Parallel Stories: A Novel (150 page)

The boys could not imagine their instructors without their notebooks. They had to feel privileged to be living and studying in such an environment, and they knew that the highest levels of German science would use the data resulting from this. But they were repeatedly told that they were the same kind of person, birds of a feather, all in the same boat, tied by a bond that could never be broken. Whatever might happen, they could not—and they knew this—not even at the cost of their lives could they leave before high-school graduation. This was so far in the future for them that they couldn’t imagine a world with different conditions.

They could not decide what they should be like, since they were already the way they were.

Or how they should behave, so that despite their unfortunate birth, they might seem to be what in all probability they never had been and never could be. Yet in this way, given who they were, it filled them with satisfaction to think they performed a great service to German science. If Schultze were to succeed one day in defining the norms of racial desirability, based on the boys’ data, their stunted racial development would become their merit.

These mainly intellectual broodings touched Hans less than they did the other boys, and they touched Hendrik only for practical reasons. About as much as did the others’ silently endured pain and self-doubts. Tension and anxiety about a lack or an injury that none of them could avoid. But regardless of the effect of these thoughts on them, Hans and Hendrik, for different reasons and in different ways, were able to keep a distance from them, and even physical intimacy could not have brought them closer than this shared ability.

To their great good luck, they also managed to keep the strong physical signs of this feeling at a certain distance. They could not afford to wind up in a situation where they’d have to explain things to their friends or be suspected darkly by their instructors.

The instructors paid special attention to such matters; moreover, they gave the boys the opportunity to observe for themselves the purity of their own inclinations or the nature of their own deviations.

The two boys were especially sensitive to the exceptional atmospheric pressure of the locale, and also to the scientific aims of the place as they understood them, though neither of them had ever shown any touchiness; their reputation was firmly based. Hans always behaved as if he stood above everything that had happened or might happen to him; he was looked upon as privileged in the school, where being privileged was usually considered as being at odds with the communal spirit and the boys were contemptuous of it. The service personnel were forbidden to establish personal relationships with the boys. Any kind of bias or self-consciousness might threaten the accuracy of observation. Yet the men and women on the staff, who came from nearby villages and the little medieval town nearby, could not treat Hans as anyone but the lord and master of the place. Bastard or not, they did not much care.

They tried to please him in small things—even when unnoticed, as it were—and he shared these friendly benefits and advantages fairly with Hendrik. The imperceptibility of these activities was what convinced the others that Hans had real historical prerogatives, which was a good reason they should listen to him. The scientific supervisors of the institute erred, however, in thinking they controlled every aspect of their observations. What is more, not only the kitchen personnel, the stokers and scullery maids, but the teachers and of course the boys all knew that Hans’s mother owned the two ancestral homes, the enormous forests between Thum and Wolkenstein, the lumberyards, and even the small forest train that, with much whistling, ran across the Wiesenbad viaduct every afternoon, and that she was also connected at the highest level to the scientific research being conducted here.

It was naturally humiliating to think they were objects of a scientific experiment, yet all of them went to sleep and awakened with this unpleasant thought.

Knowing they were here at the express wishes of their parents should have made the boys consider the matter settled. Yet it gave them no rest. When they went home for three weeks each summer, they dared not ask if their parents had any knowledge of the experiments or what sort of papers they had signed regarding their sons’ placement in the school and their being subject to hygienic observation. That was the key phrase. The boys searched and several of them found such papers among their parents’ documents; indeed, the parents had signed binding notes that referred to the appropriate law and clearly spelled things out.

This summer, Hans was not allowed to go home because the consulting committee members thought an extreme session of observation was necessary in his case. They inflicted this punishment on him because of the break-in. They exposed the boys in an embarrassingly elaborate way, for the process of exposure itself became the object of the observation. The baroness, helpless against a scientifically defended order, was in fact relieved to hear of it. Then she wouldn’t have to waste three summer weeks in hopeless family time. She preferred not to acknowledge what sort of danger awaited her son during the extreme observation. She was also afraid of him; the boy’s sheer physical existence filled her with aversion.

When occasionally, after awakening, she thought about it, she felt she’d be much happier without him, though she could not have known much about her possible happiness. Frankly, she’d spent the months of her unwanted pregnancy in anger and desperation about her new, unknown condition. Her misshapen body, the nausea and vomiting, made her restless. She could not deny that she felt nothing but hatred about her pregnancy. As if she’d been cheated out of her own body and punished too, since she couldn’t talk about it to anyone.

Perhaps that is why Hans arrived in this world way ahead of time. Which filled the baroness with a sense of total disaster. There were two interdependent beings in the world, but knowledge of their mutuality caused her not one iota of joy. Within a few days, she went dry. She probably shouldn’t have had those thoughts. To pull the little kerchief over his head, or the light blue coverlet. Another reason why the baby had to be given to a wet nurse as soon as possible. Yet he starved on the stranger’s milk, turned blue crying each time he was fed, and screamed through entire nights, even when they fed him at regular intervals with both milk and the best food.

Karla was weak; one morning, before going to the Auenberg estate, the baby unexpectedly fell silent after protracted screaming. It would have been good if he’d stopped breathing. Karla had the impression that the baby accepted his death. As if, together with her, he was waiting for his breathing to cease. She stood by the crib, silent and motionless, and wished along with him that he’d perish. Perish. But he did not. Even though she wished it, oh, how she had wished it.

Nobody could talk to her about unconditional motherly love without making her laugh, even out loud.

She knew precisely the enduring feeling with which the mother hates her son and does everything to kill in him at least the element alien to her because of his sex.

Or else he should perish.

But she did not go beyond thinking those thoughts, since she would have considered it beneath her to lose her dignity, notwithstanding her hatred for him.

After a few summer days had passed, once the others started coming back, Hans no longer expected that the baroness would come for him and at least take him to their house in Annaberg. He probably was waiting not for his mother but for the house, or for the taste and sweet fragrance of the warm walnut-filled pastry she once had bought for him at the weekly fair in Annaberg. He could not forget the lightness of this pastry and the creamy texture of the filling.

Nor forget that there was something in the world that his mother had once actually bought for him.

When left alone, this was the feeling with which he viewed his body.

As some kind of a test, he caught his penis and testicles between his thighs and showed himself like that to the others in the shower. They liked it, and laughed; Hendrik especially liked the idea that Hans might have a pussy, but only Kienast imitated him.

Hans could be content that things were going well among the other boys without him. He consoled himself with all sorts of things. He found acting like this somewhat childish, but it was unavoidable and he needed hiding places for it. He also could keep in contact with them even during months of silence, and he did not have to relinquish his leadership. He was allegedly ostracized, which, along with the denial of summer vacation, was considered the most severe punishment, but it was made even more severe by an attempt to cast suspicion on Hendrik and to separate the two of them. That is why he put on the little monkey act with his pussy in the shower. Hendrik had not been punished, because they wanted to create the impression that he was the one who had betrayed their conspiracy. In the shower Hendrik well understood that Hans did not believe this.

That is why he did not laugh along with the others and his eyes glittered with joy.

There was no precedent for imposing a permanent ostracism on a boy or for expelling him. So theoretically they could do anything they wanted to, which Hans and Hendrik comprehended and, within certain limits, exploited. They even succeeded in exchanging letters that, after repeated readings, they both burned. Had they not enjoyed their heroism, they couldn’t have done it. Even so, it was hard to watch the pages of those letters shrivel and turn to ashes in the flames, pages on which Hendrik called Hans my dear friend and Hans called Hendrik his dearest brother. But they couldn’t have known that their instructors had information about most of these secret activities and the letters had not been undocumented. While the others were away and the service staff was busy with the major annual cleaning, painting, and whitewashing, Hans could get along without speaking to anyone. It was actually interesting to live without talking. Along with his friends subjected to similar punishment, he was mainly unsupervised for those summer weeks. Recalcitrant staff members gravely violated the strict rules and regulations so that others could observe and then write about the boys’ activities. And thus, at a given moment, all Schuer had to do was go to his desk and, while Baroness Thum zu Wolkenstein was still struggling with her first surprise, take out a paper listing the illegal activities that Hans von Wolkenstein had engaged in, in the company of another pupil named Hendrik Franke, the rules and regulations he had violated, and to what sort of sensual excesses he had yielded. How many times they had broken into Schultze’s office together, the papers they had taken from it and then destroyed, the content of the letters they had exchanged, and what sort of complicated relationship they had entangled themselves in with two trusted members of the service staff.

Which put his mother in a very difficult situation; the baroness struggled with tears of anger. At the very same time, this disobedient child was crouching at the foot of the central pier of the viaduct arching seventy meters over the valley, with the rumbling noise of the waterfall rushing down from the craggy ledge of the mountain slope opposite, while his friends in the botanical garden discussed the situation in their own argot.

He was crouching on a yellow-brown rock, where the whimsically cascading, gurgling, and splashing water sometimes flowed over his feet. He was wearing his institutional uniform, a sailcloth shirt sewn in a military fashion with brown corduroy knee pants. On the banks of the stream he had taken off his high-quarter buttoned shoes and corkscrew-patterned socks and hidden them in the high sedge. Because the instructors often played tricks on the boys by taking away their scattered shoes or clothes.

His bare soles clung firmly to the rough-surfaced rock, but making the slightest move caused it to wobble under him.

He did not want to lose his balance.

In this early afternoon hour, when above the high ridge of the Frauenholz gorge the last rays of the sun were disappearing, taking their warmth with them, the end-of-summer air in the valley acquired a sharp edge.

The smell of resin and wild marjoram was everywhere.

He leaned as far forward as the wobbly rock allowed, raised a stick over the clear water, concentrating on something in it, below its turbulent wild rushing. A strange, never-seen-before creature among the stones. Perhaps the corpse or torn-off limb of a creature; just then a new current shoved it under another stone. He would not leave it there; in a little while he’d pluck it out from under the stone and trusting to the current would ceremoniously put it back. He could just barely reach it with his stick. Just enough to turn it over. Whether it was a living creature or a dead one, he wanted to see its belly. The rock wobbled a little, the water splashed, and it wouldn’t be pleasant to fall in. A pale piece of flesh that had lost its color in the water. A shred of flesh from the body of one of the suicide boys ripped on the rocks as he was hurtling down. Or a drowned slug, or torn-off crabmeat. At this spot the current was so powerful that it washed away any telltale blood, and bits of clothes were thrown out on the grass or stones.

He had not yet decided whether to consider his find an independent being, a dead body, or some kind of waterlogged piece of meat or flesh that couldn’t be dislodged from the stones, when from on high, a little above the waterfall, from the rim of the gorge hidden by the oaks, he heard the familiar rattle of rolling stones.

Someone was coming down off the Ochsensprung. And in the next moment he could make out that it was a female. The color of her skin and something red gave her away. Or multiples of red. A brief flash among the foliage as she continued lowering herself carefully, accompanied by the happy noise of the stones.

Whoever undertook the neck-breaking stunt of coming down the dangerous and twisting trail—used mainly by deer—had to watch their step. And look out for what to hold on to next, assess which root, branch, or sapling would give support or hold one up for a split second while shifting weight for the next step.