Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  Why are you doing this in front of me? Have you lost your mind?

  She received no answer.

  They never came home before midnight. As if Ágost had said, let’s go somewhere, anywhere, just so it’s away from here. They went out every night. Then why don’t you want to move out of here. He gave no answer to that either. Most of the time they came home around one, one thirty. And every night they were a bit tipsy. On the way home, Gyöngyvér hummed arias to herself, practiced scales half-aloud, exercised her voice in the deserted streets. Ágost grew morose and silent, but claimed that it only seemed he was in a bad mood. In fact, sometimes, late at night, he was in a very good mood. He really felt good whenever he could withdraw into himself. With her arm in his, Gyöngyvér clung to him, trying to synchronize at least their steps. Anyone seeing them receding down a street with their long powerful stride would have thought, with pleasurable satisfaction, that they seemed very alike. Or if not alike, one could see why they belonged together. Their steps reverberated evenly among the silent buildings.

  Icy gusts would sweep between their faces, each new one spraying cold and sticky drizzle into their eyes. They had to huddle closer, which Ágost didn’t mind at all.

  That is how they reached home.

  In these late hours, a deadly silence covered the entire city. There were no cars on the road; occasionally an empty streetcar would clatter by on the boulevard. In the sparkling drizzle dark Oktogon Square yawned mutely. Hardly any pedestrians anywhere, except maybe on the other side, in the recently reopened Savoy Café. On the Andrássy Road side, behind darkened windows, a bar was functioning again. Drumbeats were battering the walls; occasionally a saxophone wailed triumphantly or dolefully. Guests arrived here by taxicab; sometimes the noise of carousing guests reached the street, and there would always be taxis waiting outside. After the doors slammed shut and the cabs sped away, the night fell silent again. Farther off, where signs for the underground public toilet in the subway station lit up the sidewalk, some idle figures could be seen. The ladies’ section was closed at night; the men’s remained open until dawn. Balter opened it and closed it.

  At dawn, at night, and several times a day, he had to limp across the boulevard, and for that he collected a separate salary from the Metropolitan Sewage Company. Sometimes, even at this late hour, a head might appear in the bright light, coming up out of the ground, rising on the steps, then joined by the rest of the body. It might be followed by another figure or, conversely, somebody might be going down those steps, slowly disappearing in the ground.

  It was hard to tell what was happening.

  Other solitary men, like shadows, huddled in nearby entranceways, waiting. Some of them stood behind the lit-up round advertising column, smoking cigarettes. Others pretended not to be hunting for anyone, only waiting for the streetcar as they paced the island of the stop.

  But when the streetcar came, they would not get on.

  Gyöngyvér tried not to make noise, she wanted both of them to keep their voices down. They always woke up everyone in the huge apartment on the boulevard when they came home; some were startled, some only pulled the pillow over their ears.

  Have you gone completely out of your mind, she whispered angrily, and in her light semi-high-heeled mules decorated with swansdown she hurried across the large room to close the shutters of the two windows giving on the courtyard. The darkened, desiccated old parquet floor followed her steps with loud creaks. How can you do such a thing, for god’s sake. Ágost did not answer. Not even for a second did he break contact with himself.

  Their arrival had its own routine. Gyöngyvér first went to the toilet, then to the bathroom, Ágost right to the kitchen. He rarely ate at strange places; starved, he had to wolf down something very fast. Doors opened and closed, light switches clicked on in a predetermined order. The abundant and powerful stream of Gyöngyvér’s urine either made a harsh noise as it hit the toilet bowl or splashed hard in water.

  Kristóf couldn’t do much about this.

  If this happened while he was asleep, he saw it from close up, as if touching it with his tongue. It was a frequently returning memory. On a hot summer afternoon, when in a darkened room Viola pulled off her panties and squatted above him and Lilla demanded that he lick it. This room was in Dunavecse, not far from the river. In the darkened, creaking, large rooms of the house, they could smell the heavy, pervasive odor of Danube mud. Lick it for her, lick it. She whispered excitedly. Lick it; it’ll be all right, what are you afraid of. He felt its taste on his tongue for a long time.

  Nothing had a taste like that.

  He also understood from the excitement that Lilla had already done it to Viola. The characteristic odor of the mud mingled with this taste, he couldn’t get rid of it. Thinking that other girls might ask him for similar services, he spied on them, though he despised himself for the girlish trait of spying on people. Lilla and Viola rubbed themselves red. After that, he only remembered there was a certain taste he no longer smelled in the mud’s odor. He looked for it in vain. He nurtured the thought that he might find it. Half asleep, he sank into the mud, could barely extricate his feet. That’s when he woke up, to the memory of the taste and the odor, of there being a real Lilla and a real Viola, two little girls who were his cousins. Still, the taste was nowhere to be found, no matter how much he moved his tongue in all directions inside his mouth. He didn’t know what it belonged to, whose taste he remembered in his dream, the taste he could not find in his own saliva. His agitation was separated only by a wall from the aggressive loud sound of splashing urine. There was no point getting irritated because he had been awakened again. As much as he resented it, he in fact found the noise of Gyöngyvér’s peeing attractive; he daydreamed about her cunt.

  And if he also had to hear her cautious farting, amplified by the wide old-fashioned toilet bowl with its hairline cracks, he could say good-bye to sleep for good. Gyöngyvér did not fart every night. Even when she did, she would release no more than two small hushed ones, briefly, in quick succession, not letting herself go completely, though she probably thought no one would hear it. As if she were ashamed of herself. Every person is a master of dissembling; people sharing an apartment must pretend especially that they don’t notice the life signs of others, and that the attempts made to conceal these life signs are also invisible.

  This is what Kristóf did, out of politeness, but when Gyöngyvér startled him out of his sleep, it was like hearing a nice, rude, irresistible joke. He was shaken by involuntary, almost uncontrollable laughter. What he saw before him was the woman’s continually clenched lips and the fart emerging from them. Her disgusting attempts to gratify every desire. She certainly gratified every desire now. He saw Viola’s cunt rubbed raw. He was writhing, practically coiling up in his bed as he kept laughing silently. He could not laugh aloud or he’d be discovered, Gyöngyvér wouldn’t dare fart again, and that would be the end of his recurring joy. He was guffawing while winding and burying himself in his cover and pillows. This miserable creature defines herself most appropriately with her cautious little farts. The harder he laughed in the darkness, the stronger he felt that this had less to do with his good mood than with humiliation. His tears were flowing, his sides were about to split, the linen shoved into his mouth was all wet. In fact, he was on the verge of crying.

  Meanwhile there were noises from the kitchen; the lid of a pot brushed off and made a huge racket on the tile floor. Eating and shitting. And if not only men but women could fart like this, his life would not be the kind for which they’d been preparing him. Very different from the one this finicky woman, or the others with all their affectations, made it out to be. A glass clinked; a plate thudded on the table. A simpler, more amusing, much more disgusting, more ordinary life. Later, in the bathroom boiler, the gas, with a tiny explosion, caught fire. And in the kitchen Ágost turned on a damned faucet.

  Every evening Ilona carefully prepared and put out food; Ágost preferred to eat straight fro
m the pots, with spoons or with his hands, and pots make a lot of noise. For him it was a belated satisfaction to eat out of pots late at night in the parental home, to dip bread into sauces and let everything run, dribble, drip, and flow. No night passed without Ilona waking up in the maid’s room. But whether she got up to feed Ágost, or stayed in bed and from there followed the noisy events in the kitchen, she took care not to awaken her little boy. They slept in one bed. There was no room for another bed or even a cot. Lady Erna would not have stood for it, anyway, because she did not want to provide any support for, let alone any legal confirmation of, the fact that the unfortunate child lived here.

  He was a peculiar child; she admitted she could not warm to him. Or she kept her distance because she didn’t want him around. This was the situation Ilona had to accept. And at the beginning of every month, when collecting the rent, the concierge grumbled that the child still hadn’t been registered and he could not have such a situation go on much longer. They didn’t tell Ilona to take the child back to his grandmother who had been raising him until now, but they didn’t tell her that he could stay either. She had to get up very early to make breakfast for everyone and also have time to take the boy to kindergarten.

  The water in the old pipes, given to cracks and bursts, made a clanking sound, almost like a moan; unwanted air bubbles held it up before it began to flow, gushing out and pelting Gyöngyvér’s thin brown body, pattering on the tub’s enamel. Every other week, Gyöngyvér had to get up early, without an alarm clock, of course. She followed Ágost’s schedule; sometimes she would give up sleep altogether, but not her nocturnal shower. Perhaps this was the only thing she stubbornly clung to, even though the restless pipes, rattling in the walls, often seemed to threaten to explode. Her smooth body, delicately shaped limbs, elongated and strong musculature, taut and almost poreless skin had no fragrance until she applied her cheap perfume to the crook of her arms and the area behind her ears. And oddly enough, her short, thick hair had no smell either. Ágost did not think about this, but it was important to have no smell. She probably wouldn’t have smelled even without the showers, but she took them constantly. Like a compulsion, a passion or obsession of unknown origin. She took a shower before going swimming; she took one before going into the pool and after coming out, and at night she took one even if she had already showered in the afternoon because they were going to the opera or to a concert and she had to change her clothes.

  Until he was taken to the hospital on Kútvölgyi Road, the professor was also startled to wakefulness every night by the unpleasant noise. Still, he slept a lot both during the day and at night, perhaps because of immoderate doses of medicine; he slept very soundly and if awakened was barely conscious of himself. Or he may have been conscious of something entirely different. He would sit in the dark, staring at the lights trembling and shadows shifting across the spines of his books. From the time his wife no longer put up with him in their conjugal bed, a good ten years earlier, he had been made to withdraw to his study, filled with books and papers, and onto the sofa that once had been only a place for an afternoon nap or snoozes during breaks from his work. No one knew whether he still remembered things like naps or work. His condition had been deteriorating rapidly and unstoppably for months, and then one day it suddenly leveled off. As if the process might be reversible, after all, bits of memory sometimes revived, and then quite unexpectedly he caught a glance of himself in his own situation. He stood among his books, sat at his cleared and cleaned-off desk, and wept.

  One of the most brilliant minds of the age coming undone under his family’s eyes, and all as the consequence of one attack. The news was received with incredulity even by those who thought he had used his mental abilities exclusively for evil purposes, in the service of brutal authorities, which is why so many hated him, considered him spineless, held him in contempt. Now he was flat on his back. In a case like this, however, even gloating subsides because the sight of mental deterioration clearly declares that what a person knows and thinks is not necessarily his to command.

  Sometimes he would appear in his white nightshirt, hesitantly, in one of the rooms. He would speak quietly or mumble to himself. He didn’t know who the different beings might be who were sleeping all over the place in the various rooms or suddenly turning on lights to blind him. They did it deliberately. Quickly he would ask for water. He had to be on guard; otherwise, they would surely confuse him. He begged their pardon, but he hadn’t learned to find his way around this apartment. As if in his conscious mind he had another home. They showed him where the toilet was. They would support him, guide him, give him water, help him urinate, and then at some point they would leave him on his own again.

  He graciously agreed to everything, with one exception. He did not want to go back to his sofabed, anything but that, because he knew well why they wished him to be there.

  That is where they will kill him, in his bed. And he puts them to the test, to see whether they are willing to satisfy his wishes.

  Quickly he asked for something to eat.

  Except for Ilona, no one understood his mutterings. Just a little bread, nothing else. He’d love to chew on a little dry bread. And they gave it to him because if they didn’t understand what he wanted, or wouldn’t give him the bread, he would begin to shake, his entire body atremble as if shivering, as if he was terribly cold, while in fact he was weeping, without a single tear, and no one in his right mind could withstand such a sight. He liked best sitting in the hallway with his bread, in a place where a light was always on. But he only pretended to eat the bread. This too belonged to a recently discovered quality, to his ancient, secret knowledge. He would chomp a little on the bread, look around carefully, and then with a quick, almost animal-like movement shove it into the sleeve of his nightshirt and from then on made sure it did not fall out. He would hide it among his books. Occasionally he would slip a thinner slice in between piles of his manuscripts. Every object remained in its place but was assigned a new function. The two paintings, for example, he probably still recognized. Perhaps he no longer had any other window to the outside world. Sometimes they left him there for a whole night; they’d put socks on his feet, throw a blanket over his shoulders, and he would go about the battlefield examining the corpses trampled under horses’ hoofs, or chat about intricate moral questions with Captain József Lehr.

  In any case, it usually took a good long hour following their return home before everything quieted down again and no light could be seen coming from under the doors.

  When he couldn’t fall asleep again, Lady Erna would turn on his light and he would read, sometimes until dawn. But not a single week passed without his trying to convince his son that they should move out of this apartment. He’d take care of all the necessary bureaucratic arrangements and cover all expenses. They became entangled in hopeless arguments. They didn’t say anything directly but managed to unleash huge reserves from their respective stockpiles of rebukes. Every uttered word hurt. Sizzled with repressed fury. Ágost argued that for the sake of a few days, maybe a few weeks, it wasn’t worth upsetting his father’s life. His mother countered that he’d certainly be right if the few weeks weren’t extended to another four years. This could have been accepted as reasonable, just as one could understand Ágost’s argument, since they did not lack all reason. But the conflict between them was not about reasonableness and certainly not about the mutuality of understanding.

  He could not let his mother send him away again; that would have strengthened his quietly tormenting conviction, and that’s what he dreaded most, that’s what he never talked about to anyone except his friends.

  As a matter of fact, he does not and never did have a mother. True, while he had lived far away he conducted a very heartfelt correspondence with this strange woman. And his father, un vrai monstre, was not worth killing, because he’d come to life in a dozen new forms. His mother never loved him, and he wasn’t the only one she did not love; she probably never loved anyone,
and this is the inheritance he, the son, has to perpetuate. Qu’elle aille au diable. He felt, he thought, precisely for the sake of maintaining the semblance of a relationship with his mother, that he should leave—but only of his own free will, not be sent away or dismissed like a snotty little boy. And if he made a lot of noise with his life, well, let them put up with it. To hell with them. Every evening he waited for a telephone call or a confidential message, a message delivered by hand, something, a secret signal or written order so he could again leave this miserable country. Gyöngyvér, of course, knew nothing of these hopes. Earlier, he had worked abroad as a diplomat, and he had liked it; he had returned from his last position four years earlier and was now working at home on part of a confidential job: that is how Gyöngyvér understood the situation.

  Kristóf knew no more either; besides, he wasn’t interested in his cousin’s future.

  Nínó, however, should have understood what her son was counting on, what he was waiting for, what he suffered from. She herself had intervened on his behalf in some higher circles, but in vain. Which she could not comprehend and protested vigorously. By the nature of things, she could not have known anything about his conspiratorial tasks. More precisely, she pretended not to know what she should suspect.

  Or he might have been waiting to be told that his services were no longer required, neither clandestine nor public ones. He did consider this possibility. Then why scare Gyöngyvér with the possibility that tomorrow he might leave her for good. He wouldn’t admit it even to himself, but he kept his eyes open, constantly alert to possible new ways of being approached. He detected no signs of being observed, or did not want to acknowledge that his best friends adequately fulfilled the job of observers. At most, he was willing to admit that perhaps they were all being observed, and he should pay more attention to that possibility. He had no strength to stifle his own hopes. In which case he should acknowledge that he was forever imprisoned in this miserable country, in this jail that, after all, was his homeland. Patrie de merde. He’d have to live his life in this profoundly unhappy city as an exile; and he’d be forever locked up with people whom neither his body nor his soul desired. He desired no one, nothing. His idée fixe was that only servants and gentry lived in this shit country, no one else.