He had not yet read the second sentence when he wavered. It wouldn’t be so painful to give up Ingke Einbock. He wanted to deny having read the first sentence. To reject this little note, to say no. For him, Kienast and Franke were more important than his father, who all his life had done nothing but leave him.
He’d left him.
It will be an escape, wrote his father in the next sentence. He will be notified in advance of the time.
It was good to forget about his father for another reason, which was that Hans was afraid he had inherited his father’s blood. No one has said so, but that seemed to be the examiners’ assumption, based on tests and observation, which by law made sterilization necessary.
Your father, it said at the bottom of the little card.
He wanted to read it again, look at it some more, and he felt the girl’s eyes on him. He knew he was being weak, that he could not abandon them. Yet those last two words were very strong; he also could not say no. So as not to weaken in front of the girl — he had never felt such weakness before, he had never fainted — he sought the warmth of the stone pier at his back.
This stone, gneiss, behaves peculiarly in every life situation. Lukewarm a moment ago from the rays of the sun, it was now ice-cold. Or perhaps he just felt it like that. Gneiss can easily be split, because of its foliation, though one could see no trace of any cracks on the stones in the streambed. Maybe this is the last time he will see these stones in the stream. Because of the constant friction, they had lost their hard edges and lay on one another like stuffed pillows. They deceived the observer with their friendly, fleshlike colors and cushiony forms. Anyone who bumped into gneiss or wished to go at it with a chisel could testify that it was as hard as granite. To which, in its mineral composition, by the way, it is identical.
The area’s characteristic nobiliary nests were all built of this stone, the mountaintop castles of Freiberg, Wolkenstein, Schwarzenberg, Schlettau, Frauenstein, and Hartenstein — fortresses and citadels raised at the end of the Middle Ages to protect the roads along which the silver, precious stones, and valuable industrial ores mined here were transported. He looked at what he had to leave behind, and everything seemed different. They would take him to Moscow. The even older bulwarked fortress churches, sacrificial chapels, bridges, viaducts, and — grandest and most impressive of all — the church of St. Anne in Annaberg had also been built of this stone. Every window of the Wolkensteins’ house gave on its soaring apse with its arched windows. The fleshlike color of the stone filled the interior spaces in every season and in every part of each day. A veritable cathedral that, with its rustic exterior of this cut stone and its interior suffused with light, was considered an exceptional Gothic masterpiece.
And while the two children squatting at the base of the viaduct’s central pier let go the tiny shreds of the torn-up letter, piece by piece, Kienast had to strip naked and lie down on the examination table, which in that first second felt frightfully cold.
This was not the first time it happened to him — something the boys feared so much that even later they wouldn’t talk about it, not even among themselves.
That Hans and Hendrik wanted to find Schultze’s secret notes was not by chance. They knew what they were looking for and which data they wanted to destroy at all cost.
It was a brand-new method and therefore they could not have known what it was, in fact, or what occurred during the specific examination, obviously focused on specific results. In order to make plaster casts of certain sensitive parts of their bodies, Schultze had to put them in a state of hibernation. The casts, in strictly sealed little boxes, were sent by registered mail to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics on Ihne Street, in Berlin. These samples came under the charge not of Baroness Thum but, in a separate unit of the great collection, of Baron Schuer. He prepared the plan for the examination together with directors of other institutes. The Psychological Institute’s director was of the opinion that any other, more legal form of sample-taking would have an unpredictable effect on the pupils’ mental development that might seriously jeopardize the examination itself.
Actually, they were dissatisfied with the results. They could obtain no data on the erect state of individual penises and rarely, mainly by chance, did they receive any of the boys’ sperm smear.
Yet they knew from reliable sources that American researchers had carried out similar examinations among schoolboys.
While lying down, they had to turn on their side. Schultze gave them an injection in their buttocks and within a few minutes they were hovering between sleep and wakefulness. Then he stuck them with another hypodermic, but this they saw only from his movements and could not feel. Because the peculiar feeling of losing a grip on wakefulness and bodily alertness spread quickly. Instead of the usual sense of being alive, only a strange feeling of themselves remained, reminiscent of nausea. Schultze kept guiding them back to wakefulness by telling them to turn this way and that. So it was clear the injection was not fully soporific. Their mental capacity could be awakened, while the brain stem forever swallowed up the pictures that went with the sentences spoken. The boys did what he asked them to do, though they no longer knew what he asked, who was asking, and what they did and how. It was like a severe state of unconsciousness, which is why they had no idea what experiment-related questions they were answering, answers that Schultze, sitting at his desk, carefully wrote down.
But even weeks later they knew that somebody had asked them questions about something, and this knowledge perturbed several of them, as when imagination slides into a sense of reality.
They also had memories of occasionally having to change position. Schultze or somebody helping him, perhaps a woman, would use straps to immobilize their limbs in certain positions, so that they would not move until the plaster had set.
This kind-voiced woman may have mixed the plaster too. They sensed this; they sensed things from behind the nausea but did not remember them the same way.
That somebody was shaving something.
This remained as a strange presentiment, probably near the place where the brain records the pictures of imagination.
They saw but did not feel, or rather they could not comprehend even their own thoughts; and since they did not feel, they continually fell back into the peculiar deep sleep, where awareness shunted their lives onto tracks other than the ones they’d started out on at the urging of their parents, or on which they would have progressed conscientiously despite their parents and superiors.
In Annaberg, the church hill itself was nothing but a massive, extensive block of this rock formation, barely covered with a surface of soil. Gneiss supported the entire small town on its back. A few steps from the church and built of the same stone stood Kirchber 1, the Wolkensteins’ modest town house where, to the great delight of the grown-ups, Hans always played with the housekeeper’s little niece Ingke more peacefully than with anyone else. The adults could safely leave the children to themselves for long periods. Not to mention that through this rock formation the silver mines’ narrow, ever-dripping shafts lowered themselves to the bowels of the earth; an endless labyrinth of narrow horizontal passageways led to yet more darkly gaping shafts from which one could reach still lower galleries. Ingke’s father was a mineworker who had been fired several times; he was always organizing his mates, although his grandfather and even his great-grandfather had also been miners, as was almost every man in the family.
This schist-textured, metamorphic, structurally composite and crystalline stone, whose ingredients include quartz, feldspar, and mica, does not differ from granite in its texture but deviates from it greatly in its fascinating colors. Its dominant color stems from orthoclase, a feldspar that is white, red, and gray, in which quartz forms limpid gray specks.