Parallel Stories: A Novel (26 page)

In his agony, he began to throw himself about, he felt as if they had cut off his arms and legs, he shouted senselessly as one struggling to wake up.

I can’t keep quiet about everything.

He was shouting in vain because the attractive naked men lifted him up and put him in the tub while he could hear—and the dark-haired lieutenant even raised his finger to call attention to it—that the swallows had flown away, the motorcyclists were gone. By next morning, the city would be walled in and the people of Pfeilen would have to perish. Over the empty Kloosterplein, clouds of gasoline vapor hover in the evening stillness. Everything comes to pass. It is impossible to prevent what has to happen, to stop anything. While several men were washing, scrubbing, and soaping him at the same time, and the noise, the cacophony increased again in the bathing hall, and everybody was talking, laughing, and shouting simultaneously, through the cracks in the walls and doors, unseen, thick gas was seeping in to mingle smoothly and treacherously with the chamomile-scented steam.

And the attractive naked men now thought he had fainted because of the gas.

The wretch is so weak, they said laughing, he can’t withstand even a little gasoline vapor. But he lost consciousness because of his premonition. He did not know who he was. Because of the staggering knowledge that while he was enjoying his bath, and he could not but enjoy it and even think of the promised sweet milk, the catastrophe had come to pass.

He didn’t know what all this meant, who might be his people; he was searching for the meaning of his own dread.

And then it occurred to him that it hadn’t been his grandfather’s shift but that of the religion teacher.

What luck.

He could see from above how they were approaching from two directions at once, in close formation, their headlights rending the early night asunder.

He delayed no longer; the teacher of religion sounded the bell for the second time that day. He did it cautiously, barely touching the body of the bell with the blunt clapper, briefly; the penetrating sharp little sound could be heard over the dark town lying in ruins. This was followed by a terrible crack, bang, and snap, then a detonation, then a single resonance reminiscent of a bell ringing, but this was coming from below the ground. The earth, the entire half-dead little town and its distant environs, trembled, people were thrown out of their beds; even the thick monastery walls in faraway Venlo were shaking. For a second, silence fell in the bathing hall; the naked soldiers listened; only the noise of water rushing from the showerheads could be heard.

The breakaway bell splintered all the beams below it; it lodged itself into the ground four and a half meters down. This made the market square, along with its heavy stone pavement and the houses around it, explode, rise up in the air, and then collapse into itself. The rectory collapsed too, and in place of the Lutheran church only a pile of rubble remained.

Yet he knew it made no sense; there was no point in having such dreams. He should wake up. He would understand things all right when awake.

All this lasted but a short time, and then silence reigned everywhere.

Still, he was awakened by a scream, and he kept hearing the scream as he screamed to wake himself up.

On the bedroom ceiling, the big city was buzzing in yellows and reds, as if it were not the middle of the night.

And he still felt he could not talk about the things he should be talking about, and this increased and deepened his pain, no matter how hard he struggled. Whom could he talk to; he was alone during the day and alone at night. In his last dream, he was sitting awake and felt a pain as if, without anesthesia, his limbs were being chopped off, but despite all the pain he comprehended his dream, and that gave him a lift. He rose above everything. Even though his body was a mass of torn flesh from which blood poured in thick streams. He knew what happened to whom; he also knew what he had dreamed just now, or the night before last; he was glad to be able to separate out the various illusions. He could foresee what would happen in his dream, even though he awakened and his mind could not have been more alert. He saw the British motorcycle riders who, not caring that the church bell had just crashed down and that fresh corpses and perhaps injured living bodies lay under the marketplace buildings, were driving everybody outside. In the blinding beams of their headlights, they were having the two city gates walled up. This bleeding cannot be stanched. Here everyone must perish. Weighing matters while awake, I must witness my own death. He was looking for logical arguments with which to continue refining his knowledge. True, the church bell broke off and crashed, but not then and not like this. And it was also true that four years later Gerhardt Döhring returned from a POW camp, and looked maniacally for some paper box that he supposedly had given to his older cousin, Hermann Döhring, for safekeeping; but Isolde did not want to hear about any paper box, there had been no camp of any kind in the vicinity.

But there was a camp; nobody denied that Gerhardt had been a guard and that he went mad in his search for the box.

There was a camp, repeated a completely strange and indifferent voice, that he could not escape from.

He was sitting in bed and felt that he had to tell these made-up stories and lie so stubbornly because he couldn’t tell who he was. Who am I, if there was a he who consisted of more than one person. It’s true, however, that Hermann Döhring was killed in front of his own farm that morning, though it never came to light who did it. It did come to light, of course it did. Almost everything comes to light. But then where have I come up with these twin brothers. Why am I accusing one of them of murder, and why do I say that the other was burned in the
Revier
, the sick bay. His dream invented this so that he could not distinguish between the twins and thus might freely shuttle between them. His dream invented the story because of his twin sister; because of her, he looked at himself as a girl, and to this day had been unable, and had not really wanted, to make a proper distinction between the two of them. This is the very reason I want to study philosophy and psychology so I can have an insight into these tricky things from both points of view. But what if I don’t understand, complained his dream in a weepy voice; he shouted that he did not understand, could not understand. Still, the knowledge stemming from his dream proved stronger. In his body, he felt their exhausted, condemned bodies, both their bodies. And that they were alive had become his only defense. Which means that I carry within me people who are not me, and with them I look back at times and places that could not have happened to me, or I can glance ahead into times that without me cannot possibly happen to anyone.

This explanation made his head spin because he knew where he was; still, he did not understand it.

And quite sensibly it occurred to him that perhaps I, the one thinking these things, am not me. Others might live in me, people I don’t know, or people who took their leave together with me when they died sometime in the past. As if in his dream he were searching for his this-worldly self among these people; but he woke up because of all the shit and felt that no matter how much he’d like to separate his self from all the others, he is not he, he cannot find himself, he has no self of his own, he has no self, he does not exist.

At best, he might find his twin sister, and that was probably the reason he disliked her so much.

He did not understand why he smelled the smell of shit so strongly, and then who was the one who smelled it.

My dream filled up with shit. But he couldn’t accept his own empirical experience as the sole explanation.

In his mind, he first tried to avoid the problem by looking at it as a philosophical one, but that did not even come close to explaining why he smelled the penetrating stench so realistically.

This might not be the only explanation in the world, but it made him sense that someone else was here, sitting in the warm thick shit on the strange bed and thinking about empiricism. It was Isolde’s bed. I shat in bed, or maybe I’m dreaming this too. The crack of this somebody’s ass is full of shit, or rather in the soft puddle of the runny shit there is a harder, fatter sausage, right in the crack of the ass, inside the pajamas.

It cannot be.

And in that case, on the farm, it wouldn’t have been Döhring who shat in his pants when my twin brother killed him. Because I am Döhring. Or it wasn’t my twin brother who shat in his pants when they tried to yank him back from the top of the hedgerow and beat him with nailed planks all over his head and his back. I don’t have a twin sibling. But of course you do. I am a different Döhring. One who sits in his own shit, like a small child. Although neither of us is permitted to do this anymore. They’d thrash you for doing that. The only reason my dream invented my twin brother was so that it shouldn’t be me, or so that I could kill myself, so that I shouldn’t be my own younger twin sister, or so that finally I’d have some excuse to kill her, so that I wouldn’t be the only victim.

What nonsense you’re wasting your time on.

He heard his voice bellow into the room glimmering with reflected nocturnal lights.

He felt the watery shit dripping down his leg but did not dare jump up lest the fat sausage slip out. But what should he do then, what should I do, he yelled desperately to himself.

He had never heard of able-bodied healthy adults shitting in their pants while asleep.

As a saving idea, it occurred to him that it was only the natural effect of all that dry fruit, all those apples and prunes.

A starving person should never take solid nourishment so suddenly.

But he had to discard the saving idea too; after all, he couldn’t have shat in his pants because of apples and prunes he’d stuffed himself with in a dream.

But he starved only in his dreams.

And that, at last, made him conscious of having no further reprieve, conscious that there was somebody else here, somebody sitting in warm, thick shit on the strange bed. I’ve shat in my pants, maybe I’m only dreaming this too. And this other somebody has the crack of his ass full, which is to say this other person is sitting in the soft puddle of diarrhea, but there is also a harder, fat shit sausage in the crack of his ass; I am in my pajamas.

No matter how big the trouble he was in, how hard he laughed at himself for his miserable saving ideas, the verity of his dream remained more realistic. Perhaps because it was on Isolde’s bed, in Isolde’s bedroom that his shame had caught up with him.

Disgrace.

But his shame also clarified connections that until now neither he nor anyone in his family could have understood, and no one in all of Germany could have, either. He even understood, at last, that this was the reason he could not speak German in his dream. He’d rather be a different man. It was also more pleasant to escape from his shame, back into his dream, which, despite his being awake, had not stopped. The dream literally forced itself on him, as if whispering seductively, if you want me to, honey, I can take you even deeper. It was very clear now: the others remained unsuspecting to this day about the paper box because they are truly innocent.

Isolde was alone when she found it in the fruit-drying shed. Who else would have found it.

There could hardly be anything clearer than this.

He also found it interesting that his dream reworked the relationships among his relatives. He turned his great-grandfather, whom he could hardly have known, into his grandfather, and the older brothers into cousins. The dream showed Isolde too, as a cousin, though she was his aunt. It’s clear that my aunt Isolde kept her secret to herself, but her career, so strongly out of tune with the family’s general financial situation, one could understand only from the dream.

He appeared to be dreaming again, even though he was awake and free to be euphoric about having finally found the explanation.

Isolde’s father accepted the paper box, rode his bicycle to the farm, hid the box there, but the following morning three inmates freed from the nearby camp killed him in front of his house. When four years later Gerhardt Döhring returned from a POW camp, he did not believe the desperate explanation according to which the concentration-camp inmates must have taken the mysterious paper box with them and the family members knew nothing about it. How could he have thought his older brother was so stupid as not to hide the box properly. It must still be around somewhere. He could not have hidden it so stupidly that those miserable inmates would find it right away. More than once, they helped him turn the whole farm upside down, the cellar, the attic; they tapped the chimneys, the walls, all the floors. Twice they carried all the firewood out of the woodshed and back again. The fruit-drying shed they searched from top to bottom at least three times. Not by accident. They dug in the more suspicious places. Still, Gerhardt refused to accept the cold fact that there wasn’t any paper box anywhere. In the family, they knew about every possible and actual hiding place in the house; in the wall of the fruit-drying shed was a secret hollow, made 150 years ago for just such a purpose, but the paper box was nowhere to be found. Who could have imagined that two weeks before Gerhardt Döhring’s return, Isolde had found the box, Isolde, a mere child.

Barely a few weeks after his return from the POW camp, the entire town became frightened of Gerhardt Döhring. Even though strangers could not have known anything about the paper box.

Without authorization he conducted a secret investigation of the extraordinary events that had occurred during the last weeks of the war. Not alone, but with two good friends and the hero of Sedan, his own father, who was a lawyer, after all, and on whose pockmarked face Gerhardt, from his early childhood, had been observing and touching with his fingers the strange and hostile history of the world. The four of them held the view that the fact of the occupation could not retroactively justify major crimes; those who disobeyed orders, traitors, saboteurs, and deserters could not escape the appropriate punishment. And the four of them had to deal with these matters behind the backs of the occupiers and as quietly as possible. Of the deserters who managed to survive the first years of the occupation, two vanished without a trace, and to dispel any doubt about the cause of their disappearance, a third one was found dead. There was another unsavory affair Gerhardt Döhring was keen on uncovering. If the two hospital barracks had been properly set on fire, why did they not burn down completely, and how could the prisoners have escaped from them. He sought answers to these questions as frenetically as to those about the paper box.