Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Which clearly showed that the baroness realized her advantageous business position and wanted to extort as much as she could from him.

Which Mengele must also know, since nothing happened without Himmler’s and Sievers’s approval.

He had turned a haunted, musty hunting lodge into a well-functioning institute with the highest standards of hygiene, and now these people were trying to push him out and settle into a well-established place.

Mindful of the many valuable objects, some of them dating back to the Middle Ages, the old family pictures, the somewhat worn furniture that had reached a critical age, the many fragile historical fripperies, the so-called ornamental pieces, and the heavy hand-woven silk Venetian tapestry, students were not allowed in the knights’ hall except on Christmas Eve. Christmas celebrations were held in the large dining hall on the main floor, which had two stoves built of ancient tiles and walls decorated with trophies. At the completion of the festive meal, music-loving pupils were allowed to enter the knights’ hall and listen to a few recordings of classical music.

Schultze came from Leipzig too. When one boy left his office, a good half hour, sometimes even forty minutes would go by before he would order up the next one. Nobody knew what he did in the interim — how he evaluated the results, and whether the results had anything to do with whom he called for next.

Whether he had a list.

Hans, together with Hendrik Franke, the oldest of the boys, somewhat overage, whom everybody admired for his calm, deliberate manners and who, right now, was arguing with Kienast in the botanical garden, had managed to sneak into Schultze’s office several times. They wanted answers to their worrisome questions; they searched the place thoroughly, took some documents, even destroyed them, but found no list. Schultze always arrived with a large bag; he must have kept his important papers in it.

Which meant they had to get to the bag; and they were determined to do just that. It wasn’t impossible, since Schultze often sat in the second-floor hall and listened to music. He would sing to himself endlessly, even when entering his latest results into his carefully prepared tables, comparing them to earlier results about the same person and to other persons’ results at different times and different places. With a practiced eye, he would check or modify the hypotheses emerging from his research. He would draw up charts of the rhythm of bodily development; he’d compare them but had only a passing interest in them.

No definitive conclusion now was allowed to influence his pending conclusions later.

Well then, let it be him, he sang and ruminated, let it be this one or that one, as he went on with his seemingly mechanical work — based on his familiarity with the physical attributes of boys and on strictly physical measurements — work that in essence, however, proved to be intuitive. The boys could not even begin to deduce what guided Schultze’s decisions or what consequences his maniacal series of measurements might have for them. Because not everybody had a turn on each occasion, and — perhaps because of Schultze’s scientific whims — several boys were left out of the measuring sessions for quite some time. There were his favorites, boys he may have enjoyed measuring, and there were others to whom he paid no attention at all. Or on whom he did the work perfunctorily. Sometimes the boys in the latter group became very anxious that they meant nothing to Schultze anymore. This feeling was unendurable in the long term; it was very like jealousy. While the other boys were watching, enviously or disdainfully. They could not fathom the reason for their exclusion. Why was Schultze not interested in their measurements. In what way did they differ from the others; was it something the naked eye could not see or was it covered by their clothing.

And this watchfulness, intensified by base emotions, made the atmosphere among them ominous and depressive; they could not forgive one another for it.

If there is equality, then let there be equality.

And from a higher viewpoint on the persons or limbs or other body parts chosen to be measured, there were still issues that could be neither followed nor understood. The more and more detailed the data, the more clearly Schultze saw that strength, or energy, or the principle of love or that of equality did not function in organic nature, and that, with regards to judging single individuals, uniformly applied and authenticated units of measurement had been misleading him. Only the exceptional exists; the individual has its laws, very intimate and from the outside impenetrable laws; but the individual is not linked to the group through its exceptional characteristics.

Strength, energy, love, and equality are ultimately kinds of political fiction based on a statistical fiction about the average, and they have nothing to do with physics or biology.

As if he were saying to himself that these sciences must first be cleansed of political fictions, or that he must first occupy himself with metaphysical questions, and only then could he do something with the results of the mechanical measurements.

Maybe not even then.

In the evenings, Schultze sat singing to himself in one of the comfortable armchairs in the great hall. He remained alone with his thoughts even as, around him, other teachers were reading or talking among themselves. He agonized about the desirable metaphysical foundation for the so-called final questions. He did not even notice when a record ended and kept spinning on the turntable, empty and crepitating under the needle. He also managed to talk himself out of looking for connections, relationships, or parallels in his intuitively collected mass of data.

He whistled classical melodies, always repeating them, the same way and always the same ones, maniacally.

At the same time, he drank quite a bit of red wine.

Every time he finished his work, he had to wait for Geipel, another teacher, from Berlin, a renowned expert on the genetic determinations of the palm and fingers, who did not always come alone but in the company of several guests, all of them scientists. Geipel was the scientific supervisor of the examinations, and because of his humorous ways, the boys had very quickly, not as with Schultze, come to like him.

They could more easily understand the rhythm and sense of this embarrassing, oppressive activity called supervision than the meaning of Schultze’s perpetual examinations. The supervisions were carried out at least three times a year. That is when they found out who among them were considered very interesting or problematical — which, theoretically, they should have known earlier, since they involuntarily followed the measuring technique’s secret instructions and made them their own with their own eyes, except that they could never decide why and from what viewpoint this or that fact would be decisive or interesting. Once Schultze had measured something, they observed that thing on themselves and on one another, so together they probably reached a more profound level of observation than Schultze ever did with his exact measurements. They knew everyone’s measurements in any part of his body, what any of them preferred to keep quiet about and, to avoid comparisons, what they wanted to keep a secret and from whom.

Vigilantly they watched one another’s features, limbs, and colors, the changes in their attributes and physical inclinations.

The fruit of this vigilance ripened during the times of supervision.

Schultze’s monkish strictness repelled and disgusted them.

Didn’t I tell you, I also saw it, see, I knew it in advance.

However, they enjoyed the subtle knowledge they gained by studying individual cases.

Involuntarily they became attuned to the scientific presuppositions Schultze studied so diligently, but since they did not need to strive for a scientific outcome, they were free to associate their observations with feelings and emotions. This was not without danger, because they could not ascertain the consequences of their individuality, of their exceptional or problematic qualities, though that might be the fount of their knowledge. That everything had grave, even dire consequences — of that they had no doubt. Nor could they discover whether there were prescribed units of measurement by which to gauge their being problematical. Hendrik and Hans found no papers relating to this question when on two consecutive nights they broke into Schultze’s office. Sometimes it seemed that the committee found the exceptional to be the norm; at other times the norm seemed to mean average or desirable, which again should have been designated by a number or series of numbers, which the boys could not find anywhere.