Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  Mária Szapáry, as a person interrupted in exercising her hereditary superiority, stepped closer to the table and, to make order out of the chaos of the story, lifted her glass out of the puddle of the drink. But this was no improvement because she did not understand what had happened. Sugary liquid dripped from the bottom of the glass back onto the green felt. In the meantime, she ostentatiously avoided Elisa’s eyes.

  She did not want to see her.

  If I understand correctly, you mean she was with somebody, in flagrante, is that right, asked Margit Huber, and with two quick twists of her fists she rubbed tears from her eyes.

  Like caterpillars, as I’ve said, earthworms, but there was enough light for me to have no serious doubt about what I was seeing.

  But what did you do, for God’s sake.

  What could I do, that’s what was so interesting, that’s why I want to tell you about it. I pretended I didn’t see it.

  I see.

  It couldn’t have gone better.

  Izabella Dobrovan decided she had to step in before the battling fronts froze into immovable positions.

  She had been a dancer in her younger years but her burgeoning career ended with a serious onstage accident. She probably owed her imperceptible, modest decisiveness to her dance training. With her barely graying black hair brushed straight back and gathered in a bun, with her thin limbs, dry white skin, and ramrod-straight carriage, she was the most impressive-looking among the four women to this day, even though her looks were not particularly striking.

  Her dark silk dress rustled across the room.

  They had been observing one another for decades; they could see even when they closed their eyes.

  Certain things they would talk over, occasionally, briefly, and preferably in private, but they would refrain from making the kind of judgment that only a little while earlier Margit Huber had allowed herself to make. Although in a weak moment she had entrusted Mrs. Szemző with the great secret of her life, of which even Izabella Dobrovan had no knowledge. Although Izabella had followed the lines of the secret story as sensitively as she was now helping Mária return from her temporary embarrassment to the bastions of her superiority.

  But the reason Mrs. Szemző’s news affected Margit Huber as it did was that Gyöngyvér Mózes was her pupil.

  She had helped her obtain the maid’s room in Mrs. Szemző’s apartment, though Irma did not really need the rent of a subtenant.

  Any way one cared to look at it, their lives were well intertwined.

  In addition, Margit Huber loved to organize other people’s lives and to hold all the strings in her hands, as it were. Since Irma had a concert piano in her hallway, she might, who could tell, occasionally feel like accompanying Gyöngyvér, or so Margit had thought. Irma was not a brilliant pianist, but she would do. There was nothing affected about her playing. And she wouldn’t be so alone all the time.

  Kick her out, she said.

  I wouldn’t think of it.

  Don’t misunderstand, I gave up on her a long time ago. As far as I’m concerned, you can kick her out.

  Give me that glass, said Dobrovan, and she took the dripping glass from Mária Szapáry’s hand. I’ll get a rag to clean up this mess, if I may.

  I’m rather annoyed with myself, replied Mrs. Szemző. A pretty young woman, why shouldn’t she live her life.

  A hopeless slut, take my word for it. Hopeless, despite all our efforts.

  Why is she hopeless, and what does hopeless mean, anyway.

  You can’t be the judge of that.

  I never claimed I could.

  It’s not her voice, it’s that she has no psychological reserves. She herself is hopeless. And luckily she doesn’t know it.

  The moment she starts singing, she is very convincing, especially with her concentration and her passion.

  If someone’s foundation is shaky, then it’s all in vain.

  She has presence, she can fill the space with herself.

  Regrettably, passion is more of a danger, it carries her away, regrettably, and that’s when you can see she has no background, no depth. And when you consider that for someone who is almost too old to be a beginner, she is lazy and uneducated.

  Lazy.

  Elisa was whining in the armchair, but she was really begging for forgiveness.

  Mária could not see how upset she was.

  And Bella, in her imperceptible and passionless way, started off with the glass toward the door.

  Wait, Mária called after her, I’ll do it myself.

  No, no, my dear Médi, this is a suppressed, concealed, strictly controlled passion. Take no offense, but I’ve more experience in this. The situation is that she is blocked by something very strong, and whatever it is, it should be eliminated first.

  Irma was talking as if secretly she feared for Gyöngyvér and wanted to save her for herself.

  And this, in turn, could not escape Margit Huber’s attention because she feared for Gyöngyvér even more passionately, and she also dreaded her own failure, which Irma clearly recognized; she inveighed against her so she could then take her under her protection.

  She is blocked, you say, all right, but what can I do with that. These are empty psychological commonplaces. I need to know what is blocking her. I wouldn’t say it’s her low origin, some people can overcome that, some can’t, and it’s not a question of talent. She has no more time for preparation, she’s the one who hasn’t got another five years, not I.

  They all felt again that what was happening went on being something other than what they were actually talking about, which stretched every moment dangerously beyond acceptable limits.

  What’s the point of behaving in a certain way, even normally, if what they’re trying to conceal with their behavior is visible, and each one of them can sense that they all see through these efforts.

  They aren’t in protective trenches anymore.

  Dobrovan chose to wait a moment, and Mária hadn’t left the room either. They were tarrying not only because they had to split their attention in so many directions at once, not wanting to be left out of anything or to miss anything, not a single word, but also because Margit Huber’s emotional tactics were becoming clear to them. Not only did she not want Mrs. Szemző to throw out this unknown Gyöngyvér, but she was obviously fighting for her, hoping ardently that Irma would take her under her wing.

  Which was something Mrs. Szemző would no longer do for anyone, not for anything. After she’d given up her practice, she’d found work in the district clinic as a medical clerk.

  For ten years, until her retirement, she insisted on being a medical clerk and nothing else.

  But now she was wavering.

  Similarly, Mária Szapáry felt it would be better to keep silent about all this, that it was too perilous, but she would not prevent them from talking. Yet she could not tear herself away from them. All she wanted was not to confuse things more with her own words, and she could not have said what they should clarify or how that could be done. In the meantime, the two other women were not only talking but also watching Bella help Mária, who had fallen out of her role, and trying to figure out how all this was connected to Elisa’s whining.

  Which Mária cannot bear, which is the reason she must leave the room. As if they are raking through her nerves.

  They all led different and less personal lives; still, there were moments when the air filled up to the point where nothing more could be accommodated.

  They are locked into one another.

  A force, functioning independently of them, condemned them to one another; they must break out of one another.

  The question has become this, who will begin tonight, and who can bring about her breakout with the smallest sacrifice.

  Of course, the warm evening had cooler edges, currents, breezes, brief thrusts and puffs from above the heavy, darkly rolling water, which the body unconsciously absorbed. The many sensations and fragrances of early summer colored their feelings, imperc
eptibly came between them, occasionally modified the measure and direction of their emotions. On Margit Island during these days, the yellow clusters of Japanese acacias burst into bloom among the ruins of the Dominican cloister, where human urine and feces stank and burning cigarettes glowed and died off in the darkness.

  In the light of distant gas lamps, lonely men roamed, showing themselves to one another, and then stopped in one of the ruins’ impenetrable shadows and cautiously opened their flies.

  The fragrance of the heavy, dense acacia clusters is not sweet but forbidding and scabrous, like chipped metal, or like raw beef.

  VOLUME II

  In the Very Depth of the Night

  Margit Island

  I’ve got another life.

  Kristóf ran headlong into the bushes, flowery branches hitting him in the face.

  Yes, he did have another life.

  He was fleeing.

  He heard the long, hurrying steps pounding behind him, the wild breathing of his pursuer; the tightly packed footpath through the trees and bushes reverberated under their feet.

  I’ve gone too far, he whimpered to himself, much too far. He could not help going too far, no matter how much he admonished himself, because he was far from everything and everybody. He was playing with danger to feel he was alive, though his other self weighed everything soberly.

  I stretched things past the breaking point, I truly got on their nerves.

  In the fragrant darkness, in the balmy breeze, there was also the danger of muggers, pickpockets, possibly murderers or a police roundup. Let them kill me, I don’t care; that was not what he was dreading. He increased his excitement with the dangers of the night to the pleasure of intolerability. He had discovered this place four nights earlier, and though he’d returned home at dawn he could barely wait for nightfall to come again; he was spending his fifth night here. As if he were deep in ethnological research and was having difficulties finding his way among the tribe’s strict rules.

  There was hardly any talking here; at most one could hear hisses and brief whistles. People suddenly appeared and disappeared. He could recognize some now familiar figures, shapes who looked for and followed him, or whom he followed, but the night would swallow them up without a trace.

  There were too many of them.

  They were on their guard, fleeting, sneaking, prowling, as if they could see in the dense darkness filled with little noises, sighs, moans. He discovered that he too could see in the dark and he especially enjoyed that. His mind recorded, gauged, established contact, combined data, and stored urgent questions; in short, it functioned at full capacity. After a while he understood or seemed to understand the intentions of those shadows and silhouettes, and he comprehended their passions, condemned to silence and mutual dependence. He was happy with his scientific discoveries. At the sight of different figures and the abundance of various desires, his lips, which he licked excitedly, became parched and his mouthy.

  The younger man, the one with the mustache, will now make a wide detour, and, before one can get out of the park, with his enormous limbs he will block passage on the trail. Because sometimes he not only planted himself before him but roughly pulled him to himself, hugging him gently, and when this happened the first time he planted a kiss on his neck, so he remembered with his skin the touch of his limbs—and longed for it. He could anticipate this younger man’s grinning mug, his large meaty nose and the bushy Hungarian mustache overwhelming his lips; he felt his breath, with its commingling odor of alcohol and tobacco, a particularly repulsive mixture. Let him plant a kiss on his neck. He nearly fainted at the mere thought of it, the fear. The two worked as a team; he’d be caught between these two large-bodied men. Kristóf realized that the two used the older one as bait, because on this turf other men, mainly the young ones close to Kristóf in age, considered him more attractive. They fancied him; all their lives they’d dreamed of physical strength, of greater size and perfection, and with his sheer presence he embodied this dream. The two of them are waiting for him to walk unsuspecting into their trap. They’ve built their strategy on the physical perfection of the older one; regarding the temptation, there is total harmony between them. Neither of them wants to catch him alone, they want to do it together; and realizing this has made him suspicious of them. But he also realized that his continuing flight from them is part of the lure and serves to increase tension; he’s become a toy of his own permanent desire for greater physical perfection. Everything is preordained, and whatever he now discovers or foresees happens several times a night. There’s no longer any difference between the inner and outer worlds, everything was prepared during Creation, and now only the resolution, the cadenza, is lacking: the death rattle, or ejaculation. If he let them, they’d torture him mercilessly, tear his muscles apart with their sharp teeth and instantly devour his flesh.

  That’s all he could think of; he could not imagine it any other way, or he did not want to imagine his pleasure any other way, the pleasure these two had treacherously been preparing for him.

  The trembling darkness, mottled by lights from distant gas lamps, was full of hard-packed paths and trails. The men who stepped off the trails and headed into thickets were the ones who wanted to offer up their bodies as free prey, or who wanted someone who would mutely and willingly offer up his. This was one of the general rules of the place. Shortly after ten o’clock in the evening, when unsuspecting strolling lovers disappeared, naked limbs and other body parts flashed in the depths of the darkness that neither gaslight nor reflections of the city’s sky could penetrate. No one who must mature from being an unripe boy to being a ripe, full-fledged male could deny himself the curiosity, the urge to know what other men were like. Insanely, he tried to become like the others. He liked to imagine himself in their place as they offered themselves to anyone, or took possession of a total stranger’s naked body, though he kept telling himself he only wanted to watch, to see.

  Mutual imagination became their aphrodisiac, and this made the darkness vibrate and tremble in a state of excited expectation that no mortal man could have gratified.

  It was as if he had acquired forbidden knowledge, the city’s ultimate secret.

  If he approached them very carefully, minding the slightest crackling sound, they would fly apart, continue elsewhere, and look for different partners for their games, or they’d call him, signal to him, gesturing and hissing for him to come and join them, be the third or fourth among them. It was all the same to them. They offered him their lips, opened for kissing or sucking, or their asses, or simply their erect cocks for a blowjob. They ridiculed the desire for married life or any sentimental notion about mating.

  Anything could happen. And he was the one who had to bolt, frightened.

  Yet they were not indifferent to everything and everyone, not always.

  In general no one was faithful to anyone, nothing could be considered permanent, not even for a moment, every occasional relationship could be dissolved at any time because everyone possessed a certain amount of manliness, so it was always possible to make, with anyone or in any way, a defensive or offensive alliance based on the cult of manliness. But even these strict basic rules were constantly being rewritten and modified.

  I can’t decipher it, that’s what he felt, and he went after them, dazed.

  Some among them would suddenly find his one and only and leave with him, laughing happily. Some among these returned after a few minutes and, as if nothing meaningful had happened, would go back, indifferently or disappointedly, to searching for someone else. To be more conspicuous and provocative with their nakedness, some men hid their clothes among the ruins of the Szent Margit monastery,* some in the niches of statues, or in portal arches and jambs, or behind dismantled Gothic corbels; others made them into small packets that they strapped to their waists or lower legs. Formidable tribal warriors. He envied them, in his heart he felt great warmth for them, though they were the ones he had to be most chary of: they were wild, mercile
ss, tough, and unpredictable. Sometimes they’d attack as a group. Hissing and snickering like children, they’d make stinging remarks, behavior that was artificial and, despite the manly display of muscles, very feminine. They left behind a scent of cheap cologne and the strong smell of sweat. Without a thought they kissed, sucked, and pummeled. They must have decided at some point to live their lives in this unrestrained and licentious manner.

  But I could not decide.

  I couldn’t imagine what role I could possibly have in such an insane game designed for more than two people. I wasn’t ready to make a decision about anything. First, I wanted to watch, to see everything with my own eyes, to see through these appearances; everything these men did with one another seemed like sheer humiliation or self-abasement to me, and I simply could not comprehend it. As if I were watching, repelled and estranged, my own inadequacy for submissiveness.

  As if I were watching the readiness of someone whose life, despite ceaseless self-rebuke, was one long temporizing. It would have been better to decide right off, especially if this thing was hereditary anyway. But this someone had no idea what to do to bring about a decision. That is why he’d better stay on the trail.

  Not step off it.

  According to local custom, the trail provided a measure of safety, respite, and protection; staying on it meant, for the others, that I hadn’t yet decided. As if I were saying to them, hold your horses, I’m still searching, waiting for the great unknown, and I’d like not to be touched by you until I find my right to self-determination or voluntarily relinquish it.

  I also feared stepping into shit, another reason it was dangerous to go off the trail.

  There were others also, who, driven by unrealizable desires, roamed the trails endlessly, went away, and then came back—quite a few like that.

  They searched in vain, all in vain; they found no one.