Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

They hastened to satisfy his every wish.

At this moment, Baroness Thum, with some anxiety, was hoping that her old wish would come true and that she would be sent to Rome. Her boss was not known for personal conversations or insignificant invitations, and given his high position, his house ran on a busy schedule and he had his share of social obligations.

There could be no other reason for this sudden lunch invitation but that the professor wished to give her confirmation of her mission to Rome.

At least the baroness could not think of any other.

Indeed, in Schuer’s life obligation had a larger part than pleasure. Like fine clockwork, he was reliable, quick, dutiful to the point of humility because he wanted to satisfy his idolized father’s never-uttered demands for quality; and for the same reason he was diligent and painfully impartial in his judgments; it would be very difficult to accuse him of cringing before authority. He had the reputation of being a deeply God-fearing man, and in some way he may have been one. To this day, he feared nothing more than the withholding of love, though he himself was more likely to do anything than to express love.

His pagan experiences had compelled him to be an even more perfect Christian.

Whenever he agreed with the Nazi leaders, he was basically obeying the commands of his own conscience, expressing his own convictions, but he was far from agreeing with them about everything. Because he always kept a higher scientific or religious standpoint in view, his opinions had great persuasive power, which allowed him occasionally to resist or be blunt.

The prestige of his science increased steadily, for it proposed many direct or indirect solutions to problems concerning growing human populations, problems to which the governments of fast-growing mass societies throughout the world, whether aristocratic or democratic, were but helpless bystanders. There was a need for definitive solutions to a number of provocative issues concerning population hygiene. And the more pressing the demands for his science became, the more rapidly did his career blossom. His fairness and selflessness were above suspicion, and with his powerful insights he unerringly separated the essential from the unessential and was excellent at managing and controlling things. He also had long experience. After his professor and mentor Eugen Fischer* retired, they could not have found a more energetic and ambitious man for the delicate job of running the world-famous institute.

One might say he had the proper education and expertise to take the helm.

Of course, his appointment would not have been even considered had his origin, traced back to the distant past, not been pure Aryan. He instinctively kept his distance from racist groups because of his deep contempt for the hoi polloi, and he favored neither absolutism nor anarchy, although he had an aversion to the physical proximity or even spiritual presence of Jewish persons. The characteristic traits of Jewish thinking disturbed his composure and indeed his entire mentality — their penchant for emotional exaggeration, their spectacular ideas, their fiery gesticulations, their scientific bluster, their effeminate features, and their hedonism — but he never talked to anyone about these reactions of his and in fact fought them heroically, mustering the full power of his Christian conscience, as if he were trying not to feel toward Jews what he felt about people beneath his rank, and he was loathe to wind up being influenced by other people’s extreme expressions.

On his maternal side, he came from a noble Baltic family, on his father’s side from a no less ancient clan in Kurhessen, whose men traditionally became members of Hesse’s order of knighthood, the Althessischer Ritterschaft. His father had often taken him down in the mines, which were frightening but where they would walk for miles; Sundays were the days for these shared excursions, after church and before the traditionally late lunch. In mine baskets powered by horse-driven winches, they would be lowered hundreds of meters underground, and he learned, from his father’s instructions and also from the pressure he felt at the top of his skull and in his lungs, to gauge how far down they were at any given time. Heat and darkness ruled, yet strong, cool airstreams blew; the beams and support poles creaked in the silence. Dampness dripped everywhere but in some places water gushed in torrents only to vanish with strange gurgles into openings that looked like gullets of hell; at other places abandoned strippings might suddenly shift, with rubble slipping and slamming noisily into the tipcarts.

The family was not simply in the business of mining; it exercised the Schuers’ ancient mining rights.

Otmar and his siblings spent their childhood summers on their maternal grandfather’s estate, where early on, and not only in the mines but also on the land itself, the children learned how and why they should control and take care of others for the sake of their own family. The art of disciplining and being disciplined captured the boy’s imagination, one might say. This is why he felt a strong calling for a military career. He was lucky: just after he was graduated from school, the war broke out, and in September 1914, on the memorable day when news came from the western front that in the face of relentless German attacks, Albert, king of the Belgians, had been forced to abandon his carefully guarded fortifications in Antwerp, Otmar was able, in the company of other noble and enthusiastic youth — oh, how they would have loved to have been there at the siege of the fortresses! and then the road to Paris is free! — to join the Gersdorff Rifle Regiment of Hessen as a Junker ensign. It hardly needs mentioning that he was a volunteer, thrilled no end not only by deep patriotic feelings but also by the peculiar circumstance that had several hundred young men from the best families stripping to their birthday suits simultaneously in order to appear in that condition before the health commission.

This was the first time for any of them that they had to stand so closely together, exposed to one another’s gaze in a mass of similar skin colors and bundles of muscles. Once they were free of their clothes, silence reigned in the enormous hall, the silence of bashfulness. At the news of successive victories, crowds of people gathered on the street outside, exulting and celebrating; complete strangers hugged and kissed. In the hall, the young men smelled one another in silence, and the thought occurred to most of them that from now on they knew something about one another that no one else did.

Countess Auenberg was thinking how much the renowned scientist, with his conspicuous physical attributes, his build, the sensitivity of his features, and his incredible strength, not to mention his seriousness and levelheadedness, reminded her of her fiancé. She sighed to herself, my, my, a truly experienced man, a man’s man. The resemblance caught her off guard. But Mihály was much kinder. He had nothing to hide. And he was more open; but of course he was, since he had nothing to hide. At least, once the thought occurred to her, she hoped he didn’t.

She couldn’t stop comparing all the young men who came into her view with him.

Yet in vain did she tip the balance to Mihály’s advantage, because she couldn’t deny that she felt a similar attraction to male bodies she judged to be similar to his.

Her strong attraction to Mihály, demonstrating which was frustrated by prevailing etiquette, had often shaken her physically and made her dizzy for long minutes. The reason the same attraction failed to seize her now, a feeling she would certainly have found out of place, was that they had brought with them some of the coolness of the church’s interior. Occasionally, it was enough merely to think of Mihály and she’d ask for a chair or a glass of water. As if she were not totally there, at the place where in fact she was. As if it were not she who saw and sensed the other person. As if her conscience unexpectedly claimed that she sensed their identical being by her physical attraction, even though she knew well — vehemently protesting her own thought — that this was but an illusion, a sensory error, surely nothing else.