Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  It was as though I simultaneously had two unrealizable hopes, equally strong. If she was going to meet someone, I could simply avoid her; just keep walking. But if she didn’t meet anyone, there’d be no more excuses; I knew that too. If we could not talk to each other, open our mouths and understand each other, then our relationship would remain a painful illusion, a disgrace, a defeat. And I wished for nothing more than such a defeat, accepting in advance that I would be the loser. Or rather, I’m not sure I could imagine such a great defeat. But if I had to open my mouth, I might have nothing to say to her. This was just too much; I can’t talk about it. And I wished nothing more than that I should have nothing to say to her. Then at least it would be over. In the meantime, it was most important that I could see her, follow her, adjust my pace to the patter of her high heels. I had never before seen her walking on the street from so close up, and this became more important than anything. Whatever happens later, this I will find out now. Or maybe I already have. Even though I couldn’t know in advance what I wanted to find out. But I knew I was curious about this monotonous sight that changed every second, though I had no idea why. I drank up the vision, blotted it up, and was not disappointed by a single moment of it.

  Maybe her coat caused a slight disappointment. If not disappointment, a little confusion. She wasn’t wearing her own coat; it had to have been somebody else’s; I could see that it wasn’t hers. No stores sold such coats, it was too big, sand-colored, made of some light material and maybe a man’s coat. And this sand-colored blotch was leading me down dark Szófia Street. The coat not only bothered me, this ill-fitting coat that made it so I couldn’t see her, see who she was, but bothered the tenderness I felt for her. It was not her body I wanted to see, or maybe it was. The silence of her naked body, unhindered. When I’d seen her from a distance or in her white work coat, nothing disturbed my sense of her beauty. And nothing restrained my fancy either. As if only in the finest garments could I appropriately dress her beauty. But her coat reminded me of socialist reality, of the disagreeable and recurring thought that I was pursuing just an ordinary woman who worked in an espresso bar, and then this couldn’t be more than an awkward little adventure anyway. Which I didn’t need. And if I was already thinking this, it was almost as if I had already offended her. As if a wicked aunt were calling to me from the pages of a pulp novel: you can’t belong to each other anyway. I’ve always made allowances for women, but it was high time to admit to myself that I was more passionately interested in men, since what I’m really interested in is what I am like. Seeing her in her white work coat, there might have been room for a romantic imagination yearning for elegant richness, but seeing her in her awkward penury made that impossible. As though nothing was or could ever again be in its right place. Women were not the ones. I couldn’t find my own way, or anyone else’s, or anything at all. Perhaps this inability of mine lent weight and strength to her beauty, but I didn’t want to retreat from my illusions. Luckily for me, she did not stop and gave no sign that she heard my steps. She hurried on as if she had urgent business somewhere.

  Her wonderful footsteps gave me a respite.

  She was probably wearing a tight-fitting skirt under the ugly coat, for her steps were very short though very determined, the patter of her high heels almost aggressive. I wouldn’t have thought she had nice legs. I was seeing something of which I had to say that I’d never seen anything so beautiful, but I’m sure I did not elaborate on the sight, not with words. I knew that men paid special attention to legs. But this too was one of those things I didn’t understand about men. It was as if there was a direct relationship between their sexual potency and the sort of legs this or that woman had. While men talked about women’s legs, I looked incomprehensibly at the men or at their legs. I was engrossed in her straight posture, in the unbroken rhythm of her steps, in everything that was entrusted to her feet, rising in a pleasing arc to her ankles and to strong and shapely calves in silk stockings. Earlier, I hadn’t even thought that I would or ever could need a woman, because the crudely declared need for possession rather nauseated or scared me. I considered it absurd, ominous, arrogant, and crassly stupid when a man declared something like this out loud, or made eyes or gestures to make his intentions clear to the woman in question. In myself, I couldn’t arouse anything that even remotely resembled an urge like that. Earlier, the very assumption of something like this would have made me sink into the floor with shame just to think of it, let alone do such things. That I’d be interested in someone’s legs or might want someone because of her legs, ass, or breasts. And I especially did not understand about the ass; why the ass, what could men do with women’s asses.

  So now that’s what I was thinking about. As if somebody inside me had said it straight out, loud and clear. Well, this woman certainly has great legs. I want this woman. And there was nothing to add, not that I wanted to, because the statement referred not to her soul but to how she walked, to everything that this impossible coat so cruelly concealed, to her ass. I wanted to look at her ass, to see her ass and her breasts and her belly.

  It was all about my own soul, and I could not resist it.

  Her steps kept pattering on. I heard these wishes uttered within me in my own voice, and not only was I not ashamed of them but an unknown quantity of unreasonable cheerfulness was bursting in my chest. Which made me exactly as irresponsible and haughty as I saw other men being in similar situations. Only a little while earlier, I had been eagerly sneaking after her; only a little while ago I had felt the heavy, anxious, nervous, and unstoppable hammering of my heart, and now this—this puffed-up, conceited, and unimpeded gaiety. I kept following her and my own voice made me feel free.

  This is how we reached Ferenc Liszt Square.

  She is leading, this woman is leading me, I thought, she was leading me somewhere. That was my definite impression. To tell the truth, though, I couldn’t really have believed this, because I had no intention of arriving anywhere, could not have said where I might arrive with her and what was making me so puffed up, but by then at least the doubt and dread had disappeared. As if I were saying, if it won’t be like this, well, then it will be some other way, shrugging my shoulders. Even if I’d known what was waiting for me, what kind of months or years, I still would have surrendered to this moment, because I had nothing to ward it off with. I haven’t regretted anything, I’d do the same today, I would surrender.

  While we were crossing the square in front of the Academy of Music, she had to lean forward and force herself into the squalls.

  She was holding on to her bag slung over her shoulder. She turned her head to the side to keep the wind from slamming ice-cold drizzle into her face.

  I let the wind do what it wanted to, let it hit me in the face, let the water drip down my neck, so long as I could see her, not lose sight of her, not for a second. And then I turned my head away too, and for a while I followed her like that, though I was as good as blind and with drizzle spitting into my face. Inside the academy, a concert must have started; in the pale light of the lobby, behind the art nouveau swing doors, strolled two usherettes deep in conversation. I don’t know if she slowed down or I speeded up, but by the time we reached the corner of Király Street there were no more than ten paces between us. I did not dare go closer; I deliberately kept this distance.

  Let her lead; let me follow.

  Perhaps it was only for a few seconds, but I was gripped by an attractive irresponsibility, or perhaps I was completely filled with joy, or one feeling totally masked the other. Above Király Street the sky was completely dark, with only the streetlights swaying in the wind. A police car was approaching, its wheels whispering a soft slow melody on the wet asphalt. As if with its quiet purring it had banished all the other noises in the empty street, the unexpected clapping of the wind, the mysterious knocks, the low gurgling in the gutters on the unadorned neoclassical corner building. Even if it hadn’t been a car like that in which they took my father away and made him disappe
ar, I’d still be afraid of them forever. My own fate no longer interested me, and my father’s fate had shrunk to being a mere episode in the overall story. She was moving along, walking close to the corner building while navigating between puddles and water dripping from holes in the gutters. The squalls could not easily penetrate this area, yet the roofs were clamoring. The police paid no attention to us, in their eyes we were only pedestrians; still, they watched and acknowledged us. Quarreling lovers. The car carried four somber outward-looking faces, busy ascertaining whether there was still an adequate level of fear in the dead city. I could have been a rapist-murderer; all they were interested in was the degree of fear. I could have been a mugger planning to rob the woman and waiting for the police to disappear. It was happening right before their eyes, yet they had no words or even eyes for it. No matter how much they checked things, the street was still there and they could not keep people from walking on it. It was the minimum they could permit, but it showed on their faces that this was too much for them, more than necessary; it overtaxed them.

  There went the prey, who deliberately revealed her steps to me. And the city’s darkness was also not working for the police. I wouldn’t have minded walking all night in its labyrinths. If they had followed us, they’d have had nothing to uncover. It was like a blood clot momentarily stuck in the heart for an unexpected, fleeting instant; still, I felt light and it made me happy that I could follow a woman on the street right in front of the police. I could have easily said that I was enjoying my secret little liberty. As if it were the randomly appearing and disappearing police car that made me understand what I had taken earlier as regret and sadness on her face. I saw my own hesitancy, anxiety, and dread squirting up from under the police car’s wheels. My entire life until then had been nothing but withdrawal and hiding; I wouldn’t have thought there was free will—as indeed there was not. But now, with her steps, she simply suspended my fear. I didn’t care about her ugly coat either, because my hated cousin’s hand-me-downs no longer bothered me. Only a few more steps were left, which is to say no more than a few more seconds. And that was the end of this last little reverie, because then she turned into Nagymező Street and disappeared. As if she had been meaning to trick me. And life would indeed be nothing but bitterness and disappointment. I speeded up and took the last steps to the corner on a run. I could not let her do this to me after she had brought me so far. I wanted to see at least where she was going.

  She was standing in front of the church as if she had meant to flee there in the first place. One wing of the heavy door was wide open.

  She could see that I was virtually running after her. And I, at last, could see that she was waiting for me, nobody else, because in the middle of the broad sidewalk she turned around to face me. I couldn’t slow down, and I couldn’t have said how far I’d go in my daring now that she had gone this far. As a feeling, it was as if, unable to brake my momentum, I’d plow into her—but my courage abandoned me at just that point. I had a chance to live through one of my life’s most lucid and delicate moments. There was no room for deception or falsehood in it. It was a brief flash preceded and followed by thick fog. She stood there, stiff within her own obstinate decision. She would wait for and, with a single blow, bring the insane attacker low; that’s how I saw her, determined, wild, and aggressive. But the closer I came, the more nicely she smiled, as if welcoming the attack with the joy of brutality come true. Which meant that she was no less insane than I. Her smile was so refined, so soft, so unalterable, yet expanding and spreading so that her face almost swam away with it, but the obstinate decision with which she planted herself on the glistening sidewalk was not nice.

  It was crude and uncouth, and my overhasty running wasn’t nice either, as if my limbs were flying away from me, leaving me unable to control or aim my movements in the right direction. The eagerness, this greedy fear that I might lose or miss out on something, was not aesthetically pleasing. And neither was my alarm that I might smash what I wanted to seize and hold on to. But it was nice that I wasn’t ashamed of all this, of my desire to possess. In what way would it be possible to possess an entire human being—in no way. There was nothing I could ruin. For at least a single moment to grab her ass with both hands. And that’s what she responded to with her smile because she wasn’t ashamed either. She said, I’m not playing hide and seek with you. She said, what do you want. She said, here I am. She did not say, possess me, but now I shall crush you, tear you apart, devour you, possess you. And that, after all, was a different kind of beauty, though a little funnier too, or cruder. Until then, she had always seemed rather fragile, transparent, anemic, and sad. I could not yet see clearly that she had physical characteristics in which the cruelty of her soul was engraved. In her there was room also for the ugly; on her the lovely also had its place; madness took up space in her, as did shameful cunning. Ultimately we both knew what we wanted from each other, and we even knew that we were unstoppable.

  Yet I had been counting on something entirely different.

  She had to be beautiful; that’s what I had counted on. Nothing should be left that wasn’t nice, harmonious, or aesthetically arranged. Although nothing had a real explanation, things did not happen that way. And then there was no explanation for the way things did happen either.

  Drizzle shone on her hair and shoulders. The entire street glistened around us.

  Here, at the corner of Nagymező and Király streets, the wind swept up everything, blew and scattered things everywhere; the streetlamp’s light was swinging on its cable above the pavement, the wet branches trembled nervously.

  I asked her if she’d known I was following her.

  She said she knew and shrugged her shoulders, as if she didn’t consider this interesting or significant enough to talk about.

  Drizzle sat on her eyelashes too, and much more interesting than the meaning of the words was that we were speaking to each other. That some kinds of words were coming out of her mouth and I had answers for them—this was something completely new and completely incredible. And we were speaking loudly too; we had to, over the noise of the wind. But it wasn’t nice that I wound up so close to her. As if I were forcefully invading her, giving her no way out; at the next moment she’d have to back away from this exaggerated closeness. It was not appropriate to the situation. As if, after all, she might have wanted something other than I did.

  I said that even though she’d known I was following her, she pretended not to notice me.

  Because she had to hurry. Her whole boring life is nothing but one big hurry, oh God how boring. Even now, she has to go on running.

  But how did she know it was me and not someone else, seeing as how she didn’t look back.

  She knew I’d understand without an explanation, she answered, and from her smile I understood that this insane woman really knew everything in advance. I shouldn’t be angry with her, but she could not go into explanations. We wouldn’t have time for a regular conversation this time, anyway.

  But I still don’t understand, I said. I really couldn’t decide whether to show up or not because she hadn’t really answered my question that morning.

  She shrugged her shoulders again.

  But I could see her ring, she said, I am a married woman, she said. She had seen clearly that several times I had looked at her ring. In her opinion, it was very obvious that she was marked as belonging to someone else, and she wasn’t kidding.

  I had looked at her ring because I didn’t understand the situation.

  I had to decide about everything else.

  And I thought I was only imagining things, I moaned. I made myself imagine, fantasize things. What I was looking at was the question whether she was engaged or, I don’t know what I’d thought, maybe recently married, or whether she was wearing the ring on her right hand or on her left.

  She can’t arrange a date like this in front of her boss, could she. They’re on deadly bad terms, she said emphatically. Which is bad enough as it is
, no point making it worse with some stupidity.

  One can see that, I said.

  See from what, she asked suspiciously.

  From the way you two go around avoiding and watching each other all the time and relax a little only when the other woman’s husband or fat little son comes into the store. Then they manage to be more polite, considerate.

  Although our eyes were flitting around each other’s eyes, I was watching her mouth. And how she too didn’t know what to do with her hands. I didn’t know what to do with mine, and because of that I was standing so stiffly in front of her that my legs trembled.

  The trembling did not let up; it kept on, gentle but steady.

  She speaks nicely to everyone. She never wants to hurt anyone.

  Nor I, I replied, in which there was a good dose of coquetry.

  Not you either.

  With these three words in the daring informal mode, everything changed again. Until then we had been politely using the formal address, now she changed the rules and we had to look at each other in a new light. As if we were looking at the three words receding, which calmed and slowed us down. It was impossible to decide whether she’d said this deliberately or the way she thought about me had just slipped out of her mouth. But I think she said it deliberately. She wanted to test me. And it was like pulling aside another curtain so we could see each other better.