Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  She would have loved to do it, just once the good Lord should grant her this, so that Ágó wouldn’t take it out on her.

  Never.

  This morning, it would have made no sense for them to go on making love.

  The sense of desire awakened with them—it always awakens in the man, or anyway is more unequivocal with him—but they could not tell which limb belonged to whom, whether they were feeling and sensing the other’s body or soul, and whether their own spirits had any boundaries.

  The current of air kept moving the open window above them as it had throughout the night.

  The summer morning breathed on them its coolness filled with birdsong.

  Never more beautiful and dangerous.

  With her power of imagination she would not accept the notion that that’s not how it should be, that nothing like this can ever happen again; she did not see the never-again standing before them as a gaping abyss, that this would never again happen to them.

  She was already falling fast through the endless time of never-again, and she had to get used to the pain, otherwise she couldn’t bear it. She must anneal herself. It cannot be that there will never be mornings like this, never, never.

  Each time anew, the image hit her like a blow to her head, this never-again. Not even a year had gone by and it was already over. And when she told herself that her heart would break and her head would split, she did not mean it metaphorically. The veins along the wall of her heart’s aortic arch trembled from this knotty tension of never-again, her skull throbbed with a migraine. Or she told herself that she would forget him.

  Never. I will forget him. Never.

  The meaning of the sentence was weak, its exhortation strong. Her consciousness was reminding her of the delicate border between physical and mental abilities. That somehow she should release her accumulated fear, regulate it, divert it in other directions, for it was threatening to burst its dam, her sensual energies were ready to rage, and they were naturally linked to blood pressure, pulse, and breathing rhythm.

  I was thinking of that partner of the beautiful Ingrid Bergman, Lady Erna continued, literally shouting, which drove the cabbie to further venomous and contemptuous conclusions as he handed her the hat over the front seat.

  Lady Erna accepted her hat from this truly congenial and attractive man and, as was her custom, conveniently forgot that only a few minutes before she had thought the same man obnoxious. The most she noticed was that from the time they began to speak more confidentially, the driver stopped using the unpleasant if-you-please-madam phrase, with which these terrible country folk continued to embitter Lady Erna’s life.

  They got on her nerves with it.

  It had become a maniacal urge with her to hunt it down and eliminate it; she would not suffer it from her own servants; her ears were alerted to it. She firmly believed that it expressed secret contempt, indicated lack of openness and honesty. Whoever worked for her had to learn that no such form of address existed in the Hungarian language.

  Or the person could leave; after all, his or her character was bad anyway, probably given to stealing too.

  She thanked the driver for the hat, for being so kind.

  As the two of them were escaping from the Nazis, from Prague if I remember correctly, she added in the same loud voice, Mister Laszlo or Victor Laszlo, come on, help me, my God, I can’t remember the name of that famous actor.

  Unable to do anything else, the driver burst out laughing.

  You can imagine I’d help you out, dear lady, if I could only remember it myself.

  And like close acquaintances of the same generation, familiar with the same pieces of music and the same movies, which is to say whose memories propose the same information on the first try, they laughed together contentedly.

  Which filled Lady Erna with a certain relief, that the man with the leather cap could not possibly be a former Hungarian Nazi or a secret policeman.

  When it comes to that, Casablanca is not the worst place in the world, believe me, dear lady. I’ve traveled a lot in my life, he said cheerfully and with not a small amount of self-mockery or self-contempt. Although the second time he used the dear-lady phrase it rang sarcastically on his lips. At this time of the year, in March, everything is in bloom there.

  By the way, my name is Bellardi, he added, to end the embarrassing misunderstanding between them.

  And as if moved by this mention of his own historic name, he gently combined the two names.

  My son is László Bellardi, and of course that’s my name too.

  And as he said it he thought irritably, now she’ll know everything and be satisfied, the old Jewess.

  Who was dumbstruck, alarmed, as if suddenly reprimanded. Hearing the old familiar name, she grew silent in her soul, and the gravely serious little girl instantly pierced her way through the old woman’s worn and discomposed features. As she was being taken in the familiar buggy to the station along the elm-lined street, in the noise of hoofbeats and the sight of treetops she grasped the entire strange and hostile universe.

  Suddenly every possible conversational topic became too delicate to propose, let alone talk about.

  If only because of Gyöngyvér, they had to be cautious. Neither of them knew whether she was an informer. Although for long minutes she had ignored what the other two were talking about, things reached her in snatches, interfering with the high, love-induced blood pressure thumping in her ear.

  You would be the father of little Bellardi, she said from her corner of the backseat, surprising both her listeners, her voice hoarse and loud.

  Very kind of you.

  You don’t say, she exclaimed.

  She felt an impulse to yield to this chitchat; she probably sensed their distrust.

  What a coincidence, she exclaimed.

  She ignored Lady Erna’s imploring or rebuking glance.

  But then Gyöngyvér feared she had once again done something terrible, behaved improperly.

  In the car reeking of stale tobacco, Gyöngyvér’s panic made the mutual caution of the other two all but palpable. The affectionate indulgence they had allowed themselves took on a material quality in the air. What could they do with such a cackling goose, such an ignorant little servant. Bellardi drove attentively, with great practice and courtesy, while Mrs. Lehr, née Erna Demén, politely holding her mill-wheel-size hat on top of her handbag, withdrew from public life, as it were. Gyöngyvér’s noisy behavior irritated her greatly. Knowledge of where they were going in this stinking dark cab with its useless springs unexpectedly came crashing down on her again.

  She sat firmly upright, back glued to the seat; with her self-saving posture she resembled Gyöngyvér.

  Of course she knew.

  She knew a great many things that it would have been better not to know.

  Of course she remembered Bellardi’s son; she did not have to strain hard for that. But she hadn’t known that the boy’s name was László. Little Bellardi, or poor little Bellardi. Gyöngyvér was right, that’s how the professor used to refer to him. When she was introduced to people who turned up in their apartment on Teréz Boulevard, she mainly acknowledged their names or their presence. So this was Bellardi. She was surprised. This was the father whom the People’s Tribunal had sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiracy against the democratic order.* What an impressive neck this Bellardi has. He did not remind her of that person, at least not by his exterior, and that’s why she hadn’t made the connection in her mind. She was amazed. So that’s why his phiz was so eerily familiar. And at that moment she seemed to remember exactly the light summer suit the father had worn in that famous newsreel when, handcuffed and between two guards, he had to step up to the microphone and respond to stern questions put to him by the presiding judge of the People’s Tribunal.

  They led him up there as if he were a dog; only there did they take the handcuffs off his wrists.

  He must have cut a fine figure in that suit, if I still remember it today. />
  Of course there are men who never lose their boyish charm.

  Actually it was a dispossessed man standing there at the microphone; he held on to it, but the presiding judge quickly warned accused number 3 that it was not the microphone he should hold on to. Because of this reprimand not a peep was heard in the courtroom for a long time, of course. Foreign correspondents in the first rows were especially alarmed. His suit hung on him as on a clothes hanger.

  He might get the death sentence.

  The person Lady Erna must have been remembering was this robust man, crucified in many ways. But his son was short, quiet, pale, charmingly fragile or rather puny, with no cheerful strength or manly brutality; perhaps he took after his mother. Whom Mrs. Lehr had met twice in Mária Szapáry’s hunting box in Vésztő, at the time it was being liquidated. Once hunters had gone there for small game, coot, wild duck, hare, pheasant, and bustard. Both meetings were brief; on both occasions Lady Erna spoke briefly with the young woman, who seemed to her like a volatile spirit. There was no reason for Erna’s mind to bring together information originating in two different historical times. So it unfortunately never occurred to her that there might be some blood relation between poor little Bellardi, who had belonged to the professor’s circle of favorite students, and the hapless beloved of ugly Mária Szapáry. She should have known that Elisa Koháry was the little boy’s mother. So he was the boy whom she had abandoned when he was only a baby. Although she had returned for a few years because she wanted to be heroic, wanted to overcome her terrible inclination and her maternal irresponsibility. There was no reason to link the two sets of data, stored at two different places and at two different depths. Lady Erna appraised and purchased objets d’art on commission from very wealthy collectors. She managed to include a few valuable items among all sorts of cheap wares and to acquire them for a lump sum that was the usual wholesale price paid for the cheaper items. An activity for which she earned Szapáry’s eternal ire. But who cares what an insignificant costume designer had to say.

  That infamous lesbian chased younger women so tastelessly and aggressively that, soon after she returned to Budapest from abroad, she became the terror of young husbands and mothers of daughters. No matter how exciting events may have become between the two women—and no doubt the story had been exaggerated in social circles at different levels of Buda or Pest—they were not in contact and tracked the other’s love life only from a great distance.

  The two of them, Erna and Mária, did not even address each other in the familiar form, though they had been students together at the same school.

  Miserable harpy.

  In the depressing, tense summer weeks following the disclosure of the conspiracy, people could not predict whether Professor Lehr would be only a witness in the proceedings or whether in a matter of days charges would be laid against him. It was impossible to detect the actual interest of each party concerned in the feverish preparations, where the different interests would clash, and where the associates would draw the borders. Whether the Russians would succeed in eliminating the entire secret organization or were intent only on slicing off the tip of the iceberg. How the national conservative wing of the Communist Party would position itself in the new situation. They were not prepared for this catastrophe. For the time being they had to lie low, safely wedged between the once illegal domestic activists, the slowly returning Western emigrants, and the Muscovites, and to become integrated into existing factions without undue gnashing of teeth.

  It did not occur to any of them, thanks to the professor’s untiring inventiveness, to seek an understanding alliance—with the Russians, of all people.

  Of course, Professor Lehr was powerful enough on his own to remain a mere witness at war-crimes trials. But only after he found a high-ranking supporter among the Russian nationalists—one might say only after he embedded himself in the heart of the enemy, helped in this by the Muscovites, of course, much more wary than he—on the Stefánia, in the garden of the former Park Club, which for a long time served as the Russian field officers’ casino, could he congenially review every detail of the future with the pathologically obese, wheezing lieutenant general as they strolled on the narrow footpaths covered with fine Danubian pebbles. Only then, thanks to the quick intervention of his high-ranking patron, did the professor become a scientific expert witness and advisor for the People’s Tribunal.

  These days, many people condemn the professor for his terrible volte-face. Being familiar with his views, they should have understood that this was not betrayal on his part but rather the most recent manifestation of his profound loyalty to Hungary’s cause. If he had worked for the nation in the highest echelons alongside the Germans, why shouldn’t he work for the same cause alongside the Russians. Lady Erna knew of the fateful meeting in the Park Club garden, and neither she nor her husband doubted that the high-ranking patron was the Budapest representative of Russia’s military counterintelligence. That uniformed person, with his gilded epaulettes, red braids, general’s sword, and a great many decorations, had been introduced to her at the premiere of the new production of Fidelio at the Opera House in Budapest in 1947. On that memorable evening Klemperer conducted with especially enchanting dynamics. Luckily the formidable chorus of released prisoners in the last act is replete with tutti and forte. When the prisoners kept coming out of their dim cells toward the light, bidding one another to keep their voices to a whisper and singing what joy it was to breathe freely in the fresh air, to find peace and tranquillity at last, and they would trust God to guard their freedom, several people in the audience were heard sobbing.

  Klemperer had to be careful with his dynamics lest sentimentality flood the orchestra pit and the stage. The strong basic structure of Beethoven’s music allows for this; the sobbing and wailing spread, quick as a plague, among the warm bodies. It swept across the audience, glittering with reflected golden lights; it spread and raced ahead like an unstoppable wave hurling its foam skyward.

  At this moment, Klemperer thanked his good fortune and his fate for choosing this opera.

  But Lady Erna could not have known what price had been paid for that congenial conversation on the Stefánia.

  She did know the basis of the negotiation and careful agreement. Excepting only the highest positions, the Russians wanted as few Jewish elements as possible in the Hungarian government, in parliament and in the leadership of the political parties. The directive stated that the people’s democracy of Hungary needed, first of all, activists from the ranks of common people, and the Communist Party should be filled with them too. And they considered Professor Lehr an eminent guarantee that university and academic life would be steered in the desired direction. The laudatory attention the professor later gave to the young man must also have had its explanation in this weighty bargain. The price was like a poison capsule.

  Better not to crack it open, just swallow it quickly.

  Except that very often Lady Erna had to absorb with her own body the contempt, anger, and hatred surging toward the professor.

  It was not enough that she swallow the poison pill, as she had done three times.

  And now she was being taken to her husband’s deathbed by a driver whom the professor, true to form, had betrayed or at best left in the lurch for the sake of the great cause. Which fit nicely into the theory of tactical conformity. You have no other choice but to cooperate, to serve the prevailing conqueror willingly, but you must always remain conscious of what you are doing and why.

  And when were you freed, if I may ask, she asked a little later, her voice lower than low.

  She meant to express compassion and empathy, which had to function as a clear marker, and thus was part of their secret language.

  In the spring of ’fifty-five, answered the driver, in the impersonal tones in which it was possible to speak of such matters during the years when prisons were still full of people.

  He wanted to reciprocate Lady Erna’s empathy, would have said that it had bee
n six years now, and thus indicate in their secret language that he understood and appreciated her viewpoint, but he had no idea who the young woman was.

  Everyone feared informers. And he didn’t want to become too cozy with Jews anyway.

  I certainly don’t envy your poor wife for those terrible years, if I may express myself like that, Lady Erna added, filled with genuine empathy and a mite disturbed by his lack of reciprocity.

  She caught herself only after she’d said this—that she’d made a mistake, good Lord.

  The instant she said it she knew she had committed one of the worst faux pas of her life.

  Bellardi did not reply, not because he didn’t know how to respond to such rudeness but as if he hadn’t heard it. Even though from that moment, like a blow to the back of the neck, he was once again afflicted by the scandalous weeks, months, and years he’d spent at the bottom of the well. The state of feverishness and sleeplessness when he could not understand, during either the day or night, how Elisa could have done this to him. And when despite everything sleep managed to overtake him he would shudder and awaken to the question. Why did she do it. There was nothing to understand. How could she have left him. The person to whom he was more devoted than anyone else; he had never, never before or with anyone else; it was no mistake, neither hallucination nor loss of proportion, that actually they had bestowed on each other nothing less than the enjoyment of hell.