Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  His Excellency was very pleased with the reports from this high-ranking civil servant, who on more than one occasion had proved more than competent in the execution of confidential missions and whose loyalty was unquestionable.

  At the conclusion of their last meeting, he made the chief counselor promise that if there were incidents of atrocities or arbitrary actions taken by gendarmes during the evacuation of ghettoes around the country, the counselor would telegraph a report immediately, using the usual codes and addressing himself to the countess. His Excellency’s personal opinion was that within a few months a burning and weighty problem would be settled once and for all; arbitrariness and injustice were not commensurate with the chivalrous Hungarian character.

  Ever since, Mrs. Szemző has wanted to see what the unavoidable moment might bring, the inevitable moment.

  She told herself that the details would surely be of interest to a pathological anatomist or an expert in forensic medicine, and then she had to think about the person, identical to herself, who had the chance, for a few months in the Buchenwald camp, to work as an assistant to Professor Nussbaum, the prosector. Who had examined how, in a given situation, living bodies deal with the bodies of people who have fainted or died, in which case, according to popular belief, they are no longer aware of anything. It always seemed to her as if she had only read about these cases, rather than that she was remembering them as a real occurrence in her life. She also remembered Dr. Dénes Schranz, who could not have known in advance about this abomination when he wrote his book about the various and extraordinary phenomena of death.

  Mrs. Szemző snickered at this notion.

  Interesting in all this was that she couldn’t believe how many superfluous bits of knowledge she had.

  Once the living and the dead were jammed in there together, the dead were stuck, inescapably and constantly, under the feet of the living, who went on thumping and jockeying; the living trampled and ground down all the soft or liquid tissue, which oozed through the gaps in the cattle car’s floor: blood, urine, eyeballs, excrement, even bone marrow.

  A few had tried to do something about this but ultimately could change nothing, their shouts being insufficient; after a while she too lost her voice, no longer saying that things shouldn’t be like this.

  She had to conceal from herself what her feet and others’ had done in the infernal heat and maddening cacophony, for days on end.

  Her mind invented a fear with which to occupy her memory.

  That she could no longer wear her medium-heeled shoes with their arch supports, or that she would have constant guilt feelings about the ankle boots of her two dead sons.

  The sounds now echoing from her other life, the creaking of mucous, muscle fibers, tendons, and cartilage, were sounds that even that stranger, identical with her, could not have heard, theoretically, given the other constant noise and clatter, the crying, the clanking of the cattle cars’ buffers, and the frenetic, crazed altercations.

  The light did not become much friendlier even when they turned on both sconces and the ceiling light for music practice.

  The custom-made furniture that had originally given meaning to this sort of spare lighting were missing from the apartment.

  Once, Mrs. Szemző stopped her accompaniment, laughing, and said that Gyöngyvér should not be an alto because she had the voice of a man who’s trying to sing contralto.

  They giggled about this for quite some time, saying that Gyöngyvér must have been a eunuch in one of her previous lives and was now the reincarnation of Farinelli; they laughed, but the idea made them shudder, and neither of them could shake it off. Gyöngyvér thought of this later when she and her famous coach were grappling with problems of her voice sliding and gliding, and the need to clarify her timbre; it was at the tip of her tongue, but she never dared to mention the nightmare to Médi Huber.

  Originally, simple lack of brilliance and sobriety free of illusionism characterized the light from those lamps, but for years the appropriate opal bulbs had been unavailable, so the original idea had become plain shabbiness.

  One of Mies van der Rohe’s Hungarian pupils had designed the original interior, in fact had built some of the pieces with his own hands, skilled as he was in many crafts. But except for the sconces, little remained of this work because these unique objects had fallen victim to the Arrow Cross terror of 1944.*

  The architect’s name was Alajos Madzar; his friends called him Lojzi.

  He returned for a while to Budapest, but he had no intention of resettling there.

  He planned to go to America, which he did as soon as he had completed his projects.

  On the recommendation of friends, the Szemzős had commissioned him to design their villa on Dobsinai Road, including all the interiors, and almost as an afterthought had him design Mrs. Szemző’s clinic on Pozsonyi Road. The circle of friends in which the Szemzős moved had direct contacts with the two great schools of architecture of the era, the Bauhaus and De Stijl; their friends had friends who worked or studied in Weimar, Dessau, Leiden, and Utrecht, or with Alvar Aalto in Helsinki, or overseas in the great architectural firms of Chicago and Boston, even with Frank Lloyd Wright. With the psychoanalytical clinic on Pozsonyi Road, the young architect attracted considerable attention because domestic and international architectural journals often photographed and published articles about his projects.

  The mainly young people at these journals, with their networks of interest and lively exchanges of ideas, captured half the contemporary world and documented every progressive change in it, however small.

  The architectural attributes of the newly furnished apartment were, however, far from flawless. Madzar encountered serious issues at every turn. He had a good rapport with Mrs. Szemző and right away explained to her what he was objecting to. It would not be honest, what he was about to do, and therefore he couldn’t do it in good conscience. He was not objecting to the apartment’s architectural attributes per se. The world is the way it is, after all, but like Mrs. Szemző, he could not bear decoration for the mere sake of decoration. Yet he’d be forced to decorate because the fundamentals did not show any kind of original architectural idea but were mere imitation.

  What was the sense in decorating an imitation. Simulation wouldn’t work either, or pretending not to notice the imitation.

  With detailed architectural arguments he gave ample reason why he could not undertake the job in this unimaginatively and falsely constructed building on Pozsonyi Road, but then he decided to do it anyway.

  A few days later he withdrew, however.

  Mrs. Szemző did not protest and did not want him to change his mind.

  She understood his arguments and found his dislike of the building persuasive.

  But she could not invent for herself another street, another city, or another practice, so she was prepared to give the architect an elaborate, factual account of reality’s compelling power.

  They began their conversation on the subject in the empty seventh-floor apartment, later went downstairs and out on the street to look for a café, and then, as if by chance, they strolled across the Margit Bridge and wound up on Margit Island.

  Already this first long walk caused them some embarrassment.

  They could not decide which was more important: the person whose work they were talking about or the historical and sociological subject of their conversation; put another way, neither of them was clear as to the connection between these two. After all, it was not enough for Mrs. Szemző to understand the young architect’s motivations; Madzar also had to understand why she wanted her psychoanalytical clinic precisely here and what work she would do, in these surroundings and in this clinic, for the people entrusted to her care.

  As if both of them were saying they had to look for something amid the pathological or disadvantageous fundamentals in order to create new possibilities.

  Madzar found it difficult to refuse the job for another reason: in Mrs. Szemző’s intentions he d
iscovered an analogy of his own plans, so that unexpectedly the building’s inferior architectural quality became not an irritation but a challenge. His hands would create the new qualities needed for a brand-new civilization, and the places of creation, wherever they may be on this earth, would slowly interconnect. Like the best of his generation he was a devotee of this monastic utopia.

  They all shaped their fate under its influence. They threw out their parents’ junk, freed themselves of superfluities, strove for transparency and simplicity in order to create pureness.

  They accepted nothing less from one another.

  Madzar wanted to take another half step in this radical direction. He did not care to go into finished situations; he wanted to confront others with a fait accompli. When standing under the huge plane trees on Margit Island, Mrs. Szemző understood the architect’s strictures and recognized in them the compelling force of her own attributes and inhibitions; she suddenly began to regret not being younger. Or more daring. She could not begin a new life with him, another life perhaps in another language and on another continent. As if she were discovering that beyond her real life she might have a more intense, ascetic one.

  They felt the spray of the fountain on their faces.

  His origins do not restrain this man in the kind of tight familial and tribal net that obviously had not let her go or did not let her go far.

  She could not take her eyes from the young man’s hair.

  Not only was its color, a deep bronze red, unfamiliar, but also its texture, the thickness of the individual hairs, as well as his quickly fluttering eyelids, suggesting nervousness, and his dense eyebrows, attesting to constitutional tranquillity. The roots of his eyelashes were transparently blond, the arc of the lashes darkening gradually to bronze red. His rapid blinks gave the impression that eyelashes and eyelids were unconnected, each fluttering independently.

  A little enviously, almost longingly, she thought to herself that this man was heavier than bronze yet would soar. A most original man. Freeing himself from the burdens of the material world. With no apparent mythic bonds.

  Mrs. Szemző was curious about the relationship between personal experiences and the characteristics of larger surroundings beyond the personal; about the personal and historical pasts, about everything that was mythical and magical in the historical past, everything beyond individual life that recurred as ritual in deeds and words. Ultimately, she and her friends were concerned with similar issues and occupied with similar matters. Mária Szapáry dealt with the relationship of the body to the fabric draping it, between the body’s nakedness and its exposure, a subject profoundly and thoroughly, yet no less falsely, documented and developed in the history of civilization. They both asked the same question: what was unique in the material they were dealing with, what was general, what was collective and what was individual, how did one fit into the other and how could one be comprehended, shaped, and expressed through the other. Perhaps Margit Huber’s profession was the classic exception, for which the other women rather disliked her. A dompteuse d’animaux. Dobrovan’s basic question was also similar; originally she had wanted to rescue her mere body from this extremely old false world filled with superfluous gestures that restricted her senses.

  After her terrible accident, her sight remained her only tool, helped by her hand, her drawing ability, and her attraction to handicrafts.

  She designed and wove fabrics and worked for fashion designers.

  She learned her profession from her Lithuanian boyfriend, who had studied with an ancient Parisienne, and both of them had probably paid for their skill with reluctant love. She was searching for possible practical solutions to the problem of how, on what levels and by what means, the unique personal imagination can be reconciled with the demand of the masses, and in what way handicraft can be linked to mass production. Or, in the reverse direction, what higher standards might the nature and methods of industrial production, and its new technical achievements, offer the public. Although none of her woman friends knew Madzar—he was much younger than they—they all spoke the same language of ascetic functionality, albeit in different dialects.

  They instantly understood and liked what he did on Dobsinai Road and what he designed for Pozsonyi Road.

  The given was the seventh-floor apartment in a building erected only a few years earlier and designed on principles of functionality and modular coordination like other similar buildings in the Újlipótváros district. On closer inspection, however, especially by a person who worked or lived in these buildings, one noticed that their interior proportions were determined neither by the necessarily modest scale of individual need nor by the era’s architectural aesthetic, dependent on collective Puritanism and personal asceticism, but by the profit motive of petty, insignificant designers and investors shamelessly exploiting an architectural style.

  In truth, the business egoism of the larger context left its repressive stamp all over this quarter of Budapest.

  Writhing under the enormous weight of its ongoing collapse, self-satisfied feudal Hungary drags itself from one economic crisis to another, lugging along the antiquated customs, traditions, and inexhaustible wounded pride of its failed aristocracy, which keeps an iron grip even on those who do not share their hope for prosperity in an illusionary greater Hungary or their confidence in the historical mission of the Hungarian people, but who feel great social responsibility for rural wretchedness and urban poverty, yet nevertheless adjust their professions’ rules and demands to the generally accepted and all-pervasive laws of the corrupt gentry.

  If one decides to build on illusions, it is not easy to break free of hypocrisy and the worship of decoration.

  It showed through in the floor plans; it showed through on the walls.

  Mrs. Szemző instinctively understood what Madzar was talking about and what he abhorred.

  The ceilings and windows were lower than they should have been though not by much. Not by much, and everything was less spacious and airy than what could be called desirable for a balanced, individual lifestyle. Once again entire streets had been laid out so the sun could not shine into the buildings. In the absence of appropriate architectural demands, transparent geometry turned into rigidity and constraint. Empty style. Material and fittings of questionable quality. Showy but inferior facings that could easily be detached from the underlying constructs. On his first visit to the empty apartment, Madzar already had the feeling that he was not standing on but hovering over the floor. Something wasn’t right with the construction. As if he were hearing an echo of barracks architecture from the First World War. Most buildings in Újlipótváros had an improvised look. They lacked the elementary joy that the personality and sensuality of true artisanship offers. As if every building component, in its symbolic language, were saying, well, it’s true, there is peace now, the lost war is behind us, but industry has not yet recovered, it has not been modernized, therefore we are producing inferior goods.

  The ceilings and walls were flimsy. Even the more generously proportioned or better-built apartments were unpleasant to go into because the stairwells and entrances were too narrow, and though there were spaces where one could step out of the apartments, what was the point of so many congested balconies and loggia if they felt like dovecots.

  The other side of the street was too near.

  These buildings with their crippled interiors could not even present their facades to the outside world. They did not have enough room to look at themselves from any angle, and they couldn’t see how inconsiderate they were of one another.

  They wanted to show something other than what they could show.

  They had no air.

  They either pretended to be open or tried to conceal being locked in.

  After a few hours in the empty apartment, Alajos Madzar realized there was no partition wall, door, or window that he did not want to change. Mrs. Szemző had claimed that although historical givens should not be altered, sometimes a single creative profe
ssional move, a kind of trick of the trade, was enough, at least in theory, to alter the inner conditions of functionality and to influence the surroundings strongly.

  Hearing this practical comment, Madzar asked himself whether there was such a trick in the architectural trade.

  Of the many outmoded light fixtures, only one gave any light at night.

  And now there was nothing in the spacious hallway except the open, pitch-black piano.

  It stood heedlessly in place, just as the movers had heedlessly put it down more than a decade earlier.

  In the wake of the wartime devastations, no one analyzed the traces of destruction anymore; neither did anyone look for some trick of the trade when a job was to be done, not anymore.

  In her search for a nice warm blanket, Gyöngyvér hurried past the piano like someone about to steal something. She had to go around the piano stool. The movers should be called again to move the piano from the stoppers placed under its rolling legs and shift it a little to one side. Mrs. Szemző had meant to call them, but she never got to the point of picking up the telephone.

  Yellowish light from the street and bluish light from the rooftops opposite filtered into the hallway, and Gyöngyvér stepped back to the piano like a sleepwalker at the sight of an apparition.

  Seeing nothing else and forgetting every other intention and danger.

  The real apparition in these surroundings was her healthy, tanned, naked body and the restrained patter of her bare feet.

  As if she and the apparition could not see each other.

  She knew nothing of the missing objects or of the history of the house or of this section of the city; indeed, she knew very little. Although Mrs. Szemző had mentioned the night when Arrow Cross men opened every faucet and threw out the window all the furniture Madzar had made with his own hands, still, Gyöngyvér did not know much. She felt for the piano stool and sat down. But the strange apartment, the strange building, and the silence thick with the strange city’s history came crashing down on her.