Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  Yet she felt there was no humiliation she could not endure. If only she could stay with him.

  But he should spurt it on her, spurt his semen on her instead of spluttering his come on the floor, not on the parquet floor, so Ilona could see what the pig had done; how could anybody be such a filthy pig.

  Lady Erna watched the young woman silently as they left Moszkva Square behind them.

  You’re so quiet, Gyöngyvér, my dear, you look unusually pale, she said in the backseat of the Pobeda, her voice quite loud though she still held herself aloof.

  Listen to me, Ágost, Gyöngyvér kept saying to herself, because she wanted to rehearse what she would tell him that evening.

  It’s over, I should have known it would be over because of you, but now it really is, everything is over between us.

  After what you did to me last night.

  And she heard Lady Erna saying something to the effect that she sincerely hoped everything was all right.

  Except I might faint, but I wouldn’t say that to you aloud.

  Lady Erna has nothing to worry about.

  What a lousy, rotten old woman, she thought, as rotten as her little son. What could be all right, what in the fuck could be all right.

  But heedlessly she begged Lady Erna’s pardon, she said everything was perfectly all right, she was only ruminating on something.

  Ruminating on what, what was she ruminating about, Lady Erna cried with an offensive laugh.

  She’d have given anything to know what Gyöngyvér had to ruminate on so thoroughly.

  Luckily the other person can’t know it.

  Aunt Nínó should not worry about her.

  Well, she has enough to worry about Ágost. Who keeps disappearing. That’s the cause of her heart trouble, and the constant maternal worries have ruined her general health.

  Gyöngyvér has no idea how much.

  The moment they get to the hospital, she will call him, Gyöngyvér responded in her servile voice.

  What did Aunt Nínó think he’d been doing to her. That maybe he’d made Gyöngyvér an exception.

  No, not a chance.

  He’s rude.

  Says, I’ll pick you up at six.

  He’s not there at eight or even at ten.

  Something’s come up—hard to believe, but that’s all he says.

  But what has come up, Ágost, my dear.

  Unfortunately she always talks to him as if she’s already forgiven him for everything, in advance, for anything.

  How could she be kinder or more polite to him.

  He doesn’t answer.

  And why didn’t you call me, Ágost, my dear, to tell me that something’s come up.

  He has no explanation for the simplest things, acts as if he hadn’t even heard me.

  Of course she would try to reach him, to find him.

  He just keeps staring with his big eyes.

  It’s very insolent of him to cause his own mother so much grief.

  And at a time like this, added Lady Erna and, quite unexpectedly, still somewhat mellowed by her wickedness and sentimentality during the previous minutes, she cried out, then cut short the sound and swallowed her tears. Though she felt at home in Gyöngyvér’s company because of the younger woman’s submissive tone, she also pitied her almost as much as she did herself.

  That’s very kind of you, Gyöngyvér, and it will be important to do, since I think we won’t have much time.

  Lady Erna could count on her, absolutely.

  Because if she couldn’t find him, she was sure she would find one of the boys.

  They were still calling to each other, seemingly in vain, when they both reached the shore on that enchanted night, which they felt to be endless.

  I can always leave him a message if I can’t reach him otherwise, that he should come right away to Kútvölgyi Hospital.

  After continued and desperate hooting, they found each other, teeth chattering.

  Or if I can’t find the boys, their secretary will surely be at her desk, by the phone.

  As if it were the world’s greatest miracle that neither of them had drowned in the river and suddenly they were both standing there among the pale moonlit trees, their bodies trembling, only an arm’s length apart.

  But then, shaking and trembling, they had to look for Bellardi’s abandoned car, and he did not even hear what the two women behind him were chattering about.

  They looked for it so long in the darkness punctuated with the hooting of owls that they thought the entire night would be spent in the search and that they were merely dreaming that it was possible to find anything.

  From then on they said not a word to each other; in the moonlit darkness they even restrained the chattering of their teeth, so that they’d have absolutely nothing to do with each other, not even what chattering teeth might betray.

  They could reveal nothing about themselves to each other, and mainly not their weakness, nothing about the fallibility of their bodies.

  There was a terrible chance that they might loose their infernal wrath on each other’s goose-bumpy body.

  They would have loudly reproached each other for something for which they could not reproach themselves. As if they had lost each other because of each other. They could not find the damn car with their clothes in it because of him; it was his fault, that damned other one.

  Luckily they were stubborn and determined enough to hold their peace, though each felt strongly the silent wrath and hatred of the other.

  And when he finally discharged the two women in front of the hospital and they, tugging on their gloves and holding their hats against the wind, slowly made their way up the steps, which remained blindingly white even under the overcast sky, Bellardi could hardly comprehend that in his unfolding life this might have been the happiness which until now had not proved worthy of even being mentioned.

  A completely different, strange life that might have been his if it had found its substance in him, not only resistance and toleration. His happiness could not escape him, though it did not possess him; until this very moment, he had not even acknowledged that it was precisely with this pain and this lack that happiness did not escape him. There was no continuation, and the beginning had vanished in obscurity. Once, a long time ago, his alien life with all its futility and unexpected pleasure had snatched him up from the bottom of unhappiness to take him to itself, body and soul, as an empty object, into its iron fist, and then, just as unexpectedly it had dropped him and left nothing behind except the deadly bleakness of boredom and fatigue, war, humiliations, jail, and privations.

  He had to get across it.

  Now it was wringing his heart.

  He did not know why he should have to get across it or whether that bleakness would even have a far side.

  At any rate, he had no strength left to turn the key in the ignition.

  And there was the realization that with Lojzi Madzar and Elisa he had indeed tasted and enjoyed the happiness of being privileged, however their story ended or had not even started.

  That is the sum of what was; everything else would begin only now.

  Leaning across the rim of his consciousness, he managed to comprehend the strangeness of his condition; I wouldn’t have this much strength left, I shouldn’t have even this much strength, but actually, I’m not surprised.

  I was still young then, a young man. I could swim across the Danube at Mohács with my young friend, a number of times too, and now I can’t turn the damn key in the ignition.

  Back then I also knew I was swimming across my death, which I enjoyed immensely. What I enjoyed was that despite all my misfortunes my muscles and nerves functioned flawlessly in face of the elements.

  In the hospital lobby, decorated with tropical plants, palm trees, and giant ficuses, inspired by the fascist spirit of wondrous sterilization and furnished in the style of imperial modernity, whose coffered ceiling was supported by smooth marble columns, and in which at this hour not a soul was to be f
ound, the porter showed Gyöngyvér where the telephone booth was.

  This hospital was perhaps the last edifice left in the city that had once dreamed of a Hungarian empire, before everything collapsed.

  Follow me as soon as you can, Lady Erna motioned to her from the elevator that was to take her up to the psychiatric ward on the top floor where the professor was being treated for brain softening.*

  Looking out of the spacious glass phone booth while she waited, dialed, and then talked, Gyöngyvér noticed that the pike-gray Pobeda was still parked in front of the hospital.

  She spoke to the secretary; none of the boys was in, but she managed to arouse the secretary’s curiosity as well as her willingness to help since they were talking about a matter of life and death, and Ágost Lippay’s father literally had only a few hours left to live. She saw the pike-gray Pobeda make a sharp turn in front of the building, its wheels screeching; it barely missed slamming against the sidewalk across the street. Gyöngyvér almost cried out. And then the cab pulled into the hospital parking lot but stopped as if there were no marked parking spaces or as if the engine had been suddenly throttled.

  They hadn’t told him to wait; it was very suspicious, what this Bellardi was doing in the parking lot.

  She could not give him her full attention because the secretary on the phone was promising that she’d try to track down the boys right away.

  And as if she were saying.

  Where.

  What are you saying.

  Track down the boys where, Gyöngyvér shouted, because there was much noise around her now.

  She thinks all three of them are there, the secretary said, involuntarily raising her voice at the other end of the line. They can’t be anywhere else, she shouted. No doubt about it, today they seem to be staying a little longer than usual.

  The poor things, sometimes they work at night too.

  A bus passed by on Kútvölgyi Street, going uphill, its engine loud, and Gyöngyvér could not hear where the secretary thought Ágost and the boys might now be. She was relieved that he was not with another woman who might take him away from her, so she wouldn’t have to break with him tonight.

  You can count on me, shouted the otherwise lazily indifferent woman, I’ll do it right away.

  But where are they, for God’s sake, Gyöngyvér insisted, what did you say, I didn’t get it.

  That’s the part I didn’t get.

  I’ll get to them, Gyöngyvér, leave it to me, don’t worry, I will.

  You must have other things to do now.

  You don’t have to worry about this.

  But despite all her promises, the secretary did not manage to find them. Gyöngyvér put down the receiver, calmed herself, and, with a last glimpse at the cab, headed for the elevator.

  As if being able to drive his cab into the lot had been a great accomplishment. Bellardi took off his worn leather cap and did not understand why he was perspiring. In the oppressive dimness he leaned on the steering wheel for a while to rest a little. He was ashamed that one of the wheels had hit the sidewalk, as if his greatest concern now were damage done to the cab, property of the state-owned taxi service. However, not only his forehead was covered with perspiration. As soon as his head touched the steering wheel, he felt that his bare neck was soaking wet, which made him feel cold.

  But why am I cold if I’m so hot, which I can’t feel.

  I don’t feel anything, I’m becoming numb.

  This is the reason that in the darkness descending about his shoulders he had to recall the particular summer night that most likely had accepted his life and absorbed it. How curious, how his shoulders throbbed and how weighty the past proved to be.

  When his entire naked body trembled.

  As if, at the sight of the unknown future, he were trembling for life, fearful of what was ahead because of his abandoned life. The life he would have gladly given, all his life, to Elisa, and had feared—he now at last realized—giving to Madzar. He saw how helplessly Madzar’s naked body was trembling only an arm’s length away; Madzar could not control his either. And perhaps it had been in his power to stop or relieve the trembling.

  But his armpits and chest became drenched under the ice-cold shirt, his loins and, oddly, the crook of his knees too; he could feel sweat dripping down his calves.

  The secretary could not reach the boys because at the end of the glass-covered corridor of the Lukács Baths, nobody bothered with the telephone ringing in the cabin attendant’s booth. It rang insistently and long and then it ceased for a short while only to begin anew a little farther away in the public phone booth.

  The bench, on which a little while ago and under the indignant gaze of the new attendant the three friends had been lying in one another’s laps and arms, was now empty; those attractive men, with their choice rudeness and equally choice gentleness, had been trying to keep Ágost from another attack of despondency. The realization had never reached Gyöngyvér’s awareness that the man she loved, whom she would have to leave during the approaching evening, was a seriously afflicted and endangered melancholic. The thought would have paralyzed her or would have ruined her amorous enthusiasm, which she considered a gift more precious than anything else in the world.

  She could not have imagined that with her enthusiasm she had failed to reach, let alone mitigate, the other person’s weltschmerz.

  At this moment, André Rott’s cabin stood empty. Unquestionably the most envied cabin even among the most privileged bathing guests, it was the very last in the row of cabins, next to the bathing master’s booth and the stairs going up to the sun terrace. In front of it was the famous bench on which one could lounge, sunbathe from spring to fall, receive guests and chat with them, not to mention the public phone at hand on which, in contrast with all other public telephones in Budapest, one could receive calls. A short while ago, Rott had had only enough time to throw off all his clothes and, with a certain physical repugnance, put on his wet bathing trunk before dashing off.

  Events, running on various tracks, now followed at fever-pitch speed.

  When a few moments earlier, as the ambulance people had put the young man slightly injured during his epileptic fit on a stretcher and taken him away, the prime minister’s private secretary appeared in the corridor, having come from the steam bath; he was still red and perspiring. A rapidly balding, not very tall man with a slight limp, who, according to his official title, was head of the prime minister’s secretariat with the rank of cabinet minister, had arrived through the secret side door, which invisible hands closed behind him.

  He went about the world as unimpeded as if he could walk through walls.

  As he passed, he motioned to André Rott, who was just putting on his socks, to follow him, go for a swim with him, and with his thumb pointed upward, signaling that celestial persons had ordered something very important.

  And Rott knew very well who the celestial ones were in this instance.

  The young man’s protestations were in vain, he begged them not to take him to the hospital, he had had this problem many times before, in the Gellért nobody paid attention to it, and in a little while everything would be all right.

  Of course everything would be all right.

  He should not worry.

  Just a little dizziness, that’s all he feels.

  His head nearly split with pain; that was the truth, a sharp throbbing pain that sometimes remained stuck in his brain for days, making him vomit a lot of the time, but he kept quiet about this because the doctors could not help him anyway.

  See, he can stand up already.

  Whenever this happened to him, all he wanted to do was walk out on the world or hide at the bottom of abandoned mouse holes and shut out every bit of light. But Rózsika, the ticket taker, with her blood-red beads, her thick neck layered with rings of fat, pushed him back down, did not let him sit up; she had the same kind of blood-red beads on her massive wrists and in her small ears.

  They rattled softly wi
th her every movement.

  You, now listen to me, my child, you may have a concussion. Don’t ever forget that, my sweet Jani.

  And that means you must not move.

  Everybody knows that.

  I’m just telling you so you won’t forget it. You’re lucky you didn’t split your head on the faucet. I can hardly believe it; you missed it by a hairsbreadth when you fell, my God.

  She followed them, she walked with them across the inner courtyard with the plane trees, and when they stopped for a moment she would stroke the young man’s limp hands, arms, and shoulders, his marble-pale forehead. The stretcher bearers stopped and changed direction several times under the storm-beaten wet trees, discussing loudly to which building the physician on duty had asked them to take the patient. All the while Rózsika whispered in a voice sweet as honey that he should not be afraid because she would not leave him, she would go everywhere with him, she will take care of everything but absolutely everything.

  In the ice-cold wind she gathered the thick hand-knitted sweater about her, and the strangest thing was that in the following years she kept her promise. To the general indignation of her friends, colleagues, and relatives, she did not leave the young man, and they learned that the young man clung to her no less ardently once he left his little fiancée for Rózsika.

  For a few steps the cross-eyed chief attendant also followed the stretcher in his white short-sleeved shirt and his white trousers tight as a drum on his paunch and buttocks. His wooden-soled slippers clapped along as they walked. He was turned back by the security people streaming in from the steam bath to take up their observation posts around the pool, in the corridors, and at other important points of the building as required by the presence of a high-ranking visitor.

  Of course Wolkenstein, known here by his Hungarian name, János Kovách, could not see any of this because a moment earlier he had finally had the chance to take his chilled limbs and disappear behind the sailcloth curtains, where hot, unadulterated medicinal water gushed freely from the shower heads in great spurts, smelling like rotten eggs, just as it burst forth from the thermal spring. He shampooed his gray head, rubbing it pleasurably, and then did the same to his substantial limbs, which over time had grown a little heavy; he worked up a foam, his strong hands gliding as he massaged himself while over the gurgling water he sang at the top of his voice.