Parallel Stories: A Novel (13 page)

In a few minutes, the taxi arrived at the front of the house, a gray Pobeda. It had to wait quite a long time.

Gyöngyvér had dressed quickly and, stamping her feet, waited in the hallway for Lady Erna, who also put on her clothes fairly fast, though she spent some time on her makeup.

The concierge still had half a flight to climb to reach the attic.

As if walking up three floors once wasn’t enough without the elevator, damn it, now I have to do it twice, and this half a floor too. A pox on the whole business.

He huffed a little and then shoved the key into the lock, and as he turned it, the gust of wind roaring through the damaged roof nearly tore off the attic’s heavy steel door. It opened with a loud creaking, and in a little while it slammed shut because the wind not only knocked it outward, but also immediately sucked it back in the other direction. He staggered, found no place to back up, the wind opened the door again, he grabbed the railing. An appalling sight came into his view. It was bad enough that so many tiles were missing, but they were missing at places he could not possibly reach without the right ladder or scaffolding. And where the tiles were missing, the sky had fallen through. In the dark attic loft, divided by the various incoming shafts of light, peculiar rags or skins were swaying in the insane air currents. Order ruled everywhere, no superfluous odds and ends, everything spic and span. He had more than enough roof tiles to replace the fallen ones. Neatly stacked between the two chimneys, the original tiles had been left here by the tile setters eighty years earlier, and had served as the reserve supply ever since. He had to get to work because not only light but also rain kept falling through the holes.

In vain he tried to close the steel door, the wind kept knocking it open. He looked around for something flat to use as a wedge, but he relented and locked the door from the inside as he had done many times before.

I should take these beasts down too, he grumbled to himself, and walked to the front of the attic facing the street. The long rags or skins hanging off the longest crossbeam, five of them to be exact, were packed tightly next to one another; they were almost exactly the same length. He had to walk around them.

These were not rags and not skins, but cats shriveled down to their skeletons. This hardly surprised Balter; after all, he was the one who had hung them there.

Isolde’s Lovelorn Swan Song

The rain threatened to fall on that early cold spring morning but did not, as for days it had not, and the weather remained as it had been all along.

By afternoon the steaming gray earth, unnoticed, reached up to touch the deep gray sky, and suddenly it all turned into mauve evening again. Under penalty of death, the blackout order was in effect. People holed up in their cellars, in their cold houses, among the ruins; the endless night was ahead of them.

On the flat lowlands extending to the horizon where the Maas, the Niers, and the Rhine flow toward one another, it is not rare to have such a late February day shortened by spring fogs.

From the windswept tower of the old brick church, two people were taking turns observing the darkening landscape. No planes came. The artillery was silent. As if they had been forgotten. The enemy’s advance guard had not arrived. They were expected to pop up suddenly from the direction of the meadows of Herongen, to emerge from the swamps that in this area are covered by low, bushy coniferous forests full of trees with twisted trunks. Or maybe they would enter with tanks on the Broekhuysen highway. In such foggy, vaporous weather, even to the most experienced eye familiar features of the terrain seemed to move, pitch and rock. One tends to see successive ranks appearing, advancing with weapons at the ready, but it’s nothing but the fluttering of eyelashes, the hovering of patches of fog or scattering smoke in the hazy dimness as it glides in and out of the fluffy mass of distant pines.

Two older men, both veterans, took turns at their post in the heavily damaged tower, a duty not without danger.

A few days before, the church’s clockwork had crashed, tearing through the lower floors, leaving the beams in shambles, and on the opposite side of the church the resulting blast of air cut a two-floor-deep hole in the tower wall. They were relieving each other day and night; they could still manage three-hour shifts. But even they, at the highest possible point, could not see or hear much; after all the noise of weapons and blasts of explosions, there was only painful silence.

They were cut off from the outside world. He could hear his grandfather saying, we were cut off from the outside world. He repeated to himself this long-ago sentence, we’re cut off, we’re cut off.

After the heavy air attack of the previous day, their town, crisscrossed by winds from every side, lay in ruins. Try as he might, he was unable to tell whether this used to be Kloster Street or Mühlen Street. There were too many wounded and there was no place to take them; countless dead under the crashed roof beams. The odor of burned flesh wafted in the air, clung to the smell of smoke, and even if the air current changed direction in the evening, it still brought the stench of burned flesh and bones.

It was often said earlier, when referring to this stench, that somewhere out there people doing compulsory labor were making soap out of bonemeal.

During the day, the radio broadcast patriotic songs, marches, Isolde’s lovelorn swan song, nothing but, without stop or intermission, over and over. The music blared from loudspeakers mounted on the facade of the city hall, crackling, scratching in the grooves worn down by the blunt needle. No one deluded himself anymore with fairy tales. News was no longer reported. Because of the danger of enemy propaganda, no one could own a radio. Everyone knew that a total and unconditional surrender would be unavoidable, yet no one would speak of that.

This situation can lead to nothing but. For days now, there has been nothing to talk about.

The next morning, the priest climbed the tower too.

Who knew what might be happening here.

He wanted to see what was causing the threatening silence.

The front was thumping and clanking farther away. At the top, he found not the religion teacher but Döhring, the retired director of the local branch of Raiffeisenbank, a man whom he had always somewhat feared. They were barely nodding acquaintances and thought even that was a bit too much; yet now they sensed how vulnerable they both were above the gaping depth below. The distinguished, authoritative old gentleman, who bore signs of the Battle of Sedan on his face, signaled with alarmed fingers that the priest should pay close attention to his every word and every move. Back in his time, doctors could not remove metal fragments from head wounds, and those fragments marked for life the depths of the scars on his face as well as their uneven ridges.

They could not be sure that the tower’s damaged girders would support for even another minute the enormous weight of the bell looming above them.

When nothing happened after three days, though in their ears the army kept happily marching on and Isolde kept dying in her lovelorn sorrow, members of the town council—who had all been seriously wounded, mustered out, and sent home—decided at their peril to take action. They anticipated an epidemic and protracted hunger. It would be the end for all of them unless the fields could be prepared for sowing. To ward off any temptation on anyone’s part, seed corn and seed potatoes were stored in the municipal warehouse. First, one of them carefully lowered the radio volume, as if to test whether the others would stand for such serious disobedience. Then with great difficulty another one got up and in the midst of Isolde’s tragic grief turned off the city radio’s broadcast with such zeal it was as if his nerves had completely ceased to function.

In the awkward silence that followed, which made everyone happy, there was no need to say much about the tasks ahead.

More than a week earlier, guards at the nearby camp had driven away all the forced laborers who could still walk. Some of them then put on civilian clothes so they could hide out on their farms near the town.

The city councillors knew what to expect, or what the consequences might be of certain actions.

Before leaving, the guards crammed all those unable to walk into the two small one-story hospital barracks, boarded up the doors and windows but, as it turned out, did not take enough care when they set the two structures on fire.

One guard who was leaving at the last moment handed a paper box to his older brother, another guard who was staying behind, with instructions to hide the box.

This Döhring was a middle-aged, heavyset man, and he rode his bicycle to his farm with the paper box hidden under his raincoat. The fire had long yellow tongues; the gasoline, bluish and purple within the yellow, kept hissing, while the people inside whimpered and bellowed like animals; though they were men, they screamed, the walls were shaking until they trampled one another to death in the smoke; and this did not take more than twenty minutes.

But perhaps not everything had been considered thoroughly.

For a long time, this too remained a mystery.

Inside, everything smoldered and continued to char even a week later, but outside the flames subsided in no time, shortly after those who were leaving had gone.

They all walked together for a while under the pitch-dark sky, which was occasionally rattled by the din of distant battle. At each crossroads one of them would stay behind until the rest had vanished somewhere in the lowland fog.

In the meantime the windows cracked in the heat, the planks burned off the boarded-up windows, paint singed off the frames but they did not catch fire, and though the ceiling fell down on the slowly incinerating bodies, the flames did not catch the beams. The two buildings spewed their putrid smoke into the heavy, foggy air.

On the order of the town council, the dogs were tied up outside.

But they could not tie up the cats, the birds, or the rats; these creatures went their own way.

It also had to be considered that nocturnal frosts would soon end.

The bicyclist made a large detour across the fens; he was riding on dirt roads, on barely noticeable little paths. He avoided all human settlements so as to arrive unnoticed.

He was perspiring heavily, with foglike ice settling on his face; he met no one. He heard his own panting only when he dismounted. He lifted his bicycle into a rowboat, untied the boat, and rowed to the other side of the lake. Luckily for him, the evening mist was thick over the water, practically steaming; even the plashing of the oars or creaking of oarlocks could barely be heard. As if slowly he had forgotten where he was coming from and how uncertain his future might be. He was a little sorry too that he would reach his farm before dark and would have to lock himself inside the cold house.

But first, he hid the paper box in the fruit-drying shed.

This handsome little brick structure stood at the edge of the apple orchard about forty meters from the whitewashed one-story main building with its reddish-brown crossbeams. The moment he pulled out the empty drying racks his lips and nostrils were assailed by the smoky, sweet fragrance of prunes. He grumbled that his daughters had left the dryer like this for the whole winter after the plums had been preserved.

His fingers became sticky.

He had to crawl inside the soot-smelling little building attached to the big oven and smokehouse; he groped around in the honey-sweet darkness and soon found the small recess.

He was already making plans; he could not imagine ever giving this paper box to anyone.

Council members had raised the possibility of beating all the cats to death, down to the last one. Some people did this without official authorization because it gave them meat to feed their raging dogs, going mad with hunger. It’s not simple to kill a cat. It must be bludgeoned on the head to daze it; then, having a firm grip on its hind legs, one must keep knocking its head against the chopping block or house wall or anything else until not even a sigh comes out of its mouth.

Then it is dead.

He became almost cheerful at the thought that he would never give it back to anyone; he was very satisfied with himself; the hell with all my relatives, I’ll come up with a story.

He had to push back the sticky drying racks carefully and see to it that under every second rack the tray would slide into its proper place. As if his escape had freed him from something whose weight he had not acknowledged until now; or rather, because of the paper box, the seriousness of the situation now made some sense, retroactively. No matter what happened, the gold promised a future.

In those days, farms on the periphery of the town had no electricity, but the flames in the fireplace gave ample light.

Sitting in the dark, looking into the flames and thinking about the hidden box, fright seeped back into him, filled him to the brim and strained his chest.

I’m a deserter, I’m taking part in a mass desertion, and to whom would he have to account for this.

Nobody could stop the prisoners, either, who at the news of the evacuation managed to hide somewhere and now were coming out of hiding; and maybe a few broke out of the burning barracks and could crawl, driven mad by thirst, as far as the next corpse.

In the infernal noise and chaos accompanying the evacuation command, the guards could not maintain order without shooting at least two dozen people dead, though according to Himmler’s last instruction of the day no harm should come to any prisoner. But instead of taking them out to the fields behind the camp, where in long ditches corpses dug out of earlier mass graves had been burning for weeks, they carelessly left the new bodies to their fate. And these corpses, dangerous prey for man and beast, now lay around everywhere on the camp’s open areas and empty roads.

The flammable human colloid gathered in the ditches, fat and marrow arranged in fine layers according to their relative density; at night, the religion teacher or the retired banker watched as fires burst to life with fat and flames flaring up from the depths.