Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  It is probably no accident that the two of them are such good friends.

  So much openness and chatter charmed everyone at the table, as if they now forgot about her earlier scandalous statements.

  Men are truly enviable for the profound friendships they develop among themselves. Men are peculiar, very peculiar. Women are not prepared for things like that, for such great, heroic friendships. Their pure feeling for one another is what makes men psychologically so strong, in her view. And they need their strength too, because somebody has to protect the women. Still, everybody was surprised to see that somebody would have such a likeness, which was indeed beyond all human imagination. Perhaps we should read the Bible a little more carefully. Or take it more seriously. Because if we are all created in God’s image and He wants it that way, then there can’t be too much difference among us. And how in the world could there be so many likenesses in one big pile, she thought in Hungarian, which seemed disdainful enough for her not to say aloud. However, the true focus of her disdain was Bolshevik and Nazi ideas of equality, neither of which was to her liking; they both seemed to her to be terrible populisms, inundating many societies with their vulgarity. And Schuer surely knew this too; he must have noticed that in bodily shapes there are other similarities around the world. Perhaps everyone recognizes this, but not everyone is fortunate enough to live in proximity to his likenesses. Schuer, with such splendid achievements in his research on twins, as the baroness had told her with great enthusiasm, must have an explanation for this phenomenon. She regaled him with the story of her official visit only to mention the shocking phenomenon for which she could find no scientific explanation. She could call this nothing but a miracle, a miracle. Surely there was a scientific explanation, of which she, because of her feminine ignorance, was not aware, even though she had taken biology courses in Prague.

  She wanted to let the man of science know this fact too.

  She’s always had a special interest in genetics, and she mentions this now only because when she mentioned it this morning she had the impression the professor thought she’d done so only out of politeness. Which offended her a little. How is it possible that there are so many multiple resemblances and simultaneities among different lines of heredity, would Schuer be kind enough to allow her to pose this question directly to him. But she would not say aloud that when, as part of the crowd streaming out of St. Anne’s Church in Dahlem, Schuer stopped in front of her, she glanced at the four of them linked in their physical reality.

  She glanced at Mihály’s lookalike, who was the likeness of these two who in turn were each other’s likeness.

  I’m losing my mind, she thought in Hungarian, what a dizzy person I am, I see him in every man, she said to herself, though she could not have said who she was seeing in whom among the many likenesses.

  She knew Mihály best of all, of course, which is why she thinks they all resemble him, but perhaps it’s the other way around, that he resembles them. And the attraction of this thought was so strong she could not banish it.

  Another reason she did not say this out loud was that at the table, very near a full glass of water, she was whirling within her own thought and in dread of what she felt about it. If four such insane likenesses may occur in creation, if Albert Speer can resemble Arno Breker so much that it seems as if Breker had modeled himself on the architect, who happens to be his friend, and these two so eerily resemble Schuer—this is how her insane calculation went—whose shape is eerily like Mihály Horthy’s, then there must be countless others like them who keep exchanging their personalities and profiles, in which case we are talking about the possibility not that one of these men will by chance become her husband, with his own or someone else’s personality, but that any one of the others could be her husband.

  What frightened her most was that she accepted this thought from herself without protest and broke down every barrier in her thinking. Even though she had been raised to fear and dread black magic, reject esotericism, and disdain superstition. There were secret passages, then, among individual lives. Which she has now uncovered, found the trail of, but should not tell anyone about lest they think she’s gone mad.

  Frightened and suspicious, she asked herself whether these unhindered secret passages existed only among men.

  Whose powerful probability she could not but feel in the muscles of her thighs; she should have spread them a little more, which she did, but in her fright she closed them again, modestly. She had only to look at this variant sitting across the table from her to feel that she was insanely attracted not to their personalities but to their sheer physical forms. These men have no personalities. In which case, she has gone mad. Her mother must have left her and her sisters for some reason like this. The big trickster probably strongly resembled their father; more correctly, their father was only a doppelganger of the trickster and their mother had to leave the copy for the original, and so she made short shrift of exchanging one for the other.

  And why shouldn’t she have done it; it was logical that she did.

  She’d never experienced this among women, women are very different from one another and like to be different; they make a point of it. In contrast to women, men are interchangeable. You may choose any one of them, this other voice whispered, you have to pick one; for them it’s all the same whom they impregnate. In her feet, growing tense in her comfortable shoes, and in the roots of her hair she felt the excitement of the thought; she could not let go of it. She was pursued by the thought that she must choose not the copy, obviously, but the original; the thought made her brain ache, yes, not the forgery but the original. There’s no denying that she also felt this torturing thought in her breasts, becoming sensitive where the silk blouse touched them, and in the depths of her womb. She continued to chat rapidly and with inspiration about the many-faceted indecency that this truly great artist allowed himself to commit against the wife of the famous architect, let’s admit it, very boldly. If he were not an artist, one could not forgive him such immoderation.

  He had told the visiting ladies about the emotional admiration and devotion he had felt for Margret’s husband from the first moment of their first encounter, and with this admission he no doubt embarrassed them all—the ass kisser, she thought in Hungarian, every artist is a born ass kisser—but Margret’s husband was also the man whom he could thank for his wonderful commissions, she added aloud in German, laughing.

  Still laughing, she asked Baron Schuer, deep in his own monologue, whether he had the good fortune to be familiar with the amazing story of the two great artists’ encounter.

  She could easily call it a meeting of giants.

  Her overheated, shrill little voice sweetly cut through the other voices.

  Frankly, she was happy because she was no longer thinking about the oddity that she would have to leave the proximity of this man and return to the Auenbergs’ city palace in Tárnok Street in Buda.

  The sun-drenched riparian city sank back into its dim and chaotic past.

  The umbilical cord snapped.

  Although she received no answer, she probably did not expect one, just as she had not responded to every aspect of the hubbub Schuer had made when he volunteered, unasked, those details about his youthful experiences in the Thuringian campaign.

  For the time being they could both be satisfied with what they had found in each other’s eyes and quickly made their own.

  She bewitched Schuer with her shrill little voice, and the scientist’s warm, lecture-trained deep bass had a similarly profound effect on her. Because, you know, Countess, it so happened, and with your permission I’ll tell you this one last story, before moving out of the area we should have stopped in Friedrichroda to put things in order there too. The two of them made each other’s body resonate like a sound box; with vibrations coursing through each other’s corporeal matter, neither of them had to pay attention to what was actually being said. They could look at each other’s hands, lips, neck, or forehead, whatever
their clothes left exposed to the eye. While the three children and the three other women, their pupils dilated, marveled to see them being gradually and improbably transformed. Spooning their soup with painful precision, the hostess and the two other women tried to engage in conversation on so-called neutral topics. They ostentatiously pretended to be sharing lighthearted banter and paid no heed to its content, hoping that the other two would awaken from their scandalous shamelessness and return to earth.

  The two continued to converse politely, spoons in hand, hoping to distract everyone’s attention including their own from all that was happening publicly between them.

  People in Schuer’s house never sat down to lunch before two o’clock, and they always ate very simply, never to excess. Which was as much part of the strictly followed family tradition as was the obligatory tastelessness of the food. Occasionally cooks would quit the job out of conviction, when they reached the point where they could not endure banishing all taste and character from the food. No surprise that in this house the preparation of sauerbraten was a hotly debated issue. At the Schuers, the cooks had to be sure that the food was never composed of ill-smelling or odorous raw ingredients, for the smell of raw meat revolted Schuer, and though he never went near the pantry or kitchen, the very thought of being under the same roof with uncooked meat also revolted him. Yet a good sauerbraten must, before being cooked, marinate in its vinegary, spicy sauce for at least ten days or even three weeks.

  They all found it unbearable to sit there as if nailed to the stiff, high-backed, barely upholstered chairs along with other people with whom they had nothing in common. Baroness Karla did not understand what might possibly have tied her only a few hours earlier to this shocking female, who with perfidious naïveté was concealing her intelligence and about whom, despite her unpleasantly shrill, hysterical little voice, there had never been anything little-girlish even in her girlish years. Still, she couldn’t get enough of the younger woman’s premature beauty. Suddenly she felt compelled to accuse Imola not only of being ignorant of degenerate art—the reason for her idolizing these particular modern works—but also of having lost her innocence.

  Though she’s engaged, she’s not ashamed to behave like this with the first man she meets.

  Baroness Erika disdained but also felt a little sorry for the showy young lady.

  She’s crazy, she said to herself, excusing her guest, yet it was in these painful moments that her mind clearly formulated the haunting yet always repellent realization that the father of her children was not a human being; she’d always known he was an animal. Who obviously would have preferred to get up from the table in his home, grasp the hand of the ever-twittering crazy woman, and with no consideration run off with her, leaving behind his beautiful, happy family life.

  They didn’t know what to do with their destructive emotions; they couldn’t shed their self-discipline so suddenly.

  Though Baroness Erika nervously repeated to herself several times the helpful bourgeois commonplaces reserved for just such occurrences—I’m dreaming, this cannot be true, I must be dreaming—that is to say, though she tried to diffuse her anger by saying one should not acknowledge painful reality, she could rise above it by talking over it, and clichés often help one navigate seemingly hopeless situations, she herself was behaving compulsively. In a loud voice, she combatively matched every sentence spoken by someone else with one of her own, saying something about the soup they had been served, that the Schuers cannot bear cinnamon or clove in fruit soup, which in the first years struck her as very strange, it’s not always easy for a young wife to cope with the odd eating habits or peculiar demands of a husband’s family; something about the rose garden where blooms continued so abundantly until November, about pervasive smells emanating from the institute, from the entire research area, from her husband’s clothes, from the clothes of their guests, frankly, she can’t stand the smells; something about the children’s progress—she uttered proper and improper bits and shards of sentences with no apparent logical relation to one another, but with which she stepped over the boundary between inner monologue and public conversation; in fact, she didn’t know what she was saying.

  She asked if the others were aware of the smells, because she was, even as she spoke.

  But the others paid no attention to her. What she was feeling now, what was guiding her, was a terrible dream she was having about her husband. She could not have imagined he would be so starved for this common kind of love or that he could tenderly love anyone. She had no tender feelings for him. They respected each other and had no reason to be dissatisfied with that. And yet she now had to witness his meltdown, his disgusting hankering for this hysterical Hungarian woman, virtually devouring her with his eyes. Baroness Erika was convinced that neither of them needed intemperance like this breaching their obligatory mutual respect. Life was ruled by a strict agenda, and she had never thought there was a nobler or morally more satisfying task than to carry out that agenda, a task that required a complete human being.

  Saturday nights were the only times when she was assailed by a physically somewhat burdensome and potentially sordid anxiety: about moments when, accompanied by a long moan, her husband reached the end of his all-too-short pleasure. The baroness would have wanted more. Which she would never have dared to wish. Instead she tolerated what there was, if that was how it had to be, and offered no initiatives. She was careful not to fidget afterward with the inexplicably deep currents of her wildness, not to awaken the man who, having wiped his member, wet with sperm and vaginal secretions, on the edge of his silk-poplin nightshirt, dropped into a deep sleep as if on schedule. The nightshirts had to be hidden in different places so the maid would not find them, and every week she would sneak them into a batch of clothes to be soaked so the washerwoman would not notice them either. After his aggressively large and satisfied body relaxed in sleep, he often and for long periods continued happily to pass wind, of which he was wholly unaware. Or, if he was startled awake by it, for the sake of them both he pretended not to notice. Twice it happened to the baroness that just as she lay there helplessly on her back, disgusted and rigid in the fetor emanating from under the cover and with her very wet thighs trembling, perhaps because of the strength of the aversion she felt for the man, rumbling waves of her own gratification swept across her. Her body made itself independent. It was as though her insides sensed a tectonic movement and then her entire disciplined and pampered state of mind dissipated like the crest of a gigantic wave into individual drops.

  Without her being able to do anything about it.

  She could not even scream, yell, or bellow exultantly.

  When her consciousness returned, she felt filthy again.

  She could barely wait for Monday, when she could change her nightclothes and her husband’s stained and sperm-smelling nightshirt. The washerwoman did not understand why she had to starch the professor’s nightshirts more heavily than his shirts. So he wouldn’t wipe it on them, let it hurt if he does things like that. The baron did not dare say anything about the stiffened nightshirts, because then he might have to specify what he did with them. The baroness would not have liked to acknowledge a human organ and its attendant physiological phenomena of which, even after the births of three children, she knew hardly anything. Later, though, she always hoped that maybe it would happen to her again, and so she did not mind that the man dropped off into satisfied sleep, always at the same moment and always in the same way.

  While she listened, mildly disgusted though not completely denying her moderate interest either, to the bursting bubbles of his gases and to his snoring, all she had to do was touch herself, just barely, the temptation was great for it to happen again, but she did not do it, she resisted, no.

  She thought it best not to have it happen, for she was ashamed of pleasure and ashamed of her readiness for it.

  Occasionally, Otmar wanted it several times.

  She could not reject him on every occasion.

&
nbsp; That was another reason it seemed more correct for her to remain calm and not to tremble.

  Whenever Otmar awakened himself by farting too loudly because of his efforts, in a developing dream, to stop his falling body at the edge of a precipice, he would grab wildly at his wife to stop her trembling, pry her thighs apart, and, bent on satisfying her, brutally penetrate her. Although he did not much feel like it, he did it because he was aroused by his wife’s heavy body trembling vulnerably under the covers, and he would keep pushing and thrusting like an obstinate willful child who wants everything and at once, because he lived in the belief that the more expediently he pushed and the deeper and more brutally he penetrated, the greater his wife’s pleasure would be.

  During such moments there was no room for formal tenderness or obligatory attentiveness, which otherwise functioned flawlessly between the two of them.

  Schuer believed that the male had to struggle with the tempting resistance of the female for the sake of propagation, and her eternal frustration from not being satisfied was temptation itself.

  That was the brick wall he had to break through.