Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  Mother knows right well what I’m laughing at.

  Hungary’s always been lost because of discords. There’s nothing to laugh about there.

  Haven’t you been lost yourself, haven’t you said the same thing yourself plenty of times. Then why are you laughing at others. Just because you’ve seen the world, you don’t have to put your nose in the air.

  The cover on the double bed, piled high with eiderdowns and pillows, was made of smooth, glossy yellow cotton twill, as was the upholstery on the two chairs, the round pouf in front of the dressing table, and the armchair, all of which were overlain with heavily starched handmade lace. Whenever Mrs. Madzar reminisced about the oath, Madzar had to smile because his mother truly did not consider herself Hungarian. We are German, she would say proudly, raising her white-kerchiefed head high. She said it as if she were removing her son from among the Hungarians.

  Luckily, my son, she always said, with your nature you take after me more than after your father.

  If only you didn’t urinate on the roses the way he did.

  She moved out into the summer kitchen, sleeping on the cot, so that the precious bedroom would remain untouched until the guest’s arrival. A commodious white porcelain chamber pot was also part of the furnishing. They had never used it, because inside and out it was painted full of pretty little blue forget-me-nots. Still, during every spring and fall cleaning, Mrs. Madzar scrubbed it spick-and-span. Since she has been alone, she uses a blue, zinc-coated bucket at night so on cold nights she needn’t leave the bedroom and go outside. She was afraid, scared of every shadow. But she did not want more dogs in her life, because she’s had to beat enough of them to death. Earlier, they kept the bucket, if not this one, out on the veranda. It was not nice to let the man hear the woman’s dribbling. But even in the coldest winter nights her husband thought nothing of standing on the steps of the veranda and pissing from there.

  I’ve never regretted marrying a Hungarian, but this I could never forgive the two of you.

  That you have to piss on my roses, making the whole yard stink.

  I can’t understand how Hungarians don’t smell their own stench.

  Since they talked about a possible guest, she had been airing out everything, mercilessly chasing the tiniest flies and numerous mosquitoes. Every evening, she collected the day’s eggs in separate baskets. Her zeal irritated Madzar, her humbleness and servility because of the supposedly upper-class guest.

  Why must you prepare so much, Mother. But he restrained himself, did not say anything. They talked very little anyway. Unless his mother was doing one of her well-practiced monologues, silence reigned in the house and above the yard. At most, the power saw screeched on the wood. The feeling itself was unjust toward his mother. Still, he did not show his real feelings. And Mrs. Madzar was very indulgent with her son, that was the reason—not thoughtlessness—she always talked with him about something other than what they should have talked about.

  There were so many things that a mother could not talk about with her grown son, anyway.

  She did everything not to hurt her son.

  Because what she feared most was that this, her last remaining son, was about to leave her for good.

  He was in such a hurry he did not even bring any luggage and he walked around in his father’s clothes.

  Very carefully, she said to him, son, people will laugh at you in your father’s clothes.

  Actually, her son confused her in these clothes.

  You’re paying for your expensive hotel room in Pest instead of bringing your fine clothes here.

  I’d keep them in fine order here.

  Come on, Mother, who would laugh at me, I don’t know a soul in the whole city.

  The city knows you’ve come home, son. At least when you leave the house you should wear your own clothes. Can’t you see how much you take after your father. He also saved money on things he shouldn’t have.

  Oh, Mother, stop chewing my ears off.

  As if you were only a tradesman, that’s what you look like in your father’s clothes.

  Well, Mother, what should I look like.

  You’re working here and paying for your expensive hotel in Pest. Gottlieb’s older son has two cars in America. I’m afraid your studies may have been in vain. The way you’re going, you’ll never have anything.

  What have I got to do with Gottlieb’s older son, Mother.

  He uses one to deliver merchandise. In the other he takes his family on outings.

  How many times have I asked you not to interfere with my life.

  But try as he might, no matter how much he felt he was behaving very properly, exercising the correct measure of self-discipline, with his mother he was unable to use a different tone.

  Please be quiet.

  Don’t you tell me to be quiet.

  I know what I’m doing.

  In a few days, he could see how thoroughgoing her secret preparations had been. And he also failed to banish Mrs. Szemző from his mind, because whenever he finished his daily work—before twilight, for he did not feel like working by lamplight on this sensitive wood with its delicate color and proportions so easily distorted by electric light—then suddenly he felt very lonely. There was nothing to be done about it, and he was disturbed by the thought that he had no way of knowing what he was doing.

  He sensed, like a heavy premonition, how utterly alone he would be in America if he ever got there.

  On top of it all, the day was approaching when he would have to interrupt his work here and go back to Budapest for the work on Dobsinai Road. And he worried that the apartment would not turn out as he had hoped. That it wouldn’t satisfy his demands for architectural purity. Don’t let the telegram come just yet. If Bellardi arrives at night, he’ll be getting off at Mohács on his way from Vienna. Or else he might come five days later on the ship arriving from Belgrade at four in the afternoon.

  But he did not come at either time, and Madzar again had to wait three more days, and he could be glad that no telegram came either. In his great expectation, he went so far as to leave his work quietly at the relevant hour and take a leisurely stroll down to the boat station. He went as is, in his father’s work clothes, to see with his own eyes whether Bellardi would disembark or not.

  But he did not see him on the bridge.

  He could have sent him a message, because he saw the Mayer boy.

  But, outwitting himself, he had to pretend that only by coincidence was he observing from the willow trees along the shore the Carolina’s spectacular and noisy arrival and then its painful departure. When the Carolina was receding from Mohács, with its streaming, clattering wheels turning against the current, the wailing of its horn lingered for a long time. At such times, Madzar usually stopped either behind the customhouse or at the silk factory’s stone wall, but from there he did not see Bellardi either when the ship came or when it left.

  Sometimes he would run out of the house at the doleful sound of the horn, just as he had in his childhood, hurry down to the dock and from the old fishing-boat landing watch the slow passing of the Carolina.

  Once he saw Chief Counselor Elemér Vay get off, on his way back from Belgrade; the Mayer boy lugged his suitcases behind him. The smartly dressed, severe-looking gentleman was conveyed from Fish Market Square in the Hotel Korona’s black, crest-adorned carriage, while simultaneously, amid much blowing of its horn, the ship set out upstream, taking its passengers leaning on the railing. And this not only pained Madzar but also made him dread the pain of longing to be off.

  Which should not have touched him. He did not want to admit that his life had various mysterious processes and phenomena that he could not clearly see even in retrospect and that no sober reasoning helped him anticipate. He feared them the same way he did bodily contacts he considered improper. And when once again Bellardi did not show up in the afternoon, and Madzar was left with only the Danube’s enormous currents and muddy, layered whirlpools, he took off on a longer stroll to w
ork off his anger with Bellardi.

  He should pick up at least two bottles of good wine; that way he wouldn’t be going home alone.

  At least they’d have good wine when Bellardi came.

  North of the city lay ridges and series of hills, covered with loess and divided naturally by vales that seasonal streams had created, where even in Roman times grapes were grown and where, thanks to Levantine wine merchants, the very demanding viticulture survived the century and a half of Turkish occupation. At some places, the ancient wine cellars had long since caved in. Above the buried, walled-up medieval labyrinths sat small windowless grape-crushing sheds and proud, richly decorated houses belonging to rich Swabian smallholders, with wooden porches and tripartite wooden facades overlooking the river. He made his way up here on banked, carriage-wide roads between vertical loess walls. He was recalling in more depth and detail what once had happened to him and Bellardi. It felt good to go for a long walk after a full day’s work. As if he were thinking that with these pieces of furniture he might be able to make a present of his childhood to Mrs. Szemző. Recollection itself was not surprising to him; he has had ample practice in it. While working, one concentrates on the details of details, and parallel with them all sorts of other things come to mind, details and images from his life completely unrelated to his work. Except that now this was happening in the city of his birth as he walked along fences and stone walls, among raging dogs, or clambering upward in the grave silence and green dimness of the banked roads. Preoccupied with a technical detail, such as that something needed oiling, he would recall the giant willow that arched over the swelling river, in one of whose branches they had spotted the little cripple, look, there he is, reading, because he was always reading, taking his books everywhere with him, and in the next instant he would suddenly realize that the V-shape belt of the electric saw was loose, and so on; thus his thoughts kept chasing one another.

  Or in the midst of having to deal with some quintessentially technical detail, he might think, we are the culprits, and he would brood on this if he could not suppress his memories.

  Bellardi did not come.

  He wanted to give up on him, but anxiety, aversion to the other man’s capriciousness, elemental wonder at the sight of this strange man’s behavior, and existential fear about the future remained much too strong in him. He won’t even have one car in America, let alone two. I’m a dreamer who doesn’t do anything. And why in hell did Gottlieb have to go to America of all places.

  Why couldn’t the Gottliebs let him have that pleasure for himself.

  He decided to wait for him anyway, to be prepared, and not to let Bellardi surprise him. And the telegram still hadn’t come from the head mason or the cabinetmaker telling him to come to Buda. He and his mother ate up, or gave to friends and relatives, the plum-jam tarts, morello strudels, and cherry pies; his mother kept bringing fresh fruit from the island. At night he drank the light white wines he had brought from the Süssloch or from the valley of the Csele river, from the Stricker relatives’ vineyard, sitting by himself on the veranda, in the dark. He wouldn’t turn on the light. But why should Bellardi come to see him. Bellardi’s life was nothing but a series of promises he couldn’t keep, not even for himself. What cause could they have in common, no cause at all. Yet Bellardi must have felt bad about having been so firmly rejected. But Madzar couldn’t imagine not rejecting him, how he could have been less rejecting, what he might have done so as not to reject Bellardi’s proposal. What part of the proposal should he accept. Still, the following day he walked out of the city again to get wine, taking with him an empty demijohn, sat around again with the old men he knew, sipped wine with them until it grew dark above the cellars.

  If Bellardi comes now, he won’t find him at home.

  Sometimes it rained for long spells and he could not go out for days.

  Gradually he had to admit to himself that during the twelve years of his forgetfulness, he had not only guarded the safety and strength of his emotional attachment but also nourished it, kept it alive. He allowed his most secret images to return to him, repeatedly, mutely; he reveled and delighted in them. Even though, along with Bellardi, he wanted to forget Mohács. The place where unsuspecting people go to hoe their vineyards, tie up their vines or pound vine props in deeper, and then suddenly the ground opens up beneath them.

  Collapsing medieval cellars swallowed up and buried many of them.

  The Gottlieb boy sat on a branch of the willow tree, and they were throwing stones at him.

  He could not remember which of them started it. First they lobbed small pebbles from the shore, and the boy kept jerking his sharp little head away from them, and the two on the ground laughed silently, writhing like snakes; they could not completely suppress their laughter but at least held back the sound of it. At first, the little humpback could not understand where the pounding pellets were coming from; both Madzar and Bellardi were good shots. Somehow, it was also part of the game that the two of them were so strong and well developed while the other boy was a pigeon-breasted hunchback. They left the little grub alone for a while, let him reimmerse himself in his reading. Then they bombarded him again with handfuls of pebbles, burst after burst, let him beware and feel the pain.

  It became more and more serious.

  Let him hold on to the branches so he’ll drop the book.

  After a while they saw that the cripple understood but in his great Jewish pride pretended to care about nothing but his book.

  They were no longer laughing.

  With bigger stones they were more certain to hit him. The stones thudded on his body, then splashed into the water. No other noise disturbed the grand summer landscape.

  He was still pretending not to notice the impending danger, as if he were absorbed in his reading, and he did not hold on to anything. But he waited for the next missile with his thin little neck pulled in, risking much. With the hard cover of his book, he tried to protect at least his face, but of course he was always late; they hit their mark well. He not only made himself ridiculous but ran the danger of losing his balance and falling out of the tree.

  They’ll get tired of their lousy prank and go away; that is what he must have thought.

  But they did not go away, out of spite, because they figured that eventually he would climb down.

  He uttered not a word from where he sat.

  Then let him stay up there, up where he’d climbed by himself.

  We’ll see who can hold out longer.

  If he made a move to sit more comfortably with his book, they right away fired at him. And they did it when he stayed too long in one position.

  When another gang of noisy boys arrived to fish for driftwood, their enterprise could no longer be kept secret and these newcomers were certainly not going to let the hunchbacked little Jew climb down from the tree.

  He might have begged the two of them for mercy, but not the newcomers.

  He and Bellardi might as well go home.

  And when he returned one evening from the vineyard hills, a bit tipsy, not only was his supper waiting for him in the immaculate kitchen fragrant with freshly baked morello pie but his excited mother held out an unopened telegram, which reminded him of Bellardi’s long letter from the Trieste Naval Academy, every sentence of which had also surprised him.

  Sometimes, Madzar left home so as not to be there if Bellardi showed up unexpectedly; it was a way to ensure his own surprise—to return to find Bellardi there.

  Although the possibility of such a visit had never been mentioned, in the telegram Mrs. Szemző announced her arrival the next day.

  Telegram in hand, the text much too long with too many detailed explanations, Madzar stood, overcome by the news as if hit on the head. He managed to read the first sentence all right, but he gave only a cursory glance to the rest. How could he prevent her. He turned red right under his mother’s watchful eyes. Bellardi must love him greatly, after all. There was no possibility of replying; the post office
was closed at this late hour. He did not understand what this meant or what he had read in the telegram, because he hadn’t expected Mrs. Szemző to be interested in his work; this was too much for him. What did each word mean in the sentence about needing to clarify unresolved questions, and his mother wanted to know, and quite loudly too, who, when, and how many guests might be arriving. Or perhaps he had to go to Pest. Just to be on the safe side, as soon as the mailman left she had quickly slaughtered a chicken. Should she add another one. She had cleaned the vegetables for the soup and she would put it on the stove at dawn, but would her little boy tell her whether she should pick more carrots and turnips. It was as though each of his mother’s words reached him from a great distance, along with one of the telegram’s words hovering before his eyes, or as if the words had not reached him at all.

  She already has nice new string beans in the garden. It’s a good thing they don’t grow just on the island.

  They should pick some before it got completely dark; she’d make some bread-crumbed beans.

  As if in her convoluted explanation Mrs. Szemző could conceal why she was coming and why so suddenly.

  His first thought was that he should get some water from the soda man who had an artesian well; finicky Mrs. Szemző should not have to drink the stinking water from the Madzars’ well. With all those expensive words in the telegram, Mrs. Szemző revealed that her pride and standoffishness had collapsed; she couldn’t bear being without him, and putting aside propriety and decorum, defying the social differences, she was on her way.