Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  He tried to interject that he did not object to looking at Stipiczka’s sleepers but frankly did not need ninety-eight of them, in fact didn’t need a single one.

  The Jew pretended not to hear this; he kept talking just to work his jaws.

  Even though Madzar emphasized that he was not interested in waterlogged wood, which he could not use in his work.

  Gottlieb did not give in; he enjoyed his own artful jabbering. He understands, of course he does; with a raised voice, he spoke a word to every one of Madzar’s, clear as day, unless he had misunderstood the gentleman. Because if we figure three hundred river kilometers, and we can’t figure less, then this wood had to have been sent downriver from Verőce, which took at least a week.

  Well, now, how can you say such a thing, Madzar interjected angrily, as if he were in the mood to argue about this with a Jew. He did not understand why the Jew was exaggerating so shamelessly when the exaggeration was against his business interest. Even from Győr it’s not three hundred, how could it be more than two hundred from Verőce.

  I wouldn’t want to argue with the gentleman, I’d probably wind up at the short end of the stick, but please take a good look, he said, and with his finger he pointed at the place they were approaching. Whether it’s two hundred or five hundred, on that wood the gentleman will see no trace of any damage or any alteration. Right next to the red stamp of the railway, the gentleman can see Stipiczka’s burn marks. He, Gottlieb, has a good man with the railroad who follows up and takes care of everything for him. In the end they agreed, he doesn’t mind telling the gentleman, that he’d pay the railroad a symbolic sum, they set it at ten pengös, which he paid properly, because according to railroad regulations the wood had been exposed to a natural disaster, and they’d have to chalk it up as a loss anyway.

  And that the gentleman needs just this kind of wood borders on the miraculous. This is what happened. One of the piles, listen to this, dear sir, they didn’t unload it on the right side from the direction opposite to the train’s travel, as the engineer in charge had told them to do. Boggles the mind that such coincidences exist in this world, this is a miracle, a real miracle, this is; I don’t want to exaggerate, but the truth is they unloaded the pile on the left side. This is how this one pile wound up on tideland, but the water didn’t carry it away all at once, it nicely divvied up the labor, and Gottlieb laughed again, his mouth wide open, as if he were praising the water’s elemental force and the treachery of the current. Ten sleepers a day, it regularly lifted off the topmost row, at least that’s how my men caught them. But the last two never showed up, doggone it, he exclaimed unexpectedly, and then quickly offered an explanation. It’s possible that those two rows simply drifted right by their noses without their noticing them.

  And they had not yet reached the woodpile, protected by a wide shingle roof on stilts from rain, spray splashes, and strong sunshine, when the sight emerging from the shade stopped Madzar in his tracks.

  From that point on he dared to approach the wood only very cautiously, as if not meaning to go ahead at all.

  He had never seen such sleepers. He could not believe his eyes.

  He did not even know that such sleepers existed. He could not comprehend how sleepers could be so perfectly processed and finished.

  Could he be lucky again, he asked himself, and he knew immediately that he was damn lucky.

  How long has this pile been here, he asked gruffly.

  For years, five years, let me see, I don’t want to lie to the gentleman. I know we repiled it twice and very carefully too, if that reassures you at all. But the mystery, my dear sir, is what these sleepers had been saturated with, go ahead, feel them, come on, closer. I don’t know who will take the secret with him to the grave, but they saturated these with something, that’s for sure. I mentioned that we repacked the pile because I myself became very curious to see whether this material was changing or not.

  Madzar was now close enough to study the sleepers’ rougher, darker cut surfaces. He would have preferred to smell them then and there before deciding what the method of preservation had been. But he was bothered by the other man’s physical closeness and the suddenly created professional mutuality.

  At first glance one would take them to be of a dark tropical wood, he thought. If these really have stayed like this for you for five years, he said aloud, then they won’t change, and again he shuddered at the idea of permanence and the thought that he had found the material for it.

  You can rest assured of this, no need to lose sleep over it, he added gruffly. Bet your life on it.

  I must be an idiot to praise his merchandise for him, Madzar grumbled to himself, overcome by a strange, gentlemanly emotion.

  He hadn’t touched the wood, hadn’t properly assessed its qualities, and didn’t know for sure whether the unknown saturant had penetrated it fully.

  This is what I’ve been looking for, he thought, remaining calm. And what might the preservative have done to the medullary rays, had it reached the wood’s medulla, he asked himself seriously. By then he had told himself that this was it, yes, this is what I had in mind. If he cut it into mirrors, and removed the medulla, which he might have to do, would it be the required size. As if from a secret source, he knew the answer, yes, yes, and was ready to decide immediately that this would be better than taking wood from demolished buildings or long-seasoned plum or cherrywood. He liked this wood precisely because of its perfect saturation of unknown origin and its purity; he only now realized that he couldn’t have done anything with the dry hollowness of wood taken from demolished buildings.

  He kept calming himself, saying, take your time, take a closer look, don’t get excited for no reason. In his mind, question was chasing question: would the unknown material leave stains, will it have an unpleasant odor.

  I’ve found it.

  Don’t rush your decision; don’t rejoice in vain.

  In his helpless joy he would have burst into tears if the stranger hadn’t been standing next to him.

  It was as though he instantly felt the wood as part of his flesh and was living through the wood’s peculiar fate.

  This was saturated right after they felled it, he said aloud, which leaves the question, saturated with what.

  Gottlieb joined him in making little rhythmic sounds punctuating the logic of the thought.

  And Madzar could not tell how the magic moment occurred, a moment not entirely the product of either chance or necessity but containing elements of both. Something like condensed precipitates. He must look into this, cannot jump blindly into the unknown. Destiny appeared before him as a convergence of old dirt roads coming from various directions under the open summer sky.

  Sometimes the old dirt roads crossed, other times only touched one another; they were familiar or completely unfamiliar.

  Events arriving from different points of the compass met on these abandoned dirt roads, and once the encounters were over they moved on, indifferent to one another. Perhaps Gottlieb was also luxuriating in the grandeur of the moment; he wasn’t chattering anymore, he grew silent alongside Madzar.

  There’s no doubt these oak sleepers were used on secondary rail lines.

  In size or material they did not differ from standard ones.

  To prevent any possible disappointment due to the usual stickiness one feels when touching saturated sleepers, he hesitated to step closer and did not dare touch them right away.

  Even though he could see plainly that he was not in for much of a disappointment. In his mind, he had already gone too far, figuring and calculating things; the disappointment would be unbearable. Two fifty, and he wouldn’t need longer ones than that, not even by a centimeter. But mainly he was shocked by their color. Although they had darkened considerably, the substance of the wood, as far as one could see, had not changed at all. Or perhaps they had steamed it too, and after the first saturation sort of washed out the tar oil with some kind of additive, dried it, and put it in the pneumatic boiler u
nder high pressure, then saturated it again with, say, creosote and some other refined preservative. Not impossible. It might have been a vegetable oil. After that, the density and quality of its flesh could not change. It would not get moldy, it would resist fungal decay.

  It has to be looked at in a radial section.

  It could have been linseed oil.

  Once, on behalf of Mies van der Rohe, Madzar had gone to order some material from the famous plant in Semmering where the modus operandi was true handicraft and nothing was mass-produced. He spoke to the ancient Stipiczka himself, and now, thinking back, he had the impression that he’d never gotten any information about the details of his work. With his drawn-out, reluctant emphases, his bulging, expressionless eyes, and in the blue work apron tight across his abnormally protruding belly, Stipiczka was for him like a peculiar idol one should not dare address. He either spoke so fast it was impossible to follow, as if he did not want to be understood, or he kept quiet. He must have been frightened of people his whole life, frightened of everybody and everything except perhaps wood. Because he feared that everything would be taken away from him. But to the wood, in contrast, he gave everything the wood had to have or could possibly wish for.

  I won’t be able to get the information I need from him, if he’s still alive.

  He tried to imagine the pleasant surprise that would greet him when with a power saw he opened the heavy, dark blocks of wood. Or painfully unpleasant surprises, one after the other. He drew his finger across the surface of one sleeper, lifted the finger to his nose, smelled, and very quietly asked Gottlieb if he knew the sleepers’ measurements.

  Of course he did, Gottlieb replied in a similarly quiet tone, and quickly enumerated them, they wouldn’t have to measure, revealing to Madzar that his rough calculation had been way off the mark. The sleepers were a full ten centimeters shorter than he had guessed by his eyesight. In his embarrassment, Madzar leaned closer and now had the impression that his nose was registering something familiar that one usually smells several times a day, the odor of a common chemical.

  The sleepers’ cross-section he found ideal, however.

  He was making small approving sounds too.

  It deviates from the standard, or I may not be remembering the standard measurements right.

  He thought, pondered, mused, tried to recall and fix in his mind the smell of the familiar chemical, but from where. Another excitement on top of the others he’d been coping with. He tried to lift this smell away, as it were, from the smells of other compounds. Perhaps it is from an organic not inorganic compound.

  Probably some formaldehyde derivative.

  With this idea in mind, he started to go around the pile, but he moved away more to be alone with his sense of smell and freedom to touch, and also to keep telling himself, to be allowed to keep telling himself, how damn lucky he was.

  Gottlieb did not follow; he did not wish to disturb the strange gentleman, whom he could not place by either his attire or his behavior.

  He thought of belladonna, which ladies suffering from headaches drip on lump sugar in the depths of their darkened rooms, and of atropine, but he didn’t stay with either because of that sharp edge to the odor, so characteristic of organic compounds.

  I never heard of Stipiczka manufacturing sleepers of any kind, he said irritably to the merchant when he came back around the woodpile.

  If material of such quality lay around here for years, the question pricked him like a thorn, why did no one take it.

  As if to say, you can’t put anything over on me, my friend, you’ve got to get up a lot earlier for that.

  Stipiczka doesn’t make sleepers, why should he, answered the merchant, yielding, but my man told me these here were specially ordered from Stipiczka by the Hungarian State Railways. They could have had them done in Dombóvár, but extra demands cropped up, you see.

  Correct me if I’m wrong, these measurements are for sleepers used on secondary lines.

  That’s right, no need for me to correct the gentleman. You may not know, but between Verőce and Kismaros the railway has a branch for forestry work, and that was the one whose capabilities had to be strengthened, how should I put it, in order to make it possible to reach the new border station.

  They turned Mohács too into a border station, he added, but then cut short the plaintive sentence.

  Hold on a moment, Madzar said, that secondary line has a narrow-gauge track, which as far as I know would need two-meter sleepers. These here, according to you, are two forty.

  If the gentleman does not believe me, we can measure them. But it’s not me who says it, I’m telling you what my good man told me, and the insulted merchant giggled a little, then went on in a whisper, my man at the railroad. For troop transports, the gentleman understands, the man said the line had to be suitable for transporting troops. And the job has been completed.

  With his index finger, he pointed triumphantly to the sky, indicating that it was done at a higher command that saves us all from damnation, and then he silently spread his arms.

  We put down larger and more durable sleepers than regular ones, but nobody could tell the difference.

  I see.

  They did not want to attract unnecessary attention, you see.

  Well, then, that’s the explanation.

  So the gentleman understands now. To avoid any accusations that we might have violated that part of the peace treaty.*

  During the pause that followed, in which neither of them could think of anything but the injustice done to their country, its territory dismembered by the peace treaty, the architect, deprived of the last morsels of his distrust of the sleepers, thought it was going to be very hard to get through the next few hours patiently. He glanced at the elderly merchant with tenderness, affection, and almost as if asking for help. He had a good mind to have him cut into the wood. He wanted to slice off a piece at the end to see the cross-section, and then another piece lengthwise to look at the radial section. Perhaps Gottlieb had not dismantled the machines in his workshop; they might still be working. How could they be working, there was an ominous, bleak silence above the embankment precisely because they were not working. Anyway, one is better off alone with such ideas. In retrospect, he understood every word of the Jew’s meaningless jabber and saw through it, but he could not find the words with which to reciprocate.

  He was as happy as a lark.

  He was back at the reassuring feeling of bourgeois equality.

  To rush forward with gratitude was not advisable since they had not talked about the price yet.

  The price could not be too high, though the mere thought of it gave him a fright, again.

  The Jew must have set a trap for him.

  He asked whether Mr. Gottlieb could have one sleeper delivered to his workshop.

  By all means, gladly, of course.

  Now he thinks he will need all ninety-eight after all, but for the final decision, he would have to examine at least one of them thoroughly.

  The gentleman doesn’t have to worry about price, said the merchant, his tone suggesting that suddenly he didn’t understand things.

  What workshop could this stranger have here.

  But of course he understands that the gentleman can’t buy a cat in the bag, the quantity is quite large for that, he nodded, and in a voice filled with profound distrust he asked where to send the sleepers, because he would send at least three for the test.

  On hearing the object of his earlier curiosity, the familiar name and familiar address, no surprise showed on his face, because he was not surprised.

  Although he no longer had hired help, he would fetch somebody to deliver the material to the Madzar house.

  In his soul, Gottlieb was crestfallen.

  As he covertly and incredulously observed the blue shadows on the other man’s delicate white skin, always ready to blush, and his strong, darkly red hair, he could not chase away the thought that red-haired people were always sly foxes and mean swind
lers.

  They exchanged a few words about what the price might be, paving the way, so to speak, for later bargaining.

  The mind could not comprehend what the young man was doing and why.

  This young man’s father and even grandfather had bought wood from them, not from Roheim or Gojko Drogo, and in an instant he recognized in the young man’s face the long-forgotten features of those two older men.

  After all, this young man had been a classmate of Gottlieb’s own boy in the school on Koronaherceg Street.

  And because of these useless thoughts and unappeasable indignations, his fate opened up, his everyday life came crashing down on him. He saw before him his little boy as a grown man, the unlucky, miserable little boy. Never mind, we’ll have him study a trade, he’ll be a watchmaker; that’s what they planned for him.

  Which made his soul whimper.

  He saw his beautiful, strong wife at a time when she hadn’t yet gone mad. She had been not quite right in the head even as a girl, but no one would have thought that as a woman she would go mad. Still, he blamed himself. He was feeling the threat of the final hours groping their way toward him, a total darkening of the spirit. He hadn’t recognized the Madzar boy. Not only can I not find my hat and to my greatest shame I’m standing here without a head cover at the sight of my Creator, may His name be blessed forever and ever, but I don’t even remember whether I put my own hat on my own head this morning.

  His negligence confused him, the other man’s presence and incomprehensible behavior upset and hurt him, and he must not allow any of this to show on his face.

  When he was finally left alone with his desperation, limping back to his office, going across the yard alive with the chirping of sparrows, he began to whistle, but with him this was a sign not of jollity but rather of unbearable tension.

  All right then, this hour too has arrived.

  He could console himself that at least he managed to sell the wood after all.

  And the architect strolled along the embankment to the boat station. He sat down on a large stone by the ferrymen’s small kiosk and watched the arrival of the almost empty ferry from the island; creaking mightily, it slid up on the paved shore. Serbian Gypsies in snow-white shirts were the first ones off, leading three restless horses amid a loud pounding of hooves. There was no feature of the landscape that didn’t bring back something of the past. The sun was very strong, and nothing was left of the early-morning mist above the lively surface of the river; the water reflected the current-driven image of the sky in vanishing brown, blue, and white spots.