Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  The dark-brown folding shutters were closed everywhere, and only through cracks in the aged wood did some light come into the house.

  Gottlieb put his yarmulke on his head and relaxed a little in the familiar dimness, in which white slipcovers on the furniture glimmered faintly and his transgressions reassumed their customary places. He also seemed to hear his ancestors, who opined that at least in our homes and synagogues we should remain free human beings in the sight of the Lord of Mercy. When on waking you cover your head, no matter what the day will bring you have spread the holy firmament over it. They have always lived in this spacious home, with its rooms opening one into another, hoping to please the Lord and to avoid eliciting His terrible wrath with their transgressions. There were only the most necessary pieces of furniture, beds, tables, chairs, that should suffice, and these were also made of the least expensive painted or wood-grained pine. Although there were more expensive carpets, they lay on the floor, carefully rolled up in wrapping paper, along the undecorated and empty walls. If, at the time of general cleaning or during high holy days, the folding shutters were opened, the covers removed from the cheap chandeliers and modestly dark furniture, the carpets rolled out, smoothed along the floor in preparation for receiving friends and relatives, then Ármin Gottlieb’s house positively flaunted its merciless cleanliness and cheerlessness.

  Here lives a Jew, and Gottlieb was fond of this awareness, a Jew who displays nothing ostentatious, does not tempt fate, because he has not forgotten for a moment what he owes his Creator.

  He would burst into loud sobs at the painful joy when, after the holidays, he was suddenly left alone in the sunny, bleak emptiness. But soon he would exchange his embroidered kippa for a plain one and, obeying the ancient duty of resignation, go from room to room carefully closing all the brown shutters again.

  His house had one bright space: the wooden veranda framed in glass that faced the small, walled-in yard.

  At the edge of the yard, where grass could barely survive at the base of the walls, stood a tall sumac tree, its widespread branches towering above the roofs, its trunk partially grown into an abutment of the brick wall; it was a Rhus hirta, the undemanding plant of Mediterranean and subtropical regions whose leaves, unlike those of the indigenous trees of Mohács, did not open completely until late June and whose acrid, velvety flowers emerged very slowly.

  When he could be alone, Gottlieb liked to sit here, on a painted kitchen stool, and between two ritual devotions he either prayed or read one of his beautiful half-leather-bound books, either the six-volume Prayers for the High Holy Days or the eight-volume Weekday Prayers. This time, however, he had barely sat down and opened a randomly selected prayer book from which hundreds of small slips and bookmarks stuck out, both from the Hebrew text and from the pages printed and footnoted in Hungarian, and he had barely placed his elbow on the windowsill to create a reasonably comfortable position for reading, when his wife appeared in the dark frame of the doorway.

  She appeared like a shadow slipping silently toward the light.

  You think I don’t know, you really believe I don’t know why you’ve come home so early from your famous lumberyard, his wife said angrily, contemptuously, reproachfully, and then she almost broke down, barely able to suppress the tears of her bitterness.

  But I know, I do. I could have known that you’d deceive me again and come home earlier.

  If only once you came home on time, then I could breathe a sigh of relief.

  Almighty God, I keep saying all day, the poor man really thinks he can hide his forgetfulness from me. Of course, he still has to wait for his lunch. I know very well what he forgot and left at home, but I shall never tell anyone what I know about you. How would I know, I don’t know what time it is, the kitchen alarm clock is broken again, and he hasn’t taken it to the watchmaker; but this time he had bad luck with his forgetfulness, didn’t he, leaving his hat home again—unheard of. He’s come home, let’s not talk about why, but his lunch is not ready. He said, I’ll be coming back late, Margit, didn’t he. And indeed, now it will be late for you, even though you hurried home early. Wretched. You’re a wretched man. You couldn’t possibly get done with your papers in such a short time. You can thank only yourself for all your troubles, because all your life you’ve been fumbling. Your famous lumberyard has always been more important to you, sawn planks are more important than your beautiful family.

  You’re not a Jew.

  You should be ashamed of yourself, you and all your papers.

  She continued to talk very quietly like this, rather impassively, actually, using a barely changing falsetto, chanting a text that seemed alien to her, her head tilted a little mischievously and little-girlishly, her countenance suffused with hatred and contempt, her eyes narrowed and swollen with too much sleep. She was observing this despicable stranger who had wandered into her home, yet whom, according to the prescribed rituals, she should receive with a hot lunch, someone with whom, allegedly, she had lived in the happiest of marriages for more than forty years, giving him three beautiful children and raising them very well, yet her secret opinion about this man remained that although she knew him by sight, she wouldn’t marry him if she listened to her heart, because he was not a Jew. A Jew does not behave like this, and she hasn’t the slightest intention, there is not enough money in the world to convince her to marry him. She will dissuade her mother of blessed memory from insisting on this marriage, and she truly hopes that at least her adored father will reconsider his plans, because this wretched man will do nothing but deceive her, throughout an entire life will do nothing but mislead and deceive her.

  They should look for somebody else.

  I am the only one who can see through him.

  Like through a sieve, that’s how I see through you.

  You wretched man, you.

  But if you dare do it anyway, and it’s obvious that you will, you shameless, vile man, and my dear beloved father will not want to keep me by his side, what can I do, that’s how it is, then you will go tell it to everybody on our street, you won’t spare yourself and go into every single house and tell them. What you’ve done to me, what you have done. And every Jew in Munkács will know what a wretched man he is.

  What he did.

  Such a wretch and yet what he dared to do.

  He violated an innocent Jewish girl.

  It was as if the empty dark house were the only house she had ever known, or as if she had recalled a long-abandoned snail shell, yet the street outside would not be a street in Mohács and the lapsed time had no meaning.

  Keeping her dead alive.

  It was not surprising.

  However, the snail shell might have crushed under anyone’s careless step. All he had to tell her was that we’ve raised only two of your beautiful children, Margit, because the third one is long dead. Gottlieb wondered more than once how he or anyone else could remove themselves from this vast present, in which we eternally mourn, only mourn, while every event relevant to our person is still ahead of us.

  We are still before the death of our loved ones.

  One’s unlucky little son should not have died before one’s own death.

  For a second he looked up at her, ascertaining the time in which, separate from everything and everyone else, he too lived in the eternal present time of his wife.

  Margit was pressing a deep china bowl against her large, heavy, drooping breasts in a peculiar defensive posture, as if to protect both herself and the bowl, and with a wooden spoon she occasionally lifted and then disgustedly slammed back the dumpling dough, bright yellow from its many eggs, or with obvious boredom she simply stirred it. Over her pink, not quite clean nightshirt she wore a dark-blue apron patterned with tiny white flowers and, on top of that, a sweater filthy from work in the kitchen and from making fires in the large stove. When she spoke, one could see she was missing many teeth, which made her lips sink into the hollow of her mouth. Unruly clumps of thin, unkempt gray hair leaned stiffl
y in all directions; for more than a decade now she had refused to have her hair shaved as religious propriety would have required.

  Threats, implorations, or explanations notwithstanding, no and no.

  Until given away in marriage she would not sacrifice her beautiful hair.

  She was even prepared to play the madwoman.

  Her daughter tried once, but the moment she cut a large tuft the mother grabbed the scissors from her. They tussled vigorously for a while, until it became clear it was more than playacting; she first stabbed her own breast and then, with shouts of murderess, murderess, I’ve been murdered, she was ready to throw herself at her daughter, Marika.

  She suffered a kerchief on her head only when she went out on the street.

  The street was perhaps the only worldly authority before which she was willing to bow, or before which at least she forced her madness into different forms. On the street she played the kind of role that others could accept but that also suited her own adolescent daydreams. She transformed herself into a lady who, with exaggerated gestures, indicated how disgusted she was by the vulgarity of the world but who also knew at any given moment what this world owed her.

  At home she wore no shoes, not even slippers. If in the winter she spent time in one place or just stood on the kitchen’s freezing floor, she’d keep shifting from one foot to the other and under the long nightshirt rub her cold soles on her calves.

  She suffered from the cold.

  Although she wore thick underpants, she struggled constantly with inflammation of the bladder and chills. Before going anywhere, she’d spend a long time picking her shoes and bags. Sometimes the careful preparations took days or even weeks. Because of her fine skin, her legs were sensitive, she explained to everybody, and with her fingers she’d point to and gently touch the fine skin on her cheeks and forehead, everything chafes and irritates it. If she went only so far as the marketplace, that would be the end of it, her feet turned into one big sore, sometimes her shoes filled with blood, and every shoe hurt, cut into her flesh, she has nothing to wear anymore because of your disgusting stinginess. I will not shove my feet into bloody shoes, yet she has to because this helpless man, whom even his children have left because of his terrible miserliness, they hate him, won’t talk to him, have nothing but contempt for him because he is mean, mean, and everybody always cheats him at the market too, sells him rotten fruit, he gets all the bruised ones and the ones full of worms, and no matter whether he looks at them or not, if the merchandise is cheap he doesn’t notice.

  The meat already has a smell. Still, he buys it.

  Shoemakers can’t help her anymore either. Once she had a decent cobbler, but who knows where he is now.

  May his memory be blessed.

  These cobblers can’t or don’t want to widen her shoes properly, if only they widened one pair, the one made of fine calfskin that’s flexible enough, because all her shoes are custom-made so they won’t chafe her instep or heels. She swears on the memory of her beloved father that she never suffered any pain comparable to this, and every week, when she goes to the market, that is her burden, that is what she has to endure. And not only is the cobbler wicked, treacherous, mean, and I don’t even know his name, but he’s worse than the goy cobblers, only the butcher is worse than this cobbler. The butcher is so mean, he’s a common criminal.

  Mean.

  Listen to me, man, that’s how I call him, who can remember the names of these cobblers, I’ll give you any money for a pair of proper shoes. God is my witness, when I try them on they fit, see how nicely you could fix them, you see, but by the time I get home, my feet are nothing but blisters.

  And already yesterday I told you, she says now, that you’d have liver today.

  But of course you forget everything. To you I’m air. I already told you yesterday what nice liver I bought for you, you wretch, was I talking to the air. I don’t eat any of it, not a bite, but once again I swore, I swore on everything dear to me that I’ll never go to that shoyhet again. I don’t care what you say, he is not a human being. Mean. You protect him only because you want me to go to him for your liver, but his stinking mouth is always dripping with hazeer,* she said all this in a uniformly high, almost bored falsetto, and then, as if obeying her body’s unknown passion, and with the passion of her sense of justice, she unexpectedly began to shout.

  Can’t you see, she shouted, yanking the elastic dough out of the bowl with the wooden spoon, you don’t even have an eye for wickedness. Mean. You’re no less mean than all the rest of them. All right then, I’ll fry this liver for you, she added tenderly, stupid that I am, I always let you have your way, and the unexpected emotional turn was addressed not to her husband, this miserable man, but to the liver, because she liked to fry it and she liked to pronounce the word fry as many times as possible and always with the same gusto.

  And to make her lips pronounce the word liver, while she envisioned the liver bursting with blood under the bluish-purple membrane, even though she would never have put it in her mouth.

  I hope you’re happy to have liver for lunch.

  Now I’ll fry it well again. And don’t worry about blood, not a drop will stay in it, don’t you worry.

  All this time Gottlieb did not look up from his prayer book, not out of meanness but out of considered goodwill and self-defense. Ever since the woman’s condition had taken a turn for the worse, he let her have her way, he had to endure almost everything, while with carefully doled out indifference he protected himself, spared himself from emotional involvement to the extent that allowed him to remain by her side.

  He did not love her, not even in their earlier lives, and the woman had not loved him, never; he had failed to love this woman for even a moment, and therefore it was incredibly hard for him to remain permanently indifferent to her. To find a solution for this problem throughout an entire, unpredictable lifetime, even though the solution consisted of unbearably long moments.

  In the early years of their marriage, they had tried to accept each other’s bodily proximity, but they failed.

  At most, he was fond of remembering her beauty. Of saying to himself, after each moment gained, see, you managed to bear it, and instead of rebelling, you steadfastly praised the Father of Mercy for all your tribulations; yet he knew that his perseverance had only its own value and no reward, and never would have, neither in this nor in the promised other world. To this day, it filled him with satisfaction that he had been granted a beautiful wife, though he had never succeeded in opening up this beauty, and had never been able to think about what might have happened between them in the sight of the Lord. He feared that if instead of praying as he should, he’d think long and hard about how unbearable it was to endure her indifference; then madness would seize him and hurl him into the depths. Once, during a prayer, he shuddered when he realized he should stay away from depths, should strive for heights, because this hapless woman had no one but him. Since then, consciously and guided by the greatest compassion, he forced himself to think only about shallow things. Thank God she had two healthy children, knock on wood; may the memory of our poor little dead one be blessed. But these children, her own blood, are not only indifferent about their mother but stranger than she is, because they take after her completely. He could see that they wanted to be free of their mother; they would unhesitatingly put her in the nursing home in Bonyhád, which the Transdanubian religious communities maintained for mentally deranged Jews.

  What else can we possibly do with our mother, they would say.

  He must not die while the woman lives.

  He, the stranger, must take care of this strange woman.

  He did not understand Creation, why it assigned strangers to live together.

  But how could he comprehend His powers. And he no longer wanted to.

  In the midst of his prayer he really had to laugh out loud at the Lord Almighty for his wild thoughts, and that made him shudder. Into the minds of people given to alienation, the Lord p
ut thoughts of estrangement. He enjoyed immensely the sly tricks of the Lord, how He managed to reach into his thoughts.

  He says, think of shallow things, and the shallowness turns out to be deep enough to be painful.

  You’ve got me again, my Lord, I thank you, Thy will be done, as Thou had willed it once, now, and forever.

  He understood how the Lord’s mercilessness could possibly remedy his joyless life.

  Don’t reply, don’t even look up, whispered the sober thought, but with the prayer drive out the sparks and restless incitements of reason.

  Actually, he could endure everything except for one thing.

  When Margit screamed, can’t you see that I’ve raised three beautiful children for you.

  Not that, not that third one.

  Our third child, Margit, deformed and crippled, you can call it what you want, but not beautiful.

  Hold your mouth. Give no cause for quarreling.

  If they started to quarrel, because Gottlieb did not respond or because he did but could not reasonably control himself, which made their quarrel deteriorate, because he said out loud that they had buried their third child, we buried him, Margit, make a note of that finally, even then there was no room for reflection. Except that on those occasions it was not his goodness but his wickedness he had to relish to the last drop, and with it he had to part with his reason—no small physical and mental ordeal. His wife would repeatedly shout the name of the dead child, exactly as she had done when she was first told; she kept calling him to come home, where was he, just a minute ago he was still out on the street playing with the other children.

  He was not, how could he be, we sent him away to the Strickers, Margit, for the whole summer, to the island.

  I don’t send my child to anyone, to no kind of island. You gave him away. You did it. You. To the goyim. Only you.