Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas; Imre Goldstein

Author:Péter Nádas; Imre Goldstein
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780374229764
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Published: 2005-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Last Judgment

Interrupting the usual early morning music, the loudspeaker called him to the south gate.

Kramer to the south gate.

And it cannot be claimed that he did not know what that meant. The people they called to the south gate they put away for good.

The Niers flowed there, nice and slow.

By nature, he was the kind of man who rarely thought there was any problem he could not solve or avoid. He was breathing more heavily, or rather he had the feeling that with his body grown heavy he should be out in the fresh air. This time there was no way out. He could not avoid it. For days, he had counted on the water’s slow current to sweep him away. They could hear shots from the direction of the river; it was surprising they wasted bullets on people. And there was one fleeting moment when he still hoped. The person he loved more than his life, more than his long-forgotten wife, more than all his incidental lovers—and he did remember them all simultaneously during this long moment, all of them—the person he loved even more than his children was standing only two steps away from him at the deep-brown, empty table of the Blockälteste, in the harsh light. A pale, fragile, but strong and nimble young man whose ambition and energy had given him a stooped back and who could get away with nearly everything and could afford not to be completely bald like the others. His shapely skull was covered with maddeningly rich hair, curly, golden, and ruddy.

He was ordered to special details at least once a week. To sort clothing in the laundry building, which did not necessarily mean anything but sorting and loading clothes, though sometimes it could mean something else too. The camp had eyes for things like that, since close connections acquired a commercial value of their own. Eisele, an always well-dressed and very cruel man, the commandant’s deputy for supplies, personally managed the work in the laundry. At such hours, it was still dark outside. If the loudspeaker ceased, they could hear the intense bombardment. The potbelly stove was glowing red. Every breath of night dripped or cascaded down the small square windowpanes. He was chatting with someone, with Bulla, obviously doing business with him, explaining something very convincingly, his snow-white hands flashing in the lamplight.

The boy might get away with it, Kramer thought.

This was his first precise thought and perhaps the last hope of his life. He could not harbor resentment of the boy, because business is important for someone who has to live.

The morning cauldrons still had not been brought.

For more than two years now, he’d had no way of knowing whether members of his family were alive or not. Even political prisoners were forbidden to receive mail, and so it was all right if family members were alive and healthy, and it was even better if they were dead because an air attack had killed them all; they were easier to imagine that way, since he did not believe he would ever return to them.

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