Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  Even though I too could have lugged ammo on my shoulder.

  Which in the language of feelings meant that it would have been better, after all, for me to stay with him. The situation of the street could be gauged in a second.

  Their ammo dump was in the onetime concierge’s booth in the building opposite; from there they carried the ammo up to the roof for the sharpshooters. For days people on the radio had been talking of snipers, who did not stop until the final cease-fire was established among the Russians, the government, and the rebels. The rebels chose firing positions that bullets from the street could not reach. Tank barrels could not be raised to such a steep angle, so from a roof the rebels could control an entire street. Buildings were destroyed by cannon fire from far away, or Russian tanks fired until every support beam and wall underneath had been blown out, when the roofs, along with the rebels’ firing positions, crashed to the lower floors.

  Nevertheless, important transportation hubs remained in rebel hands.

  Just such a battle must have raged here the night before, and the Russians, unsuccessful in their efforts, retreated with their cannons to the basilica. But I had barely reached the pillaged corner, where the contents of the former photo store with all its furnishing and equipment had spilled out on the sidewalk and glass mixed in the debris was creaking under our feet, when I was already forgetting my stupid wish to stay with that boy. I gave up the idea of fighting and with it I also gave up any moral superiority. I was on my way to get bread, and the more important question was how to cross the street and who’d have the courage to go first. Even without aiming accurately, from the basilica the Russians could fire into any part of Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Road; a careless step or movement in the early morning darkness would be enough to set them off.

  By the summer of the following year, however, I couldn’t even remember on what day this happened and at first had no idea from where I knew this boy.

  Maybe it happened on Sunday, but probably on Monday, at dawn on October 29.

  For a short time, standing near the train toilet, we tried to figure out when we had met. Sunday, he exclaimed, because the bakers didn’t work over Saturday-Sunday night.

  I already had my hand on the toilet door handle—that’s where we met again, on the speeding train, in front of the toilet.

  Definitely not on October 30, because that day I’d never confuse with any other, not even accidentally. That was the day of lynching, with riffraff loose on murderous rampages everywhere in Budapest. And I don’t think he meant to remember or to remind me of anything in particular; he began to talk just to ease his embarrassment.

  In fear that he might involuntarily have exposed himself to me and I might inform on him to the police.

  Even among the rebels, most of them are sleazebags.

  I didn’t quite understand why he called them sleazebags, but in fact I was an eyewitness; I could testify against him anytime.

  That summer, normal people no longer talked about the events of the previous autumn, and certainly not about what kind of people the rebels might or might not have been. The rebels were no longer spoken of. For a while, I was grinning in embarrassment that I had initiated such a conversation right by the train toilet and was ready to listen to such an unpleasantly candid recitation. What did he want with this story. He was trying to figure out whether I was a provocateur and I was wondering whether he was an informer. At times like this you can feel in the corner of your mouth the unpleasant twitching of the other person’s distrust. True, we were talking in very low tones, the train was rattling underneath us, and we were on an open platform, children were asleep inside, piled on one another, and, their jaws open, the German nurses or whoever they may have been were dozing off in their compartments. We were in the charge of Sister Klára, an older woman with very observant eyes who paid particular attention to me. I could see she wasn’t watching me so much because I spoke a little German, but she watched me everywhere and whatever I was doing. I was anxious about her attention. These nurses wore gray uniforms with white collars and white aprons; the small gray caps on their heads had a large cross with red borders.

  Nobody could hear what we were talking about.

  Another reason it was inadvisable to talk was that it seemed better not to know about things that someone else knew. I had no way of knowing the things he didn’t talk about. And maybe that was the reason we couldn’t stop talking. With every word, our knowledge of each other accumulated, and that’s why we had no choice but to trust each other.

  It was as if we were mutually forcing our secrets on each other.

  Later, we urinated together, which he initiated.

  He said, fuck, we were already buddies forever, weren’t we. Why would we be ashamed of showing our cocks to each other.

  There was some profound truth in this because, thanks to our jabbering, we had instantly lost our independence.

  Whenever he said something concerning which he counted on my confidence, I had to reciprocate by saying something with which I would gain his. I couldn’t tell him that I wouldn’t urinate with anybody and certainly not because of my cock. This was the hardest thing, to trust each other, to entrust him with something secret that would make life riskier than it already was. Because you had the feeling you were becoming somebody’s friend not of your own free will but because of a compelling necessity, and that is not a pleasant feeling at all. Or as if you were flaunting your own candor and confidence so that you could appease the other person or bring him to his knees with his voluntarily accepted vulnerability. This kind of chumminess could be nauseating. But now, the train and the insane journey had somehow lifted or torn us out of the conventional, shadowy world of compulsions and unpleasantnesses, had somewhat lessened the force of its strict regulations.

  The train was taking us on a vacation so exceptional that we could not know in advance when it would end or even where exactly we would spend it. Everything would be decided in Dresden, where they might put us on a different train or not; some kids might be taken to the sea, others to the mountains.

  Sister Klára talked of these things in big generalizations, as if she herself was not quite certain of them.

  In brief, although the general emergency condition continued in uncertainty, no authority or person could come up with surprises, at least until we reached the border.

  We were still clattering across the landscapes of our country; our train didn’t stop at any stations but sped through them, blowing its whistle, or stopped for long periods in open areas. A special train illuminated by pale lights in the sweltering summer night. We were truly free on the train.

  When the train suddenly braked and stopped in an open field, the night around us, resounding with crickets, seemed to pulsate.

  Or if we were not quite free yet, we would be somewhat free out there, beyond the border.

  That year, the sizzling summer had burst on us suddenly just as the school year ended.

  The official notification said that one should report at such and such a time to the departure hall of East Station; having to be in the departure hall was itself a good sign. Assembly at train number 2; length of stay abroad undetermined; group passport in conformity with ticket of participation. Didn’t understand a word of this. The only difference in our papers was that some had to report to train number 1 or 3; I had to go to number 2. But nobody knew what this meant or how a ticket of participation would turn into a group passport. I had never been abroad. It felt as if I were going to Paris to see my mother, who of course was not expecting me, was not in the least interested in me, and whom I did not even remember; I didn’t even know whether she was still living in Paris or if she was alive at all.

  I yearned, I thirsted for the sea because abroad meant not only my mother but also infinity.

  The two distant objects of my yearning had somewhat blended together the night before my trip, and because of that, like a child, I developed a temperature and fell asleep at the table, my head buried in my a
rms. As if along with the sea, I might have my mother again too. Or if I couldn’t, I’d be given an even larger body of water, one unknown to me but whose grandeur I would remember. Nobody knew of this pipe dream of mine, just as I had to keep secret that I had a temperature. They might have noticed, though, that I was paler and even more reticent than usual. Nínó felt my forehead. I was still shivering in the rapidly warming morning as we hurried to the railway station with Ágó.

  In the huge, glass-covered sunlit station several thousand children and even more relatives were thronging and grumbling. Since my grandmother had died nobody had kissed me, nobody had touched me, nobody had hugged me. Beautiful Ágó and I could not stand each other. I did not have to fear tenderness from him; he would definitely not have noticed that I had a fever. He did not care much about anybody but himself. Just then he was preoccupied mainly with his ancient Mercedes Nürnberg, left parked in the blazing sun, which he claimed had been made especially for Pope Pius and in which for days the radiator water had been coming to a boil.

  As soon as we set foot in the station, the sight of the crowd made him even crosser, he mentioned his car again, and my yearning had to subside, perhaps my temperature too. In the throng there was no longer room for promises made to individuals. I knew what I could expect; the collective dread would continue. Neither of us felt like wading into the crowd; I set down my suitcase at my side. It would have been better to be sick and stay home. Who could have known that the children’s vacation operation in East Germany would be so enormous. We were counting on being offered some privileges to cope with our problems.

  Ágost kept looking around to see whom he could turn to in the crowd, wondering what he should do among so many disgusting human beings.

  The glass-covered part of the station was completely empty that morning; the usual traffic had been redirected to the outer tracks. Only three long trains stood on the indoor tracks, but the police had cordoned off the way to them. Even the railroad workers couldn’t tell the hysterical relatives where these trains were going, or maybe they were not allowed to say. It seemed there was no information to be had from anyone. Ágost did not move; he stood like a statue. I asked people what was happening here, what was supposed to happen to us. Only people who had registered earlier could cross the police cordon, which meant people who had turned over their participant’s tickets at the table where the crowd bunched up and everybody was shouting. A child’s name would be looked up and checked off on a list, then the child’s papers would not be returned, and instead they gave the child a number, whereupon the boy or girl had to say good-bye to the accompanying adults.

  The German sisters practically tore the smaller children away from their relatives or escorts and pushed and shoved them along with their luggage across the cordon, from where they staggered to their trains, mainly by themselves, while the sisters kept yelling after them in German, there, not that way, the other track. These were stern, disinterested women, though some gently smiling deaconesses were among them.

  If you didn’t understand German, you couldn’t understand anything of the chaos, of the German commands echoing through the huge station.

  The little ones were bawling, did not want to be taken from their families, did not want the language of this other chaotic world. Parents and relatives tried to explain things to the children, waved good-bye to them, and implored the shouting, impassive women who were urging the children on and trying to calm them, but no matter what they said or explained, the way the nurses stuck to their orders seemed ominous and incomprehensible in this emptied-out railway station.

  From the railway people one could learn at least that the three long trains had arrived the night before from Dresden and would probably return, as they put it, to their home base. And there something would happen, they explained patiently, because passenger trains of this length usually did not run on domestic routes—they would be rearranged, we’d be transferred to other trains, some of the cars would be detached—and then we’d continue our journey. The adults were running around discussing things, showing their papers to one another; maybe somebody else could find some secret and decipherable sign or cull something intelligible from them, something promising. The excitement was understandable, given that the adults were being asked to relinquish small children in their care without knowing where the children were headed or for how long.

  The echoing German words probably also contributed to the general excitement: that something like this was being done again by Germans, that Germans were once again free to do anything they pleased.

  When we’d been given our participant’s tickets at school, they’d told us we’d learn all the necessary details at the train station. But the German nurses and sisters pretended not to hear the questions or did not understand what was being asked in this stupid foreign language. At best, one could presume they had good intentions toward the children; one certainly could not see it. And most people were rather afraid of asking the Hungarian policemen; when someone did, the policemen merely shrugged their shoulders, they didn’t know any more than the questioners. The trains were taking orphans and bombed-out children somewhere, though the official language no longer permitted these innocent words, just as it had been forbidden, since March, to utter, even by accident, the word revolution. Jails and internment camps were full, reprisals against the uprising of the previous autumn had entered their most vicious stage, and people were determined not to let their mouths betray them; if they had managed to survive until now, they weren’t going to make a wrong move and risk everything. Anyone talking to a policeman had to invent a whole other language, taking into account that the very act might be considered suspicious by people standing around. Everyone was still afraid that a misunderstanding might result in a lynching, as had happened to some secret policemen on the street in the last days of October and to anyone whom the riffraff declared was a secret policeman.

  Newspapers were reporting that our sister countries, as part of their summer vacation campaign, had offered to take children who “live in broken families” or “whose housing problem is not solved.” What a laugh. Although one could appreciate that they were trying with these unnatural formulas to avoid certain locutions. The official version decreed that it was hostile propaganda and punishable slander to make any statement or allegation that the Russians had conducted air attacks against Budapest and had helped their troops fighting in Budapest’s streets with bombs. The mere suggestion that the Russians might have bombed the city would suggest that not only had they smoked out the rebels from their hiding places but, in complete disregard of international rules of warfare, had not spared the civilian population. Yet the high number of dead and seriously injured, or of destroyed apartments, couldn’t be denied, and the numbers passed by word of mouth could not be explained as having been caused by street fighting, the dimensions of which were known. This is why normal words could not be used when speaking aloud.

  Nevertheless, when we children talked to one another, the first question we’d ask was always whether the other one was an orphan or one whose family had been bombed out of its home.

  That way, one knew right away who had had help getting into the vacation program.

  I said I was an orphan so that at least here I wouldn’t be looked on as a privileged child. I couldn’t tell anybody that my mother had abandoned me for a woman and my father had been done away with by his comrades.

  While I was going around looking for information, I noticed a boy who seemed familiar to me, though I had no idea where in hell I’d known him from, picking up his suitcase.

  It was similar to my yellow suitcase.

  He started off as if resigned to throw himself into the crowd bunched up in front of the platforms. I saw why he did this. Earlier he had seemed determined not to; no, he would not cross the police cordon. As if that meant walking voluntarily into a trap. He’d rather not go on this vacation. Then he decided that in the end it was best to put the whole thing behind him as
soon as possible. Nobody went with him. He hadn’t noticed me then, and I had no way of knowing what he was afraid of, or why he thought it better to get on the train. It was as though on his face and in his bearing I could follow all my feelings, all my disgust, all my fears and anxieties. Perhaps my relatives had insisted on my going on this vacation so they could at last be rid of me. I suspected that I’d wind up in an institution from which there would be no return. They’d take my name away again and this time I’d be given a German name. I did not understand what was waiting for me or why the grown-ups were so unsuspecting.

  Maybe they were not unsuspecting but, rather, party to this lousy show.

  Then it meant that we were being taken away the way the Turks used to take away rounded-up children to raise them to become janissaries. I so surprised myself with this association of ideas that I suddenly had to look up at Ágost, who was barely taller than I was, which I always forgot. For some time then, I had been made to wear his used clothes. His gaze passed absentmindedly over my face. I wanted to attract his attention with something, to say something quickly so I would see on his face whether there was a conspiracy or we were actually going on vacation, in which case I could get over my persistent anxiety. The station was reverberating with the insane hubbub of the children and their families, and an impassive female voice on the public address system went on repeating, probably for hours, the same few sentences.