kind and dedicated communist whom the Gestapo had arrested in January 1939 in the brilliant snow-covered mountains. Since then he’s become completely gray. For four months, they kept him chained to a cell wall, his handcuffed hands tight behind his back. If it hadn’t been for his guard who out of mercy regularly loosened his rope for a few hours and took off the handcuffs, his arms would probably have had to be amputated. They arrested his wife, who, after protracted torture, asked him to end the nightmare by making a detailed confession. Hearing the request, what else could he have done: he banished from his heart the woman who had allowed herself to be instructed by his torturers. If he had acceded to her request, he would have had to betray more than a dozen men. Maggots settled in his festering wounds and by the time the prison doctor was willing to take a look, they had eaten a good-size chunk out of his shoulder and thigh. He had a barely perceptible limp and he could now not fully raise his left arm.

Of course they managed to get the information they needed out of other prisoners, his wife being one of them.

He had too much to answer for; he killed without giving it a thought.

By then he had been smuggling comrades across the Czechoslovak border, near Annaberg. These people had gone all the way to Prague or Moscow, or happened to be sent back from those cities with new assignments of illegal work. Kramer stayed mainly in Chemnitz and conducted operations from there, working with runners. He developed an entire network of smugglers and confidential collaborators whom he did not know personally but about whom he knew everything. It finally took a dozen agents to surround him and catch him. But not before he killed two of them. The last person he smuggled over the border was the young son of a Hungarian comrade of his named Kovách. He had to rescue him from the Wolkenstein hunting lodge, from a secret boarding school for boys well concealed in the Erzgebirge woods and used for genetic experimentation. He did not want to entrust this delicate operation to anyone else. But by then agents were following his every step. The child got across all right, a car was waiting for him on the other side, but Kramer was wounded in his shoulder and thigh.