by Peter Nadas
There were moments when the landscape made a profound turn, because he felt that everything, after all, was referring to Mrs. Szemző.
It was for her that he fantasized about the darkening color of the oak, but he did not understand the connection between her and the color.
As for Bellardi, well, the sooner he forgot him, the better.
And what about that certain deep purple visible on the densest part of the surface, on the knobs and knots, would he find it on inner surfaces exposed by cutting the wood. Among the women, whether on foot or with bicycles loaded down with packed baskets, gabbing loudly and cutting into one another’s words as they followed the horses to the shore, he did not see a single one with a bonnet on her head. But it was too early for his mother to return from the island; she never came back before four in the afternoon. These women were Hungarian, he could see that from afar; Catholics and Protestants wore their headgear differently, while the Slavic women, who used their white linen kerchiefs only during work, spread them taut across their foreheads and tied them not under their chins but at the back of their heads. The most fertile lands belonging to Mohácsians were on the other shore, along with shepherds’ and fishermen’s accommodations and the so-called bush farms, owned by rich German farmers who moved there with their households for the summer months. In his childhood Madzar had frequently experienced a strange anxiety at the thought that among the uniformly dressed, constantly chattering women he might not recognize his own mother.
Standing by the railing, he might lose himself in watching the ferry and would never find her. But in his dread he was not allowed to cry, not there among the horses, the carts piled sky-high, the bicycles and people. Look at him, a boy, and sniveling, some German woman laughed derisively, what kind of man will this one grow up to be, and then somehow his mother’s hand, the one with the ring, suddenly turned up from somewhere and slapped his mouth.
No kind, if you let him get away with everything, he won’t become a man.
He was still thinking about Bellardi, and he did not forget Bellardi’s lover either, whose arm had smelled like fish all night.
Nor did he forget that to Hungarians every German was a Swabian because their prejudices made Hungarians incapable of identifying any concept correctly. Although at this moment he could not have told Bellardi whether he was thinking of himself as a Hungarian or as a German. Was he lashing out at the Hungarian element in himself for the slipshod phrasing or was his German blood protesting the Grobheit. In which case it would be Bellardi speaking from him, after all.
The word of the blood.
As if without Bellardi such a thing could not have occurred to him, blood.
He used to be plagued by nightmares in broad daylight. He was especially frightened of Hungarian women wearing dark kerchiefs. Congealed blood clots.
He kept scaring himself with the notion that one fine day, if he failed to behave correctly, the German women with their ringed fingers would pummel him and thrust him from their circle and then the Hungarian women would take him in between their legs. The envisaged image was of the huge, fat great-grandmother with the pus- and blood-soaked bandage on her ulcerated leg as she lay on her pallet in the dark kitchen. Her leg would never heal. Because Hungarians wash only to their waist, it’s a good thing they wash at all, and they couldn’t wash out this bandage, he heard this complaint enough times; mainly on Sundays they slap some water on their upper bodies, and only at the well, and Hungarian women won’t even take off their vests or undershirts to do it. The blood stank. He’d never have dared to reach into the cleft of his buttocks while washing, not to mention his hole. It never occurred to him that his underwear wouldn’t be shit-stained if he cleaned his bottom properly. He did not have his mother’s permission for this, which caused him no small inconvenience in college.
Not even after graduating from high school did he receive permission to do what had to be done with his foreskin.
The fine deep purple, which only the most experienced eye would have detected on the oak’s dark gray surface, ran through with yellow streaks, also stood for a grave threat.
For a very long time, he used to turn away, ashamed even before himself, when he drew back the foreskin from the bulb of his penis. It could mean that water had somehow managed to make its way into the structure of the wood after all, and was still working into it. He was about to purchase some material, having fallen in love with it because of Mrs. Szemző, whose inner characteristics were unknown to him.
He tried to imagine the two of them in the empty apartment on Pozsonyi Road, what he could have done with the woman in the twilight had he not let her go. Good Lord, what couldn’t I have done, he kept saying to himself; as if the woman’s hand had left a trace on his arm, where with her touch she strengthened his awareness of the mutuality of their feelings, which he was now tearing asunder. He could have done everything with her. But he did not see anything there except the reflected yellow light on the ceiling. His wish now grew so strong while sitting on the stone that he did not know, or rather did not wish to imagine, what might have happened had he reached after her and held her back.
Don’t go away.
The more he tried not to imagine it, the more he reinforced his inability not to desire this woman.
He considered it scandalous on the part of nature that it had presented the human male with such a member. As if the demanding gods had turned his raw insides, so sensitive with their mucous membranes, out into the light of day, had denuded an inner organ with no aesthetics of its own commensurable with other surfaces of the body.
He could think of nothing else except that while groping in the dark, searching for the true inner structure of things, with his erection he was feeling Creation’s sole palpable instruction.
He was standing before God with his head uncovered, he remembered that too, and then he suddenly rose from the cool stone and started off after all, though he knew they wouldn’t be bringing the wood yet, no matter how much he wanted to hasten things. It was as if he had to reach the end of the world to complete his mission. He’ll wait at home for the wood to be delivered. And when he got home, first he opened both wings of the workshop’s enormous door as wide as they would go, to let light and warmth at last pervade the huge space where he might spend the next few weeks working. As he wedged open the heavy iron-framed oak doors, which would grow hot in the sunshine, frosty cold invaded him from the inside, which made the moment even more celebratory. As if he had released both past and present, letting them flow into each other. And he saw before him the morning a few days after the funeral when the assistants pushed the last completed barque out of the yard.
This time there were no loud cheers when the barque hit the water with a great splash, only the dogs barked and yelped in joy, being used to it with their master.
After that, the workshop became overgrown with the bare tendrils of woodbine.
He stood for a long time in the dead, spotless, and for many decades useless yard, waiting impatiently and helplessly and with a rising sense of ceremony for a knocking at the gate and delivery of the wood.
After that, two of their dogs were beaten to death.
But nobody was coming, because first Gottlieb, insensitive to his own forgetfulness, had to look in the office, helplessly and furtively, for his hat.
He had to do this before going to find somebody in the neighborhood, this he remembered, but, and this had never happened to him before, he even forgot what he was looking for. Yet instinctively he kept looking. He looked among his papers, under the furniture, and if he came upon it, he’d remember it. In the meantime he murmured fragments of a prayer designed for other occasions, about our God, who was one, as if he had to convince himself that he had someone he could trust. Our Lord is great, His name is sanctified and awesome, he continued in Hebrew, remembering it by chance, not praying consciously.
For years he hadn’t asked for anything, only given thanks for everything. When he asked for something f
or his daughter in Dombóvár or for his son in Coney Island, he simply recited what he had learned fifty years before in the heder, and had the nagging doubt that he’d never fully understood what he was saying. He saw no point in asking things from the Lord. Although he had fulfilled his obligations toward Him, his wishes and intentions had simply died away in him. The Lord has not heard my wishes, he said to himself in secret, somewhat reproachfully, even when He answers one. The Lord does not listen to wishes even though He is not deaf.
There is no causal relationship between the Almighty’s mercy and man’s appeals to Him.
A little later Madzar walked into the house; in the hallway, smelling of mold because of the cold winter, he opened the lid of the hope chest in which his father’s, grandfather’s, and their old live-in assistant’s oft-patched, clean work clothes were kept.
He found everything in the chest ironed and neatly folded. While he changed into work clothes, exposed to the pervasive smell of home-boiled soap emanating from the chest, no one came with the sleepers on his shoulder. Soap boiling was done everywhere in the autumn, when the golden yellow leaves fell from the poplars; sometimes Bellardi would go with him to help push the wheelbarrow home with the collected bones from the old granny’s house.
Driven by shame and restlessness, Gottlieb finally closed his office.
That was actually very nice of Bellardi, helping to push the stinking bones in the wheelbarrow; after all, his mother was a princess. It was very nice of him. And it was very nice of the Lord Jesus that he blessed both of them with the most deep-felt childhood love.
He was literally fleeing from the words of his prayer, was it holy or sanctified be Thy name, the angels sing Your praise each day, he was in a hurry and picked a detour along which he might meet the least number of acquaintances as he rushed along, uncovered, at the very nadir of his shame.
He wanted to avoid everything and everybody.
He hastened along the flood-blackened brick wall of the silk factory, and he kept on saying the words, shouting over the monotone booming and clatter of the machines, the metallic clangs of the combs, reciting the words to himself. With the fragments of the Hebrew prayer he displaced every Hungarian word so that his thinking would not be Hungarian, so that he would have no imagination, no Hungarian imagination either. Let us praise the exalted sanctity of this day. Terrifying and forbidding, Lord, what Thou hast given us today. May your realm and golden throne, resting on mercy, tower above all abomination.
There could be no living tie between the ancient text and Gottlieb’s practical thinking, since he no longer believed that people’s stupid wishes could touch Creation. He no longer believed; did not believe in his own faith that there was a god on whose terrible deeds anybody would build an empire, or that there was any other kind of god either. He imagined, keeping it a secret from himself, that the world was an empty vessel, completely empty, anything could be poured into it in any way, no matter what, since everything flowed out, spilled out, dripped away and scattered in the dust, dwindled and vanished. These were the kinds of thing he envisioned and thought about, though he continued to celebrate all the major and minor holidays, strictly observed the ritual rules and regulations. He concealed his own convictions from himself as if in his old age, supplanting his parents and taking over their role, he related to himself as if he were still a child. He must remain the same. Whatever happens, the world cannot change, and if his eyes saw far-reaching changes, he would not allow his mind to follow his eyes, lest his personal experiences improperly violate the depth of his faith or that of his skepticism.
Thus was Gottlieb riddled by the excruciatingly painful absence of God, about whose rapid withdrawal he would not talk to anyone, not for the world.
Gottlieb was not a stupid man.
To no one.
He should not be seen while crossing Halpiac Square, where at this hour the fish market was being cleaned and scrubbed by municipal sanitation workers, followed everywhere by cats, dogs, screeching seagulls, and beggars hoping to retrieve some scraps. He waited a little while and then managed, without having to greet anyone, to make his way across among the upended washbasins and tables glittering with water and leftover fish scales; hurrying under the spherical crowns of the elms, he fled from the familiarly functioning world along Szent János Street and the narrow, snaky Kígyó Street, and after he had crossed the wide and tranquil Szentháromság Road, lined on both sides with the severe-looking houses of the more prestigious Catholic families, their blinds rolled down and shutters closed, looking for all the world like two rows of citadels, he at last reached, at the corner of Zsidó Street, the old Israelite graveyard packed with uniformly pink tombstones.
Here he definitely had something to worry about without his hat.
The goyim could not know the meaning of the Almighty’s wrath and judgment; but there was no Jew who didn’t. The terrible promise filled him with the sense of a painful safety. He stopped in the shade by the tumbledown wooden fence to protect his bare head from the burning sun, and he regarded the street with the eyes of a stranger abandoned by God, his breathing heavy.
Between two breaths, he was still praying.
The bustle and shouting was great, somebody in front of him was pushing a handcart piled high with assorted junk. In the cacophony, it seemed improbable that he could reach his house unnoticed. Two unfamiliar rag-and-bone men were shouting at the top of their voices, their free hands spinning rattlers to attract attention. They both wore yarmulkes. We buy everything, they shouted into the noise they were making with their rattlers, everything you can find in your kitchen, your pantry, anywhere in your house. A few meters away, on the bank of the roadside ditch covered with wild spinach, a Christian kitchen maid was cleaning a chicken and singing loudly. In the dust, children were having a hoop-rolling competition; a farm wagon loaded with last year’s grapevines was just arriving, its wheels creaking and squeaking. Dishwater was hurled out of a window. From deep entranceways and echoing yards, the sounds of arguing voices, hammering, and grating were heard, which died suddenly at the unexpected slamming of a door. Then, along with the kitchen noises, the wound was opened again, and while a man’s voice begged and beseeched, two desperate and frantic female voices were shouting at each other.
A few weeks earlier, by mail, the Gottliebs had received the voucher from their son Jakab, according to which they were to board ship in Rotterdam for their overseas journey.
They already had their railway tickets to Rotterdam, and their son wrote to tell them to spend the night in a small old hotel near the dock, which frightened Gottlieb more than the long journey across the sea. What if there were no vacant rooms in that hotel. What would I do with your mother then. In response, Jakab wrote that there were many hotels, like mushrooms, near the piers. They didn’t have to worry about that. Robbers and drunkards are found in hotels at every port, Gottlieb knew that already; he already saw the corpse of his wife, frozen in its own blood, among the slashed eiderdowns in a ransacked little room. No amount of prayer could keep him from looking into the future, in which he too would be killed. One night he looked out the window because he thought someone was prowling, he heard voices. He could not get his head above the flesh of the murdered ones. The blood stuck to the feathers, no one bothered to bury their blood, and later no one could find out what jewelry had been stolen from them. And he could not write to Jakab about this either—that we are taking such and such pieces of jewelry with us—he could not put it in writing because he did not trust the letter, which might wind up in anybody’s hands. He did not reveal what pieces they were taking to Marika either; it had to remain a secret, otherwise a war of jealousy would break out between brother and sister, which never stopped smoldering anyway. That is how their terrible lives ended, for which he expressed his thanks in advance, bowing before the eternal throne.
The glory of Merciful God never ends; His rule is our beacon.
Actually, he couldn’t imagine that his own son would ro
b him, the son for whom he had made allowances, out of necessity, and to whom he had given more, after all.
He listened to ascertain where his wife was, who in a short while would be murdered mercilessly for her jewelry.
He most feared that their bodies would be mutilated and their blood left unburied. Their fingers would be cut off along with the rings. And as he suddenly opened the door, he saw the miscreants approaching in the silent night with their sacks open. By then he wouldn’t be able to get up, out of his cut-up flesh, to do the most necessary things for the soul. In the meantime, as if nothing had happened, all his hats were there, in a row, on the coat-and-hat rack in the dim hallway. The shiny wide-brimmed black hat he wore on high holy days, his richly embroidered kippa, the everyday black hat he wore in the city, and the oddly frayed, lusterless, greasy hat too, which he wore to work and which, after exchanging it for the yarmulke he wore at night, he should have put on this morning.
Like a thief, he lifted his own weekday kippa off the hat rack in his own hallway and hurried deep into his house.
At least a dozen times a day he made himself believe that just this once he could avoid the madness of his wife.
He opened doors carefully, trying to make as little noise as possible by tiptoeing on the softwood floor, turned gray and splintery after many autumn cleanings. There were a few spots that creaked badly no matter how careful he was, because the joists underneath had rotted away. As he made his way through the rooms and corridors, moving ever deeper into the unpredictable labyrinth of the commodious house, the emptiness became darker within the whitewashed walls, which echoed the tiniest sound.