Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  This was the only decently furnished room in the large apartment, or more correctly, Mária had made sure that no valuable object in this room was sold, even in periods of great privation. The room was just as it had been when they set it up, according to Elisa’s taste, during the first, not exactly blissful weeks of their living together.

  The repeated gesture was understandable at first sight. She must have been doing it for a long time. It was easy to see she was punishing herself, was passionately dissatisfied with herself, her miserable knees not moving and she being unable to get up from where she was sitting. And it was impossible to forget how well proportioned and shapely these legs had been in their fine silk stockings, with fashionably graceful, thin-soled, indecently high-heeled shoes showing off her ankles, calves, and thighs. Now her swollen feet were forced into two down-at-heel, checkered felt slippers. Her downy blond, naturally wavy hair, richly interlaced with gray, which made her blondness even more exciting, fell into her face because of her continuous, practiced gesture of passionate self-punishment. She looked like a lunatic, but this exaggeration was a part of that particular language of gestures with which she could still express her will and feelings, and for which she mobilized incredible reserves of strength.

  Her left shoulder and arm were partially and her lower body completely paralyzed as a result of hereditary arteriosclerosis, which can afflict young people. This diagnosis was well supported by the facts that her grandfather, Baron Dénes Koháry, chief counselor for hunting matters to the minister of agriculture, had died following an unsuccessful treatment of his syphilis, and her father had had a long bout with serious circulatory problems. Elisa’s anus and vagina retained their full sensitivity, however; she felt her needs and could to a certain extent take care of them herself. She could no longer formulate intelligible sentences except for one, though with great effort she could produce sounds that for practiced ears were not completely indecipherable.

  A person who, according to all medical prognoses, should have been dead long ago.

  Mária hurried to help her up. Relax, patience, she called out coolly. Calm yourself, stop making such a ruckus, for God’s sake. I’m not completely deaf. But she had barely touched her when the blond woman, with the same rage with which she had been hitting herself, now, throwing her head high, freeing her oval face from the dense mass of her blond hair with its silvery highlights, rudely shoved her away.

  I don’t know, she shouted in English several times, I don’t know, quickly, angrily, plaintively, passionately. Or so it could be interpreted.

  I see you didn’t make any kaka and you didn’t pee, exclaimed Mária, glancing impassively at the bedpan lying in front of the swan-necked divan in which there was nothing but a little water. Then tell me what’s up, but a bit more clearly, what do you need.

  I don’t know, Elisa kept shouting, now more desperately, reproachfully, I don’t know, her enormous blue eyes all but throwing sparks as they darted, rolled, and flashed.

  Elisa never failed to surprise Irma each time anew with her sorely ravaged beauty. As if, despite all her misery, she was radiating it still, as she had done long ago when Irma saw her for the first time, at twenty, from a distance. And later, to be honest, she had had grave doubts about Professor Bókay’s diagnosis when he’d been called in as a consultant. She would never have told anyone, but her decided impression was that, independent of her grandfather’s youthful syphilis and her father’s wildly fluctuating blood pressure, Elisa’s cerebral hemorrhage had successfully thwarted the breakout of a well-developed schizophrenia.

  She couldn’t forget that a week before that catastrophic event they had had lunch together on Margit Island on the terrace of Palatinus Strand, and by then everything about the latent disease was visibly present. Could schizophrenia induce the same process in arteries that arteriosclerosis or syphilis did, that was the question. She was with her children, which required that she divide her attention, but during the short quarter hour when Mária was getting dressed in her cabin, Irma observed something in the seemingly gentle but in fact ruthlessly icy blond woman, something that would have been hard to put into words.

  It was becoming overcast.

  She would have liked to warn Mária, but kept her peace.

  Above them, the wind gently flapped the giant blue-and-white-striped canvas umbrella; still, the air seemed not to move.

  A light-music orchestra was playing on the terrace, which the young woman found too loud, and the smell of bacon too strong. It is possible that she was indeed suffering from a constantly changing accumulation of impressions that she could not process properly, from the strength of those impressions, from the incredible fact that everything in the world is present at the same time and with great force; nevertheless, what emanated from her was a benumbing indifference and icy tranquillity. She spoke of herself excitedly and with great agitation as if representing another person, a complete stranger. Which made the blood run cold in the veins of everyone around her; the boys were especially alarmed by her. First, she had a problem with the soup, which she said was sour, then she claimed that the smell of the cucumber salad was unbearable, the vinegar in it, and she asked the two boys not to squeeze any more lemon on their fried veal cutlets in her presence.

  I want to tell you, she said, smiling enchantingly, everything around me is too rich in acid reaction.

  She issued such reports about her impressions in precise, impassively spoken sentences.

  This may be understandable, but she didn’t want people neutralizing her own personal chemical reaction.

  Otherwise, she had nothing to say or ask anyone, she talked continually about herself, this other person, or she sat quietly observing this other person in herself.

  Usually it was hard to restrain the two lively boys, but now, without a word and looking frightened, they placed the half-squeezed lemon slices on the rims of their plates. This woman is far from being as ready to smile as she tries to pretend she is; she is busy with that grim self of hers, whom she treats as a stranger to be indulged.

  She has taken on the dark loveliness of this stranger, though in none of her parts or traits is she identical with that stranger.

  The combined din of the tugboats was becoming unbearable; the air shook and vibrated above the terrace restaurant. A pervasive odor of crude oil overwhelmed the river’s evening coolness; heat and the engines’ nauseating, stinking particles of combustion filled the air.

  One tugboat was pulling some loud dance music upstream, maybe that’s what reminded her of the orchestra playing light music.

  Yes, I know, you’re right, damn my rotten forgetfulness. I forgot again to put your chair here for you, shouted Mária over the noise, giving the impression that despite her contrition, she would not be rattled by the other woman’s agitation.

  Since those days, of course, Mrs. Szemző too has looked at everything differently.

  If only because misery had fundamentally changed the blond woman, making her attentive, almost humble, which meant that not merely did she suffer but she also managed her suffering. She has softened and warmed up because of her terrible illness; heat emanated from her bare neck and naked arms. But Irma dreaded the very sight, the proximity of this change. She could not rid herself of the notion that in certain cases only at the expense of a physical catastrophe can the human constitution avoid a mental catastrophe. And if this were indeed so, then occurrences in this world must have not only reasons but probably purposes as well. But then she was faced again with the stupid question of who was at the helm, or what could be the thing that had a purpose. And she should also ask who took her children away, why, and why had she been left alive.

  And that she’d rather not be.

  Which may have been easy to say, but its consequences were unbearable, and then her mind began the cycle all over again, like a squirrel in a cage.

  The wheeled armchair was there but out of reach, that is to say unreachable but close enough to annoy the sick wo
man greatly. She must have made unsuccessful attempts with her cane somehow to yank it closer. The chair was a beautiful museum piece, from Steindl’s famous early nineteenth-century carpentry workshop, now in rather poor condition.

  Varga had attached a tip-up footrest to it.

  I don’t know, replied Elisa, I don’t know, she kept repeating, though this time very differently, the yells sounding at once satisfied, almost cheerful, and also irritated. She was making her voice bend, rock, and sway in an unusual way but very sensitively and understandably. Which meant, on the one hand, that Mária understood and with satisfaction acknowledged Elisa’s response as splendid, and, on the other hand, that many things were still to be clarified.

  There, Mária said, as you see, there’s not a problem in the world. I broke the dishes from Urbino, every last piece, but that’s all it was, not an air raid. We threw them all out. I cut my finger a little.

  That made Elisa stare at her, frightened and at a loss.

  And Mrs. Szemző, Irma Arnót, felt it was not nice to lead Elisa astray and the time had come to intervene.

  Sometimes Elisa’s face showed that she did not know what to do with what she had heard, or that she could sort out even the simplest things only very slowly if at all. Her reflexes had recovered almost completely after her cerebral hemorrhage, she followed every movement with her eyes, lazily but accurately, and it seemed that she comprehended everything immediately. She remembered and could be reminded at any time of events in the distant past. But some parts of her brain had been irreparably damaged. Mária’s experience had taught her that there were no longer reliable passages between certain brain areas, or that direct communication between them had ceased completely. Elisa could probably locate the areas that still communicated, this was visible on her face, but she could not make the other connections. It was interesting to watch her facial features when she tried; at such times she appeared to be searching more than suffering. Or, as if it were possible to make the missing contact via a different approach, one could see in her heightened attention that she was trying out different detours and hoping to reach her goal. Something was missing, something was not functioning, but obviously she had no conscious reflex to deal with this lack. And once she realized she could not find her way between two or more things, she became quite oafish. On such occasions, her back had to be tapped and her face gently slapped. Which returned fatigued calm to her face, though she seemed to have forgotten what it was she’d been trying to find.

  In addition, something else shut down, heavily and ominously.

  Empty space in a transparent system.

  Futile effort exhausted and disheartened her; for half a day or sometimes for days, her face remained gloomy.

  Now, at Irma Arnót’s unexpected appearance, she gave a start and roared like an animal, stretched out her arms like a child offering itself to its mother, please hug me. This gave the impression that the connection between fear and joy was unreasonably strong; the waiting time necessarily attached to every emotion had ceased to exist.

  At the same moment something happened that unexpectedly distracted Irma. Roused by the animal-like roar, Elisa’s huge, long-haired, flaming red Persian tomcat plopped down to the floor from the divan’s bentwood back and, as if fleeing from mortal danger, padded off on his fuzzy paws, flitting between the furniture legs until he reached the open terrace door. Using the large oak bucket of a richly branched ceiling-high ficus as protection, he looked back at Irma with a glance of fright mixed with wonder, and then vanished in the dark outside.

  When something like this happened, the cat would jump up on the handrail of the terrace, from there to the flat rooftop and the elevator shaft. From there he would slink to other elevator shafts and even steal brazenly into strange apartments; through distant stairwells he would make it to the street, into the world of automobiles, streetcars, strange smells, dogs, and pissed-on trees, moving along his dangerous routes; and the women always feared that he might never come back.

  Elisa’s movement was particularly poignant because to give someone a hug, she had to use her good arm to lift the paralyzed one.

  Her tone of voice and the play of her features also changed completely.

  She says, I haven’t seen you for a long time, Mária called over the noise, a little humorously, a little instructively. In other people’s company, she would quickly translate Elisa’s gestures into words. She did it out of consideration, so that the guest or unsuspecting stranger who had strayed into their lives did not have to struggle. In another sense, she seemed to be not so much obliging the stranger with a translation as sharing something with Elisa in their most secret language. Elisa was begging, entreating, with the single more or less coherent sentence, I don’t know, that she cried, she sang, to Irma. They weren’t even sure whether she was repeating the English phrase for its meaning in that language, or whether her paralyzed speech organs could only form sounds reminiscent of the English phrase, in which case the syllables were arbitrary and void of meaning.

  If they asked her about it, she irresistibly broke out laughing.

  I don’t know, she’d answer playfully, her head tilted to the side, as if she understood the humor. Now, however, she used the phrase to beseech and extort, as an indignant beggar woman would, and when Irma resignedly hugged her, she clung to her neck and kept kissing her.

  My sweet, my darling, Irma whispered, very feelingly despite her own intentions, and momentarily lost her balance; when her knees buckled a bit under Elisa’s weight, she could not but think of being hugged by her own children.

  She says you’re an unfaithful pig, Mária Szapáry interpreted; on hearing this, Elisa with bubbly sounds laughed sensually into the creases crisscrossing Irma’s naked scraggy neck. With both her arms, she continued her insistent clinging, entwining, and clasping movements, partly because she was holding her half-paralyzed arm around Irma’s neck with her own good arm. As if she were wanting to climb up on Irma, to wrap her in her body, she offered up her thin body and her light, quivering, little-girl breasts.

  And since you’re here, Mária continued her somewhat arbitrary translation, please help me get up.

  Irma had to lift Elisa’s helpless body by holding it under the arms, to pull it up onto her, to cushion it, as it were, while Mária shoved the antique wheelchair under her.

  She called me an unfaithful pig, did she, Irma was ready to burst out.

  Mária keeps Elisa under lock and key, and if someone happens to ask about her condition, she considers the very question a lèse-majesté. And while she was holding the blond woman’s light body, she could not but suspect that they were engaged not in doing what they were talking about but, rather, playacting again, in their well-practiced way, for each other’s benefit.

  Elisa offers herself up almost as if she were complying with Mária’s silent consent or express wish. Those two continue to weave and carry on their secret nocturnal interplay at her, Irma’s, expense.

  She fought against these paranoid thoughts, she had to be sly with them, give these twisted notions a bit of air, a little chance, and, when they began to breathe, pitilessly strangle them.

  But this time she was not mistaken.

  When thin bodies touch this closely, they are capable of incredibly profound sensitivity.

  This was not the first time she had illicitly experienced Elisa’s thin body or the exceptionally powerful flavor of their nights.

  Fuller bodies may be hot and more passionate, but thin bodies are unerringly accurate in sensing things. She could not ignore the feeling that Mária used Elisa, that through her thin body she avenged herself for all her injuries.

  The two tugboats were receding, and as they carried their sounds with them, echoing above the Danube and penetrating the water, their throbbing, puffing, and pulsing again separated and became independent.

  I don’t mind telling you, you’ve been pretty unfair with me, remarked Irma quietly, and with a little groan she placed Elisa’s body
in the wheelchair.

  And as if to corroborate her earlier suspicion, Elisa and Mária laughed together, conspiratorially, shamelessly.

  For them to get going, along with the chair, Irma had to squat down in front of Elisa and put her inertly dangling outturned feet on the folding footrest. The immobile feet were surprisingly heavy.

  With whom else could I be as unfair as I can be with you, Irmuska, replied Mária from above her.

  You mean you’re taking your revenge.

  Except for you, Irmuska, on whom could I take my revenge, for God’s sake. And if I have a good reason or at least a good motive for it, why shouldn’t I.

  I’ll do it.

  Which Mrs. Szemző thought was a funny enough remark to laugh. She may have laughed a bit too hard, factitiously and demurely.

  With which she meant to excuse herself for her own cruelty. But she had no intention of retreating.

  She took the offense more seriously than if it had actually touched her.

  Mária quickly pushed the chair forward so forcefully that Mrs. Szemző barely had time to straighten up and jump out of the way.

  It’s high time to be at the table, she exclaimed. Please open the door. And put her blanket on her knees.

  They had done this before, wasting a little time before the card game, which filled them with pleasant impatience.

  Mrs. Szemző opened both wings of the door. Since one of the women would always become impatient during this little interlude, this too belonged to their well-refined routine. In the large space called the workshop, an atelier with a northern exposure originally designed for a famous sculptor, large wooden dummies in various stages of dress or undress were standing around a huge drafting table under the bare lamplight. Nothing shone or glittered, and nothing cast a shadow. On another large table, its surface dotted with myriad holes made by thumbtacks and sewing pins, and with several burn holes left by unattended irons, lay pieces of fabric, cut and waiting to be sewn, stacked neatly in layered piles, blue and claret lining material spread under red and purple silks, measuring tapes, scissors, horseshoe magnets, tailor’s chalks, pin cushions full of pins and attached to rubber bands, which Mária or occasional seamstresses would wear on their arms as they worked, so as to have pins always at the ready. Wheeled clothes racks stood along the bare walls and in front of the very deep, floor-to-ceiling closets, most of whose doors were open. On these racks, in a picturesque jumble, hung basted or finished theatrical costumes along with all sorts of civilian clothes.