Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

One of them, named Kienast, happened to know that the researchers in Leipzig and Berlin were especially interested in the brains of the suicides.

You’re making this up, Kienast, said one of the older boys hesitantly. I’d say you’re talking nonsense.

And they know how to make clean work of it too, continued Kienast, as if he had not heard the older boy. If there’s anything left of the head, they saw around the dome of the cranium and take it off, like the lid of a pot.

They don’t do that differently with others, so what’s so special about it, if you wouldn’t mind telling us.

Listen, I know exactly how they get to the valuable brain.

That’s not what I doubt.

And they have to get to it.

Come on, my little friend, they can’t suck it out with a straw through the ears or the nose.

But I know how, the bookish Kienast kept repeating stubbornly and was hurt when the other boys laughed at him again.

He was from Leipzig and his father was indeed a prosector, employed not by the university clinic but by the municipality. More precisely, he made very ingenious dissecting instruments, and Kienast claimed that this was a family tradition, because the whole family was made up of inventors. He often picked his nose, and the others said that he seemed to have invented nostril mucus. The older boy, known to be Hans von Wolkenstein’s best friend, had great prestige. In the boarding school, the boys conversed in exceedingly polite and bookish tones, but there was much cruelty; in fact, they concealed their brutality and cruel behavior behind politeness and dry argumentation. They would not burden one another with openness. At times they wove their sentences so circuitously and archaically it was as if they wished to hide their longings and desires from one another. Even in their loud skepticism, they never went too far. Now they were laughing mainly because of the tension suddenly provoked by the extraordinary event. The way adolescent boys laugh to stimulate one another to continued laughter. Some of them were gliding between higher and lower registers; others simply neighed. It was hard to imagine that someone who only yesterday had knelt right here to fish mole crickets carefully out of fresh horse dung and throw them into a bucket of water was now lying on a marble table, having become the object of scientific research.

What makes the brain so precious is that you can make vertical or horizontal cross-sections of it. I wish to note that it’s your privilege not to believe this, insisted the one called Kienast, shouting over the laughs.

There was no malice in the boys’ assault of laughter; they treated Kienast’s foolishness, and even his obvious character weaknesses, with indulgent love. He was a shitty little character, but they liked him, and for quite some time he had been under their protection. Whenever he was gripped by an epileptic fit, they literally formed a wall around him, cleverly diverting the counselors’ attention from him. They could not bear letting his secret be discovered; he became the pledge, as it were, of their secret resistance.

They preferred to overlook his shitty little quirks.

Kienast was small, fragile, incredibly mean and aggressive. It had become clear that even epileptics were not removed from the boarding school, because the researchers were just as curious about their behavior patterns as they were about every other deviation, though by law epileptics had to be sterilized. This was no laughing matter, and that is how he had become the silent object of their resistance. He probably tried to balance his threatened state with zeal, while the others did the same with their manliness.

It hurt his pride that his physical misery, whose origin was unknown to him, made him dependent on his mates.

And then they progress cell by cell; in retrospect, they can find out the guy’s personal secrets.

He had a complete story, told with quiet shuddering, about how different people had committed suicide.

It was strictly forbidden to go near the railway that crossed the pine forest unless a counselor went with them, or to the enormous viaduct bridging the Wiesenbad valley or, higher up, the Ochsensprung, a rocky ledge barely protruding from the oaks that clung to a steep slope above the waterfall, from where, according to legend, because of a shepherd’s pact with the devil, the Wolkenstein estate’s entire herd of oxen had sought refuge in the depths.

On paper, the counselors had to note every infringement. However, they mainly obeyed the school regulations by noting down when someone, or more than one, had violated one. Their aim was to gain a realistic picture of the various rebellious tendencies thriving among the boys and of their secret movements. On several occasions, when it was Gruber’s turn to wait for the small group of boys in front of St. Anne’s, he would take them not directly back to the boarding school but first to the municipal baths in Hauer Street, into the steam section and afterward to the beer hall on Johannis Street frequented mainly by miners dressed in their Sunday best; the boys ate there, and the older ones also received big glasses of beer.

Gruber paid; he paid for everything.

And he said that they no longer had any secrets from one another.

Which Hans von Wolkenstein, no matter how hard he thought about it, could not understand. Indeed, theoretically nothing could happen to or among the boys that the counselors would not have known about or would not have recorded in their report notebooks. But he did not understand what kind of secret Gruber could observe on Sundays in a steam bath filled with loud men. Hans was sure that Gruber observed a physical phenomenon that, theoretically, they could observe too.

And that Gruber would bring this observation of his into some relationship with the boys’ religiousness or faith. He did not dare ask anyone what Gruber had in mind. The body of anyone jumping from the Ochsensprung would first be smashed on the waterfall’s enormous ledges, but the water would carry the body farther, pushing and hurling it down to the next rocky ledge.

The data gathered from the counselors had to be put into the pedantically documented system of parallel scientific examinations; all data had to find their proper places; there could be no information that, in relation to the expected research results, was not important or interesting. The pupils themselves readily accepted this principle; they knew better than anyone the generally accepted genetic norms and rules. They knew that none of them had a flawless Nordic origin, least of all Kienast. After all, this was the reason they had been brought together here, this is why they’d been picked. Gruber’s origin was different, however; he proudly told them that all his measurements were pure Nordic. Which they watched with great interest and suspicion. Being near him, they felt their own sense of inferiority strongly. The number of peculiarities about him was too many as it was.

They distrusted him, if only because he still lived with his mother, who served them delicious streusel cake when she hosted them.

They had to be here for the experiments; they could conclude that from Gruber’s remarks, but they never talked about this with anyone, never about anything like this.

But why were they, and not their siblings, who were also thoroughly examined in outside clinics, at the school. They asked each other about their origins and defects; it would have made no sense to keep them secret. There were no Jews among them. At least they had no knowledge of any. Secretly they had to know everything, so they could have a better picture of their own situation. Or what about their parents, who had turned them over and exposed them to this continual examination when they themselves were the cause of their children’s dubious status. There is a kind of sexual or amorous heedlessness in the world that cannot be corrected. Kienast’s mother was Mexican, Christian but not Aryan. Something one could not see with the naked eye in her son, but the family was aware of it; they knew it would show up in her son or grandson, and the latent biological conformity filled them with a peculiar dread. If only because of Kienast’s truly spectacular epileptic fits. However, Kienast found it hard to imagine what would have happened if he’d been born not to a mestizo woman but to an Aryan one, whether it would have been better for him. Shackled by a certain physical hypochondria, the boys observed themselves and one another as if expecting some secret ailment to appear at any moment, or some racial impurity whose carrier they had become because of their parents’ mating.