Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

You garbage, you shit, Peix would hiss, as if his teeth were being pulled; you pig swill, you shit, he hissed.

But why would he hit him.

He had never loved anyone like this, so senselessly, purposelessly, and unconditionally. As if he were wishing to redeem the other’s soul with his own. He loved him with every experience of his life, with his entire social wisdom honed on Marxism, with his messianic fervor; he loved the future in the boy. Then how could he possibly admit to himself that he had made a mistake. They should at least have killed Bulla. I made a big, big mistake, he said to himself. Although he could not acknowledge, not even to himself, that it was not a person’s circumstances that determined how that person would go. Not even birth was an influence strong enough to make a person good or evil. In Buchenwald he managed to convince his comrades with the same arguments he had used on himself, but here they reached the very end of the human world’s possibilities, and now he sees that there are no more possibilities, there is no future tense and there never has been one. Yes, here, in the very center of human misery and baseness, here, in hell, he wants to prove, he thundered to his comrades, that no one is born a criminal.

Where else, my dear sweet comrades.

But in the matter of criminality, the others had eyes too. They quickly called him to account about Peix, and he could expect the very worst.

He laughed at them lustily, at what they might have been thinking about him.

The comrades did not see how brazenly he was lying. But his comrades could see that a man who spoke and laughed like that was probably unaware of his own dangerous nature.

It was a very telling indicator that they called a meeting of cell leaders for Sunday afternoon without him. Bruno Apitz was there, in the bathhouse behind the laundry, and Fritz Lettow and Gustav Wegerer, and they sent for him only after they had made their decision about him.

They were going to withdraw him from circulation.

It was spring; the sun was warming everything.

A wondrous spring in the indecent woods of Buchenwald. A time when a man walking thinks, well, I’ve managed to survive this hard winter. And that he’s not alone. This is what he was thinking as he walked, because he really was not alone. Now only better things can happen. Birds were making a din, singing. A gigantic oak stood in front of the laundry. It had to be at least four hundred years old. The prisoners liked to think of it as Goethe’s tree under which he used to rest with Eckermann, who in some way must have been his friend, after all.* The way Peix was his. And when he thought of this, he somehow forgave Goethe too, which made him feel as if suddenly he’d found an explanation for nature’s terrible indifference.

Anyone going to the bathhouse had to pass in front of the laundry, but few people were allowed to walk freely on the camp’s roads and footpaths except for Kramer. The terrible bathhouse was an enormous white tiled hall, with more than two hundred showerheads in the ceiling, of which about two dozen were dripping, the sound of the drops echoing loudly. Through the multipaned windows, open on this Sunday afternoon, one could see the famous oak from a slightly higher angle; the woods were lower down and much farther away, vanishing into infinity beyond the electrified barbed-wire fence. The three men sat on a bench inside the bath, warming their backs and shoulders in the sun coming through the window.

He succeeded in convincing them that without the criminals they would not be able to win the battle with the criminals.

They asked him to wait outside while they made their next decision.

While they deliberated long and rescinded their earlier decision, Kramer waited in the wintry-cool shadow of the bathhouse, looking into the distance above the oak, above the woods. Until they called him back in, he shuddered slightly with fear, though he was not afraid of death. He was not afraid that his comrades would kill him. That would be more like a kind of mercy. There was no point in hoping or knowing that in the end his comrades would see reason. He was trembling a little. They can do nothing else, and he cannot do anything else. It was not his fear of death but his dread of life — that is what he feared so much, that they would thrust him out from among themselves, and then his entire life would become senseless retroactively and his death would be senseless too. All his activity until now would lose significance. There would not be an iota of sacrifice in his death.

But now he wanted to say good-bye to him; he was taking leave of his sensible life.

Gregor, he said quietly, and this was exceptional because in the four years when they lived in each other’s soul and physical proximity he had never said the boy’s first name out loud. In the barracks, the name sounded so scandalous that he instantly recalled the plank wall, warmed by spring heat, which even the fragrant cold of the woodland night could not quickly cool, where they, squeezed between two buildings, felt the warmth on their bodies. They were standing in the starless, deathly dangerous darkness with their pants pulled down, helpless and listening intently.

He knew a good place, Peix had whispered ten minutes earlier on his pallet. Kramer thought Peix meant a hiding place for something, like food, that he wanted to share; in a few minutes, he followed the boy. They carefully went around the latrines. Twice they had to wait for the searchlight’s beam to pass and then run quickly, one at a time, and then Peix led him here. Kramer followed the boy with alert attention and also with admiration; Peix had arrived only a few weeks earlier but was moving about as if he had lived at Buchenwald for years. As they stood trembling with emotion in the heat emanating from the two buildings on either side of them, Peix excitedly pushed his pants down and, shuddering with passion, groped after the cord of Kramer’s pants. It was as if they had washed the desire of pleasure into the sensation of danger and it was impossible to say which was greater. Kramer, surprised, rather felt, endured, or heard all this, but they could see nothing of each other in the darkness. Within the darkness was a more warmly outlined darkness, and this second quality of darkness was the other person. Which conquered them both, more than either of them had anticipated or wanted. Peix found Kramer’s hand and led it to himself, and for a while that sealed their fate, since from then on they could both justifiably believe that the other one wanted the same thing. Why would Kramer have resisted a kid in such a situation. From then on, the few significant moments of their lives were made up of hesitant, hasty movements like these, directed at each other, of which they were incapable alone and alone would not even have thought of, hasty, impatient movements that occasionally caused a bit of joy or evoked the memory of joy. These fractions of seconds thrust them close together, much closer than any closeness they might have known before. They were intent on fulfilling the obligation they imagined they owed each other, if that is how the other one liked it; neither of them wanted for himself the small amount of good every man’s body knows of the bodies of other men; they both wanted to give it to the other. But it all turned out badly; out of sheer consideration for the other, it became difficult to restrain their aversion, embarrassment, and urge to laugh, so after a while they stopped, giving up, at a loss. They stood in the hiding place, foreheads touching, hugging each other’s shoulders and waist as strongly and mercifully as possible. They were careful not to let their loins make contact again.

But now Peix was paying no attention to him, as if he actually neither saw nor heard Kramer.