Parallel Stories: A Novel (15 page)

As soon as they reached the first houses, they moved right in.

Who could have anticipated this. This meant that the camp guards had left behind not only corpses but living prisoners as well.

Get going, he shouted down to the square.

But those on the church square did not understand where they were supposed to go, they wanted more precise instructions from above. The other people were already entering a second house, but the religion teacher was so paralyzed with fear he could not make any corrections. Or rather, for long moments he had to cope with the thought that the fate of this village of Nordwall, with all its inhabitants, was now in his hands. That meant nothing but trouble. Had he called out to them immediately he might have been able to save some of them, but he kept quiet, and they all had to perish.

They kept coming on the road, in files of three; three of them veered off at the third house and entered it.

They had already drunk from the water of the Niers; what they wanted now was food, warm clothes, money, and revenge.

When the religion teacher from the tower hysterically made people understand what they should do, since some were already jumping out the windows of the first houses, they quickly took off toward Nordwall. By the time they got there, panting and exhausted, the village was in flames, and although some tenants managed to get out at the last minute, others, beaten to a pulp and frozen in their own blood, were awaiting a fiery death. Seeing this sight, the townspeople knew no mercy. They knocked milk mugs out of the mouths of some; some they tore away from pantry shelves along with fruit jars clutched in trembling fingers; they took some prisoners out of clothes closets from among hidden furs or biscuits, or caught them when, trying to escape, they got stuck on fences or high hedges.

They beat them to death with spades and shovels; they pierced the hearts of twenty-five of them so they would never rise again. Some resisted fiercely, and many of the townspeople, despite their numerical superiority, were left on the scene badly wounded. The twenty-sixth got away. They couldn’t find him, or the religion teacher miscounted. But they did not give themselves enough time to see to the wounded, help put out the fires, and calm down a little. In the heat of killing, they piled fresh corpses on handcarts, pushcarts, wheelbarrows, on any old conveyance; they were proud that there were so many corpses and that they were the ones who had produced them. The corpses were dripping with blood and slippery with splattered brains, there were too many ears, noses, truncated parts; hastily they collected what they could find and then pulled, tugged, dragged their burdens to the burning ditches to be done with the job before dark. The damn ditches were far from here, and they had already lost a lot of time.

They reached the camp in the afternoon. It was impossible to tell whether humans or animals had picked and gnawed so brutally at the corpses lying on the deserted roads.

To be honest, nobody tried seriously to answer this question.

The important thing was to burn the corpses as soon as possible so the ditches could be covered over and the land above them properly plowed.

The sole escapee who survived was picked up by a British patrol near Venlo, among the greenhouses of St. Thomas Monastery, and at this very hour he was regaling them with the story of his escape while they fed him with lukewarm sweet condensed milk, covered him with a blanket, though his whole body kept shaking uncontrollably.

Slowly, slowly, motioned the British officer, there’s plenty more where that came from. Take small sips. You’ll get more, but first we’ll give you a bath, put you in a nice warm bed. In the meantime, I’ll bring somebody who speaks your language.

So until that time he saw not him but his twin brother.

He screamed in his sleep that he did have a twin sibling, after all, and it was a boy.

Yes, he mixed them up.

From which he gathered that, luckily, the other boy had made a mistake. His twin brother could not have burned to death if he reached this place and was still alive. Because of this final realization that put everything in its place, a happiness of enormous proportions and unknown source gripped him, though he knew he was dreaming; still it was as if he were rescued, because at least in his dreams they were both alive.

How old are you, asked one of the monks curiously.

The question was so unexpected that, no matter how hard he thought, he could not answer it.

Don’t tire him out, said the other monk. He can’t be more than fifteen.

Or maybe he just can’t call out of his dream to tell us.

I think he has to be a little older than that.

It was odd that he could not understand the simplest things.

His grandfather had taught Döhring that the devil always wears a disguise and never sleeps. Or even if he stops to rest sometimes, a cautious person never leaves hatchets, knives, sickles, or scythes unguarded.

When the basket was filled with firewood, he put the short-handled hatchet among the freshly chopped wood, as was his wont, and took the basket under his arm. He kicked the door open with his knee. Nothing fatal happened in that instant. The flinging door of the shed covered the boy with the sharpened stake, crouching and waiting for him, and almost hit him on the forehead.

Döhring did not look back, because the door worked on a spring and would shut automatically behind him.

Unsuspecting, he walked toward the house with his basket.

And the boy did not immediately follow him, because he was certain that here indeed was that German, either someone who looked just like him or the man himself, though he had had no contact with the prisoners until the last few weeks.

But then he had revealed himself to them.

He took after him only when the familiar figure had almost reached the open door of his house.

He found himself facing the ones coming downstairs from the upper floor.

Because they had found nothing in the house. This calmed them down, though at the same time the mute house with all its possibilities upset them. Their mouths and hands were full of dried apples and prunes, their pockets stuffed with them too. Up in the ice-cold bedrooms fruit stood in open sacks and baskets; they had stuffed themselves with fruit, kept on chewing. Here is the bad egg, look, one of them yelled in an incomprehensible language, his mouth full.

He didn’t think he’d find us here too, added the other in German, which is to say, in the language spoken at the Niersbroek camp, and it sounded most like German.

At the sight of the two live prisoners, Döhring was not only deeply surprised but about to turn around because he sensed, rather than heard, footsteps behind him, but just then a mighty blow hit his head. A single dark flash that scattered in bursting sparks. This seemed to make him feel lighter, but he did not understand what was happening, and then he received the second blow. He no longer felt the basket with the firewood in his arms, but he saw from close up the faces of the two unknown figures, and that made him feel like laughing.

And before it grew completely dark with the third blow, the sense of being light was the last thing he comprehended, that the burden of life was being lifted from him.

This time, it would have been better to have left his short-handled hatchet in the shed: this became his last sensible thought as the light of the sparks slowly faded into pitch darkness. He knew it was superfluous to think of anything else, he was already dead, even though he was still breathing and thinking. Sprawled among the firewood, he gave the impression of wanting to rise from his death.

But you can see there is no more, one of the monks explained kindly, and enjoyed the pleasant fragrance emanating from his body.

The monk had a scent like lemon drops when their honeyed contents burst in one’s mouth.

Both monks wore thick white frocks.

They tried to take the lukewarm mug from him; he did not want to part with it. The mug reminded him of something from the past, from the distance of eight long months he did not exactly remember of what. They tried to peel his fingers off the mug handle and make him stand up, but he insisted on remaining seated, pressing his soles hard to the floor of the unknown room. This made the monks laugh, as if they were enjoying his mulish stubbornness. And he tried to laugh along with them as they were laughing at him. He understood well that for his own good they could not give him more of the sugared milk and that they had to move on, go to some other place, yet his response turned into whimpering. He did not want to be taken from here. And he was profoundly ashamed of this.

He whimpered and implored them, begged them and beseeched them to give him just a tiny bit more.

Until he disappeared, that squat British officer had spoken to him in French, and with his words he delicately thrust out and retracted his red lips under his red mustache so that he looked like a snuffling Easter bunny looking for more to eat.

The bunny just popped into his mind for no reason; he wasn’t sure it wasn’t a dream.

The Dutch monks addressed him in German, informally, while he kept crying and pleading in his own mother tongue, almost as if he did not want them to understand.

Which helped him a little.

He had to overcome something within himself, something he would have liked, in vain, to hide from them; they understood that.

And then he relented; let them take him, let them do what they wanted, as if he had been dissolved in the strange bodies and the familiar smells. The two monks laughed at this too, their Adam’s apples bobbing; they were enjoying themselves, and their double chins were trembling. They took him along white, sparkly corridors, their steps echoing. They descended an endless spiral staircase; this too seemed like something in a dream. Occasionally a tall window passed by; bluish fog was rolling in the twilight outside. He no longer felt himself, only the steps under his feet, though he could see his feet walking on the spongy cream-colored stone, his soles brushing along the chipped, worn-out parts that made walking even harder. The tall window kept returning; they were going down, but always to the same landing; the fog was outside where nothing ever wanted to end.

Suddenly he reached the ground floor and they were leading him farther along a corridor where it was dark, though just below the vaulted ceiling were small, grated windows. There was a great hubbub and he was blinded when they opened the dark, strap-hinged doors of the bathing hall. In the thick steam, in the midst of shouts and splashing, he could see nothing between the thick white columns but a vast whiteness at whose bottom red fires were burning, dark hair, and glistening patches of faces, drenched dark hair on white bodies. In booths partitioned by white walls, white bathtubs stood under the vaults; white tiles sparkled, light coming from under white lampshades illuminated everything through the steam; hot water dripped from brass faucets and gushed from the many showerheads; fires blazed in large copper drums stoked by naked men, their buttocks spreading as they squatted before the flames; firewood was brought in from somewhere outside. They were bending toward and away from the heat, whispering, the British soldiers were soaping and scrubbing one another, shoving and jostling together with the Dutch monks under the hot water, shouting and drying themselves, throwing ice-cold water on one another with wooden buckets, some of them screaming as they sang.

In the meantime, the helpless, large-bodied German, after having fallen on his face, lay before them on the green grass: their prison guard.

It felt good to see his huge limbs twitching, now this one, now the other, as if he wanted to get up but couldn’t.

Or maybe he didn’t get up lest they hit him on the head for the fourth time.

You’re in a big hurry, aren’t you, said the second prisoner.

Nobody inside, said the third figure reproachfully, and you had to waste him right away.

Would have been enough to stun him.

Now he won’t tell us where he put the money, that’s for sure.

The asshole left us only his gun, we saw it as soon as we walked in, on the table, to have it handy for him,
ausgerechnet
on the table, peaceably explained the former, who produced the pistol from his pocket full of dried fruit.

Before putting the weapon to use, he had to clean off the prunes sticking to it.

Now that we’ve gotten this far, he added, grinning, maybe we should try it out on him.

None of them would make a decision without the approval of the youngest.

The one with the pistol handed the prunes to him.

To the one who had been standing above the body, watching, mesmerized by what he had done.

Perhaps contemplating all the many things he would still have to do. This was not his first murder, and he had the premonition that killing would fill him with great contentment. After stuffing a few prunes into his mouth, and while beginning absentmindedly to chew them, he raised the sharpened stake, which they had pulled out of the ground at the edge of a meadow, and plunged it into the nape of the lifeless man on the ground.

No need to make noise with your weapon for no reason, he said to his comrades, while he paused in his munching.

Although it slipped a little, the stake did pierce the skin and made a popping report when it reached the spine, but it slipped on the cartilage. The stab was not powerful enough to make it straight through the sinews and muscles. The strength of his arms and shoulders might have been reduced by his having bitten down on a sharp plum pit, removing the flesh of the plum with his tongue, letting the smoky, honey-sweet taste, which he had not experienced for so long, engulf his entire mouth.

It was interesting to see how his two older buddies were serving him.

They put the short-handled hatchet helpfully into his hand.

He missed with his first blow, which made them all laugh simultaneously.

Instead of the stake, he almost hit his own hand. With his second blow, however, he hit the stake fully on its flat end.

Although the vertebra did not give—on the contrary, it returned the blow—the slippery wet fibers of muscle and sinew finally led the stuck tip of the stake to the space between the third and fourth vertebrae, where the gap kept widening and, after the third and fourth blow, was ripped open completely. He must have been bleeding internally, because around the stake’s dark, splintering pulp appeared a translucent liquid, barely stained by blood. With his fifth blow he tore through the windpipe, they heard a peculiar bubbling, perhaps rattling sound, and the stake became lodged in the frosty ground.