Parallel Stories: A Novel (4 page)

He really did not feel sorry for them.

Döhring’s manners were cool and negative enough to keep people from seeking his company; of his exterior, one could say it had nothing irregular about it, but it was more impassive than exciting or interesting. He had contempt for everyone, including those dead authors whose books he was fond of reading. The lives of these writers were full of all sorts of disgusting and chaotic matters that left their traces on the immortal works. This was an area he would not enter, even though he had no partner to discuss the issues about which he thought often and passionately, because no one had ever asked him his opinion on this or that subject, let alone shown need for his tenderness.

He kept looking out the window until the train pulled away from the city.

As if trying to restrain himself or hoping that these wet gardens, sooty walls, cheerless railway yards, and dreary backyards would detain at least his gaze, would not let go of it. How characteristic of him that all this time he kept open on his lap the book he was about to read. As if sending out involuntary signals saying, please, I’m a busy man, do not bother me needlessly.

He could not turn his head away, he could not let go of the city.

He was afraid that in his absence, while away from the city, they would accuse him of something. He was thinking not about what he had done or failed to do, what his imagination was doing or what was happening to him, but about the possibility that while talking to that detective he might have put some things the wrong way. Not only had he left himself exposed, but with his chattiness he might have unleashed a mass of immeasurable and unpleasant consequences. Yesterday’s nervous fever left no external trace, perhaps a slight cold; he was sniffling a bit. An observer would see a stern, calm, tall young man who was daydreaming, but yesterday’s fever had spread throughout his cells, flooding and infecting an important center of his brain. It had devastated the uniquely constructed, delicately built inner world in which until now he had lived in complete isolation; it had enlarged and inflated certain objects of his memory and imagination, leaving barely any space for the incoming outer world. When he got on the train and opened the door of his compartment, he automatically greeted those sitting inside; when a few hours later he rose, he said good-bye in the same automatic way.

One of his travel companions, a young woman, was fascinated by Döhring’s motionlessness, but he did not even notice her.

He got off in Düsseldorf, where he had to wait for his twin kid sister, coming from Frankfurt, and he had four full hours until then.

Usually, when she finally arrived, the entire station and all its trains would be echoing with the repulsive throng of harried, rushing and pushing people.

They traveled home rarely, but these journeys had their own rhythm, which until now he had never thought of violating. The hours in Düsseldorf were as if the family, the neighborhood, everything familiar was gradually accepting him back. Even though he did not want to be reaccepted anywhere. He feared his twin kid sister—if only she were not a girl—who was much too close to him; he did not want his family. He would have liked to break out, but he could not have said to where. Out of this familial net that forever held him down and pulled him back, out of the circle of women. Under the lenses of the security cameras, people, including him and his sister, were moving among the lockers in the left-luggage section; how laughable they seemed. Everyone was looking for the most secure locker, from which no one could steal anything. Döhring demonstratively threw his things into the first available empty locker. Shards of a broken beer bottle crunched under his feet; in a corner a homeless man was exuding his stink, probably the one who had dropped the beer bottle, and now was snoring drunkenly.

And then, taking the usual route, he headed for his aunt’s apartment; she usually had a sumptuous breakfast awaiting him.

These were their hours together, for which they both mutely prepared.

It was a ten-minute walk, but when he reached her street he did not turn into it.

An act with which he broke the continuity of a long-standing game harkening back to the dimness of unconscious childhood. The essence of the game was to assume that the beautiful aunt was his favorite aunt and, in defiance of their rather primitive and petit bourgeois family, the two of them would ostentatiously adore each other. As if in his effort to preserve his independence, it was his duty to adore not his kid sister but his aunt. The aunt was indeed a spectacular phenomenon: entertaining, cheerful, well off, in her fifties, who had worked for decades in the fashion industry, representing a reputable Italian international firm, and who had lived an almost ascetic, relatively liberated life. She traveled widely all over the continent, where at remote locations she kept many people with unusual skills busy: pearl stringers, linen weavers, lace makers, braid makers, and braid trimmers. The aunt’s need was probably greater for a favorite nephew of whom she could expect a great deal but whose existence did not demand the kind of responsibility she would have had to accept for a child of her own; and since at the time she would not dream of giving birth to a child, she lured her little nephew into this endless game. In fact, she separated him from his twin. She offered him the spiritual and financial aid that would help him leave the family nest, free him of tribal restrictions and take him into the big wide world.

At any rate, they played the dangerous game of such a move being possible.

The aunt lived near the Hofgarten in a very expensive apartment, and from the three windows of her dining room one could see the giant trees of the ancient park. It was not very cold that day in Düsseldorf, but the sky was dark and the wind screamed among the bare trees. Döhring took himself into this familiar park. He forgot about his twin sister, of whom, because of his own rebellion against the family, he always thought reluctantly; he forgot his aunt, the sumptuous breakfast, his deadlines and commitments; or more precisely, all of these were pushed to the edge of his consciousness where he could barely reach them.

Only one thing interested him: the dead man, the man’s death, or death itself; what he had seen with his own eyes, and how he could make no proper accounting to anyone of what he had witnessed. He kept walking, not caring about anything, and that felt good. He knew where he was, knew what he should do, but was becoming indifferent to everything that moved or lived around him. Or rather, independent of his thoughts, he was preoccupied by one question: whether he was seeing a corpse on the bench, at the bottom of a hedge, among the trees. All he saw was an occasional squirrel and a wild hare here and there. As if the dead man still had a chance and the chance was a direct function of Döhring’s alertness. As if the abandoned parks of the world had been entrusted to his care and he had to search through all of them. He was also interested in knowing how the dead man would find his relatives, or how his relatives would find him. Does he have anyone at all. Would his fate take a better turn in the end, now that he had to perish in a public park in such awful circumstances, and what could he, Döhring, do about it. And what does death mean anyway; how could he put right what he had done. Or what he had failed to do. The possibility that he could still do something both excited and tormented him, something he kept on neglecting every second simply by not being where he was supposed to be, or, more correctly, the opportunity had passed irretrievably and others were acting in his stead, doing the things he should be doing.

He should not have left the corpse.

At the same time, he knew that the questions were so dangerous it would be best to forget them. After all, one does not find a corpse in the park every day. If he had found the corpse in that park, he surely would not find one in this park. A catastrophe is a single occurrence; it cannot happen twice. Though there is no rule that says one catastrophe cannot cause another. He kept hoping he would forget it all, because he wanted to; he had come here to forget it. He wants to. At most, he could find another, completely strange corpse. The wind seemed to be sweeping his creaking steps from under him on the pebbled path, the sensation of his steps. But he noticed that the reason he could not keep his mind on anything but the familiar corpse was that he was busy telling himself to forget it all. He kept turning over in his mind how everything had happened, what he had or hadn’t done, because he wished to recall most accurately the very thing he wanted most to forget and what he should tell the detective. And this thought filled everything with the corpses he would find. He did not understand why he had done what he’d done; he was not even certain it was he who had done what he had, and whether he was the one who every moment was neglecting something that should be done.

He understood nothing, he was merely seeing a movie about himself that got stuck at certain spots and then flickered up and continued at some other location.

And then, in the stormy, booming, bare wintry park an enormous absurdity arose in his mind, bringing him to a halt.

He did not even notice he had stopped, because what he was thinking was that the Creator wanted it this way.

I am his most faithful foxhound.

He had never thought he had a Creator, or that this world had a Creator whom he might or might not know. Nor had it ever occurred to him that the Creator might want something from him. Nobody would do it except me. He saw clearly what he had to do; the thought made him feel very light, relieved, perhaps even a little happy. He also liked the role of the foxhound—the sniffing, the tireless running, the frequent spurts of urination. He felt the smell of the nearby river. Or the nearness of the large body of water, the mighty Rhine river, for some mysterious reason suddenly became significant; he could not see it from the park yet the wind filled his nostrils with the water’s cold scent. Because of it, he could hardly breathe, as if he had too much air. Now at last he reached the end of his brooding and confusion. He realized what he had to do, and that made him feel wonderful; he enjoyed himself as much as he enjoyed all the smells in the air around him.

He has no choice, he cannot leave anything unclear, he must confess everything and he will.

This urge had the strength of a calling.

He could see himself, with the fallen quarry in his chops, running toward his master; he could not tell whether it was a man or a woman because it was the Creator and the Creator has no body. He also estimated that putting his decision into action would require additional strength, and this need had a direct connection to the powerful smell of the river, to all the other scents, to his surging vigor and to a surplus of air.

He must retrieve the prey. As if he had told himself he must acquire the river.

He was standing in the middle of a pebbled path under a sky continually revealed and concealed by swift-moving clouds. He must turn himself in. Although nothing could make him change his mind, the anticipated deed proved a little painful, in advance. To bare his breast. He feared being exposed again to Dr. Kienast’s persistently penetrating, almost melancholic, provocative countenance. Along with all the life-threatening dangers facing him, he also felt a desire for the dead man’s body. He could no more break free of the trusting pair of brown eyes than he could of the figure of the unknown corpse, the gentle, white, bladelike stripes of snow, the magical coolness of the discovery.

He was still breathing, lolling on the bench, his arm dangling, and snow falling on him.

He walked to the river, though he did not cross the wide road, did not go down to the shore, only looked at it from afar. Thus he signaled to himself that all this is not nearly final, he is only gathering strength; now he has to attend to a very different, interim but very important matter. From here he could truly see on what a vast lowland, vanishing into infinity, and under what a vast sky the city had taken roots. As far as the eye could see, low plains everywhere; on the plane of the sky, clouds moving on their way; on the earthly plane, cars speeding in two directions; on the river, heavily laden barges progressing majestically, hulls deep in the water. The river was filled to its brim, the windblown surface spread out thickly and reflected grayly. He stood in the wind for a long time, unaware of time’s passing. The aunt had been waiting for him for an hour and a half while he continued loafing and looking around, thinking that only a few minutes had gone by. He was enjoying the world’s booming, noisy, coolly fluttering fullness, emptiness, denseness, and flatness. The wind that had come up over the river clashed behind his back and rumbled through the park’s trees. But its rhythmic booming was sliced across by the even murmur of the city, punctuated by plaintive horns from tugboats. And they echoed long under the mute clouds rolling over one another; the openings between the clouds left behind a few quick or lazy light spots on the ground. As if beams of spotlights had been turned on or dragged across the landscape; it turned bright, became overcast or unexpectedly darkened as if twilight were approaching; and then glittering across the huge surface for a second, sky, water, and earth throbbed, the armor of vehicles dazzled, and then everything grew dim again. Nothing had ended. Probably his hunger reminded him it was time to put his plan into action. He remembered the set table at his aunt’s, the sumptuous breakfast. He turned around, started back, but did not continue on the promenade, under the trees, but turned into the quiet side street where elegantly reticent windows looked out on the park.

The neighborhood was familiar; he knew where to find a telephone booth. There was nobody around; he met no one.

First he called information, but he had nothing with which to jot down the number of police headquarters and nothing to write on, therefore with his nail he carved it, as a kind of reminder, into the yellow lacquered cover of the telephone book. Neither the 4 nor the 8 came out right; he hesitated for a moment and then punched in another number anyway. To be done with it quickly.