On his maternal side, he came from a noble Baltic family, on his father’s side from a no less ancient clan in Kurhessen, whose men traditionally became members of Hesse’s order of knighthood, the Althessischer Ritterschaft. His father had often taken him down in the mines, which were frightening but where they would walk for miles; Sundays were the days for these shared excursions, after church and before the traditionally late lunch. In mine baskets powered by horse-driven winches, they would be lowered hundreds of meters underground, and he learned, from his father’s instructions and also from the pressure he felt at the top of his skull and in his lungs, to gauge how far down they were at any given time. Heat and darkness ruled, yet strong, cool airstreams blew; the beams and support poles creaked in the silence. Dampness dripped everywhere but in some places water gushed in torrents only to vanish with strange gurgles into openings that looked like gullets of hell; at other places abandoned strippings might suddenly shift, with rubble slipping and slamming noisily into the tipcarts.
The family was not simply in the business of mining; it exercised the Schuers’ ancient mining rights.
Otmar and his siblings spent their childhood summers on their maternal grandfather’s estate, where early on, and not only in the mines but also on the land itself, the children learned how and why they should control and take care of others for the sake of their own family. The art of disciplining and being disciplined captured the boy’s imagination, one might say. This is why he felt a strong calling for a military career. He was lucky: just after he was graduated from school, the war broke out, and in September 1914, on the memorable day when news came from the western front that in the face of relentless German attacks, Albert, king of the Belgians, had been forced to abandon his carefully guarded fortifications in Antwerp, Otmar was able, in the company of other noble and enthusiastic youth — oh, how they would have loved to have been there at the siege of the fortresses! and then the road to Paris is free! — to join the Gersdorff Rifle Regiment of Hessen as a Junker ensign. It hardly needs mentioning that he was a volunteer, thrilled no end not only by deep patriotic feelings but also by the peculiar circumstance that had several hundred young men from the best families stripping to their birthday suits simultaneously in order to appear in that condition before the health commission.
This was the first time for any of them that they had to stand so closely together, exposed to one another’s gaze in a mass of similar skin colors and bundles of muscles. Once they were free of their clothes, silence reigned in the enormous hall, the silence of bashfulness. At the news of successive victories, crowds of people gathered on the street outside, exulting and celebrating; complete strangers hugged and kissed. In the hall, the young men smelled one another in silence, and the thought occurred to most of them that from now on they knew something about one another that no one else did.
Countess Auenberg was thinking how much the renowned scientist, with his conspicuous physical attributes, his build, the sensitivity of his features, and his incredible strength, not to mention his seriousness and levelheadedness, reminded her of her fiancé. She sighed to herself, my, my, a truly experienced man, a man’s man. The resemblance caught her off guard. But Mihály was much kinder. He had nothing to hide. And he was more open; but of course he was, since he had nothing to hide. At least, once the thought occurred to her, she hoped he didn’t.
She couldn’t stop comparing all the young men who came into her view with him.
Yet in vain did she tip the balance to Mihály’s advantage, because she couldn’t deny that she felt a similar attraction to male bodies she judged to be similar to his.
Her strong attraction to Mihály, demonstrating which was frustrated by prevailing etiquette, had often shaken her physically and made her dizzy for long minutes. The reason the same attraction failed to seize her now, a feeling she would certainly have found out of place, was that they had brought with them some of the coolness of the church’s interior. Occasionally, it was enough merely to think of Mihály and she’d ask for a chair or a glass of water. As if she were not totally there, at the place where in fact she was. As if it were not she who saw and sensed the other person. As if her conscience unexpectedly claimed that she sensed their identical being by her physical attraction, even though she knew well — vehemently protesting her own thought — that this was but an illusion, a sensory error, surely nothing else.
Just because she missed him so, after only two days she did not suspect him.
Or this strange man.
Schuer indeed deserved the accolades due his sex; he was indeed a man’s man. He had been seriously wounded twice in 1917 in the western campaign, on battlefields in Flanders, and once earlier, with lighter wounds, at the siege of Gorlice, in Galicia, and on all three occasions he had received the silver medal for valor, along with the title vitéz; for exceptional bravery, he had also been awarded the Iron Cross Second Class and First Class. At the end of the war he was honorably discharged with the rank of captain. Then, in truth, he was obliged to hide his experiences — Countess Imola was not mistaken about that — and his mind was much tortured by what he had to hide, even though he seemed to lead an orderly, cloudless life with his wife and three children in the sunny and lovingly tended directorial villa on Ihne Street.
With Germany’s enormous wartime collapse, he had to give up his plans for a military career, had to abandon the flag to which he had pledged eternal allegiance in the summer of 1914; he had no choice, he could not have continued. His earlier convictions evaporated or, rather, deserted him. Yet even after two decades, his war experiences pursued him in the form of menacing images, not picturelike images but mostly visions and apparitions. He could never tell whether he saw, imagined, or only envisioned in his memory the impact of the bomb that had lifted the torso of his machine gunner, along with muddy clumps of earth spraying the sky, high into the air from a spot now emptied and exuding only heat, and, while the torn-off arms flew off in different directions, the gunner’s trunk, pared down to its bare frame but still alive, was skewered on a tree branch.
Had that really happened; had he in fact seen it.
Put another way, fear of insanity quietly, almost imperceptibly transformed his patriotism, and his strict upbringing has not allowed him to speak of this terrible renunciation to this day, not even with his friends.
He has hardly any friends.
Because he could not afford to engage in what he might rightfully have assumed to be friendship.
On the one hand, a feeling of friendship doesn’t pick and choose solely among people of the same rank, or according to rank or title. On the other hand, neither religion nor tradition can explain the shy physical tenderness and cruel physical brutality he had seen and profoundly experienced in water-soaked trenches, among barbed-wire obstacles, in the miserable barracks of military hospitals, and in overheated whorehouses reeking of tobacco in small Galician towns. Everything was beyond what could be measured by any social standard. When he returned, neither his mother, coming toward him in her clouds of perfume, nor his father, having in his model austerity grown very thin, could have known anything about the wild animals dazed with hunger and thirst who wandered aimlessly in forests razed bare by bombs, and about the camaraderie patched together out of cruelty and brotherly feeling — yet their youngest son had seen it all and lived through it all.