Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  Now, because of Bellardi’s unguarded words about the future, that in the fall Madzar would have woodland mushrooms, the real pain felt at the long-ago loss returned.

  He did not know what to think of this; for the first time in his life, it confused him to his core.

  Maybe you don’t remember, he said loudly in a stifled, strange, trembling voice, as one calling back one last time from his childhood, desperately asking for help, I left my best leather slingshot at your house.

  Something similar now happened to the captain too; it was very rare that something truly surprised him, but this was as if some rebuke or old rumor had caught up with him, accusing him of theft.

  You forgot your what, he asked, shocked and threatening. I don’t remember a slingshot.

  This hurt Madzar because he could see that Bellardi truly did not remember, the louse. But somehow he quickly awakened from his surprise that Bellardi couldn’t even remember this foul deed of his. He had the nerve not to return one of my best slingshots and he doesn’t even remember doing it.

  Don’t be angry, I beg your pardon, it just happened to pop into my mind.

  Sounds ridiculous, but I remember exactly, even today, where I put it that afternoon, he said, looking for his grown-up voice, placating.

  You had a picture book, Hungarian Noblewomen, and I put the slingshot on top of it.

  You mean I didn’t give it back, asked Bellardi with a modicum of obligatory remorse. It was as though he had a vague memory, after all, of Madzar putting his leather slingshot on the book. Just goes to show you that one always harms one’s fellow even though one is unaware of it, he said, indulgently self-critical.

  What stupidity.

  Madzar remembered well how he had to be on his guard against Bellardi at such junctures.

  Bellardi’s lies were always convincing, he wove them out of modesty and arrogance, a fabric not familiar to Madzar; he was always late in realizing he’d been taken in again, and that it was best to be quiet about the whole matter.

  You know, even if you did leave it with me, when I went home to Buda for my first vacation and not Mohács, I couldn’t find my old things in our new apartment. And I wouldn’t have dared ask about them. I imagine they simply threw it out along with my things.

  Imagine, I could find none of my stuff. Nothing at all, he added after a short silence.

  Forgive me, I really don’t know why I brought it up, why it popped into my mind.

  Come on, what’s there to forgive, please don’t apologize.

  You think you could offend me with something, he asked, flashing his teeth and pouring more wine.

  This time only into his own glass, however, as if accidentally forgetting about the other man. There’s nothing in the world, you couldn’t offend me with anything. But when the mushrooms turn red, he continued relentlessly, they sprinkle them with lemon juice, salt them, throw in some bay and freshly ground pepper, a dash of saffron wouldn’t hurt either, that’s what makes it so crazily yellow.

  Madzar was paying no attention.

  Yet he heard that the dish was then cooked gently for ten minutes, uncovered, no lid. He was thinking about slingshots, that there were rubber and leather ones. It is cooled on ice, auf Eis sozusagen abgeschreckt. The leather ones were more valuable, and he saw Bellardi put the bottle back into the ice bucket. Of course, he preferred coarsely chopped black olives, he was saying.

  He always needed some advantage, not a big one, just enough to feel a bit of gratification. It would suffice to drink more than the other man, even if only by one gulp.

  For him, his life on the river is forever the Mediterranean, forever the Adriatic. The black olives are tasty too.

  Forever, said the architect jovially, who began to pay attention when he heard this pathetic word.

  Go ahead, laugh, my dear friend, forever, that’s right, forever, and I mean this seriously, said Bellardi, and his voice trembled. After all, he had deployed the concept of forever to regain Madzar’s attention, so that they could laugh together at his real sentimentality, which tied him to the other man and which, in this way, he was still willing to display.

  Do you have any idea what a yellow night in Cyprus is like, he asked, growing subdued.

  I’ve never been to Cyprus.

  How would you know, even if you had been there.

  Go ahead then, tell me about it.

  You live in another world, a completely different world.

  Perhaps that’s why I’m still curious.

  You’re going home, let’s say with all due respect you are on your way home with your accidental Greek lover. What home. What you’ve got is a room, another fleabag hotel where everything is sticky and smelly. But at least on high the stars are yellow, the size of your fist. You’re only a lousy little sailor man, but that, my dear little Lojzi, with all your big ideas, you will never understand. A Hungarian who no longer has a sea, because they took his last lousy little sea away from the lousy little Hungarian.

  You’re one big nobody. You have half an hour with your lover, and his arm has the fragrance of fried fish.

  While he spoke, he kept staring at Madzar’s hand as it lay on the table. He looked at it as if his gaze was stuck to it.

  And the cicadas are screaming in your ears, you can’t hear yourself think. That’s how things are, my friend.

  As if he were waiting for the other man to raise a big fist and knock him down.

  Madzar could see that on the gleeful face the long laugh lines had flattened out because Bellardi could not say what he wanted to say.

  He had the feeling they were sailing into the empty night on Bellardi’s face, and he truly did not understand him. On the surface of his face, unfamiliar faces kept turning up, and Madzar could barely follow them. This is a given quantity, he thought, self-satisfied, as if he had indeed discovered something. He also saw what the other man was expecting from his fist. Bellardi’s expression was changing so rapidly that its various qualities were impossible to track. He could no longer weigh whether he should accept this behavior or not, whether what was happening would turn out well or whether he should reject it.

  The essence of the other man was radiating directly into him.

  I didn’t know stars were so important to you.

  Now you do, Bellardi replied in a hostile tone, and he quickly lifted the wine bottle from the ice bucket.

  To be proper, this time he refilled Madzar’s glass first.

  What could be more important for a sailor than the stars.

  From this point on, he could say anything at all, since he had that one-gulp advantage. He laughed bitterly, as if he were using his self-pity against the other man. But who’s a sailor anymore, he said. To you I don’t mind admitting I’ve become a common maître d’hôtel in a flea-bitten hotel.

  I see the wine’s got to you, gone to your head. Or is it melancholy.

  As much as you’d like to deny it, we Hungarians are a lost people, my dear Lojzi. You still believe, my pigeon, that you have something you can take with you to America and that’s how you’ll rescue yourself for the future. I don’t give a shit whether you go or stay, Lojzi, and don’t think I’m envious. You’ll pack your suitcase very nicely and discover when you open it that it’s empty. We are empty, my Lojzi, we’ve been drained of our blood. From here, you can take nothing with you except your emptiness.

  Come on, you’re talking nonsense.

  That’s what I was trying to tell you with those dumb yellow stars.

  Maybe I’ll hire a guardian for you.

  I shit on the stars too, including yours. You can take this as a manly confession, but I don’t give a shit about that either.

  I really don’t understand what this is, maybe some kind of weltschmerz.

  Their voices deepened and they spoke more and more quietly; the deepened voice of one made the other deepen his voice too.

  Well, if you don’t understand, then you don’t.

  After that, not another word.
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  They ordered different soups to keep their feelings for each other from being so alike. In small matters, being different means a lot.

  The captain had the so-called pale fish soup that, true to its name, was given color only with finely grated carrots, turnips, fennel, and celery.

  It looked back at him, pale bluish green, from the white soup bowl.

  He can’t possibly think I’m complaining. An obdurate German like him is always more calculating and levelheaded than that.

  Madzar ordered chicken soup for himself.

  Na ja, das wird etwas deftiger, the old waiter clicked his tongue upon hearing the order. Unser berühmt, berüchtigter potage royale.

  Bellardi, revived by his sense of gratification, explained as they spooned their soups that if this interests you, they make this famous, infamous soup by cooking a good-size hen on a slow fire, along with various vegetables, until it is very soft and tender. Our chef has a big pot of it on the stove from early morning on, which he moves to the edge to make room for other pots. When it’s done, they lift out the chicken and strain the broth until it’s clear; the meat on the chicken should be falling off the bones; they cut it in pieces and grind it up along with the vegetables. Then they put all of it back into the broth, along with a generous amount of slivered almonds, you can taste them in it.

  He felt a kind of serenity, as though he had had a good cry on the other man’s shoulder.

  Oh, so it’s the almonds, then, that’s right.

  They also add a butter roux to it, and then simmer it for a bit.

  Now all Madzar had to do was watch the other man struggle with his sobbing.

  To look at the imposing uniform, the furrowed, strong face, the thickly drawn straight eyebrows, the traces left by the sun on translucent milky skin, the thin edge of the prominent long nose, and the way his face constantly changed in the hovering candlelight. The way he traced his explanation with his fine fingers, making it easy to see how familiar he was with culinary activities; the way he gesticulated, lost in the details, and explained things while holding back his impending sobs.

  You’re not serious about this, are you, don’t tell me you know how to cook.

  Why should I deny it, Bellardi laughed amiably. I could be a ship’s chef anytime, though in the first weeks I’d probably miscalculate the amount of ingredients you need to order.

  You don’t have to deny it. It’s just that I’d never have guessed.

  You mean because it doesn’t go with my manliness.

  Nonsense, why would I think that, Madzar answered with a question, but he was thinking that within this mature man, considered very manly even as a boy, this man he had vied with to be most at home with the myriad details of the world, to know them in greater depth and objectivity, there surely dwelled a woman too. It seemed as if Bellardi were carrying all the Odescalchi duchesses within him, and not only with his contrived, polished manners. The face of Bellardi’s mother showed through in his face; he had his sister’s milky skin and sharp nose; and some of his manly features he inherited from his aunt. That aunt was an old maid, almost completely penniless, whom fate had sent to Mohács for a while but then she could not afford to move elsewhere. It was to her that Bellardi returned every summer from Trieste, until he started going to her parents in Buda.

  The best chefs in the better hotels are all men, Madzar said.

  If I can put your mind at ease, if you’d like me to put your mind at ease, replied the captain, laughing, I’ll tell you that I’m most comfortable preparing outdoor dishes. And you know yourself that that is truly man’s work.

  If only because of the fire.

  Roast beef, roast mutton, those are delicious dishes.

  And so is slambuc, you know, noodles cooked in broth or water with potatoes, then baked, not to mention knuckle of veal, goulash, tripe, chowder.

  Yes, chowder. Between you and me, chowder would be my main attraction.

  They changed wine for the brandied snipe, listed on the menu as bécasse flambée.

  It was getting late. The ship was to dock at Mohács at half past eleven in the evening.

  Madzar did not want to look at his watch but he sensed the time approaching when Bellardi would have to leave the table to give orders preparatory to docking. And with that everything would be over between the two of them. Yet he no longer wanted these flat, embarrassing conversations. There didn’t seem to be time for Bellardi to carry out his confidential mission. While they had been dining, they could hear the helmsman’s commands as well as the shoveling of coal in the boiler room coming through the open brass cylinder of the communication flue; and those below could hear their conversation or at least snatches of it. Occasionally, Bellardi appeared to want to say something to the men. At the corner of his mouth and in the deep furrows on his forehead there played a kind of childlike or perhaps grown-up affected gravity; Madzar could see the high-minded, religious boy scout as well as the deeply disappointed man. He hoped this would break the icy silence between them, which could not be warmed with words. But he hoped in vain. The upright boy scout meant to do something good but did not do it. And the man who was disappointed in everyone did not make the confession of his life after all. The old waiter kept turning up to pour more of the simple Szekszárdi that, with its slight acidity and rough aftertaste, went well with the venison.

  He came with his whistling breath.

  The cabin boy did not return to help the old man collect the dishes.

  With his whistling breath, he kept shifting the two men’s intended intimacy to different dimensions. Or he was busy with the desserts; in the end they both ordered baked peaches.

  Large peeled and halved peaches, which out of season were fished out of a jar of preserved fruit, filled with finely grated gingerbread and, in a well-buttered pan under a thick layer of marzipan, cooked to a pale red.

  Bellardi was going to order a third wine for this. Madzar parried the offer; he would stay with the Szekszárdi. Which was clearly not to the captain’s liking; it seemed to hamper his self-realization. He did not voice his dissatisfaction perhaps because by then they were both quite under the influence or at least pretended to be. They grew heavy, genuinely weary of words. They once again became rather bored with each other; or rather, they each gave this name to the icy calm from behind which they observed each other’s strangeness.

  They pretended to be staring ahead or looking out into the motionless night in which the river gave signs of its existence only by sounds. The insult suffered by one of them inevitably offended the other, and so the muteness did not seem vacant.

  By the Summer of ’57

  It was as though I could hear again the faint, even banging on the rear walls of the cellars.

  He was telling me about it as we stood on the platform at the end of our car in the speeding train; he told the story as I remembered it too.

  There was cannon fire, with everything booming and trembling; mortars that made the ground heave; the impact of shells nearby, explosions far away or very close that seemed to make the building above us look as if it were shaking its head; blasts of explosions from which the walls seemed to lean away or somehow hide, while in the vaulted parts of the cellar the candles went out or their flames became eerily elongated; rattling and barking bursts of machine guns and submachine guns, now shorter, now longer; excited monologues and leisurely dialogues. Yet, easily distinguishable from these sounds and despite them or perhaps together with them, one could hear the continuous, regular sound of hammering as people wielding pickaxes, chisels, and hammers were breaking down cellar walls, simultaneously on both sides.

  He told me how they managed to reach the Kilián Barracks, which was under constant fire. People broke through to our house from a cellar on Eötvös Street; from there, passing under several buildings, one could get to Szófia Street.

  By dawn, we were out of the mousetrap.

  This is how I learned—from him on the train, quite by chance, while the inrushing win
d puffed up the unbuttoned shirt on his chest—that on that particular night not just in our building and not only in the neighboring buildings but all over Budapest people were opening up an underground labyrinth.

  By the summer of ’57, however, one remembered nothing of this, or at least no one spoke of these matters. Everyone was responsible for erasing their personal memories. Or maybe I couldn’t or wouldn’t remember. It was strange to listen to him above the infernal clattering of the train wheels, and to stare through his open shirt at his razor-sharp lean brown body. But I’d probably have told others the story the same way as he was telling it to me, free of emotion, as if he were modestly defending himself from his own sentimentality or as if he were telling the story to himself, without self-pity. We were hurtling into an unknowable night. He must have known that I was familiar with the core of the story. A few words sufficed to remind us that we had met once before; a shy blink was enough to ascertain what the other thought of these things. This was the older boy who on that memorable early morning had stopped me on Podmaniczky Street and asked me where we were going, and I had told him to Glázner’s for bread, the one the nice woman called down to from the second floor.

  She had called him Pistike.

  When with the ammo box on his shoulder he had unexpectedly leaned toward me and was so close to my face in the darkness that he flooded me with his mild breath, I felt I had been caught doing something wrong.

  We had exchanged only a few words.

  His speech was not very refined. Still, I felt I should stay with him so I could fight too.

  As if preparing for some peaceful celebration or festivity, bright lights were shining from the windows of the upper floors.

  At the same time, the attraction frightened me, because it was as though I had a view of myself as another figure, more beautiful and more sharply drawn, and because of that I could not possibly part from him. Until then I had been but a shadow, but now I had before my eyes the body itself. As if staying with him depended not on my cowardice or courage but on his beauty. Despite the fact that in those days I was interested in many things but not in beauty. Somehow, it was easier then to look beyond people’s ugliness or beauty. In the general turmoil one’s eyes searched more for signs and peculiarities of character; that’s what seemed important. This boy was dangerous; one should be cautious with him, even fear him. It was as if I had to be afraid of myself. I did not want anything irrevocable to happen to me; I walked on; but after a few steps, I wanted to look back, and that is how my leaving became irrevocable.