Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

This explanation made his head spin because he knew where he was; still, he did not understand it.

And quite sensibly it occurred to him that perhaps I, the one thinking these things, am not me. Others might live in me, people I don’t know, or people who took their leave together with me when they died sometime in the past. As if in his dream he were searching for his this-worldly self among these people; but he woke up because of all the shit and felt that no matter how much he’d like to separate his self from all the others, he is not he, he cannot find himself, he has no self of his own, he has no self, he does not exist.

At best, he might find his twin sister, and that was probably the reason he disliked her so much.

He did not understand why he smelled the smell of shit so strongly, and then who was the one who smelled it.

My dream filled up with shit. But he couldn’t accept his own empirical experience as the sole explanation.

In his mind, he first tried to avoid the problem by looking at it as a philosophical one, but that did not even come close to explaining why he smelled the penetrating stench so realistically.

This might not be the only explanation in the world, but it made him sense that someone else was here, sitting in the warm thick shit on the strange bed and thinking about empiricism. It was Isolde’s bed. I shat in bed, or maybe I’m dreaming this too. The crack of this somebody’s ass is full of shit, or rather in the soft puddle of the runny shit there is a harder, fatter sausage, right in the crack of the ass, inside the pajamas.

It cannot be.

And in that case, on the farm, it wouldn’t have been Döhring who shat in his pants when my twin brother killed him. Because I am Döhring. Or it wasn’t my twin brother who shat in his pants when they tried to yank him back from the top of the hedgerow and beat him with nailed planks all over his head and his back. I don’t have a twin sibling. But of course you do. I am a different Döhring. One who sits in his own shit, like a small child. Although neither of us is permitted to do this anymore. They’d thrash you for doing that. The only reason my dream invented my twin brother was so that it shouldn’t be me, or so that I could kill myself, so that I shouldn’t be my own younger twin sister, or so that finally I’d have some excuse to kill her, so that I wouldn’t be the only victim.

What nonsense you’re wasting your time on.

He heard his voice bellow into the room glimmering with reflected nocturnal lights.

He felt the watery shit dripping down his leg but did not dare jump up lest the fat sausage slip out. But what should he do then, what should I do, he yelled desperately to himself.

He had never heard of able-bodied healthy adults shitting in their pants while asleep.

As a saving idea, it occurred to him that it was only the natural effect of all that dry fruit, all those apples and prunes.

A starving person should never take solid nourishment so suddenly.

But he had to discard the saving idea too; after all, he couldn’t have shat in his pants because of apples and prunes he’d stuffed himself with in a dream.

But he starved only in his dreams.

And that, at last, made him conscious of having no further reprieve, conscious that there was somebody else here, somebody sitting in warm, thick shit on the strange bed. I’ve shat in my pants, maybe I’m only dreaming this too. And this other somebody has the crack of his ass full, which is to say this other person is sitting in the soft puddle of diarrhea, but there is also a harder, fat shit sausage in the crack of his ass; I am in my pajamas.

No matter how big the trouble he was in, how hard he laughed at himself for his miserable saving ideas, the verity of his dream remained more realistic. Perhaps because it was on Isolde’s bed, in Isolde’s bedroom that his shame had caught up with him.

Disgrace.

But his shame also clarified connections that until now neither he nor anyone in his family could have understood, and no one in all of Germany could have, either. He even understood, at last, that this was the reason he could not speak German in his dream. He’d rather be a different man. It was also more pleasant to escape from his shame, back into his dream, which, despite his being awake, had not stopped. The dream literally forced itself on him, as if whispering seductively, if you want me to, honey, I can take you even deeper. It was very clear now: the others remained unsuspecting to this day about the paper box because they are truly innocent.

Isolde was alone when she found it in the fruit-drying shed. Who else would have found it.

There could hardly be anything clearer than this.

He also found it interesting that his dream reworked the relationships among his relatives. He turned his great-grandfather, whom he could hardly have known, into his grandfather, and the older brothers into cousins. The dream showed Isolde too, as a cousin, though she was his aunt. It’s clear that my aunt Isolde kept her secret to herself, but her career, so strongly out of tune with the family’s general financial situation, one could understand only from the dream.

He appeared to be dreaming again, even though he was awake and free to be euphoric about having finally found the explanation.

Isolde’s father accepted the paper box, rode his bicycle to the farm, hid the box there, but the following morning three inmates freed from the nearby camp killed him in front of his house. When four years later Gerhardt Döhring returned from a POW camp, he did not believe the desperate explanation according to which the concentration-camp inmates must have taken the mysterious paper box with them and the family members knew nothing about it. How could he have thought his older brother was so stupid as not to hide the box properly. It must still be around somewhere. He could not have hidden it so stupidly that those miserable inmates would find it right away. More than once, they helped him turn the whole farm upside down, the cellar, the attic; they tapped the chimneys, the walls, all the floors. Twice they carried all the firewood out of the woodshed and back again. The fruit-drying shed they searched from top to bottom at least three times. Not by accident. They dug in the more suspicious places. Still, Gerhardt refused to accept the cold fact that there wasn’t any paper box anywhere. In the family, they knew about every possible and actual hiding place in the house; in the wall of the fruit-drying shed was a secret hollow, made 150 years ago for just such a purpose, but the paper box was nowhere to be found. Who could have imagined that two weeks before Gerhardt Döhring’s return, Isolde had found the box, Isolde, a mere child.

Barely a few weeks after his return from the POW camp, the entire town became frightened of Gerhardt Döhring. Even though strangers could not have known anything about the paper box.

Without authorization he conducted a secret investigation of the extraordinary events that had occurred during the last weeks of the war. Not alone, but with two good friends and the hero of Sedan, his own father, who was a lawyer, after all, and on whose pockmarked face Gerhardt, from his early childhood, had been observing and touching with his fingers the strange and hostile history of the world. The four of them held the view that the fact of the occupation could not retroactively justify major crimes; those who disobeyed orders, traitors, saboteurs, and deserters could not escape the appropriate punishment. And the four of them had to deal with these matters behind the backs of the occupiers and as quietly as possible. Of the deserters who managed to survive the first years of the occupation, two vanished without a trace, and to dispel any doubt about the cause of their disappearance, a third one was found dead. There was another unsavory affair Gerhardt Döhring was keen on uncovering. If the two hospital barracks had been properly set on fire, why did they not burn down completely, and how could the prisoners have escaped from them. He sought answers to these questions as frenetically as to those about the paper box.