Parallel Stories: A Novel (147 page)

Occasionally the feverish desire to free-fall seemed to spread like an epidemic among the boys. It was safest to jump off the viaduct. As if every school year demanded a living sacrifice to frighten the rest of them and make them forget their own attraction to it. As if the suicides were offering up their mangled bodies to their mates. And to have one successful attempt, several boys had to try it; there were always more of them prepared to do so. Whether as dead or as wounded, the boys who made the attempt were never seen again. There were no funeral services or memorials; the counselors conducted no investigations that might have revealed who had assisted the suicides in their preparations.

Alone and unnoticed, it would have been hard to do anything. Obviously everyone had accomplices, and this kind of friendship was no less a threat to society than a collective rebellion. Baron Schuer himself viewed this infectious inclination with some anxiety, but after consultation with pedagogical and psychological workers from sister institutions he concluded that, statistically speaking, the phenomenon was not extraordinary or worrisome. It was necessary to take certain risks in an experiment of such scope.

They did not reprimand the survivors in terms of religious morality either; instead, things continued as if nothing had happened. For the living survivors who had helped other boys to kill themselves, this lack of reprimand, especially the lack of religious reproof, marked a kind of limit on their own impunity.

A certain stillness, an unnamed shame, filled the empty spaces. Among the boys who missed their self-destructive mates, anyway. Being silent made forgetting harder. One of the priests at St. Anne’s should have commemorated the unusual events—at least from the pulpit in Annaberg, when on Sunday morning the counselors accompanied the boys who showed up for early services. Every Sunday, those counselors turned the simple act of preparing to go to church into an elaborate procedure, using it to see who were the believers, who the dissemblers, who might go just for the fun of it and then during the service end up scandalizing the town with their giggling. Hans showed up for services, but not because in his faith he wanted to follow his mother’s example. Yet the priests, whose relationship with the demonstrably pagan counselors was obviously strained, never mentioned the events in any sermon. It was impossible that they did not know of them, but one couldn’t tell this by looking at them. Hans had the impression that the communal silence resembled the behavior of a free valence in a world of chemical compounds, forever dangling in the empty universe in hope of combining with something.

After all, the the ones who had perished were flawed specimens—this must not be forgotten for even a moment. A pagan thought, and Hans did not understand how the priests could approve it.

He imagined that their departed mates had the free arms of the living boys in their grip.

And when it happened again, the physics teacher, Gruber, would take them the next day to the viaduct to explain again the laws of free fall, sometimes several times over. He did this each time a suicide occurred, using the very same expressions on each occasion, yet the boys never tired of his lectures. Whether the act had been successful or not, the poor fool had come to grief forever, Gruber explained as if for the first time. One group of boys was made to stay at the bottom of the viaduct while another group, led by the good-looking young teacher, clambered up to the railway embankment among the pine trees, and from there to the viaduct’s central pier; after they had performed the experiment the groups changed places. The teacher’s opinion was that the boys could understand the dazzling regularity of uniformly accelerating motion and the strictly physical character of human life only if they measured and experienced them from both perspectives. All they needed for the experiment was an authenticated means of measurement, an authenticated lead weight, and two authenticated stopwatches. The measure of uniformly accelerating motion differs only slightly at every geographical location; up to this point, it is easy to understand the premise. At the select location where we live, for example, the contiguous crust of gneiss strongly but uniformly modifies the motion. It is a general rule that the speed of a given body, while falling, changes equally in equal intervals. According to Gruber’s authenticated measurements, in the Wiesenbad gorge the speed was 980,839 centimeters per second. If, therefore, at the dropping of the accurate lead weight, the speed is zero, then in the second second of the fall it will be 980,839 centimeters per second, in the next second 2 x 980,839 centimeters per second, and so on; after
t
seconds it is
t
x 980,839 centimeters per second. From here on, only a few could follow the good-looking young teacher’s explanation, according to which, in plain words, speed is proportionate to time and it is therefore easy to figure what sort of resistance the body, falling at the given speed in the given time, will encounter when hitting the ground.

The boys, who did not understand the logic of the calculation and would have liked not to think about the smashed body, about the boy whom they may have loved or sometimes hated, but who still hoped they’d do the measurements rights, at least mechanically right, usually watched the good-looking teacher rummaging with both hands in the pockets of his smock while moving his buttocks in odd ways. Walking back and forth in front of them, what was he looking for and what was he finding. Sometimes he became so involved in the explanation of the physical world that he stopped involuntarily, lifted something from his pocket, and looked at it a long time with innocent eyes, though he probably could not have said why he had taken it out and what it was he was seeing. He had in his pockets pieces of chalk, a pencil sharpener, an eraser, a ball of carefully rolled-up string, and a pendulum; the latter two went together. One could fit the waxed red loop of the string into the hook on the pendulum. Hans, for some inexplicable reason, particularly envied the teacher this clever little instrument. Or, in his absentmindedness, the teacher would reach into the depth of his pocket and at the same time stick his butt out and reach between his legs to scratch. The boys knew perfectly well what he was scratching, and they said he was scratching his balls. They happened to know he suffered from some skin ailment that might have been caused by venereal disease. Occasionally, he’d lift the wings of his smock and, reaching into his pants pocket, rearrange his testicles in a more comfortable position.

He would halt his explanation while his symmetrical face with its handsome little mustache took on a dreamy look.

The crushed bodies were taken not to Chemnitz, nearby, and not even to Dresden, but to distant Leipzig, directly to the university clinic where, after thorough autopsies, the families could receive them in sealed coffins. On this brand-new day, fallen on them from the bright blue sky, their hands messy with fine woodland dirt, the boys were standing in the botanical garden.

One of them, named Kienast, happened to know that the researchers in Leipzig and Berlin were especially interested in the brains of the suicides.

You’re making this up, Kienast, said one of the older boys hesitantly. I’d say you’re talking nonsense.

And they know how to make clean work of it too, continued Kienast, as if he had not heard the older boy. If there’s anything left of the head, they saw around the dome of the cranium and take it off, like the lid of a pot.

They don’t do that differently with others, so what’s so special about it, if you wouldn’t mind telling us.

Listen, I know exactly how they get to the valuable brain.

That’s not what I doubt.

And they have to get to it.

Come on, my little friend, they can’t suck it out with a straw through the ears or the nose.

But I know how, the bookish Kienast kept repeating stubbornly and was hurt when the other boys laughed at him again.

He was from Leipzig and his father was indeed a prosector, employed not by the university clinic but by the municipality. More precisely, he made very ingenious dissecting instruments, and Kienast claimed that this was a family tradition, because the whole family was made up of inventors. He often picked his nose, and the others said that he seemed to have invented nostril mucus. The older boy, known to be Hans von Wolkenstein’s best friend, had great prestige. In the boarding school, the boys conversed in exceedingly polite and bookish tones, but there was much cruelty; in fact, they concealed their brutality and cruel behavior behind politeness and dry argumentation. They would not burden one another with openness. At times they wove their sentences so circuitously and archaically it was as if they wished to hide their longings and desires from one another. Even in their loud skepticism, they never went too far. Now they were laughing mainly because of the tension suddenly provoked by the extraordinary event. The way adolescent boys laugh to stimulate one another to continued laughter. Some of them were gliding between higher and lower registers; others simply neighed. It was hard to imagine that someone who only yesterday had knelt right here to fish mole crickets carefully out of fresh horse dung and throw them into a bucket of water was now lying on a marble table, having become the object of scientific research.

What makes the brain so precious is that you can make vertical or horizontal cross-sections of it. I wish to note that it’s your privilege not to believe this, insisted the one called Kienast, shouting over the laughs.

There was no malice in the boys’ assault of laughter; they treated Kienast’s foolishness, and even his obvious character weaknesses, with indulgent love. He was a shitty little character, but they liked him, and for quite some time he had been under their protection. Whenever he was gripped by an epileptic fit, they literally formed a wall around him, cleverly diverting the counselors’ attention from him. They could not bear letting his secret be discovered; he became the pledge, as it were, of their secret resistance.

They preferred to overlook his shitty little quirks.

Kienast was small, fragile, incredibly mean and aggressive. It had become clear that even epileptics were not removed from the boarding school, because the researchers were just as curious about their behavior patterns as they were about every other deviation, though by law epileptics had to be sterilized. This was no laughing matter, and that is how he had become the silent object of their resistance. He probably tried to balance his threatened state with zeal, while the others did the same with their manliness.

It hurt his pride that his physical misery, whose origin was unknown to him, made him dependent on his mates.

And then they progress cell by cell; in retrospect, they can find out the guy’s personal secrets.

He had a complete story, told with quiet shuddering, about how different people had committed suicide.

It was strictly forbidden to go near the railway that crossed the pine forest unless a counselor went with them, or to the enormous viaduct bridging the Wiesenbad valley or, higher up, the Ochsensprung, a rocky ledge barely protruding from the oaks that clung to a steep slope above the waterfall, from where, according to legend, because of a shepherd’s pact with the devil, the Wolkenstein estate’s entire herd of oxen had sought refuge in the depths.

On paper, the counselors had to note every infringement. However, they mainly obeyed the school regulations by noting down when someone, or more than one, had violated one. Their aim was to gain a realistic picture of the various rebellious tendencies thriving among the boys and of their secret movements. On several occasions, when it was Gruber’s turn to wait for the small group of boys in front of St. Anne’s, he would take them not directly back to the boarding school but first to the municipal baths in Hauer Street, into the steam section and afterward to the beer hall on Johannis Street frequented mainly by miners dressed in their Sunday best; the boys ate there, and the older ones also received big glasses of beer.

Gruber paid; he paid for everything.

And he said that they no longer had any secrets from one another.

Which Hans von Wolkenstein, no matter how hard he thought about it, could not understand. Indeed, theoretically nothing could happen to or among the boys that the counselors would not have known about or would not have recorded in their report notebooks. But he did not understand what kind of secret Gruber could observe on Sundays in a steam bath filled with loud men. Hans was sure that Gruber observed a physical phenomenon that, theoretically, they could observe too.

And that Gruber would bring this observation of his into some relationship with the boys’ religiousness or faith. He did not dare ask anyone what Gruber had in mind. The body of anyone jumping from the Ochsensprung would first be smashed on the waterfall’s enormous ledges, but the water would carry the body farther, pushing and hurling it down to the next rocky ledge.

The data gathered from the counselors had to be put into the pedantically documented system of parallel scientific examinations; all data had to find their proper places; there could be no information that, in relation to the expected research results, was not important or interesting. The pupils themselves readily accepted this principle; they knew better than anyone the generally accepted genetic norms and rules. They knew that none of them had a flawless Nordic origin, least of all Kienast. After all, this was the reason they had been brought together here, this is why they’d been picked. Gruber’s origin was different, however; he proudly told them that all his measurements were pure Nordic. Which they watched with great interest and suspicion. Being near him, they felt their own sense of inferiority strongly. The number of peculiarities about him was too many as it was.

They distrusted him, if only because he still lived with his mother, who served them delicious streusel cake when she hosted them.

They had to be here for the experiments; they could conclude that from Gruber’s remarks, but they never talked about this with anyone, never about anything like this.