Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  Excuse me, but this is outrageous. What is going on here, asked Margit Huber, greatly surprised, as she stood in the doorway.

  The tugboat noise reached this far into the apartment with its rapid little throbs.

  You don’t have a cleaning woman again, I presume, said Izabella, as if to express indignation.

  Not only that, but the beast with her smelly flesh left me without a word of good-bye, grumbled Mária, and, finding no appropriate glasses in the cabinets, she began rummaging in the sink, full of dirty dishes. So don’t aggravate me with this too, now.

  A good two weeks have gone by since then, if I’m not mistaken.

  It’s rather dangerous in such heat.

  She hadn’t before, but now she knew where to look for the glasses. Still, because of her anger, the task was beyond her strength. Though evidently she had worked herself artificially into this state, there appeared no way out of it, and she did not quite understand this. She was playing a role for the others’ benefit, which helped a bit to protect her from them. At such times, one appears to oneself as a stranger within oneself.

  She must break through herself.

  They’re here, of course they’re here, rotten little things, on the bottom, she kept exclaiming, to help control herself, where else would they be, but she could restrain her outburst only with another one. Why in the name of heaven and hell haven’t I moved out of this damn apartment.

  I don’t myself understand it.

  The two women still in the doorway said nothing; this new turn of events silenced them. Because they both knew there was someone else besides them in the apartment, a woman much younger than they. She either lay in bed or, wrapped in a blanket, sat on the terrace, living an unchanging vegetative existence. The door of her room was closed most of the time, and if there was a reason why after the war Mária Szapáry could not move from the apartment, it was this sick woman or, as others referred to her, her sick girlfriend.

  They came here every evening so Mária wouldn’t have to leave the young woman alone.

  The dirty dishes in the sink clattered and slid about under her hands. Bella started to make a move to help her but then changed her mind.

  Maybe because of Elisa, Margit Huber started to say, cautiously yet emphatically, in a different voice; she knew she was going too far with this tentative comment.

  Perhaps it would cause a change in her condition. I mean a negative change, if I may say.

  She had barely spoken when Mária Szapáry was ready with a withering look. But that couldn’t stop her, so Margit Huber quieted down only gradually. Two such rotten women. Daring to stick their noses into her most jealously guarded secrets.

  In fact, she had no guarded secrets from them. At most there were certain things they never talked about, and their mutual silence had its own strict logic and a well-founded moral base.

  I’m going to burst.

  The meaning of so many things in this world is simply incomprehensible, and very little can be comprehended with the help of knowledge.

  She was raving, but not without method, which dictated the clatter and clinking of dishes under her hands, enamel knocking against metal, glass against china. She continued to carry on in a small, almost shrunken voice, which of course could be construed as a seal of their friendship, and she finally found two tall glasses. She could never have let herself do anything like this in front of other people. She knew she was being unjust, but with whom else might she be unjust. The glasses had dried shreds of lemon on their opaque sides, lemon pits embedded in ossified sugar on the bottoms. She had to permit this injustice in order to feel the pain of what hurt so much and of what she could never really share with anyone ever. In her lucid moments, she was very grateful. That they were here, around her, these increasingly vulnerable women, still like little girls in their pain. One after the other, she fished out the two glasses with one hand and, remembering exactly where the third one was in the pile, supported the raised dishes with her other hand.

  Elisa has no condition, please understand that once and for all, she muttered. She never had and will not have a condition. Condition, ha. And there can be no change in her condition either. Besides, she’s the last person who gives me trouble or any reason to worry.

  I don’t understand how an innocent question can be so misunderstood.

  Unless it’s done intentionally.

  Only you two give me anything to worry about. Or the simple fact that I haven’t moved out of this rotten apartment. Why can’t I get free. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand this infernal noise.

  Why am I still here.

  Rotten would have been a valid and justified word to describe other parts of Budapest, but not the clean, well-landscaped, and relatively well maintained Újlipótváros. And the adjective was inappropriate even if one hadn’t forgotten the terrible things that happened in Szent István Park and on the Újpest docks in the winter of 1944. Or how they unloaded frozen bodies from the bed of a truck at the same place in November 1956, yes, at the very same place. And it wasn’t the noise, not by a long shot. And moved out means out of the country, and the apartment means, perhaps, this miserable world. And her anger is her way of asking where would she go.

  At this moment, Margit Huber finally understood that Mária was tormented by a compassion that had grown to gigantic proportions. As soon as she understood this, she knew instantly how to respond. Although first she once again had to overcome her stifling jealousy of Irma and, mainly, Elisa. She was always having to overcome it. Mária hadn’t had two children who were murdered. This burden she does not bear. She wasn’t taken away, but only watched helplessly when others were. The burden had been not intended for her. She hadn’t had a cerebral hemorrhage in her youth, needed no medical care, and therefore she cannot count on anybody’s compassion.

  Of course, what she said out loud was not what she was thinking. If only because her jealousy was the least important element in the situation.

  For eight years she had worked as a vocal coach at the Berlin Opera and then for twenty at the Budapest Opera House. She had firm notions about the inner logic of hysterical outbursts of temper; about how, with the help of her own smile, she might guide the singers in her charge along the path of first taming and eventually controlling their emotions. Only with maniacal repetition can they uncover the dark depths of their fears, and when there is no way back from a repetition, one must pounce. They explicitly expect, wish, and demand that she go with them; they want to pull her in, entangle her nerves in their own, and with the strength of their frenzy pull her down to the depths with them. She’d smile, though she felt no sympathy for them. In this, she was helped by the fact that people instinctively want to be free of the little pains that others cause, and she helped herself with the unbroken armor of her smile. She rarely came close to succeeding, but when she did, she was able to explode her hysteria, which filled her with bursts of satisfaction and gave her smile added meaning.

  But the professional, technical means of arresting and utilizing hysteria were for her almost more important. The connections between dramatic strength and breathing, their effects, credibility, proportions, expressive techniques—these means that were exclusively her and the singers’ domain.

  Later, these studied components could be consulted as a professionally developed collection of paradigms.

  When she stopped, lowered and condensed the column of air inside her, it changed the posture of her impressive body.

  Among themselves, her friends referred to her as Brünhilde or Krimhilde, expressing their adverse admiration for her, their yearning fear. They had become inseparable friends on Veres Pálné Street, at the most venerable girls’ school in Budapest, famed for its liberalism; and they also knew Erna Demén from this school. Where in classes of fifty, poor girls and rich, middle-class and aristocrat, German and Slovak, Hungarian and Jewish, all studied together; already then they admired Margit, in whom lurked a strange, large-bodied woman blessed with an enormo
us smile. In summer, her blondness turned literally to whiteness, but the sun did not harm her skin, and the girls had much to delight in when looking at her.

  Starting in the late 1920s, when women began to sunbathe freely, she shed her clothes and pranced about wildly in the joy of absorbing the sunshine, tanning her bare body to dark brown. Men had very little to do with this, just as earlier she had not been charmed by the shy stares of boys. Today, the crown of snow-white hair that radiated above her shiny brown forehead had of course lost some of its firmness. Her eyes glittered brightly when she—carefully, from a lower register, hitting her warmest timbre, with deep resonance and increasing power—made her column of air sing out.

  You know, don’t you, Mária, that you’re talking nonsense. How could you move out of here, and where could you move to with Elisa, for God’s sake. But all that aside, why on earth do you have to move from here anyway. You can’t be moving all the time just because your house fills up with dirty dishes. Just wash them, damn it.

  After the last phrase, which hung in the air between them, and there was no stronger swearword than this among these friends, Margit allowed a short pause. In her next sentence she meant to raise the volume considerably and give the timbre another twist. The sentence would be long, complicated, the loudness making the articulation harder. In such cases, tongue and lips must shape each and every syllable most precisely.

  The only reason you may have pangs of conscience, and there’s no other reason, is that you don’t talk decently to your servants.

  To this dramatically enunciated declaration, Mária responded with a laugh. How do you know that. She was giggling.

  How do I know, I’ve heard you enough. If you learned how to talk to them, they wouldn’t be leaving you all the time. Damn it, why can’t you make the effort. That’s the only thing you should have qualms about.

  She wanted to take the burden off her shoulders.

  Though she became ridiculous with these voice-coach techniques.

  And indeed she did remove it.

  The way she meted out, artificially increased, and then reduced the volume of her voice, the way she puckered her lips vertically to give shape to the words, and the way she never ran out of air, all this held Mária’s attention. Margit flooded Mária with her anxiety, carefully formed in her loins and belly, and the loud, even, slightly rasping throb of her voice involuntarily played counterpoint to the tugboat’s increasing and insidious beats, which reverberated on cobblestones, along subterranean walls, and in dull cellar cavities. As if she were demonstrating the means by which drama can be both intensified and extinguished.

  Even when she unashamedly put her substantial, deeply tanned and wrinkled breasts on display as she lifted them and pressed them together, in her bearing there was something profoundly ascetic and humble. Her moral attitude, her appearance, and her work had anointed her as the priestess of her profession, and she elicited devout reverence from her students. Though they couldn’t understand why she smoked so much. When she dispensed those precise portions of air, her feverish flesh undulated and trembled in the frame of her richly embroidered, lace-trimmed, and pleated blouse. To Mária’s critical eyes the more sensual, steamy image proved stronger, even though her resisting body, unnoticed, relaxed and grew peaceful in the currents of that intimately deep voice.

  The red, eyelike coral beads danced on the finely trembling necklace.

  Delight made her giggle like a little girl. She thought she was laughing at what she was seeing, though in fact it was because of what she was feeling.

  To gauge properly one’s actions, one needs a bit of emotional perspective.

  She was tittering, enjoying immensely the distance that Médi could open up and then throw a bridge over with her voice.

  Being a costume designer, she observed the theatrical banality of Médi’s temperament from the viewpoint of a sister profession; to provide some extra income for herself and Elisa, she worked as a cutter and seamstress for all sorts of minor stars. It was as if she were suddenly saying to herself, but this is great, a white lace blouse over a wrinkled bosom tanned to brown.

  But her laughing made the pile of dishes, raised and supported by her arm on the edge of the sink, lose balance and slip.

  A red enamel lid was first to slide off, and it seemed to set in motion the rest of the variously sized platters and dessert plates. Clumsily, from the bottom, she reached for the moving dishes with her other hand. She missed, and the dishes went on sliding, gaining momentum on the big chased surfaces of trays. And under all this, a glass broke in her hand, of course; when it cut her finger she cried out and involuntarily gave a forceful shove to the entire pile. Which was followed by a deafening noise. The two women in the doorway moved to jump forward. The clatter, clang, and clangor, and the sliding that in a single second strewed a profusion of bouncing, rolling colorful shards all over the kitchen floor could not be stopped.

  Now there was no clear space to which they might jump or advance.

  And just as quickly, silence fell over the battlefield.

  Rooted, mesmerized, all three stared at the wretched result. Mária, her wounded finger in her mouth, backed away from the shards all the way to the open door to the maid’s room, and the moment she leaned on it, the door slammed against the wall. But what was this sight compared to the devastation they had already seen in their lives. For a few seconds, until the three of them began to laugh, glad that this was nothing compared to the sights in their memory, they could hear the deep, pulsating sound of the tugboat. Though they could also hear in it—in the meantime it had absorbed—another pulsing rhythm. Perhaps another tugboat was approaching. Probably from the opposite direction, from the Árpád Bridge, and the rhythms of the two tugs differed. Mária slid slowly down the smooth door as if pulled by her own weight. And she could have told them that the tugboat has just come abreast of the empty section of the shore in front of the Protestant church on Pozsonyi Road, where it does not echo so loudly.

  The only time it was quiet over the river was when it was either frozen or full of drift ice.

  You see, Margit Huber bellowed, you see, she chortled, I could have told you it would happen, I saw it, I swear I did.

  Oh, let’s see your finger, cried Izabella Dobrovan anxiously, wanting to turn their unsuppressed laughter quickly into sentimental empathy.

  It may be a deep cut.

  From behind her finger, which she kept sucking, Mária Szapáry cried along with the other two, while shaking with laughter or weeping.

  Oh, my entire sixteenth century.

  Her mouth filled with the taste of blood. She slid down the door until her buttocks reached the floor. She was clowning for them because she was a little ashamed of her clumsiness and the condition of her kitchen.

  My entire sixteenth century is gone.

  There she was, legs spread on the kitchen’s checkered tiles, in the midst of the shards that were all that was left of her majolica dishes, true museum-quality dishes from an Urbino workshop, and it was hard to believe that this was, once again, the end of the story.

  It wasn’t her finger that hurt.

  When someone rang the bell outside, once, briefly, she was thinking that this really wasn’t an act of fate, and it wouldn’t be worth her while to resist it.

  Anybody heard the elevator, she asked, and was amazed that she hadn’t heard something she should have.

  I haven’t.

  No, nothing.

  Could she have walked up.

  It seems that way.

  Should I open it, if you’d like me to, asked Dobrovan politely.

  I’ll get it, came Mária’s firm response, but she was in no hurry.

  She wouldn’t have trusted them with opening the door; she needed this opportunity.

  That evening, Irma Szemző had made it up the stairs very slowly indeed.

  She stopped on all the landings, her thoughts repeatedly carrying her away, or more precisely, for long moments she forgot where
she was or where she was going. The higher she climbed, the warmer she felt, even though the gallery windows facing the inner courtyard were wide open. The white marble walls were mottled with yellow- and blue-grained pink spots, and there was silence and cleanliness. Today she hadn’t wanted to look at the concierge’s face, swollen by alcohol—and not just because he disgusted her in general. Ultimately, she was one of those people who, though unwilling to be absolutely honest, battle with themselves to become dishonest since they lack the talent for it. Every evening in the spacious, mirrored elevator cabin, Mrs. Szemző would impassively observe the uncertain, soft, slightly flat profile of this man struggling with melancholy; his eternally bowed head, his short, retracted neck, his strong, well-built body which nevertheless projected weakness and from which the sour odor of mental fustiness emanated; when he spoke, the emanation was overwhelmed by his powerfully foul breath.

  She observed the essence of his neurosis, scanned his constitution, which accommodated a strangeness bordering on madness, where, one might say, neurosis found an appropriate breeding ground.

  Each time she had to tell herself that he was a borderline case, she could not help him.

  In 1944, Varga had helped Mária Szapáry, which had meant taking considerable risks. However, he loathed himself for this as if for some weakness.

  He hadn’t done it out of conviction.

  He had nothing but contempt for the suspicious characters that turned up at Countess Szapáry’s place: wandering Jews, communists and socialists forced to live and work underground, various kinds of deserters; he thought of them as nothing but riffraff. The reason Hungarians are always divided is that they always have these kinds of people among them. People who, like weeds, should be extirpated down to the last one. Varga was an advocate of a firm hand, strict social order, and Hungarian unity. The Germans, their manners smoothed by their racial brutality, and the screeching Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross men, impressed him. After all, they both meant to do only good: to make permanent order at last in this Jewish whorehouse. He himself was a member of a secret patriotic organization that has gone on operating to this day. But Countess Szapáry simply paid him off, bribed him, overwhelmed him, would not let him choose another way. That was his weakness—money and aristocrats of various ranks and orders who in his eyes, after all, did symbolize everything Hungarian, and against whom he felt defenseless.