Parallel Stories: A Novel (23 page)

And the pillow was still warm from the indignant woman’s large bottom. André waited for the helpless body to relax so he could thrust the pillow between the floor and the boy’s head. As he lifted the stiff head, he reached into thick blood and felt as if his finger had slipped into the open wound. Because the head is full of capillaries, it bleeds quickly and profusely when injured, but the bleeding can also subside just as quickly. He was hoping the head injury was not serious. The tonic and clonic spasms were alternating more vehemently, which loosened the tensors in the young man’s neck and, as a result, the body writhing in opposite directions was literally bouncing the lifeless head on the red pillow. He waited patiently and there came an opportune moment when he could shove the pink bottle deftly between the young man’s teeth.

In the meantime, the hubbub above them seemed to be growing louder.

In addition, exactly during the worst moments, more bathers arrived. They could barely squeeze by the struggling body on the floor, the long legs of the kneeling man, the upended table, and the loudly protesting hefty woman hovering above them. Two of the new arrivals could not even get inside. Two frightened teenage girls kept peeking curiously through the always steamy windbreaks.

The Real Leistikow

On an empty wall of the aunt’s dining room hung one large and noteworthy oil painting, a Leistikow
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that could be found in albums and catalogues and occasionally at exhibitions. Sometimes porters would arrive, take it off the wall, pack it, and take it away. They would bring it back after a long time and then it would hang on the large empty wall the way it was hanging there on this winter morning.

Its perspective was deepened by the shadows of branches swaying in the strong wind.

Catalogues provided the essential data of the painting, of course, such as its size and title, they noted that it was a signed work, but at the aunt’s request they merely indicated that the painting was privately owned. As a child, Döhring often wondered about this. Here was a valuable object in the world, unobtainable for most people, and even its location had to be kept secret. As he saw it, it was only thanks to a strange series of lucky coincidences that he could at any time view a painting others could not see whenever they wished. What this capricious series of coincidences was, he did not understand; what is coincidence, what is sheer luck. Later, he probably wouldn’t have enrolled to study philosophy had these questions not remained firmly in his mind. The painting was mysterious enough to stimulate his imagination.

He could start at any point; at most, he would become bored, but he had never gotten to the end of the road.

Sometimes he caught himself arriving at the same spot; this too is familiar.

Why he, and not someone else, and why this painting when so many others, also privately owned, were concealed from him. When gazing at the painting, he took delight in his own ambition. If he could only fathom this secret system or chain or mechanism that conceals the knowledge of important things from some people while exposing it shamelessly to others—or rather, that sometimes hides and sometimes shows it—then he would be onto something, then he would know and surely understand things.

When it comes to good luck, the world is inexhaustible. True, the same goes for bad luck, in that the world keeps a great many things concealed. On his first afternoon in Berlin, when he pedaled up the treacherously long and boggy slope and, having reached the ridge lined with tall pine trees, wanted to continue on his way, his mouth would have fallen open with amazement had his bicycle not tipped to the side and, with momentum still carrying him along, he almost fell off. Which was embarrassing because several people noticed, a woman and an elderly man for sure, and this sort of clumsiness is usually pretty funny. In the end, he managed to stay upright, grasping the handlebars, both feet on the ground, but the pedals had pounded and bruised his ankle, shin, and calf. He was in pain, sharp stabbing pain, yet he almost shouted with amazement because now he was standing inside Leistikow’s painting. He never would have thought that there was such a sky anywhere in the world, such reflection of light, this kind of lightness, this kind of darkness.

It was among the famous optical peculiarities of that Leistikow that whoever looked at the painting thought its shape was a perfect square, while in fact there was a big difference between the picture’s height and width. And that was the first thing Döhring immediately understood about the painting when he found himself at the original location. The height was filled with a carefully painted empty sky, a pure, cloudless, crystalline, dense sky; a shadow-dappled heavy earth took up the width of the painting, and from the deep throat of this earth a motionless little lake with its leaden surface stared up impassively at the sky. And the sky was the same here too, where he was standing; it had the same texture and volume, the motionless surface of the tiny lake was pulling it down into the ominously darkening depths the same way, tugging into itself the airy perspective of infinity. Leistikow had surely painted his picture at the same spot where Döhring was standing now.

Perhaps in the same hour of the same day of the same month, though one could not claim that nothing had changed during the intervening hundred years.

In the deep valley, on the steep shores of the tiny lake, in the last, waning, reddish beams of the sun, naked people were standing and lolling about. There weren’t too many of them anymore; some were in pairs, others at a respectable distance from one another, alone.

Up to his ankles in the water, a slightly built man with a nearly black suntan stood facing the weakening sun; he swiveled playfully from his waist up when his friend called to him from the shore. Light shone through the outline of the sun worshipper’s body, slid down on his chest muscles, his abdomen, now indented by his turning, and highlighted the rich crests, ranges, and loose shrubs of his hair. His friend, though, was his very opposite, a white giant whose fuzzy skin seemed never to have made contact with the sun. He was shouting short, incomprehensible, though probably funny or sarcastic words while rifling inside a large red bag. Döhring laid his bike on the ground and sat down at the edge of the slope. At first, as if doing it only for a moment and while looking around him, he absentmindedly rubbed his ankle, his aching shin and calf, and then rolled up the leg of his tight pants as far as he could, to see what he had done to himself. Still, his eyes caught the sunburned man just as he was shrugging his shoulders, as though he really wasn’t interested in hearing what his friend was saying, and turning back, apparently offended, to face the sun. Döhring had to take a good look because he felt that while rubbing his ankle, his fingers had slipped into sticky blood.

The bruise wasn’t bleeding much, but it kept oozing from under the skin.

He did not keep on looking at his leg because he was worried or in pain; he was only putting on a little show for the woman who had noticed his faltering with his bike and who, with her large strong teeth, had had a good laugh on his account. He also wanted to avoid looking at all those naked bodies, somehow to curb his uncontrollable curiosity, which might have taken him in who knows how many different directions.

From behind her glasses at the tip of her nose, the woman steadily kept on looking at him, sizing him up, every part of him, as if touching his skull, his shoulder, reaching into the hollow of his open legs, grabbing his feet, and she kept on steadfastly grinning at him. Which was difficult to understand exactly, because the person she belonged to was lying right next to her. And there was no doubt about that. The most interesting thing was that the moment he laid eyes on them he knew everything about them. He was no more than ten meters away. This large woman was lying on her stomach, on a pink terry-cloth towel, her chin propped on her fists, an open book before her, her strong breasts pressed down and facing in two directions under her heavy upper body. The slope with its shining, thick grass was so steep she had to find support for her velvet-smooth sandy limbs; she pulled her thigh a little under her, which made her huge buttocks push upward, her crack open. Döhring had never seen so much indecency in one place.

Once a long time ago, however, he had been close to it, on vacation at the seashore when, unsuspecting, he found himself at the edge of a cliff, and down below him, like thick sausages clinging to one another on a grill, naked people were toasting themselves in the sun; his father had pulled him away, shouting that this was dangerous, it’s forbidden, never, never again, he must promise him, this was a sandbank that might cave in anytime; but Döhring sensed the danger had to do with something quite different from the sandbank, and the incident had remained in his memory as a secret excitement that he should look into sometime.

And now he took a closer look at the injury to his leg.

It was interesting that on his shinbone, along the edge of the scraped-off skin, blood, and a clear watery fluid sat in separate drops. He looked at these drops for a long time and then smoothed them carefully with his finger as though it would be better to combine the two. Having to pay attention simultaneously to several things, he instinctively aimed his performance in different directions. In one corner of his eye, he could see an older man who stood on the slope with spread legs, from whom he had to avert his eyes at all costs, given that the standing man was following his every move eagerly and arrogantly, and probably wanted to attract his attention with some barely concealed public indecency. He did not look in his direction, wouldn’t risk it, absolutely not, though the man was doing everything to make him look. It seemed incredible what this older man was doing to and with himself in the safety of pretense. Yet he could not gain Döhring’s undivided attention, because right next to the pink terry-cloth towel, on an equally large turquoise-blue towel, lay the coffee-brown girl who belonged to the bespectacled woman, whom Döhring dared look at only in stolen glances.

He had to defend himself from her. His breath quickened because of her; no matter how stealthy and hurried his glimpses, the large-bodied bony and ugly sportswoman, her wild red hair gathered in a bun yet with many of its oily strands hanging loose, would see, understand, and jealously follow them, thus keeping him from making any free, natural moves. But he had to risk it. The girl was probably Ethiopian, still a child practically, her limbs tender and delicate like finely carved small rods. Everything around the two women was chaotic: hastily strewn clothes and shoes, a box torn in half from which crackers had spilled on the grass, a large paper bag from which fruit had rolled out on the towels, a few peaches, a pulpy pear, grapes scattered everywhere. And their positions were no less amazing than the girl’s beauty or the two women’s visible relationship; the coffee-brown girl slept sweetly on the downy towel in this blood-red late summer twilight on the lawn whose green was darkening into black. Leistikow also mixed green with lots of black, here and there with steel blue, ocher, a bit of brick red; from this combination, one could see that in only a few hours, along with the impending night, autumn would arrive.

Sunshine was still glowing at the top of the pines’ loose branches; dark twilight covered the tall trunks. The forest breathed cool air and exuded warmth; the valley trapped the powerful scent of resin. Curled into herself, she slept on her side like an embryo turned woman. Her lips were like a languid purple moth, her hair a black dense forest of rings and curls. Her fingernails all but glowed. Her temple rested on her clasped hands, her tightly clamped bony knees were pulled all the way to her bosom and her thin arms pressed her small, firm, aggressive, and pointed breasts together so that one large nipple spilled out over her arm: raw pink, raw clotted purple on the bluish-brown skin.

He dared to graze these places with his eyes only twice, but he had to return to them; he wanted to return a third time. One more time, the last time, as if making a vow to the bespectacled woman and to himself.

He felt grateful, very grateful that he could sit here, because from here, from this higher place, he could see directly into the shady warmth of the Ethiopian girl’s dark lap, and her labia were open. And nobody gave him permission for this, for something like this there is no permission anywhere in the world. For some reason, the entire vision was like a forgotten summer afternoon to which, against his own wish, he would like to return.

He imagined seeing the luxuriant pubic hair.

Then all at once many things began to happen, frustrating Döhring’s anticipations and making it impossible to keep track of them.

The older man, who was bald and muscular but already tending to pudginess, and whose entire body was covered with graying hair, was stroking himself with ostentatious indifference, as though his hand had merely gone astray, or as if he were scratching himself lazily while impassively staring out into the great wide world. As if he were not trying to charm Döhring, but was merely looking over and past his head to where an extremely interesting occurrence was attracting his attention. He started his activity on his chest muscles, a spot to which he regularly returned. He kept filling himself with air, literally inflating his hairy chest, and then tried to stretch and elongate his thickset body.

At any rate, he tried to look like something other than what his natural endowments allowed him to be.

He had some kind of image of himself and he hoped to share his self-adoration with someone.

He was enacting how voluptuous it must feel to run one’s fingers over and squeeze a lean bundle of muscles such as his. Only this bundle of muscle was no longer so lean, in fact it was rather fatty. He pinched his nipples, shuddered, which must not have been very pleasant though the little nipping movement was very sensual. Then slowly down to his waist, following the inner rim of the hip bone along his pulled-in abdominal wall, just barely brushing the loins, the length of the thighs, then suddenly in, between the thighs, and with his hands, after they met, lifting his testicles. He did this too as if by accident; he wouldn’t mind airing them out a bit, and it would only be a physical necessity that along with the testicles his semi-erect prick would also rise.