Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  I am your representative in everything you are too craven to participate in.

  Perhaps you won’t hold it against me, he said, smiling at Madzar with benevolent, charming, and ironic eye beams, that I’ve disturbed your solitude so impudently. I too long for monastic solitude above all, but I can’t get along without your company, he said loudly, as if he needed this big sound to make himself utter the words.

  The captain took pleasure in filing away his cruel little victories in the records of obligatory modesty and politeness.

  On the contrary, replied Madzar graciously, helped somewhat by the routine politesse, I would hate being a burden to you with my importunity, and he enjoyed his lie as much as if he had spoken the truth. It did not even occur to me.

  Come, come, Bellardi shouted, his face darkening for real, what are you talking about, old pal. How can you say such a silly thing, Lojzi. How can you even think such a thing, he said, and then, after a minuscule pause that took the edge off his indignation, he quickly added, I am profoundly shocked. All the while his huge eyes were flashing kindly and tenderly in the pleasure of the performance. True, he expressed a bit more umbrage with that sentence than his acting could plausibly support.

  And even this ambivalence seemed intentional.

  What should I say, what would I most like to do with you, he said loudly. Of course, my first choice would be to get off with you at Mohács.

  He burst out with a sudden laugh.

  We’d let the old ship drift away all by itself and spend the remainder of our lives in a sweet duet in Mohács, my dear. We’d listen to the constant barking of dogs, and you know very well I’d never let you go to America, he cried in the voice of a scorned lover.

  He kept laughing, as a child would go on tasting the sweetness of revenge, for his very expertise in concealment allowed him to see behind every possible human hiding place.

  With Bellardi, compared to Madzar, everything was the other way around. Bellardi’s huge, weak body groaned under the crushing weight of his soul.

  We’d expose the mass graves, or we’d—oh, whatever the hell it was, but we’d do it, we’d realize all our old plans, he exclaimed. We’d do something utterly useful and noble. We’d support the destitute. Let’s leave it at that, he added, growing somber at his own jesting, which he also intended as a sort of gift. And now, as a gift to my dearest friend, I shall offer up a sight of my soul’s sobriety. He seemed to have drawn enough strength from himself with his irregular, solitary dalliance and now was ready to repudiate, with genuine feeling, his own noisy sounds and to end the public interrogation.

  Alas, I can’t leave the boat, he said like a good soldier summing up his life situation, but we shall consume our last supper together.

  What makes you think it will be the last one.

  How does one know when one’s life ends.

  Not only did they say things to each other they didn’t mean, but they compelled each other to analyze continuously and in several ways their deeply disingenuous words.

  Conventional logic was insufficient to cope with their secret language.

  Madzar was taken aback by the captain’s offer to get off at Mohács with him, though he knew it was only playing with words or, at best, only a playful thought. The captain was playing with their shared memories, with the mass graves, reaching back into dangerous depths all the way to the sweet duet and the tragedies. He wondered in the meanwhile what the captain’s intentions were, where they would be seated, where was the table set for the two of them. He noticed no such table in the dining room. From which Bellardi instantly sensed the effect of his words; he could see he had nearly gained his friend’s confidence or at least made him anxious. Madzar also found it odd that the captain spoke of dogs barking in Mohács when in fact they could hardly have heard any barks in the Bellardis’ mansion on Városház Street. Even now, he has that devilish ability to read my mind, he told himself. And since he himself had been thinking similar thoughts only moments before, standing at the railing on the upper deck, he wondered once again whether or not he was in the presence of the most significant friendship of his life.

  No matter what, Bellardi always knows what I’m thinking about.

  Because Madzar has always harbored suspicions toward men, he rejects him for the second time.

  Perhaps this time I should make an exception.

  By the time the cock crows thrice, you will have betrayed him at least three times.

  How could one take seriously the proposal of the two of them spending their lives together. In dialogue between men, there is always an intention to search for a firm hold that reveals the nature of the relationship. Should I strive for a favorable position in what I say or should I just tell him that I already occupy a favorable position.

  Try as he might, he can’t keep up with me.

  Nevertheless, the captain reminded him of the longing and promise that every little boy wants to make come true at least once in his life, and if not as a child, at least as an adult.

  They could not forget it.

  Where the river current had washed out a high section of the shore, the surprisingly intact ends of human bones stuck out of the sandy wall in thick layers—skulls, shins, pelvises, and toes that along with the sand crumble into dust in one’s hand. They happened on this scene, forgotten for centuries, south of the city, about two kilometers from the tip of Gypsy Reef, even though they knew that according to historians the battle had taken place at an entirely different location, at the foot of the Majs hills. If the desperate swallows had not been protecting their nests on the collapsing chasm so fiercely, they might have tried to dig out what they thought was there, in hopes of sharing a great discovery. They encouraged each other; they were both terrified of touching human bones. This was Madzar’s third time on the Carolina going back to his parental home, and on the two earlier trips he and Bellardi had already come to understand that the more they used the memory of the bones to preserve their common past, the stronger their disappointment in each other.

  There was no limit to what they could have done, but their youth was gone; they could do nothing anymore.

  It was not that nothing remained of the old attraction with which they could bridge the almost historical distance between them.

  They had discussed everything thoroughly; they had revived their more innocent memories almost to the verge of boredom. They left everything else untouched out of mutual consideration, and as a result they always found themselves surrounded by issues of which they did not speak.

  In complete darkness, they bumped into familiar objects.

  They smelled each other’s fragrance, and as the captain yanked the architect close, on the surface of each other’s hard body they both could definitely feel rejection being expressed. The two of them were shocked that despite their now obviously weaker attraction to each other the mutual rejection was still so powerful. As if they were being reminded of a former rejection, as if even prior to that mutuality they had had a common life that designated their places next to each other and condemned them to mutual impassiveness. Moreover, even as a child, Madzar had found Bellardi’s smell repulsive, though his repulsion was coupled with a fierce curiosity. He had felt it most strongly when they came out of the water together; perhaps it emanated from Bellardi’s hair or skin, which was given to shivering even in summer. He’d decided that this was something peculiar to the bodies of rulers and princes; he was smelling the odor of history.

  And now he was assailed by it again, along with the repulsion and curiosity. Stale earwax, which one scrapes out of the outer ear with one’s nail when it itches, smells like this.

  The captain meanwhile, despite his own embarrassment, kept patting and squeezing the architect, gleaning some joy from the strength of his rejection. Let him feel that it was his privilege. This caused an embarrassment for the architect at least as great as the joy he elicited from the captain by recognizing the aversion.

  And because of their shar
ed past, they both had a rightful claim on these genuine sensations of aversion and repulsion.

  Madzar remained mostly naïve about his own feelings and therefore had barely reached the threshold of his sensual compulsions.

  The captain’s behavior was comparatively unembarrassed, though with his every word and gesture he followed the gentleman’s code of etiquette, the very code he poked fun at and sometimes attacked with other words and gestures. He brought attention to something, which he had no intention of doing, and Madzar, although he perceived this, did not understand or have any feel for it.

  Or rather, he knew that while superficially Bellardi always seemed to accede to every request, there was always something else he wanted. To get away from this upstream area of the great river, he was sure to keep an eye on the great exit at the delta.

  He had once organized an expedition to the South Pole, but he did not include Madzar in that plan, only boys from the better families. The two of them had gone on shorter trips of discovery, though, and once on a longer one. Anyone growing up near a great river is familiar with the desire to entrust one’s light human body to the current’s immense strength.

  As everyone learned later, Bellardi had run away one summer with some Serb and Italian tobacco smugglers. He had told them he was an orphan. Gendarmes brought him back to Mohács. At his father’s order, he was taken to the town hall and, exposed to the view of passersby, made to stand in the huge echoing lobby, flanked by two gendarmes with bayonets fixed on their rifles, until his father was ready to receive him.

  Stop thy trembling, his father snarled as he rose from his enormous carved desk, I will not lay a finger on thee, but be sure I shall have thee flogged.

  He wanted to know exactly what had happened; he asked hard questions in the interrogation, set traps, his eyes penetrating more and more deeply, lighting up every dangerous corner, and all along maintained the formal address.

  Then he had his son taken to the empty city detention cell, and the gendarmes beat him with a flagpole because they couldn’t find a stick, but it was a largely symbolic beating.

  He was locked up for three days and given only bread and water.

  The family’s extravagant lifestyle and chaotic finances allowed for nothing else but that the son too would become a municipal or district civil servant like his father, who had been for many years magistrate of the Mohács district and very popular, given his dispassionate fairness. The son’s other choices were the armed forces or the church. Since he took God no more seriously than anything else, the young Bellardi opted for the navy, where his career ended before it began: shortly after he received his commission, he had to leave because of some matter of honor of whose details no one seemed to know anything.

  He was alleged to have stolen money from a fellow officer, but this was impossible to imagine about him.

  Madzar kept shaking his head at this news as if he had water in his ears, gesticulating to his mother and warning her not to dare repeat it.

  In the end, Bellardi fetched up on the only luxury liner owned by the First Steamship Company of the Danube, which was struggling with serious financial difficulties. Part of the reason for this move was that his future father-in-law had a major interest in the company. In fact, Baron Koháry liked the good-looking young man more than he loved his own beautiful daughter, whom he later sent on her way with a single suitcase.

  The baron was a man unhappy to the very depth of his soul who had never shown any of his unhappiness to another human being. He viewed the penniless young man with a certain pity for letting himself be ensnared so haplessly by his daughter’s beauty and dowry. Bellardi would raise his only male grandchild, which Koháry approved of with all his heart. Nor did he fail to notice that Bellardi preferred to follow his example of stern paternal advice rather than that of his own father, his flesh and blood.

  The steamship company, for undisclosed personal reasons as well as others, did not easily give up the old ship. At sessions of the board of directors they gave as reason for their expensive persistence the hope that when Hungary regained the territories that so unjustly had been taken from her, she would again have an outlet to the sea and, as a result, Danube shipping would flourish anew. After Viscount Rothermere made his unsettling declarations favoring a revision of the borders of Hungary,* no one had any doubt about the matter. The situation of the merchant fleet would change, shipping would become profitable again, and therefore in the interest of the future the beautiful old liner should not be sold.

  You probably wouldn’t want to dine with these people, said Madzar, fighting his blushes, and with an awkward movement of his hands tried to return the captain’s sentimental hugs.

  Ever since Serbia’s bloody rule after the Great War, the people of Mohács had feared Serbs.

  That leaves Chief Counselor Elemér Vay as a possible table companion, you can see him right behind my back, said Bellardi, laughing, but I have a feeling you won’t mind very much if we skip him too.

  On the contrary, replied Madzar, but the gesture of dismissal did not succeed, their hands slipped together, their fingers locked involuntarily.

  Anyway, I have an important assignment to carry out, Bellardi continued, and because of it, I’ll have a table set for us upstairs. I must talk to you about something in absolute confidence. Josef, he called to the old waiter who had been standing close to them all along, wir essen oben, trinken zumal ein Burgogne Chardonnay.

  Madzar, plausibly, was incredulous.

  An assignment, from whom, about what.

  More confidential than usual, said the captain, and laughed encouragingly.

  And Madzar instantly felt that he had to defend himself and apologize; he said he really did not know anyone here, he had not been born into a good enough family to have any serious connections anywhere, and while he spoke he realized how revealing and ridiculous his fear must sound to Bellardi.

  Across the bridge, they reached the captain’s salon, where Bellardi usually invited valued passengers for tea or coffee, or for the sheer enjoyment of watching the landscape swim by. The compact wainscoted room was at the highest point of the ship, its windows set in a semicircle. As soon as they came inside, the landscape offered itself to them. Water and air, nearness and distance; in the gentle rhythmic rocking, all outlines dissolved, everything blended together.

  The captain reached for the light switch, but the architect put a hand on his arm.

  With your permission, one more moment, please.

  Of course, of course, laughed Bellardi, as if he realized he had forgotten something important, his friend’s aesthetic thirst, which he, Bellardi, considered feminine whimsy; please, sit down, right there. He pointed to the cream-colored, silk-upholstered cherrywood armchair. From here, you can see all this darkness more comfortably.

  Madzar did not sit down.

  Along the shores of the huge river, the infinite flatland dissolved in the cool mist of evening.

  The darkness endures, giggled Bellardi behind his back.

  They moved forward in the darkness, but that made no change in it.

  What do you mean by that, asked the architect cautiously. The captain did not reply right away.

  The sun had long since disappeared behind the western horizon, leaving wild lights in the air, mad colors piled on top of long, layered strips of clouds. Incandescent oranges, yellows, melting reds, hard purples, nacreous grays radiating from inside out, every shade of gray from white to black, while a thin slice of the moon was already shining on the steel-gray crystal surface of the eastern sky.

  Which they kept approaching, the ship puffing and trembling, stuttering as it were, but which they neither reached nor came closer to.

  It was my dear old father’s habit to huff and puff about how the universe is mutable and only its darkness is enduring, said Bellardi in an unusually quiet tone. It wasn’t his own wisdom, he added, laughing, he was only summarizing the contents of an old letter. There is an ancient letter, you know, i
n the possession of Mother’s family, the wisdom comes from that letter.

  Madzar wanted to ask what sort of letter and what was in it, but the waiter and the cabin boy appeared, bearing everything needed for the dinner table.

  They clattered with the dishes and utensils, exchanging short instructions as they worked.

  An ivory tablecloth flew up, opened, flared out, and landed flat in the semi-darkness brightened with improbable lights and colors; the Mayer boy smoothed it out over the table.

  The two men kept silent and immobile in their places.

  When the old waiter and the cabin boy had disappeared into the steep stairwell, the captain, with two slender wineglasses in his hand, stepped closer to Madzar.

  Tell me, Madzar asked in a serious tone, in the deepening twilight that promised to be overemotional, which frightened him, do you remember the name of the Jew who had the lumberyard below the pier.

  Gottlieb, you dummy, Bellardi replied, and his voice grew hesitant, quickly taking him in another direction; he concealed his surprise by pretending that the recalled memory put him under the spell of a cheerful absentmindedness. Why on earth are you asking.

  Funny, but I couldn’t remember it, Madzar replied, as if he had to apologize for his question. How laughable one can become with memory lapses.

  Because of his carelessness, they each knew whom the other was thinking about.

  About whom they would never speak again or, more precisely, about whom they had stopped talking even back then.

  I never found out, the captain continued in his more cheerful tone, did finally anything happen between you and Marika Gottlieb.

  I’m serious, he said, and held out his glass with the quavering gold-blond wine.

  I liked her, no doubt about it, the architect replied and gazed pensively at the wine, but we were little children. I haven’t seen her since.

  I don’t understand what you mean by that.

  Even though he understood very well.

  Because Marika Gottlieb’s thin face did appear to both of them, though neither of them was thinking of her. Madzar wanted to keep feelings at a distance, yet he was glad he had managed with his unguarded remark to remind Bellardi of something they wouldn’t speak of.