Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Don’t worry, said the lieutenant, you’ll get regular clothes from them, and they won’t let things get out of hand. True, they did delay a bit, but now they see the situation for what it is. They will retaliate. If he just listened, he could hear what was happening that very moment.

And he could, very faintly, penetrating the old monastery walls, the sound of motorcycles being revved up.

The lieutenant was nodding, yes, yes, an entire motorcycle company, flying like swallows, seventy-nine cycles all told, among them twenty-seven with sidecars, 123 men all told. It showed on his face what profound self-assurance and superiority his disciplined thirst for revenge was lending him. They won’t do anything extraordinary. All they really had to do was wall in two city gates; they studied the maps. The whole operation would take a very short time.

He would have liked to beg and implore, don’t let them do it, to shout that nothing happened, victims, innocents.

But the words drowned in him before he could shout them.

How could he claim such a thing when not even one among them could be considered innocent. And then he would have tried to argue differently. The lieutenant could see that not everyone had been killed; after all, he, along with his twin brother, had survived. Only he could not talk about this either, he had to keep quiet about his twin brother, who had just killed a man named Döhring. He knew of this in his dream, oddly. But then is there anything I shouldn’t keep quiet about.

In his agony, he began to throw himself about, he felt as if they had cut off his arms and legs, he shouted senselessly as one struggling to wake up.

I can’t keep quiet about everything.

He was shouting in vain because the attractive naked men lifted him up and put him in the tub while he could hear — and the dark-haired lieutenant even raised his finger to call attention to it — that the swallows had flown away, the motorcyclists were gone. By next morning, the city would be walled in and the people of Pfeilen would have to perish. Over the empty Kloosterplein, clouds of gasoline vapor hover in the evening stillness. Everything comes to pass. It is impossible to prevent what has to happen, to stop anything. While several men were washing, scrubbing, and soaping him at the same time, and the noise, the cacophony increased again in the bathing hall, and everybody was talking, laughing, and shouting simultaneously, through the cracks in the walls and doors, unseen, thick gas was seeping in to mingle smoothly and treacherously with the chamomile-scented steam.

And the attractive naked men now thought he had fainted because of the gas.

The wretch is so weak, they said laughing, he can’t withstand even a little gasoline vapor. But he lost consciousness because of his premonition. He did not know who he was. Because of the staggering knowledge that while he was enjoying his bath, and he could not but enjoy it and even think of the promised sweet milk, the catastrophe had come to pass.

He didn’t know what all this meant, who might be his people; he was searching for the meaning of his own dread.

And then it occurred to him that it hadn’t been his grandfather’s shift but that of the religion teacher.

What luck.

He could see from above how they were approaching from two directions at once, in close formation, their headlights rending the early night asunder.

He delayed no longer; the teacher of religion sounded the bell for the second time that day. He did it cautiously, barely touching the body of the bell with the blunt clapper, briefly; the penetrating sharp little sound could be heard over the dark town lying in ruins. This was followed by a terrible crack, bang, and snap, then a detonation, then a single resonance reminiscent of a bell ringing, but this was coming from below the ground. The earth, the entire half-dead little town and its distant environs, trembled, people were thrown out of their beds; even the thick monastery walls in faraway Venlo were shaking. For a second, silence fell in the bathing hall; the naked soldiers listened; only the noise of water rushing from the showerheads could be heard.

The breakaway bell splintered all the beams below it; it lodged itself into the ground four and a half meters down. This made the market square, along with its heavy stone pavement and the houses around it, explode, rise up in the air, and then collapse into itself. The rectory collapsed too, and in place of the Lutheran church only a pile of rubble remained.

Yet he knew it made no sense; there was no point in having such dreams. He should wake up. He would understand things all right when awake.

All this lasted but a short time, and then silence reigned everywhere.

Still, he was awakened by a scream, and he kept hearing the scream as he screamed to wake himself up.

On the bedroom ceiling, the big city was buzzing in yellows and reds, as if it were not the middle of the night.

And he still felt he could not talk about the things he should be talking about, and this increased and deepened his pain, no matter how hard he struggled. Whom could he talk to; he was alone during the day and alone at night. In his last dream, he was sitting awake and felt a pain as if, without anesthesia, his limbs were being chopped off, but despite all the pain he comprehended his dream, and that gave him a lift. He rose above everything. Even though his body was a mass of torn flesh from which blood poured in thick streams. He knew what happened to whom; he also knew what he had dreamed just now, or the night before last; he was glad to be able to separate out the various illusions. He could foresee what would happen in his dream, even though he awakened and his mind could not have been more alert. He saw the British motorcycle riders who, not caring that the church bell had just crashed down and that fresh corpses and perhaps injured living bodies lay under the marketplace buildings, were driving everybody outside. In the blinding beams of their headlights, they were having the two city gates walled up. This bleeding cannot be stanched. Here everyone must perish. Weighing matters while awake, I must witness my own death. He was looking for logical arguments with which to continue refining his knowledge. True, the church bell broke off and crashed, but not then and not like this. And it was also true that four years later Gerhardt Döhring returned from a POW camp, and looked maniacally for some paper box that he supposedly had given to his older cousin, Hermann Döhring, for safekeeping; but Isolde did not want to hear about any paper box, there had been no camp of any kind in the vicinity.

But there was a camp; nobody denied that Gerhardt had been a guard and that he went mad in his search for the box.

There was a camp, repeated a completely strange and indifferent voice, that he could not escape from.

He was sitting in bed and felt that he had to tell these made-up stories and lie so stubbornly because he couldn’t tell who he was. Who am I, if there was a he who consisted of more than one person. It’s true, however, that Hermann Döhring was killed in front of his own farm that morning, though it never came to light who did it. It did come to light, of course it did. Almost everything comes to light. But then where have I come up with these twin brothers. Why am I accusing one of them of murder, and why do I say that the other was burned in the Revier , the sick bay. His dream invented this so that he could not distinguish between the twins and thus might freely shuttle between them. His dream invented the story because of his twin sister; because of her, he looked at himself as a girl, and to this day had been unable, and had not really wanted, to make a proper distinction between the two of them. This is the very reason I want to study philosophy and psychology so I can have an insight into these tricky things from both points of view. But what if I don’t understand, complained his dream in a weepy voice; he shouted that he did not understand, could not understand. Still, the knowledge stemming from his dream proved stronger. In his body, he felt their exhausted, condemned bodies, both their bodies. And that they were alive had become his only defense. Which means that I carry within me people who are not me, and with them I look back at times and places that could not have happened to me, or I can glance ahead into times that without me cannot possibly happen to anyone.