Parallel Stories: A Novel (152 page)

Actually, they were dissatisfied with the results. They could obtain no data on the erect state of individual penises and rarely, mainly by chance, did they receive any of the boys’ sperm smear.

Yet they knew from reliable sources that American researchers had carried out similar examinations among schoolboys.

While lying down, they had to turn on their side. Schultze gave them an injection in their buttocks and within a few minutes they were hovering between sleep and wakefulness. Then he stuck them with another hypodermic, but this they saw only from his movements and could not feel. Because the peculiar feeling of losing a grip on wakefulness and bodily alertness spread quickly. Instead of the usual sense of being alive, only a strange feeling of themselves remained, reminiscent of nausea. Schultze kept guiding them back to wakefulness by telling them to turn this way and that. So it was clear the injection was not fully soporific. Their mental capacity could be awakened, while the brain stem forever swallowed up the pictures that went with the sentences spoken. The boys did what he asked them to do, though they no longer knew what he asked, who was asking, and what they did and how. It was like a severe state of unconsciousness, which is why they had no idea what experiment-related questions they were answering, answers that Schultze, sitting at his desk, carefully wrote down.

But even weeks later they knew that somebody had asked them questions about something, and this knowledge perturbed several of them, as when imagination slides into a sense of reality.

They also had memories of occasionally having to change position. Schultze or somebody helping him, perhaps a woman, would use straps to immobilize their limbs in certain positions, so that they would not move until the plaster had set.

This kind-voiced woman may have mixed the plaster too. They sensed this; they sensed things from behind the nausea but did not remember them the same way.

That somebody was shaving something.

This remained as a strange presentiment, probably near the place where the brain records the pictures of imagination.

They saw but did not feel, or rather they could not comprehend even their own thoughts; and since they did not feel, they continually fell back into the peculiar deep sleep, where awareness shunted their lives onto tracks other than the ones they’d started out on at the urging of their parents, or on which they would have progressed conscientiously despite their parents and superiors.

In Annaberg, the church hill itself was nothing but a massive, extensive block of this rock formation, barely covered with a surface of soil. Gneiss supported the entire small town on its back. A few steps from the church and built of the same stone stood Kirchber 1, the Wolkensteins’ modest town house where, to the great delight of the grown-ups, Hans always played with the housekeeper’s little niece Ingke more peacefully than with anyone else. The adults could safely leave the children to themselves for long periods. Not to mention that through this rock formation the silver mines’ narrow, ever-dripping shafts lowered themselves to the bowels of the earth; an endless labyrinth of narrow horizontal passageways led to yet more darkly gaping shafts from which one could reach still lower galleries. Ingke’s father was a mineworker who had been fired several times; he was always organizing his mates, although his grandfather and even his great-grandfather had also been miners, as was almost every man in the family.

This schist-textured, metamorphic, structurally composite and crystalline stone, whose ingredients include quartz, feldspar, and mica, does not differ from granite in its texture but deviates from it greatly in its fascinating colors. Its dominant color stems from orthoclase, a feldspar that is white, red, and gray, in which quartz forms limpid gray specks.

All this, however, can only be seen close up, preferably under a magnifying glass or microscope.

Keinast’s place remained empty during supper, there was not even a setting for him, from which the other boys deduced exactly what was happening to him upstairs. After hibernation, the boys awakened the following day, at midday or even in the afternoon, not in Schultze’s office but in one of the beds in the convalescence ward. When they came downstairs, everyone could see what they had gone through and was very considerate of them. For a day, they moved about confusedly among the others, like sleepwalkers. Yet it was not so much sleepiness or the leaden fatigue in their limbs that kept them captive, but their peculiar state of consciousness, from which they did not want to return to their frightening, boring everyday existence. Some of them remembered that Schultze threw a sheet over their shoulders and seemed to have told them to hold it tight about them because they had to go across the corridor on their own. Schultze followed them, telling them what to do, which way to turn in the corridor, and then carefully closed the high window in the recovery room and tucked them in, lest they catch cold.

Those who already had pubic hair were surprised to see the next day that it was gone. They’d probably shaved it off, Schultze or the kind-voiced woman who helped him occasionally. They did not talk about this either, not even when in the bathroom they saw what had happened. Residues of plaster revealed something about the nature of the examination; they had to scrape off white bits on the fuzz of their bellies or loins that had been missed by the razor.

A mass of gneiss appearing before us as a rock is wine-red when seen at a distance; from other viewpoints and at different parts of the day, it is more ocher, at times flesh-colored. When broken in pieces, it seems yellowish or grayish brown. The biotite or muscovite micas glitter in it; these micas always arrange themselves parallel to each other inside the stone.

This very prevalent stone, though it is not always easy to notice close to the earth’s surface, can thank its mining and architectural career to the parallels that dominate its structure, which allow it to be split easily along its layers. Several varieties of its texture are known; in veined gneiss, the micas are arranged in ribbons, in layered gneiss the ingredients change with each layer, while in barred gneiss they line up in vertical rows, in slabs.

Whatever the texture, the stone can be split along the parallel lines.

Humans do the least of the splitting. It is mainly wind, frost, and water that do it; one might say that miners merely follow the natural cracks when they split the rock with their chisels to get to the silver in the veining.

Gneiss forms a large thick envelope around the globe. On it rest all sorts of deposits and sediments; when the magma moves underneath it and opens the structural cracks, the eruptive rocks burst to the surface through this three-thousand-meter stone casing.

Gneiss was probably the first crust of the earth to cool off.

I’ve Been in This Building Before

I had no idea what would happen. But I was very familiar with the wind rushing into my face from the dark City Park.

I enjoyed knowing the wind.

I would have liked the love story to be over and just to leave without a word and continue my own doomed life. The street was sparkling wet, but the wind stopped hitting us in the face once the rain let up. I was past something pointless, something completely unacceptable, I should think. If I had to leave, well, let me leave. I must get over my stupid mistake at last. I longed for nothing more than to be able to walk away, without explanation, stroll to the bus terminal, get on the lighted empty bus, let the conductor come so I could buy a ticket from him, see the driver get on in his leisurely way at the starting time, and let the two of them take me away from here. Maybe I could get off at the first stop and, unnoticed, go back to City Park and watch what the men were doing in there.

I already knew where she lived and that was more than enough knowledge for one day.

What else should interest me.

But nothing was that simple. And not only because Simon didn’t want me to get him cigarettes. He wanted nothing from me and nothing to do with me; he indicated this clearly, as if he were ignorant of the rules of human tactfulness or deliberately wanted to violate them. He didn’t want to accept my politeness. I could think of no reason to give him for leaving, and I also couldn’t leave because of my silent promise to her. Or anyway she’d raised a silent request that I didn’t have the strength not to honor. I’d had enough of them, I’d had enough of her husband, yet I could not give up.

My muddled curiosity, my disgusting helplessness kept me here. I’d had enough of myself. I should have known in advance. Only a total betrayal could have satisfied me. It would have felt good to deceive the woman, take revenge on all the insults. What could she possibly have to do with me, with such a wretch. And what could I have to do with her if she belonged to such an uncouth boor. Whom I couldn’t figure out because of his coat. But what was the point of being fed up with myself and with them if all I wanted to know was how my damn life would continue in their company. I couldn’t get free of this woman until I learned to say no. I was doing what she’d asked me to do, I had actually become her mute slave. I am waiting for her again; for months I waited for her, making myself impossible—in my own eyes, mainly. And I wait in vain. At college, my absences were piling up furiously, I did not go to classes, and it was clear that at the end of the semester they wouldn’t let me take the finals. If Simon knew how laughable I had made myself already, he’d be content and not bother humiliating me further.

Of course, I couldn’t have known why I did or didn’t do the things I did or didn’t do. When it comes to judging one’s intentions, a person generally piles errors on top of errors. It’s possible that the woman had no silent request to make of me and I had fatally misunderstood something. Did not understand. I’d had enough of her daring husband, for whom I still could not deny my childlike admiration. I’d have been happy to get him his cigarettes. While looking for an excuse to set foot in a bar that had always been off limits to me. I couldn’t have anything else to do with him, even though I’d offered him my readiness to humiliate myself. Because of him, I became like a dog that, snarling and whimpering, submits to the hierarchy of the pack. As soon as I’d gotten into his car, I saw clearly that this was an unpredictable and overbearing man. But suddenly I remembered Ilonka Weisz, whom I had accompanied a few times to the bar when she went to get wine in a large clamp-topped bottle for her drunkard father. I’d always kept away from daring people; I knew well the senseless, power-hungry games of weak men.

The order of my accusations could not be reversed. If I could not find a good reason for a quick departure, then I had to chalk this up to my own cowardice and stupidity, and not blame him. All my moral fury fell back on my own head. Seeing his craziness, I was mainly ashamed of my cowardice. I could not have forgotten with what well-prepared wiles Ilonka Weisz lured me up to the fourth floor, where her churlish brothers beat me within an inch of my life. Why do I need a reason or explanation, I should just walk out on them both; to whom do I owe a reckoning; I am rebelling against myself.

Explaining the obvious to myself.

I cannot solve a problem that any healthy person could easily solve by relying on natural selfishness. I don’t dare decide what would be best for me. Or if I did decide, and now I really have, then the obligation to be polite, which had been hammered into me, proved stronger than any sense of my physical well-being. I have a weak character, or at least weaker than that of anyone else who steers his life according to his own physical and mental interests. The woman did not make me characterless, but she’s the one who pushed me most deeply into the pit of my character weakness. What a ridiculous person I am. Surely more vile and stupid than others. I was full of reproach; in my deep dissatisfaction, I kept saying I was born to be a servant. I’d rather get out of this thing than hurt anyone with my decision; rather endure things than relinquish my precaution. Incessantly, I wanted to get over my refined upbringing, and failed to notice how I was clinging to her, cherishing her every command with delight and tender loving care.

We were standing on either side of the car and I was watching, with confused longing and in search of a saving idea, the lit-up buses and the shadows of men drinking in the old familiar light of the bar. I did this also so I wouldn’t have to look at Simon’s repulsively thin figure.

He did not take his belligerent eyes off me; he saw something I didn’t know in myself.

He was leaning on the half-open car door with one arm, his elbow on the roof, his chin propped up on his thumb. As if he knew what I was thinking about, with what moral doubts I was struggling. His self-satisfaction was a slap in the face because what I sorely lacked was a healthy dose of self-confidence.

Although I held so many things against him, his openness, flexibility, and slimness, there was nothing I could do about or say against his complacency. There was no direct relationship between the physical presence of this other human being and my opinion of him, I understood that perfectly well. One keeps forgetting and therefore must repeatedly bring together these two kinds of experience and knowledge. In the darkness of the old car, I had first noticed the adolescent fragility of his neck. Now, unhindered and from close up, I had to cope with the reality of his face.

And why shouldn’t I want to comprehend with all my senses this person from whom I must tear Klára away.

What virtues should I have, how could I be completely different from what I am, to win her away from this miserable character. It was almost like asking how I might make myself as repulsive as he seemed. But the provocative reality of his face disturbed me and kept me captive—independently of the woman. As if with his features he was playing a game, and I had to accept unconditionally the rules of this game. While I was thoroughly ashamed for him and had no idea what to do about it. Still, I felt I was accepting something unfamiliar, willingly entering something I knew nothing about. Thin men like him seem always to wear shirts at least two sizes larger than their neck requires, which makes them look very vulnerable and fragile. But your surprise is all the greater when you come up against their tenacity, shrewdness, and aggressiveness. At the same time, I discovered that what until then I had thought was just a dark shadow on his forehead was a black spot full of ominous little lumps. As he leaned forward, his elbow still resting on the car’s roof, his dark shiny hair fell over the hideous blotch on his forehead. As if it explained the dread he aroused in me, although I could not think of the name of the skin disease.