Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  But she did not let down her guard.

  On his part, the professor saw to it that he acquired permanent or occasional lovers from places where no one had any connection with his university or the academic world. This was not difficult, since commonness was his weakness; classical promiscuity, things dirty, the darkest obscenity, held his senses in thrall, everything beyond the range of legitimate social life.

  He struggled valiantly with himself all his life; he wanted to conquer his weakness or at least clean it up a little, if only because for long decades the pure, spiritualized manly life was both his ideal and his hobbyhorse.

  At least the need for cleanliness, if not cleanliness itself. Life, conceived in blood and ending in darkness, must seek light and cleanliness, as Gracián would say, it cannot do otherwise.

  However, Dr. Lehr simply loved everything that was nasty and hideous. He could not resist loving everything that was filthy, dark, base, treacherous, soiled, and vulgar. Of course, he dismissed the theory of instinctual life.

  Jewish idiocy.

  But he valued very simple copulations, which he believed were inherent and which most emphatically confirmed life. He loved that; there was no other way to put it. He pitted Jewish libido against a theory of innate copulation. Biological and racial conceptions stood behind this theory, which he spoke about to his students in detail. Who could consider it accidental that Jews preoccupied themselves with their instinctual life so as to guide the world along the alleged libido of that life. He did not elaborate on the nature of inherent copulation with his students; they all probably knew what they were supposed to think about, what natural theory.

  True, he did toy with it in a different register, the way, let us say, he loved his wife. Whom he treated with great courtesy and appreciation.

  But what could he do if he loved unsought-for copulation, he loved its inherency, and therefore he had to immerse himself in it again and again. He submerged himself, but he loved not knowing the names of these women. To know nothing, to be not curious about them; it would disturb him if he did. Sometimes he didn’t even see their genitalia or faces.

  At most, he might feel a sharp elbow in his stomach. He would be groping and pawing under unwashed sweaters and blouses reeking with sweat; the breath of the lower classes would touch him, the smell of onions and carious teeth.

  But there’s no need to fear this, because the impersonal feeling of orgasm quickly overwhelms sensations that are imbued with social ideas.

  Besides the memory of their being unwashed, nothing remained of their persons.

  I’ll go out for a spell, my darling.

  Go on, my sweet.

  For a little walk, with your permission.

  You move frightfully little as it is.

  On evenings like this, he simply had to get up from his desk.

  I’ll air out my head a bit, he would say to himself on evenings when he could no longer resist the temptation or suppress his darkly gaping proclivity. It was not that raw, physical signals reminded him of his desires, no, there were no such signals. Rather, he feared the consequences of such an outing and therefore felt completely devoid of desire. But he could not resist an indefinable mental attraction, a sort of barbarian inclination. And he knew this was a pagan, mystic attraction, a primordial one, an archaic proclivity.

  Symptoms of his inclination were reinforced during the previous week, or perhaps symptoms from previous millennia signaled their permanence in him by suggesting that he could do it with anyone, anywhere, at any time.

  They signaled to him and he followed them. He could not have known—and this was the essence of this intimate pagan attraction—what drew him on in the night, why he did not even try to understand why he should go and where; he should simply go as if under a magic spell.

  He had to set out in a night filled with unknown dangers, to follow nothing but the call of the blood pumping from his heart, its restless beating, to surrender himself, defying all danger, to the primal forces of an unknown, natural godhead. He had to be swift and inventive. The mere thought filled him with strength and charged his cool, passionless spirit. Sometimes he would not give in to the call for days, fearing that his passion would devour him whole. He could not stay out longer than an hour and a half. And he could not think he was alone with his pagan sin and enjoyment in this city, because at different secret points it turned the reality of its other parts upside down. He didn’t need more time. He knew these places and saw what he saw in the motionless city night.

  Besides, he could not take more without giving in to contempt and disgust.

  Dr. Lehr was a man of the old school, a spiritually demanding real gentleman, and Lady Erna especially appreciated his refined sense of discretion. No matter how much she suffered because of these little anthropological sallies, which always left small innocent traces, she both respected his need for them and found an explanation for them. Any of those traces could have exposed him, yet she thought it better not to mention them. She knew well that scientific activity had strictly confidential strands and currents that might lead to very dangerous political illegality, and she accused herself in her infernal jealousy of mixing up these strands. While in her feverish imagination her husband was chasing some unseemly female, he in fact had to attend a conspiratorial meeting. Instead of making unfair accusations, she should worry if he forgot to take his hat or scarf, and she should consider his brief absences part of his academic work.

  Even though she saw mud on the heels of his shoes in dry weather.

  Occasionally, Lehr wound up at the City Park lake, where human traffic was intense under the plane trees. That is where he met the greatest inherent love of his life, to whom his memory continued to return with an unquenchable thirst. As they cautiously approached each other in the alternately stronger and dimmer lights from the gas lamps on the promenade, uncertainty gripped him. Perhaps the figure coming nearer was not a shapely woman but an effeminate man. He had to be careful about that in the darkness; it could turn dangerous. There were places in the city where the boundaries of areas favored by different sexual preferences were uncertain or simply overlapped and merged. But uncertainty did not halt the steps of either of them. Professor Lehr carefully avoided places that had lost their borders. Anyway, the figure brought with it the sound of swishing feminine clothes and was dangling something in its hands. He saw that she was barefoot, which made his heart beat in his throat, a sign at once of joy and dread; obviously, she’d taken off her high-heeled sandals on the mowed lawn. Above their heads the leaves of the plane trees rustled quietly in the silent night.

  They both behaved erratically in the dark.

  Farther off, other human shadows could be seen approaching and then receding. First the two of them would observe each other, retreat a little to observe again and gauge the other’s interest from a distance—that was the accepted safe thing to do at places like this—and then, estimating the degree of danger, approach each other again.

  But that is not what happened.

  They both stopped and the young woman unhesitatingly dropped her shoes. The shoes landed silently. On the morning of the day this happened, he had given his first talk as an appointed expert at the People’s Tribunal. That is why he behaved so bravely at night. This was the phase of the attack—la petite troupe fut attaquée par surprises, as he described it to his most trusted students—which allowed him to consider that his work as an expert in the courtroom was not a tactical betrayal. There was no doubt that the figure was a young woman wearing waterproofed silk overalls, which might for a few seconds have made her seem like a man; and it was beyond doubt that she was insane.

  He had never seen such innate, inherent agitation, the strength of which his mind could not follow.

  Mechanics in the American air force wear overalls like this.

  During the one moment when he could not possibly know what was or might be happening to them, what her hands were or might be doing, the young woman with one decisive
gesture unzipped the zipper that ran diagonally down the overalls. He heard the metallic susurration. Stark naked from her neck to her pubic hair, she whimpered with expectation. An insane nymph, a pagan priestess. Never had he a more convincing body in his hands. Never had all accompanying thoughts so completely melted away.

  Only much later did he manage to recall everything that happened between them, because right afterward he was too busy trying to sober up from the experience as he staggered home.

  For months he kept going back, until in the late autumn a verdict was reached in court, but he never found the insane nymph again.

  He should have been pleased, because although accused number 1 and number 2 were condemned to death, he managed to yank accused number 3 from under the gallows.

  He could never make up the enormous loss, which also made a sensitive dent in his theory of copulation, though he remembered her face, the texture of her skin, her eyes, and the incredibly rich pubic hair. He was compelled to remember every personal thing that he now missed, and missing them was not possible without lasting pain.

  Libido is inseparable from a person, and therefore the Jew rightly holds it to be the cornerstone of individuality, he pronounced at the end to his students. To realize his aspirations for world domination, he must not only destroy the nation but also break down human society into its individual parts. As opposed to this, in inherent copulation each individual experiences the communality that characterizes us all—even the Jew, strangely enough. In inherent copulation the communal overrides the individual, as it were.

  He did not understand why he could not find the insane young priestess anymore.

  It did not matter that he found others.

  Lady Erna discovered the smeared green of grass on the elbows of his jackets and the knees of his pants. She also noticed sticky filth clinging to his fine wool overcoats and to the velour or rabbit fur of his hats.

  In the years after the war, the city at night was full of great dangers.

  She always found some kind of grayish fuzz that reminded her of cobwebs. She did not understand this, because in her great jealousy she thought about the things she and her husband did together, which weren’t to be sneezed at, and embellished and colored them a bit in her imagination, to make it hurt. Let it hurt, and may her jealousy perish in the pain. But she could never have imagined that the famous professor, object of both general esteem and public obloquy, was driven by a passion of an entirely different nature, which lured him to danger, to abandoned promenades and strange attics, which pulled him into dark doorways where it would happen amid filled garbage cans, while he trembled with the insane urgency and risk, and that this was the only way it could happen, in a state of impersonal excitement brought on by a childlike fear of punishment and a sinful desire for union.

  Not to mention wafts of smells and odors that one simply could not have in a well-cared-for apartment.

  She dismissed the scandalous odors by thinking she’d gone mad, but she couldn’t go mad. And she couldn’t go around smelling her husband’s underclothes. But she did, and frequently too, for the smells always caught her unprepared. And then she would acknowledge with considerable relief that her husband had stepped in dog shit or human shit.

  It could not be that his own shit was smeared on his underpants.

  It’s not possible, István, that you went in your pants.

  That would surprise me too.

  There was no scientific career that could exist without secret, rather dubious human relationships; also, generally speaking, there was no such science.

  Still, with her imagination bordering on hysteria, Erna sometimes so upset herself that she would have preferred screaming to having knowledge and understanding.

  I can’t bear it.

  The things I keep imagining.

  But what if I can’t endure this very hour.

  I can’t endure an entire life like this. What hell hasn’t this accursed man thrown me into.

  She was unable not to love him and want him; the thought made her loins ache. She had piercing pains in her ovaries and she could not understand her longing after so many years. Soon I’ll be an old lady, so why is my body doing this to me. I’d rather perish. Why are you punishing me like this, Almighty God, why are you humiliating me. Even though she did not believe in any divinity; humbug, she could not believe in anything or anybody. We are born, we suffer, and then we perish. C’est tout. Therefore, all her life she thought that a body, her own, had to be given its satisfaction occasionally, and that should take care of this whole frivolous business.

  She saw it on her son, she saw it on the two good-for-nothing friends of her son, what her husband had been doing behind her back, and what these good-looking filthy men were doing to poor women. There is not one among them, not one, she could call a human being; there are no exceptions, they are all animals. It was the exceptions that repelled her most because they were the loudest—the murderers, the possessed, the Arrow Cross men, the priests, the psychologists, and the party chiefs.

  I must be paranoid, mentally ill; I’m exaggerating, taking things too much to heart.

  She could not help noticing that these men did not extricate themselves from one affair before becoming entangled in another. She could not help noticing that they did not bother to keep their disgusting little affairs separate, and, what’s more, shoved and pushed one another around in the fray, with their softer or louder show-off challenges. They thrive in a single large body. These men are not persons but rather identical bundles of impulses that must, in as large a circle as possible and as abundantly as possible, spew forth their sperm.

  All this hugely disgusted her and filled her with furious envy.

  She positively approved that her son was doing this, at least.

  A good thing too that he’s not tying himself down forever to a goose like this Gyöngyvér.

  These men, with their single body, simultaneously tempt and deceive all women.

  And this woman is really a shapely bitch, nothing more.

  What more should her son do with her; at most, he could pass her on to another man so that he too could empty his sperm into her. These rotten men consider women to be nothing but vessels into which to empty their sperm.

  Here I go with my eternal Jewish accusations, as my dear István would say.

  Instead of defending this birdbrained little Gyöngyvér, this wretched little foundling, against my damned son.

  It will overwhelm me, I will drown in my own malice, but what can I do if I hate every one of them; and indeed she hated all women. And that’s also the women’s fault, my mother’s fault; I left Geerte only because, thanks to my mother, I loathe every woman.

  And since she loathed every woman, she tended, with some relish, to despise herself.

  I did not trust her, I couldn’t trust her, because somehow I did not think it natural that someone should be a woman. What need is there for different sexes in the world, anyway. And in time, there must have been something of the mentally ill in her, because she began to see how she turned her own son into a misogynist, how she imbued him with her own hatred for and aversion to the sexes.

  And when her husband infected her, once mildly, once more seriously, and once, to her great astonishment, with crabs, she remained silent, mute, made not a peep, merely endured it. After having consulted her physician, who sent for additional tests even though he had no doubts about the diagnosis and treatment, she merely remarked at the breakfast table that the professor would do well to seek the help of a dermatologist.

  To which the man, from the far end of the table, with a single elegant flick of his wrist replied that he had already done that and everything would soon be all right.

  I hope you didn’t go to see Szemző.

  Dear Erna, you should know me by now, you’ve never had reason to complain about my tact or courtesy.

  But why didn’t you warn me, István, she asked him without any recognizable sign of rebuke; she was genuinely
curious.

  She wanted to understand the man, to see whether their entire life had not been a sheer misunderstanding. Truly to understand, just once, what the other was thinking. Perhaps to understand him now, at this particularly difficult moment.

  No, no, answered the man with buttered toast in his hand, from which, as usual, honey dripped onto the tablecloth.

  Which, of course, had been changed only that morning and which, because of her husband’s absentmindedness, they would have to change again right after breakfast.

  I’m the one who must thank you for your advice, Erna, for your fairness and understanding, Erna, for your kindness.

  You are teasing me, István.

  You know I am not; you must know that you cast a golden glow on my life. Vous avez pour moi un coeur d’or, ma petite.

  My one and only, Erna whispered in response, her eyes swimming with tears.

  I worship you, whispered the man, and neither of them moved from the table.

  Which is to say that neither of them left his or her half of it.

  From which, of course, Erna understood what she already knew: that once again she had dared to come much too close to the man and would have to back off. Something inexplicable and unavoidable was happening in this creature shaped like a man, though not a very spectacular one, whom she despises and loves; and now she might be carrying one of his painful diseases too. In other words, she could not avoid what was happening in the man until she understood him, and by then it might be too late. If fate had inflicted on her this strange, slightly paunchy man, with his narrow bony shoulders, pathologically concave chest, too large hands, thick thighs, and too big head, then this is how things must be. From which it follows logically that, along with him, she had accepted insanity.