These mainly intellectual broodings touched Hans less than they did the other boys, and they touched Hendrik only for practical reasons. About as much as did the others’ silently endured pain and self-doubts. Tension and anxiety about a lack or an injury that none of them could avoid. But regardless of the effect of these thoughts on them, Hans and Hendrik, for different reasons and in different ways, were able to keep a distance from them, and even physical intimacy could not have brought them closer than this shared ability.
To their great good luck, they also managed to keep the strong physical signs of this feeling at a certain distance. They could not afford to wind up in a situation where they’d have to explain things to their friends or be suspected darkly by their instructors.
The instructors paid special attention to such matters; moreover, they gave the boys the opportunity to observe for themselves the purity of their own inclinations or the nature of their own deviations.
The two boys were especially sensitive to the exceptional atmospheric pressure of the locale, and also to the scientific aims of the place as they understood them, though neither of them had ever shown any touchiness; their reputation was firmly based. Hans always behaved as if he stood above everything that had happened or might happen to him; he was looked upon as privileged in the school, where being privileged was usually considered as being at odds with the communal spirit and the boys were contemptuous of it. The service personnel were forbidden to establish personal relationships with the boys. Any kind of bias or self-consciousness might threaten the accuracy of observation. Yet the men and women on the staff, who came from nearby villages and the little medieval town nearby, could not treat Hans as anyone but the lord and master of the place. Bastard or not, they did not much care.
They tried to please him in small things — even when unnoticed, as it were — and he shared these friendly benefits and advantages fairly with Hendrik. The imperceptibility of these activities was what convinced the others that Hans had real historical prerogatives, which was a good reason they should listen to him. The scientific supervisors of the institute erred, however, in thinking they controlled every aspect of their observations. What is more, not only the kitchen personnel, the stokers and scullery maids, but the teachers and of course the boys all knew that Hans’s mother owned the two ancestral homes, the enormous forests between Thum and Wolkenstein, the lumberyards, and even the small forest train that, with much whistling, ran across the Wiesenbad viaduct every afternoon, and that she was also connected at the highest level to the scientific research being conducted here.
It was naturally humiliating to think they were objects of a scientific experiment, yet all of them went to sleep and awakened with this unpleasant thought.
Knowing they were here at the express wishes of their parents should have made the boys consider the matter settled. Yet it gave them no rest. When they went home for three weeks each summer, they dared not ask if their parents had any knowledge of the experiments or what sort of papers they had signed regarding their sons’ placement in the school and their being subject to hygienic observation. That was the key phrase. The boys searched and several of them found such papers among their parents’ documents; indeed, the parents had signed binding notes that referred to the appropriate law and clearly spelled things out.
This summer, Hans was not allowed to go home because the consulting committee members thought an extreme session of observation was necessary in his case. They inflicted this punishment on him because of the break-in. They exposed the boys in an embarrassingly elaborate way, for the process of exposure itself became the object of the observation. The baroness, helpless against a scientifically defended order, was in fact relieved to hear of it. Then she wouldn’t have to waste three summer weeks in hopeless family time. She preferred not to acknowledge what sort of danger awaited her son during the extreme observation. She was also afraid of him; the boy’s sheer physical existence filled her with aversion.
When occasionally, after awakening, she thought about it, she felt she’d be much happier without him, though she could not have known much about her possible happiness. Frankly, she’d spent the months of her unwanted pregnancy in anger and desperation about her new, unknown condition. Her misshapen body, the nausea and vomiting, made her restless. She could not deny that she felt nothing but hatred about her pregnancy. As if she’d been cheated out of her own body and punished too, since she couldn’t talk about it to anyone.
Perhaps that is why Hans arrived in this world way ahead of time. Which filled the baroness with a sense of total disaster. There were two interdependent beings in the world, but knowledge of their mutuality caused her not one iota of joy. Within a few days, she went dry. She probably shouldn’t have had those thoughts. To pull the little kerchief over his head, or the light blue coverlet. Another reason why the baby had to be given to a wet nurse as soon as possible. Yet he starved on the stranger’s milk, turned blue crying each time he was fed, and screamed through entire nights, even when they fed him at regular intervals with both milk and the best food.
Karla was weak; one morning, before going to the Auenberg estate, the baby unexpectedly fell silent after protracted screaming. It would have been good if he’d stopped breathing. Karla had the impression that the baby accepted his death. As if, together with her, he was waiting for his breathing to cease. She stood by the crib, silent and motionless, and wished along with him that he’d perish. Perish. But he did not. Even though she wished it, oh, how she had wished it.
Nobody could talk to her about unconditional motherly love without making her laugh, even out loud.
She knew precisely the enduring feeling with which the mother hates her son and does everything to kill in him at least the element alien to her because of his sex.
Or else he should perish.
But she did not go beyond thinking those thoughts, since she would have considered it beneath her to lose her dignity, notwithstanding her hatred for him.
After a few summer days had passed, once the others started coming back, Hans no longer expected that the baroness would come for him and at least take him to their house in Annaberg. He probably was waiting not for his mother but for the house, or for the taste and sweet fragrance of the warm walnut-filled pastry she once had bought for him at the weekly fair in Annaberg. He could not forget the lightness of this pastry and the creamy texture of the filling.
Nor forget that there was something in the world that his mother had once actually bought for him.
When left alone, this was the feeling with which he viewed his body.
As some kind of a test, he caught his penis and testicles between his thighs and showed himself like that to the others in the shower. They liked it, and laughed; Hendrik especially liked the idea that Hans might have a pussy, but only Kienast imitated him.
Hans could be content that things were going well among the other boys without him. He consoled himself with all sorts of things. He found acting like this somewhat childish, but it was unavoidable and he needed hiding places for it. He also could keep in contact with them even during months of silence, and he did not have to relinquish his leadership. He was allegedly ostracized, which, along with the denial of summer vacation, was considered the most severe punishment, but it was made even more severe by an attempt to cast suspicion on Hendrik and to separate the two of them. That is why he put on the little monkey act with his pussy in the shower. Hendrik had not been punished, because they wanted to create the impression that he was the one who had betrayed their conspiracy. In the shower Hendrik well understood that Hans did not believe this.