Parallel Stories: A Novel (115 page)

Kramer saw to it that, despite the congestion, there was silence and order in the two wards; this is what he kept Peix busy with all day, though during the chaotic last days it became impossible. It was not unusual in the midst of this quiet, resigned waiting that someone simply keeled over out of sheer weakness and without being pushed. His body would stay there in the mud, which, along with the excrement, vomit, and flies, would freeze again during the night.

Peix killed many people. He had them stand up, it was their turn, they can come in now, and when they managed more or less to rise to their feet in the drippy midday thaw, he shoved them back down. Mainly the handsome young boys had reason to fear him, the ones he took on as assistants in the sick bay, just as Kramer had taken him, back then. In the camp, people said he was a pervert, which in the prisoners’ lingo meant he did not use them even though he could. But he fed and pampered the pretty boys. He would sell one to Eisele in exchange for liver paste to feed another one. The boys did not have to do anything, they could just lounge around, and while Peix worked diligently all day for Kramer, he kept sending his laughs in the boys’ direction, his mouth wide open.

This was also something Kramer knew more about than anyone else: Peix’s hideously mute laughter.

But one fine day Peix grew tired of them, and no one asked himself why, or whether he would like another one. Kramer never let him keep more than two assistants at a time, which would have put an immeasurable burden on the sick bay’s population. These boys were mostly from the ranks of Russian prisoners of war or from Polish forced labor units who had been isolated from others because of capital crimes; they regularly killed for raw potatoes, for a frozen apple, anything. Peix himself had started his career as a common criminal. He was sixteen when he arrived in the Buchenwald concentration camp having committed a particularly cruel double murder. Kramer looked at his mashed and infected hands and then by chance looked at his face and said to himself, no, this boy may have committed murder, but he is no criminal. Peix eagerly affirmed that indeed he was not a criminal. He was not the one who had murdered the two old art dealers whose place he and his friend had broken into, he told Kramer, quickly realizing what Kramer wanted to hear from him. He and his partner had found the house empty. They knew where to find the two big Leistikow paintings they had been hired to steal; and the two old homos had probably been killed by their lover boys. Kramer took him along to the pathology section, a privilege for which, Peix assumed, he was to pay with his body. By the time they discovered the misunderstanding, they loved each other so much that they could not be separated.

Now they had to part, which evidently did not bother Peix, or at least he did not let it interrupt his important business. But it did bother Bulla, the trashy little Polish squealer: in the harsh light cast on the lower part of his face he pretended to be attentive to Peix while nervously blinking in the darkness at Kramer, wondering what would happen next. Bulla limped badly; his mates had once picked him up and thrown him from the second-story window of the laundry. They heaved him out so he would fall on his spine, but it did not happen that way. He was Eisele’s personal informer. If Kramer had not fixed his terrible open fractures and if Peix against his better judgment had not nursed him so devotedly, he would never have walked again. Peix wanted to kill him; he asked that Bulla be given a small dose of sedative, which in the language of the criminals meant enough to put the squealer out of his misery.

Peix also threatened: if Kramer was unwilling, he would do it himself.

Save it for others, for a worthier patient, Kramer said; his quiet self-assurance calmed the boy down even in the most critical situations. He wouldn’t have wanted to pick a fight with Eisele over such a senseless murder. Someone willing would come along and do it anyway. Informers could not support themselves for long; they never had more than half a year to squeal on people, though during that time they managed to have many prisoners put away. Peix also made his pretty boys disappear, one after the other, whenever they grew chubby and he became bored with them. He would tell them he had heard them coughing and tuberculosis was not a disease to walk around with, they should report to the sick bay, and there, within a few days, the SS doctors took care of them, without exception. Wherever Peix appeared, everyone tried hard not to cough. Strong, large men especially had much to fear. Kramer overlooked Peix’s ongoing manhunt, or he forced himself to pretend not to notice what his friend was doing. He overlooked many things he could not help noticing, in hopes that one day, with his help, Peix would come to his senses and realize who he really was. In the depth of his soul, though, he had long understood that, shameful as it was, all his apprehensions had come true. From this icily cool-headed boy he learned much about the lives of criminals and their ways of thinking; without these experiences the communist cell could not have taken up the struggle against them in the camp; but he had failed miserably with his own pedagogical strategy.

What the boy willingly took from him was never what he had wanted to give him.

But what was he to do if this boy was the only human being in the world whom he loved so much. Perhaps he loved him because of his irresponsibility and unpredictability. The boy was more levelheaded than anyone he’d ever met, but still, his soul was crumbling in the depths of madness. The truth was that Peix loved him even more than he loved Peix, Peix loved him immoderately, with all the inner turbulence of his madness. He usually feared robust, big men like Kramer. It was hard for him to get used to the knowledge that Kramer would never hit him or punish him. In Buchenwald, he jerked away his head if Kramer stepped closer to him or addressed him in a loud voice. Kramer managed to laugh hard when this happened, because he understood the boy well; and the boy was ashamed.

Kiss my ass, he yelled at him, get your kicks somewhere else, not with me.

And what would happen if he did hit him once, Kramer often wondered, would that be of any use. Because the jerking of his head meant that, except for being hit, the boy would not accept any other proof of love.

Lemme alone, already, Peix shouted, stop bugging me. Beat your meat, play with your cock, that’s what you should play with. Find something else to do. Get off my back.

Kramer laughed at Peix’s fits of rage; he kept laughing at him very loudly until Peix gave up.

You garbage, you shit, Peix would hiss, as if his teeth were being pulled; you pig swill, you shit, he hissed.

But why would he hit him.

He had never loved anyone like this, so senselessly, purposelessly, and unconditionally. As if he were wishing to redeem the other’s soul with his own. He loved him with every experience of his life, with his entire social wisdom honed on Marxism, with his messianic fervor; he loved the future in the boy. Then how could he possibly admit to himself that he had made a mistake. They should at least have killed Bulla. I made a big, big mistake, he said to himself. Although he could not acknowledge, not even to himself, that it was not a person’s circumstances that determined how that person would go. Not even birth was an influence strong enough to make a person good or evil. In Buchenwald he managed to convince his comrades with the same arguments he had used on himself, but here they reached the very end of the human world’s possibilities, and now he sees that there are no more possibilities, there is no future tense and there never has been one. Yes, here, in the very center of human misery and baseness, here, in hell, he wants to prove, he thundered to his comrades, that no one is born a criminal.

Where else, my dear sweet comrades.

But in the matter of criminality, the others had eyes too. They quickly called him to account about Peix, and he could expect the very worst.

He laughed at them lustily, at what they might have been thinking about him.

The comrades did not see how brazenly he was lying. But his comrades could see that a man who spoke and laughed like that was probably unaware of his own dangerous nature.

It was a very telling indicator that they called a meeting of cell leaders for Sunday afternoon without him. Bruno Apitz was there, in the bathhouse behind the laundry, and Fritz Lettow and Gustav Wegerer, and they sent for him only after they had made their decision about him.

They were going to withdraw him from circulation.

It was spring; the sun was warming everything.

A wondrous spring in the indecent woods of Buchenwald. A time when a man walking thinks, well, I’ve managed to survive this hard winter. And that he’s not alone. This is what he was thinking as he walked, because he really was not alone. Now only better things can happen. Birds were making a din, singing. A gigantic oak stood in front of the laundry. It had to be at least four hundred years old. The prisoners liked to think of it as Goethe’s tree under which he used to rest with Eckermann, who in some way must have been his friend, after all.
*
The way Peix was his. And when he thought of this, he somehow forgave Goethe too, which made him feel as if suddenly he’d found an explanation for nature’s terrible indifference.

Anyone going to the bathhouse had to pass in front of the laundry, but few people were allowed to walk freely on the camp’s roads and footpaths except for Kramer. The terrible bathhouse was an enormous white tiled hall, with more than two hundred showerheads in the ceiling, of which about two dozen were dripping, the sound of the drops echoing loudly. Through the multipaned windows, open on this Sunday afternoon, one could see the famous oak from a slightly higher angle; the woods were lower down and much farther away, vanishing into infinity beyond the electrified barbed-wire fence. The three men sat on a bench inside the bath, warming their backs and shoulders in the sun coming through the window.

He succeeded in convincing them that without the criminals they would not be able to win the battle with the criminals.

They asked him to wait outside while they made their next decision.

While they deliberated long and rescinded their earlier decision, Kramer waited in the wintry-cool shadow of the bathhouse, looking into the distance above the oak, above the woods. Until they called him back in, he shuddered slightly with fear, though he was not afraid of death. He was not afraid that his comrades would kill him. That would be more like a kind of mercy. There was no point in hoping or knowing that in the end his comrades would see reason. He was trembling a little. They can do nothing else, and he cannot do anything else. It was not his fear of death but his dread of life—that is what he feared so much, that they would thrust him out from among themselves, and then his entire life would become senseless retroactively and his death would be senseless too. All his activity until now would lose significance. There would not be an iota of sacrifice in his death.

But now he wanted to say good-bye to him; he was taking leave of his sensible life.

Gregor, he said quietly, and this was exceptional because in the four years when they lived in each other’s soul and physical proximity he had never said the boy’s first name out loud. In the barracks, the name sounded so scandalous that he instantly recalled the plank wall, warmed by spring heat, which even the fragrant cold of the woodland night could not quickly cool, where they, squeezed between two buildings, felt the warmth on their bodies. They were standing in the starless, deathly dangerous darkness with their pants pulled down, helpless and listening intently.

He knew a good place, Peix had whispered ten minutes earlier on his pallet. Kramer thought Peix meant a hiding place for something, like food, that he wanted to share; in a few minutes, he followed the boy. They carefully went around the latrines. Twice they had to wait for the searchlight’s beam to pass and then run quickly, one at a time, and then Peix led him here. Kramer followed the boy with alert attention and also with admiration; Peix had arrived only a few weeks earlier but was moving about as if he had lived at Buchenwald for years. As they stood trembling with emotion in the heat emanating from the two buildings on either side of them, Peix excitedly pushed his pants down and, shuddering with passion, groped after the cord of Kramer’s pants. It was as if they had washed the desire of pleasure into the sensation of danger and it was impossible to say which was greater. Kramer, surprised, rather felt, endured, or heard all this, but they could see nothing of each other in the darkness. Within the darkness was a more warmly outlined darkness, and this second quality of darkness was the other person. Which conquered them both, more than either of them had anticipated or wanted. Peix found Kramer’s hand and led it to himself, and for a while that sealed their fate, since from then on they could both justifiably believe that the other one wanted the same thing. Why would Kramer have resisted a kid in such a situation. From then on, the few significant moments of their lives were made up of hesitant, hasty movements like these, directed at each other, of which they were incapable alone and alone would not even have thought of, hasty, impatient movements that occasionally caused a bit of joy or evoked the memory of joy. These fractions of seconds thrust them close together, much closer than any closeness they might have known before. They were intent on fulfilling the obligation they imagined they owed each other, if that is how the other one liked it; neither of them wanted for himself the small amount of good every man’s body knows of the bodies of other men; they both wanted to give it to the other. But it all turned out badly; out of sheer consideration for the other, it became difficult to restrain their aversion, embarrassment, and urge to laugh, so after a while they stopped, giving up, at a loss. They stood in the hiding place, foreheads touching, hugging each other’s shoulders and waist as strongly and mercifully as possible. They were careful not to let their loins make contact again.

But now Peix was paying no attention to him, as if he actually neither saw nor heard Kramer.