Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  But once, in a single instance, they both wound up on the other shore, from which, in the moral sense, neither of them could return.

  Take everything easy, casually; you can possess only what does not touch you. Don’t bother with forgetting; within three days even pain loses its sting.

  Who else in Mohács could say such a thing; given his behavior, nobody but he.

  In company, a serious person does not burden his fellow humans with matters they should take seriously. Just touches on them, barely. When he turned serious, he made sure with his style and tone that either the joke or its calculated effect, like a snarl, would surface on cue, revealing his boldest interests or power-hungry aspirations.

  Everyone could see what he was up to, and his impudence increased the impact.

  Compared to his former condition, however, Captain Bellardi was visibly tired, had become almost dejected.

  Because of his studies abroad and his completed projects, Madzar saw perhaps more clearly than others the realistic scale of Bellardi’s role playing. It was as if the other man had always broadcast his aptitudes and characteristics on two parallel programs. He probably did this out of self-defense. His upbringing suited neither his personality nor his actual social standing. But with a few playacting maneuvers he could permanently maintain the appearance of a person enjoying an exceptional, privileged status; and in this lawless, corrupt environment, saturated with hatefulness, insults, humiliations, and petty jealousies, others must have needed him to maintain appearances as much as he did. On one program, his upbringing progressed mechanically from its original source, the royal princess who was his mother; on the other program, his needful personality made headway in the same vacuous manner. And, as befits conditions in a monarchical police state, a third person supervised both mother and son: a secret-police agent.

  To keep personality and upbringing from initiating a forbidden dialogue.

  Above his white-and-dark-blue uniform glittering with gold braid, he presented a charming adolescent face that had been creased and probably quite tormented. Every time they met, this creased look hit Madzar in the heart; he loved Bellardi for it, and it conjured up their love-filled teenage years. Although time could not change the picture he carried within him, on Bellardi’s real face he viewed the end of his own youth. He also saw with his own eyes that Bellardi’s timeless face had grown stronger while his essential being had not changed at all. Except that in the meantime everything had been decided; the number of open questions had diminished, nothing was retrievable or reparable, and the interwoven links of Bellardi’s life’s deeds could no longer be integrated into his being.

  There he was, abandoned, shivering, in the light of day.

  Madzar saw this in his mind’s eye as the shivering of his own being.

  The inner structure of their suffering could not have been very different, and this increased the aversion they felt for each other. Bellardi’s splendid marriage had collapsed miserably after a few weeks, and, Madzar thought, I cannot find anyone with whom to share my fate.

  The difference is not so great, he thought.

  As Bellardi approached him, he could see clearly that a humiliated, failing self showed through the eternal cheerfulness, and this aroused the suspicion that Bellardi had used this sort of illusory appearance much earlier, as early as their childhood, in order to conceal his raging suffering.

  Nothing can remain a secret, but performing in public was one of Bellardi’s obligations, and so he had probably become accustomed to the possibility that people eyeing him, scrutinizing his features, were in possession of insidious information about him.

  As if they were mutely asking what could have happened in Alexandria.

  The news of the interrupted honeymoon had quickly reached Mohács, and when Madzar came home it was almost the first story he heard from his mother. The baroness Elisa had left behind only a one-line message when she abandoned Bellardi in their suite at the Hotel Prince de Galles on Alexandria’s Corniche. People dared to speak of what might have happened there only in vague allusions. They read the newspaper reports carefully but did not much enjoy the pervasive tittle-tattle that accompanied them. They would not venture to reinterpret the story with their customary animosity or deploy their eternal malice- and admiration-filled envy for high society. Yet they could not resist making embarrassing, deliberately equivocal insinuations. It began with the charge that before the wedding too much fuss had been made about the celebration, the young couple was too beautiful, there were many too many reports in society papers, and the couple’s fall was too fast and frightening. Had they discussed the matter frankly, the gossipers would have had to jettison their illusions about beauty and elegance and cancel their subscriptions to The Hungarian Ladies’ Journal or New Times; then they could have acknowledged their own viciousness and profound unhappiness. It wasn’t clear, though, how the Bellardis’ domestic peace was reestablished only a few weeks after the interrupted honeymoon in Africa, or who was to blame when the expectant young wife then left the couple’s new home in Buda. The society papers maintained a deep silence about these events.

  In brief, somewhere, for some people, exciting things were happening, and therefore no one could resist talking about them.

  In Mohács, women liked to talk not about complications like those in their own lives, but about poor Laci’s mother-in-law, old Baroness Koháry, who had such a peculiar nature that she could never warm to a man. Well, there’s no help for it, one must be careful when picking the family you marry into.

  Beauty isn’t everything; a woman doesn’t have to be an international beauty like this Elisa.

  It’s not for nothing that the saying goes, you may be looking at the daughter, but you’ll be marrying the mother.

  People noted with some relief when this Elisa came to her senses and returned to her abandoned husband along with her baby; but their indignation was all the greater when three years later the news reached Mohács that she had entrusted her little son to the maid and, without a word, left her husband for good. To leave such a handsome, honest man.

  And what a good son.

  Madzar’s mother could not imagine how there might be so much evil in the world.

  A woman like that should be drowned.

  As if she knew exactly what she was talking about but didn’t want to say it out loud.

  Drown her in water, as you would a cat, for a woman like that has no heart.

  Of course, Mrs. Madzar meant this emotional remark only as a stern warning.

  Think well, my dear and only son, think carefully about whom you want to marry.

  She did not say this aloud, because she was afraid of her son, who often shouted her down, hold your tongue, Mother, stop buzzing in my ear so much. Even so, Madzar never forgot the warning.

  As if he deliberately made it sink to lower, deeper layers.

  Once he started roaming around the sunlit streets of the city of his birth again, under the round elms that gave so little shade, beneath closed windows and lowered shutters, past the massive gates and formidable fortresslike carriage entrances, his steps accompanied by the implacable frenzy of barking dogs locked in their courtyards and aroused by one another’s rage, Madzar could have no doubts about the local scale of unhappiness.

  His interest in urban matters stemmed from the character of this peculiarly settled small town, yet when he had lived abroad he could recall only the broader picture, the ingenuity of the town’s structure, the twittering of swallows under the spacious sky.

  The joy offered by a secure place in the world and by the freedom of soaring.

  Each quarter of the city was surrounded by a wide, whimsically winding street. If a stranger wandered into this labyrinth of separate lives, following the path of a whimsically meandering street, he would be sure to reach the heart of the quarter—a marketplace adorned with a church. Along with its five different churches, five small squares remained in old Mohács. Looking at the town from the perspecti
ve given by his twelve-year absence, Madzar began to suspect that despite the liveliness of the city’s ingenious civic plan, despite the varying architectural styles strictly separated along religious and ethnic lines, creating a diversity within the unifying whole, and despite the harmonious tenements and rhythmically proportioned blocks of barns, granaries, and stables piled together, giving the whole cityscape a certain Mediterranean sobriety and lightness, these pleasant characteristics spoke of a warlike spirit that had been dead for centuries.

  Mohács’s spirit is dead.

  Its earlier spirit had penetrated its walls and topography, but ever since the Turkish victory* and occupation in the sixteenth century it had barely functioned, and ever since Serbia’s rule after the Great War probably not at all. No matter from whom the Hungarians had retaken the city, it never became theirs again. Today, the Hungarian town lived on solely in the houses’ closed yards, alive with yelping dogs. It was easy to say that the city still wore on its forehead the memory of the devastating defeat there, which over the centuries had become the symbol of the final hours of Hungary’s independent kingdom. But Madzar, returning from abroad, saw it the other way around: with the help of the historical baggage he had acquired, he carried within himself the preconditions of the ancient devastation.

  The experience of the catastrophes in Mohács, the shock of them, had blocked the city from understanding what had led to its calamities. And because of this unawareness, the city was vulnerable despite the passage of many centuries, to every new shock. This realization was so powerful for Madzar that it was as if he had become frightened of himself. He felt he’d been carrying his city’s characteristics within himself all along, not just the sensation of devastation but its unconscious preconditions.

  In its lovely setting, the city seemed at once threatening and threatened, not as if it were spiritless but as if its spirit were dead. It could never open its mouth to speak, it never closed its eyes, nothing was alive in it except the insane loneliness of its inhabitants; it had stiffened into alertness and rejection. Whether the city turned its personal or its historical face to him, it upset his utopian ideas about social mobility and a fair organization of society.

  He dismissed the thought, as he had tried to dismiss all similar thoughts, because otherwise he’d have to admit not only that he saw something of his own mentality in this city but also that he might take a good part of this mentality with him to America, and surely he would not succeed there with an injured utopia.

  When he and Bellardi had met up a few weeks earlier for the first time in many years, in his joy and surprise it hadn’t occurred to him to bring up the captain’s depressing marital story, just as the captain did not ask him whether he was still single. Yet he sensed that this familiar man was wearing many more masks than was necessary, and they were far from unfamiliar; and that the reason the captain did not ask him questions was probably selfish caution, not wanting to feel a gnawing jealousy on account of an unknown woman. With the horizontal wrinkles on his forehead, the vertical grooves in his cheeks, the puffed bags under his eyes, the radiant liveliness of his countenance, and the openness of his features, Bellardi seemed at once much younger and much older than he. These features of contrasting adult characteristics on his face, which Madzar remembered from their childhood as having been finely dovetailed, seemed to have been separated by a ruthless hand.

  His spirits are dead, like mine and everyone else’s. As when saltpeter invades an old wall and betrays how and out of what material the wall was built, what its capillaries drew into itself from a badly insulated foundation.

  Glancing at his own face in the mirror, Madzar tried to guess what he would take with him to the New World, to see whether he had similarly dangerous features.

  I’d probably give myself away, he thought, though he could not tell what secret he might reveal on the other side of the ocean.

  The social gap between them was so great that as a child it had never occurred to him, not even secretly, that Bellardi might become his friend. Yet today he realized that Bellardi was probably the only person who could have been his friend. If such a thing were possible between men. Or that Bellardi might be his friend today. But from Bellardi’s viewpoint, their relationship worked differently, and had even in their childhood. Bellardi tried to create the illusion that he could bridge social differences, and, to make everyone accept the reality of this desirable illusion, he referred to Madzar several times as his best friend. Of course, with this brazen statement he only strengthened his own social position, making it appear that his origins automatically entitled him to such an unequal friendship and that it would have been truly strange if he had lacked one. He once went so far as to declare, loud and clear, that Madzar was his bosom buddy, a friend in body and soul. The other boys looked at the two of them as if they were idiots. None of them understood what Bellardi’s phrase meant exactly. It was as if Bellardi had declared Madzar his serf, responsible for his master’s bodily comfort, whose entire being including perhaps his soul was ruled by his master. Which, in the eyes of the other boys, was equal to an accusation. For quite some time, they treated Madzar as a servant of the Bellardi family.

  These boys avoided Bellardi lest he imperceptibly put them under the yoke of his family, which already ruled the entire town.

  Although his privileged status was part of his birthright and could not be denied, nobody knew what to expect from him or how to prepare for what he might do, except by being very cautious with him.

  Bellardi was oblivious to these complications, however, and after his initial declaration of friendship with Madzar felt no need to say more. Madzar could not possibly forget the confidence Bellardi had in him.

  Madzar was a heavy man, with a soul filled to the brim, a man without secrets almost to the point of tedium.

  He was looking at the captain and reassuring himself that his friend was indeed a good boy. He could not pretend he did not know the less favorable aspects of Bellardi’s character, and the captain must have known this though he pretended otherwise, satisfying his longing for appearances. Once, Madzar thought, Bellardi’s embarrassing characteristics had not been embedded so obviously and deeply in his features.

  He had light-brown, confidence-inspiring eyes, a finely cut, well-proportioned nose, shapely, strong, full lips above which he sported a rakish little mustache.

  My dear, dear friend, he shouted thunderously from a distance. My sweet, good old pal.

  He was fond of exuding such phrases, for they befit a lively disposition, full of life’s energies.

  The motive for these extreme appellations was his wish to express in a single gesture both his monumental sentiments and the social distinctions he was obliged to respect, and, with that, to designate unequivocally his position in any possible hierarchy. The two adjectival signal rockets he launched made a little pop, shed a little light, then fell into the void, and the Great Hungarian Plain grew dark again.

  They had barely shaken hands when he changed his tone.

  Welcome, he said gently in a low voice, as if withdrawing the tone he had just used publicly and implying that this low tone was his true timbre.

  At times like this, he spoke with the impersonal love of a priest, ready at every moment to share with almost anyone his most heartfelt emotions for the Almighty. Of course he never shared them; he never shared anything. Perhaps he had nothing to share. To tell the truth, he whispered in a voice full of emotion, your arrival is most opportune for a number of reasons. Whenever Bellardi hit this tone, Madzar knew from his childhood that he should stay away from him, tolerate him if he had to, but keep contact to a minimum. Now, after all these years, he also realized that this tone was not Bellardi’s but that of the Franciscan priest who from time immemorial had been the Bellardi family’s confidant and the son’s spiritual guide. Bellardi allowed no time for sulking or reticence, because with another change of tone he put the previous dissembling one into a more desirable perspective. Very soberly, he
added that later they would talk more in detail about all this, au coup; they would find time for everything.

  I’m certain we shall, Madzar answered, no doubt about it, but he was aware only of standing there again, in front of Bellardi, awkward and clumsy, and this made his limbs feel heavy.

  Yet he could not get enough of the playacting.

  There was a crack through which he gained an image and some sense of his own heavy disposition.

  It was as if he were saying to Bellardi, you never fail to amaze me, when in fact it was his firm intention to demand that he stop, leave off with these tiresome and superfluous appearances, this foolish masquerade. But Bellardi, encouraged by his success, did exactly the opposite of what his friend expected. First, he took a step not toward, but sideways before his guest, coming so close as to make Madzar inadvertently recoil, not unlike a horse held short by its bridle. And then he took another step, beyond the necessary or possible, thereby issuing a challenge, a provocation.

  He could not let go of his friend, patting and squeezing his solid but helpless body, which made Madzar, who carried this body on his powerful soul, blush deeply.

  Don’t even hope, my friend, that the masquerade will end. Be honest with yourself, just this once. You wouldn’t like to see it end either. You’d keel over with the boredom oozing from your Protestant soul. You like it when someone plays theater in your stead. I don’t have a real face, you can see that yourself, but if somehow you had a chance to catch a glimpse of it, you’d die of fright.