Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  They kept an equal distance between them as they moved. One would disappear; the next one would appear. The faint sun grew blurry above the clouds of gasoline fume.

  No one in the line moved. Those who could see into the side street paid close attention. But the stench of gasoline grew so strong, the noise increased so much, that everyone kept quiet; no one would have been heard anyway. It seemed the column would never end. The buildings picked up the trembling, as did the street and the sidewalk; I could feel in my limbs how the various tremblings blended into one. It wasn’t I who was trembling.

  The rumbling and trembling increased as the tanks, squeaking and screeching ever more loudly, turned up on the ramp of the Margit Bridge, and now the entire bridge was shaking. We could feel the bridge in the soles of our feet. I’ve got a city; my city is split in half by a river, and now the familiar bridge over the river has turned into a sensation. The bridgehead took on the shaking of the bridge, the bridgehead’s shaking was taken over by the blocks of buildings around the bridgehead abutment, and I felt the trembling in my back also. Because of the trembling, one did not think of anything; at most one could listen to the trembling of one’s body.

  I sensed no danger. And it did not sound as if anything was about to end.

  After all, there were larger military operations for which the Russian troops regrouped, but the civilians did not bother too much with them.

  In those days, it was not completely out of the question that the Russians might leave altogether. Leave the capital or maybe even the country.

  From where I stood, I could see into the small street. I saw the tanks following one after the other in front of the Szamovár coffee bar. Behind the sunny glass of the display window hung a large photograph of Hedda Hiller, the aging, beautiful nightclub singer who had appeared there every evening until a few days ago. The coffee bar was open and full of people even now. Faces were glued to the glass, watching the passing tanks. Some people stood on the sunny sidewalk, watching the tanks from there. Then something happened that to this day I find it hard to make myself believe. Lazily, as if still thinking about it, one of the tanks seemed to change its mind, and it turned into this small narrow street, grazing the sidewalks with its tracks and making the curb throw sparks, scattering the people on the sidewalk. People ran into the coffee bar, some into the adjacent building. The street emptied out in a second. Only the smell of gasoline and the wide strips of sunshine pouring down from over the roofs remained. We, in the line, did not move. The tank was coming toward us, its barrel raised.

  It occurred to me for a second that perhaps this tank was securing the safety of the moving column, in which case everything was all right. It advanced halfway down the small street, stopped but did not turn off its engine.

  Nothing happened.

  Then I thought that perhaps something was wrong with the tank and that is why it had left the column. But I felt that trouble was near. In the next instant the tank’s barrel moved gently downward. Nobody moved. It seemed to be taking aim at the building opposite or at the wide marquee above the entrance to the Danube Movie Theater. But there was nothing there; people in the bread line were waiting underneath it, motionless. It happened so fast my mind could not keep up. My eyes saw it. Still, I could not acknowledge that the flame bursting out of the barrel and the backward jerk of first the turret and then the entire tank meant that a round had been fired. And then another one.

  Two mute pictures.

  And a horrific explosion in between. And the next one slamming into the crumbling, collapsing chaos within the cloud of dust, also followed by an explosion.

  Tearing up everything.

  They Could Not Forget It

  A few days later, Madzar was standing alone on the deck of the Carolina, the oldest steamboat on the Danube, and he felt very lonely in the spring twilight.

  Under his feet, down in the deep bowels of the boat, the engine was working at a uniform rhythm.

  The enormous mass of water absorbed the muted puffs rising from the hollows of the ship, not allowing them up to the deck.

  The muted, delayed vibrations, the thrusts of the steam engine’s pistons, the metallic trembling of the hull, the gentle breeze that carried the scent of blooming as well as the cold, heavy fish smell of muddy water from the shore, all coursed simultaneously through his body.

  Boarding this ship, which sailed regularly between Vienna and Belgrade, meant journeying back to his childhood. Already then, one of his favorite daydreams was to penetrate the immense universe that breathed like an animal and was, in every single one of its elements, suffused with the currents of existence. Let me see how every species of all living things, along with their functions, all the stars, internal organs, and snow crystals, pulsing bloodstreams, myriad details of bridges and cathedrals, how all of these are linked together.

  The river was swelling.

  His cosmic efforts led to no convincing result, of course, neither then nor later, and it would have been strange indeed if the little son of a shipwright from Mohács had succeeded in reconstructing the metaphysical structure of a pantheistic world.

  He had the impression that he attributed significance to relationships and analogies that had none or, worse, that he was unaware of certain phenomena and overestimated the significance of others, which kept him from understanding them. He couldn’t understand, for instance, into what category he should put those of his own deeds he considered ungodly.

  Yet he kept at it, began over and over again, buried himself in encyclopedias, ventured into the thick of phenomena and data, wandered off, fell into the depths. He tried to take inventory with his sense organs of every manifestation of every element in his environment and to assign them their possible positions. He realized with alarm that one prerequisite of this effort should be not to make arbitrary choices and separate individual objects from each other, but to know what belonged to what, to clarify the causality of their belonging together, to penetrate them with his imagination down to the last detail, and at the same time to remain outside and, aided by physical and cultural experiences, to establish relationships among all the things he observed, not only between them and himself. He should discern what in their functioning was similar to or different from human functioning, what was personal in the universe, what remained impersonal; by connecting the contact points of the various systems he ought to be able to map the construction, the higher mechanism that perhaps held all autonomous things together.

  That was his guiding vision.

  He would have liked to uncover how Creation’s objects fitted together; in return for this knowledge, he was ready to be burned alive like Giordano Bruno on Campo dei Fiori.

  If they had told him what he was really doing, what he went on thinking about even as an adult and why he did it so compulsively, as if possessed, he would have replied, raising his somber eyebrows, come on now, balderdash, I am not looking for any kind of god.

  He leaned against the railing, holding his visored Scottish cap of the same material as his suit, and lost himself in admiring the familiar river as its mute shores lined with silver gray willows floated by.

  They were going downstream. The old steam engine scarcely had to work.

  The nicely arched bow, ending in a long, broad prow adorned in relief with the bifurcated wavy hair of a mad mermaid, was noisily parting the golden yellow silk of the water. Metal sliced water. The rather high-pitched sound of this was steady, yet the water also made smaller, one might say more objective snaps, plops, and splashes around the prow, and these sounds seemed to link the two substances’ interwoven progress with the currents of the depths.

  Madzar was going home to Mohács.

  The wide paddle wheeler sank comfortably into the water as the river carried it on its murky back.

  He could not stop himself from imagining that the woman was coming with him; he was taking with him her stranger’s breath, which reached him even here, at the railing of the upper deck; he carried th
e image farther, imagining they were going together back to his childhood. To share something that was close and unique and dear to him, something the woman did not know what to do with. They had not seen each other for days, did not want to, no, no, and the will remained mutual, and it hurt them both. Madzar had expected not to have hurt feelings himself because he considered jealousy or longing to be senseless, pointless, its complications old-fashioned.

  So many things that should simply be eliminated from the modern world.

  No psychic illness or emotional misery should darken the doorstep of his consciousness.

  Since their talk about furnishing the clinic, however, a shadow had fallen on the demands he made of himself, and he was surprised to discover that despite his encyclopedic efforts and Gnostic passion, he had been unaware of it. Although the phenomenon of death could not elude his attention, he hardly paid attention to illnesses and ill persons. He himself had never had even a toothache; on occasion a mild head cold.

  He was not aware of his own health.

  Ill persons should be aware of their ruined fate; that’s the real reason her office must not suggest clinical sterility—so as not to strengthen this awareness of their illness.

  As if the demands Mrs. Szemző made were at odds with every system his imagination had ever concocted, dangling incongruously from them, as it were. As if he were saying that one cannot see one’s fate for knowledge of one’s own illness. Or awareness of one’s own health. And in that case wasn’t everything other than direct personal experience missing from one’s thinking. I might be pathologically healthy. It gave him pause to think that perception of futile and unreasonable things might be missing from his consciousness because it did not fit with his strict empiricism.

  I may be headed for big trouble, there is something I haven’t understood or keep misunderstanding.

  He began to be afraid.

  Mrs. Szemző, however, protested vehemently against his word usage.

  I beg of you, she laughed, showing her frightening gums above her strong teeth, please stop talking to me about illness. What I deal with is not illness; it is not maladie but, at worst, malaise. We must keep the concept strictly in its social context; I insist on that, if you don’t mind. Each soul has its given nature and characteristics just as the body does. The people who come to see me, and this is what has to be considered, my dear architect, do not behave in conformity with conventions.

  But that is not illness.

  Or it may be exactly the other way around: they cling so strictly to conventions that they become ill. And then it’s clear that the illness has to be considered the consequence, not the cause.

  Making himself even more ridiculous, he awkwardly protested against Mrs. Szemző’s protest, childishly repeating that he understood, of course he did, he had read enough psychoanalytical literature.

  Mrs. Szemző interrupted the sentence she had begun.

  With a glance she grasped that what he had said was partly true; he must have heard or read something on the subject. Then she flooded him again with her full-throated laughter, because she liked to hear the man stretching the facts a little, and under the weight of her glance Madzar once again showed his weak side, blushing deeply.

  He watched the woman, envied her for her keen glance, wanted to avenge himself.

  He imagined that a woman as self-possessed as she felt none of the pain or embarrassment he did but, head held high, went impassively about her daily tasks.

  He couldn’t imagine this completely. After all, he was unfamiliar with the life and daily routine of a well-to-do, pampered Jewish woman of Budapest.

  Instinctively he knew that she felt the pain, he could not have been so far off the mark; of course she did, she had to.

  Still, he asked himself, why would anybody miss me. Because he was not thinking of a single woman in the cool twilight, but, parallel with Mrs. Szemző, he thought also of the rich Dutch woman from whom he had fled when he left Rotterdam behind. He was very familiar with that woman’s daily routine and deduced from it what Mrs. Szemző’s might be. He imagined the moment when the piano teacher says good-bye but would like his monthly payment before going, which these people always forget, and just then the other Szemző boy rings the bell, having returned from his language lesson. Mrs. Szemző feels that everything is in hopeless disarray again in the old downtown apartment from which, in a few months’ time, they will move to their brand-new house in the great green outdoors. Her husband, on the telephone with someone, is pointing at her and gesticulating about something, but she must change her clothes. And before leaving for the opera with her women friends, she must talk to the maid about next week’s menus and she didn’t want that discussion to make her late for Margit Huber and Mária Szapáry.

  To hell with the piano teacher’s monthly fee.

  Couldn’t we please do this next week, she asks peremptorily. Although the young man gives her a desperate look, she considers the matter closed. There, you see.

  But in this series of pictures she resembles the slightly hysterical Dutch woman more than herself.

  The breath of their indifference reached him from their fulfilled lives.

  In the badly insulated, unheated street-front room of his parental home, in its pervasive mustiness, he will return to his illusions; he would still prefer to spend the night with the Dutch woman rather than with this one, whom he does not yet know and has already abandoned.

  He did not understand anything.

  Occasionally a dark object from the depths of the river surfaced.

  He did not see how his life would settle down at the side of another person.

  Which is usually referred to as resignation or calming down; perhaps he was waiting for America.

  As the days passed he was continually occupied with looking for solutions to minor architectural problems, but this brought him no closer to an overall solution. Already in Rotterdam, the question of what his future should be, with whom he might share it, had become an insoluble problem. While the work-filled weeks rushed by he failed to give proper attention to this more general and clearly more significant question, and he could see that the weeks would grow into months and whole long seasons. He reluctantly acknowledged that, judging by his behavior, he put a certain amount of passion into his work, a need for emotional fulfillment that could be neither avoided nor dissolved or even annihilated by the joy of a job well done. He should share it with someone, but not just anyone. The crater of an absence grew deeper in his consciousness. And if he found the someone with whom to share his passion, then he foresaw life-organizing problems that one couldn’t solve with this person, maybe with someone else.

  If he did not want to step into chaos, he had to step back, along with his passion, or move on.

  How could he tell the wife of a Dutch industrialist to pack her things, dress her children, call a cab, and let’s be on our way. He had to step back—to his work and to nothing else. If he were to maintain the living standard to which these people were accustomed, within a week he’d have been unable to pay the hotel bills. Yet they had been planning earnestly, because they passionately wanted to escape from that doll’s house. In the midst of their fervent daydreaming about their future, Madzar realized the woman had no idea of the dimensions of poverty. She dreamed of ways to rescue her dowry from her husband’s business, but the distrustful look on her face showed that she wouldn’t like to entrust her money to a nobody like Madzar.

  She didn’t dare reveal how much money she had.

  As if Madzar were looking into a sanctuary of guileless honesty where petty and scheming dishonesty ruled.

  Because hard as she tried, she could not imagine things in any other way but that a man would take care of her; after all, that was their obligation.

  And with Mrs. Szemző, the whole misery would start all over again.

  He had decent colleagues with whom he saw eye to eye on nearly every important professional question—structural engineers, mechanics, and c
ivil engineers, many of whom supported his professional career because they shared his ideas about modernizing the technical and spiritual aspects of architecture—but he had no friends. They’d hardly get to the end of an exciting discussion when these men would hurry off; they had secret nets that supported their personal lives. He had no insight as to how others had managed to acquire a safety net; he seemed unable to do so. If only he had some friends. Or if he could give up his desires, his emotional preferences, which kept sending him into the arms of women who were complete strangers and whose unsolved life problems he was then obliged to take on. The only obvious solution would be asceticism. After all, it was all about the purity of lines drawn on a sheet of white paper, and for that he had to see his place and function in the entire human world of strangers.

  And if this was not possible, then he should, at least in his personal life and in the interest of clear-sightedness, step out of the vicious circle of passions.

  The water brought an object to the surface, spun it rapidly around, brought it closer, moved it farther away, let it drift with the current.

  Sometimes the object showed more clearly, was fully exposed; at other times it plunged back into the water, perhaps to vanish forever. It was hard to guess what might happen next. He always feared that instead of a waterlogged tree stump, board, or spinning tree trunk, he’d get hold of a bloated corpse or blackened carrion, a pig or cow, or, worse, that his grapnel would not hold the target but would grasp something that would pop, squirt, tear, rip open, and spill guts everywhere. This fear, part of the risk in anything he undertook, accompanied him throughout his childhood.