Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

In this state of mind he enrolled in the medical school of the University of Marburg, where, after a few months spent in spiritual daydreams and mental convalescence, he could not avoid being entrusted again with a military mission. There might have been other candidates suited to the job — in those postwar semesters the student population was swarming with demobilized soldiers — yet they made him the commander’s adjutant because he had spent the most time in a staff position and in combat. General Walther Baron von Lüttwitz* was himself considered a very good-looking man, and he insisted on Schuer. He had kept his eye on this attractive, wealthy young man from a splendid family; frankly, he wouldn’t have minded if his daughter married him. As if he were saying to himself, yes, I would like to have my grandchildren come from this bright-faced, slightly indolent fellow. He evaluated the young man’s physical attributes with the reckoning of an experienced horse breeder. He was very proud that in his own case, past fifty, his muscles remained not only hard but also boyishly supple.

When a communist uprising began in Thuringia, at Lüttwitz’s wish Schuer, alongside his commander, led units of the Studentenkorps against them. Lüttwitz expected a lot from the difference in the condition of the two leaders’ musculature. Sometimes he’d grasp Schuer firmly by the shoulder, pat and squeeze him, or press his hard arms to feel what he saw. The homeland faces the greatest danger, godless civil war, brother against brother, as he put it in a famous public address. Armed bandits plunder, pillage and fornicate, murder, rob, ransack, and set things afire in ancient German cities.

Of which not one word was true.

In hours of need, everyone should suspend all personal concerns and devote everything to the cause of the nation.

Schuer did not have to suspend his personal concerns; on the contrary, in his heart he was happy about his new assignment, which he was to carry out alongside Frigate Captain Baron von Selchow, only a few years older than he. It offered him a good pretext, his intellectual doubts and devastating loneliness notwithstanding, to enter military service again and, on an apparently not too dangerous excursion, to reimmerse himself in a familiar milieu of simpler, rougher things.

Though cleansing operations and methodical house searches were not exactly to his liking, after the suppression of the rebellion and the temperate carrying out of the inevitable retaliations, he received the Large Cross, decorated with a saber, of the Order of the Lions of Zähring, Germany’s highest decoration for a soldier.

He could thank Lüttwitz’s silent intervention for this.

This police venture — it could hardly be called a military operation — which ended by early April with very few losses to his men, brought about a thorough change in Schuer’s life. Once the Spartacist uprising had been put down and republican forces throughout Germany had triumphed over the mostly monarchist advocates of a coup d’état, the Weimar authorities charged Lüttwitz with a long list of terrible crimes. To avoid arrest, he and his family escaped to Budapest, where the godless reds were routed by August and there was no fear of republican rule.

In truth, the change had already occurred on the early March afternoon when previously established units, six companies to be exact, assembled in orderly columns under Schuer’s single command, wearing their new pike-gray uniforms without stripes or chevrons, marched smartly on the Marbach highway to the Dammelberg. That is when, almost imperceptibly, many things changed in his life; thanks to some vision or realization, as it were, he found his ultimate vocation. They lit enormous fires, they sang as loudly and energetically as their throats would allow. Although his musicality, honed on several instruments, did not go to the point of his singing along with his men — he merely mouthed the words feelingly — Schuer unreservedly entrusted his body to the waves of shared sensual intemperance, while, his eyes blinded by the light of enormous fires, he observed the fields sunk in mist from the nearby river and the twilight-reddened walls and turrets of the imposing fortified castle of Landgraf, surveying simultaneously, as it were, the living, the historical, and the lifeless. The warm sensation of his left-behind but oft-missed wartime life returned generously to his limbs.

There were hardly any greenhorns among them. Almost all the men were officers, war veterans, athletic, strong, and healthy men who had survived their wounds and now wanted to study or to continue their scientific careers, which the war had interrupted.

Never again did he feel abandoned or alone with his wartime experiences.

He saw clearer than daylight that he hardly differed from these men in anything, and that was his good fortune.

He belonged, though in all probability had no individuality.

Or perhaps what liberal thinkers call one’s individuality in fact plays but a very small part in nature’s grand scheme. In itself, individuality probably isn’t worth a grain of rice. Among these wonderful men, individuality makes a difference hardly worth mentioning.

We are but samples, he thought with no small amount of fright.

In reality, the chosen ones of nature and divine Providence. Not only fit for reproduction — our dead would have been no less fit for that — but the most deserving of this purpose from a racial viewpoint, if one may put it that way, and all this has nothing to do with the individual soul or individual peculiarities. Who else should be multiplying if not these men who had withstood the crucible and survived.

What else could Providence have wanted when it so mercilessly destroyed our weaker mates.

This soul-stirring, painful realization overpowered him, though the great smoke and infernal noise might have played a part. In a nature suffused by divine Providence the theory of natural selection works more brutally than the power of Christian charity. Within decades, this brutal reality will turn Germany’s devastating defeat into a universal victory. And under the influence of this realization these magnificent men became for him like members of a blood alliance sworn to secrecy: the future of the nation may be entrusted to the contents of their loins.

He became alarmed at this pagan thought, but could not help thinking that the ancient God who cast off His Christian charity loved those whom He decimated.

Was not the treasure of the Holy Grail a secret code of advantageous racial characteristics, he asked himself, and he had no doubt about the answer.

Or rather, it seemed to him that God had taken off His Christian mask before him and would never again show His barbaric face to anyone. He shuddered to imagine seeing God face-to-face. Blessed be He, he would have said to himself, but right now he could neither pray nor express his gratitude; he could only think, very rapidly.

He was counting.

Altogether two generations, four at the most, and we’ll come out of this ignominy stronger than those who suffered fewer losses and who with their flawed individuals are now lording it over us. The enormity of this realization made him falter, he had to lean on someone, and an unknown mate standing next to him instinctively hugged him, held him up with his strong shoulders.

Among noblemen, behavior like this was not a matter of course.

He felt gratitude toward his mate and more profound love than toward any woman, or than the love he should feel as a Christian toward a helpful fellow being.

When the fires had burned down to smoldering embers, the beer was running low, or the men were becoming short-winded or somehow seized by sorrow over the lost war and terrible peace, and suddenly they felt surrounded by memories of their fallen comrades, they formed a huge circle, standing shoulder to shoulder, opened the slits of their pants, triumphantly and ostentatiously thrust forward their hips to honor the ancient Germanic custom of high-arced cross-pissing before setting out on their dangerous mission, which demanded much good luck.