Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Which ones among you have a wife at home, damned communists, step forward. Actually, he was glad this is how he remembered it and forgot nothing. Who among you have widowed communist mothers, you damned commies.

Who is an orphan, they yelled at the last one, you damned communist.

By the time they reached Friedrichroda, not one of the twenty-seven was left.

But what am I saying, he interrupted himself in a practiced conversational tone, stopping himself from uttering another word on this topic and returning quickly to a favorite subject of his, which, although it did not put his life in an adventurous or colorful light, made him feel safer morally.

These realizations, then, provide medical science with means, he was explaining, and you should never lose sight of this, Countess, means by which we can control and steer the biological fate of our people. We are no longer at the mercy of chance, as are less fortunate nations, and I hope you will forgive me for what I am about to say, because it must be obvious that I am thinking of Hungary.

Anthropologically, the most interesting part of the story was that the second group of these communist beasts ran off into the depth of the forest with the same inner conviction as the first group had — run, damn commies — even though in the fog everybody had heard the dull reports of bullets whizzing among the trees just minutes earlier.

There could have been no one who did not know what that meant.

Run, damn communists, run.

Think about it, Countess, if one has a chance to do something good and noble for the sake of one’s grandchildren or one’s entire nation, will a man with the right sensibilities pass up such an opportunity, no matter what the price.

It seems that one’s instinct to escape proves to be stronger than one’s reason, he said to himself at the same time, the animal in one has the advantage, and the human in a person comes afterward, ready to weigh things.

He did not answer his own rhetorical question because he did not wish to carry his pathetic tone too far.

Individually what we are doing here are scientific odd jobs, nothing else. But the work we do together on the national scale is indeed something big.

His fellow soldiers enjoyed it, he was thinking, and they couldn’t have been less educated or cultured than I, because this wasn’t a question of culture. To share their enjoyment after their first shots, that was wonderful. We live together or we die together. And the damn communists can always be destroyed, down to the last one, and that’s what makes the manhunt enjoyable. Which is not without etiological interest. Why does one enjoy something done in a group that one does not enjoy doing alone precisely because the group forbids it.

Who disconnects the inhibitions.

Or perhaps it should be asked the other way around. Why should he condemn it if he enjoys it so much.

Countess, perhaps you won’t be distressed by this, because no matter how highfalutin it may sound, we must say it aloud, he said aloud. Together we have lifted ourselves out of the lamentable march of world history. With the racial laws in place, the grand work is ready. About this neither American nor Norwegian, not even French researchers have major doubts. They envy not our achievements, they too have come close to such achievements, but our situation and our laws.

They were brigands, communist beasts, he said to himself, as if with his own emotions he were defending himself against his own aggressiveness.

We consider the nation as a single spiritual and biological unit, and therefore have seen that it was beneficial to reverse the order of things in medicine as well, he continued, sounding most self-assured. He had so much practice in public speaking that it was easy for him to let his attention run on parallel tracks or to divide his thinking. Schuer was appreciated at the university because he never said anything surprising; he did not do his thinking publicly. He knew well that people liked to hear only the kind of speeches they have heard before. And because he did not like to be bored, he busied himself with different subjects while composing his speeches.

We consider our primary task to be not the curing of the individual but genetic prevention, he explained, the treatment of the nation’s body, which means filtering out and annihilating the sick or flawed inherited stock, because we are working for the benefit of a healthy and racially pure genetic stock. It is for this purpose that we have established our network of race-nurturing physicians. One can only regret that the Hungarians cannot come along with us in this great work. For the first time, we have raised the latest racial-biological findings to the level of state interest, and you will believe me, Countess, when I say that this is an unshakable edifice.

We have in our hands a key with which we can daily open nature’s jealously guarded strongboxes.

Genetics has penetrated closed areas that only the gods could view, until now.

And there are only organizational obstacles to sharing this knowledge of ours with the Hungarians. From a racial standpoint I personally see no problem at all. We are familiar with the biological laws of our people’s life and therefore it is no secret with which races we see it advantageous to renew the inherited stock of our own.

At this moment, Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein fell silent, alarmed, because not even her amplified inner monologue could stop her from realizing where her boss was headed.

She thought every claim that they had reliable knowledge about anything was ridiculous.

But just this once she managed not to get involved in the discussion.

For a few moments she ruminated over the question whether Schuer’s new ideas might thwart her Roman plans.

Health and illness, talent and madness, the rise and disappearance of entire families, nations, and peoples occur not only under environmental influences, explained Schuer to the countess, as inveterate individualists or Bolsheviks would like us to believe, but also under the influence of internal hereditary laws or, if you wish, Countess, of closed hereditary chains. One might say they are the results of independently inherited narratives. Which means, put simply, that we is a more important unit of nature than I , and any nation unwilling today to accept this hard rule will not be here tomorrow. Hereditary stock determines in advance the mode of the mutual effect occurring between a living organism and its environment. And this, Countess, no one can change throughout an entire lifetime. That is how you should look at it. In the best case, one would consider this peculiarity one’s personality. Or, because of one’s upbringing, for example, one might consider oneself a woman even though half of one’s inherited stock is a man’s.

Involuntarily they glanced at Siegfried.

The countess appeared to follow the man’s eyes, which absentmindedly looked at but probably did not see his only son. The boy remained an uncertain outline, a blurry blond spot with a concomitant, constant bitter feeling. No matter what he did, this boy would not realize the hopes he had for him. For a short while they both looked at him, looked at him with indulgence, as if he were their shared child, and there was something moving and reassuring in this for both of them. But the little boy did not notice their glances, because with angelically closed eyes he was waiting for his kid sister’s kick.

If not now, then in the next second it would come; he wanted to force the kick out of his little sister, he wanted it.

Or the other way around: the other half of one’s inherited stock may belong to a woman, but because of one’s upbringing one will consider oneself a man. Nevertheless, one is not a hermaphroditic mechanism — I say this to allay your fears, Countess — though every human being is close to being one.