Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  That’s right, comrade Rott, and then the glory won’t be small.

  The timing is good, comrade Karakas, if I may say it like that, one can only approve.

  Which in their professional language meant, if you ask me, perhaps it’s not too late. We can sincerely hope that our friend Ágost Lippay has not yet dug himself a tunnel underground and indeed is not a mole.

  He would never have thought he’d be able to think of Ágost in such plain words, so that with such a simple falsehood he could avoid his own death sentence, or at least find a solution whereby he would not be the one to be hurt by the friendship among the three men.

  He could not have imagined that the betrayal would be so easy, that betrayal was as easy as falling off a log.

  Occasionally some dripping was heard somewhere, and then echoed loudly in the dark hall.

  It wasn’t as if he were committing a serious betrayal for the first time.

  But Karakas had left him no option. He wasn’t going to let himself be held uniquely responsible for this definitive solution. Or at least the weight of the responsibility would be shared. The undisguised strength of this little administrative certainty gave him a peculiar feeling. Not dizziness but raw joy. As if from the pervasive joy of perspicacity he was on the verge of fainting, feeling at once strong and weak. Like Faust, not only had he gained insight into the unmasked nature of the world, but he also proved to be more loyal than he had expected or hoped himself to be. A sense of his own grandeur was reinforced.

  Because he was more loyal to the cause of communism and to his oath than he was to his friend, he was more loyal to his profession and his conviction, and because he succeeded in making this loyalty prevail over all his other feelings.

  He was nearly choking with tears.

  Which surprised Karakas. It was as if he had caught himself out.

  At this moment, tiny cracks opened up on their faces among their various pretenses. They looked into the depths of their mutual source of joy. Another drop dripped from the dark, cold medieval cupola.

  I betrayed him, Rott rejoiced to himself. And he rejoiced exuberantly, as if this had happened for the first time, as if in the past he had not worked a long time as a mole for the British secret service.

  But that was an institution and this was a bosom buddy.

  He had to utter the magic word to himself, because otherwise he could not have comprehended that betrayal becomes not a moral weight but a physical relief. And he can thank this physically rather repulsive male person for it, for lifting the oppressive burden of procrastination off his shoulders. There was no way back, he too no longer had any secrets; they had let him know that they knew everything about him that had been or could be known, he had no place to hide.

  Like a crevice in a rock that remains open to the destructive light.

  Karakas raised his eyebrows almost involuntarily, a sign of his wonder and amazement, and, to keep Rott from seeing this, made the most telling possible move: he ducked his head again in the hot water.

  Oh, he did not wish to conceal himself; he wanted to spare Rott from his own shame.

  At the moment of betrayal Rott was finding pleasure in himself, however, exactly as he had during his darkest inner struggles and amorous confusions, from which he had fled to secret drinking and solitary binges. Once again he broke free of terrible fears and trembling and of lovely childish delusions. In his childhood they had warned him that betraying someone was to throw oneself into a kind of moral abyss, caught in morality’s whirlpool, from which there was no way back. And once again it was proved that this was not so. I am the abyss; I am the whirlpool. He could be glad of this, because it was something he had known for a long time. A living person had become free of the burden of a friend once lovingly bound to him. Whom until then he had tied to himself, to whom else, and whom now he nevertheless set free, hoping for the liberation of them both. He could be thankful to providence. Let him go. The feeling, the knowledge offered a stronger pleasure than lovemaking because, finally, another human life was no longer tied to human organs, skin, smells, or gestures, and had no perishable juices.

  He had to feel himself light, airy.

  Now anything could happen.

  He had nothing to do with him, and this suddenly rolled back and liquidated their common past. As if he no longer had any need for breathing, for anything, for eating, shitting, anything that earthly existence demands of a human being.

  I killed him; and the sober phrase, the clear accounting, felt especially good because it was as if he were the sole possessor of this knowledge, even if meant that he had killed part of himself as well.

  When after a brief yet substantial moment Karakas surfaced again, he said that Lippay’s mission of course had a rock-hard condition.

  He laughed hideously as he said this.

  He has to get married within a week so that he can travel in the company of his little wife.

  As two tourists.

  They will hardly need luggage.

  It will be done. André nodded to this coarse man while keeping his expression, excited by joy, dutifully somber.

  He was not happy to see the powerful man go so far.

  But you, comrade Rott, will also have to create more orderly conditions in your private life.

  And he sounded the same hideous laugh. Rott joined him, laughing at his own nonexistent private life, which the bathing hall echoed several times.

  Even though Karakas would have preferred to sob and shout.

  By now, he could see nothing on Rott’s face. Which did not fool him in the least. No stranger to betrayal, he knew from his own experience that Rott’s jubilation and fear were increasing as a spiral of self-gratification and self-admiration carried him away, with a phase delay.

  Rott understood this to mean, however, that there would be appropriate blood money; he would get his promotion and that would be it. He’d have to get married and start behaving like a conscientious clerk, and to all appearances that is how things should be.

  So that this perverted little asshole, this lousy turd with his pencil-thin prick, can have his revenge.

  As if Rott understood that Karakas grasped all his ulterior motives.

  And to snuff out the elemental joy of becoming pals and also to show who was boss, Karakas, with true manly affability, gripped Rott’s thigh under the water.

  Comrade Rott will forgive me, I’ve had a tough day, I must excuse myself.

  Contemptuously he let go of the strange thigh, motioned that he would take a dip in the cold-water pool, and their audience ended.

  And Rott was free to go on his way unhindered, with his breathing regained in fear and trembling. He regretted that he would no longer find his friends behind the little green door. He felt especially sorry about the anticipated loss for Hansi. And he could not imagine how life would be reorganized between the two of them once the third member of their group disappeared for good. He was afraid that the two of them might not be able to bear the solitude, which he could well endure on his own. Karakas did not lie, he very rarely did, and he was indeed having a difficult day. He needed the cold-water pool, and he repeatedly immersed himself in it. The movements pleasantly numbed the skin covering his warmed-up muscles. Above the pool they were waiting for him with his bathrobe and various towels. He dried his head as he walked. The masseur stayed close behind him and continued to massage him with the rich material of the robe, kneading his back and shoulders while buzzing in his ear that comrade Karakas should really stay for a few more minutes today, take time out to see to his health because he could feel how knotty his muscles were through the robe.

  They opened the cabin door for him and handed him his clothes item by item. A few minutes later, curled up on the deep seat of the large Russian limousine, the Zim, they sped him back across the Margit Bridge to the prime minister’s office. When they reached the ramp to the island, where the arc of the bridge rises to its highest point, he looked among the flat roofs of Újlipótvár
os for the roof terrace of Mária Szapáry’s eighth-floor apartment. Behind the high solid parapet, he quickly found the pale little light of the salon’s always-open glass screen. In time, on their way out, the policemen most likely had to close the door they had found open.

  The reason he loved Mária Szapáry was not because in November 1944 she had saved his life.

  It probably happened the other way around.

  The woman must have hidden him in the big wall closet because she could not otherwise reciprocate his silent and persistent love for her. By then other people were hiding there too: Jupi, who had given him only his name used in the movement, a field officer from a very good family, and a Jewish engineer from the neighborhood. Later, Mária Szapáry spoke to her women friends about Karakas as she would about a loyal canine, very kindly. Which he also knew, because with her customary noble simplicity she called him dog straight to his face. Listen to me, dog, I want to come up to your office, when will you have time for me, you could do me a number of favors. I’ll go see dog about it, he’ll take care of it, he’ll smooth things over. I’ll talk to dog about it, I won’t go to see him, but sooner or later at some upcoming reception. Even if she had any interest in men left in her, what could she have done with such a shop assistant with his slicked-down hair.

  Karakas had been ordered home from Paris for illegal work, but after the German occupation he was no longer safe, his false papers notwithstanding. The potential danger of his situation could hardly have been greater, but neither of them had a choice. He did not know what to do with the news of the red countess’s death. It pained him and made him sentimental. He wanted at least to see the apartment, if he could not comprehend his completely unreasonable attraction. In the last few years, he had been preparing for such a visit, as if he were threatening Mária Szapáry with it.

  Yes, of course, I’d be very glad, please come for tea, we’d love to see you, anytime.

  They had seen each other exclusively at public places, in theaters, at the opera, film premieres, or state receptions to which the countess was almost always invited officially because of her role in the resistance; sometimes she showed up to have something quickly taken care of, though since 1956 she had let Karakas feel that despite these meetings they would not retrieve their earlier harmony.

  Of which neither of them wanted to speak.

  To open the wall closet through whose sliding back panels one could gain the flat roof.

  From there they reached the steel door of a more distant elevator shaft. When Mária Szapáry was taken away, that is where they holed up for two days and two nights, without food or water. They had to go out to the roof to shit and to urinate. And then they got to the street during the heaviest bombardment, when the front had reached the nearby streets.

  According to the first police report, and this reached the highly placed man in the form of a verbal accounting, his secretary whispered what had just been communicated over the telephone, that in the early morning hours Mária Szapáry had taken Elisa Koháry out of the apartment, in a wheelchair, to the corridor, where she had earlier pried open the door to the elevator shaft, using a screwdriver later found in the apartment.

  And what she was preparing to do must have been clear to the other woman too.

  They also found crude material traces of her resistance and struggle and, given the sensitivity of the case, secured them.

  She had pushed her into the elevator shaft along with the wheelchair. It made an enormous noise, and the neighbors heard a woman’s screaming, probably the hapless woman’s last shouts.

  Despite the early hour, many people ran out to the echoing corridors.

  They heard something, but the noise was actually subsiding; when it completely subsided they heard someone slam and lock the door to Mária Szapáry’s apartment, but they could not say whether it was Mária Szapáry.

  With her strong deliberate steps, in her rope-soled Basque slippers she clattered across the hallway, across her workshop, out onto the terrace where now, at the ides of March, the flower boxes were still empty. She was as calm as if she had just let out a tarrying guest.

  Indeed, that is how it was.

  But a year earlier, when she for the first time had confessed to Mrs. Szemző, Irma Arnót, that this was it, up to here and no further, because she could not go on like this, she no longer had any reserves left for the woman, none, then Irmuska did not say not to do it.

  They just kept sitting until it became light outside.

  In the widest possible arc, she threw herself over the parapet.

  Not to get caught on anything.

  This Sunny Summer Afternoon

  I don’t know how things had started between us, but Ilonka Weisz always waited for me here on this landing between the first and second floors.

  I’d known her from before because she was friends with Viola and Szilvia. Sometimes she visited us in Damjanich Street and occasionally she came with us to City Park. But she would never talk to me, as if I didn’t exist.

  Viola and Szilvia said this was because she positively detested me, that I shouldn’t be surprised if she looked right through me. And the reason they could not make Ilonka Weisz change her mind was that whenever they were close to softening her heart toward me, I would behave callously again. They had to endure my insensitivity because they were my cousins, and one puts up with a lot when it comes to relatives, but I shouldn’t expect Ilonka to tolerate it. And they asked me confidentially to stop behaving so callously, at least with her, even if I went on being callous with them.

  I would have been glad to comply, if only I had understood what they were talking about.

  I was amazed at them, at how they could prattle all this nonsense to me while Ilonka Weisz sat on another bench, dangling her feet and pretending not to know what the girls and I were talking about. This is how people talked in Damjanich Street, and this sort of talking was understood in Dembinszky Street too, but I had a lot of trouble with their words. People there used different words and actually behaved differently from the way people did on Stefánia Boulevard. I could not imagine what callous behavior was or what I should do so as not to be callous. I also didn’t understand why on earth anyone should be softened, or what was meant by softening her heart toward me. Steel could be softened; or we say that cheese, water, or a spring breeze is soft. To soften a person implies that the person first is hard. Ilonka Weisz wasn’t hard, just a common little girl with a big mouth.

  Except she detested me for some reason and that was pretty confusing. Her detestation was attractive in a way, but I didn’t know what to do with it.

  On Stefánia Boulevard, one would say to something like this, well, that’s her problem.

  The change might have occurred one day when she was coming from her lesson just as I was going to mine, and to my huge surprise I saw she did not detest me so much. She said something to me or, I don’t know, maybe she asked me something, and I answered her politely. I didn’t understand why she had changed so suddenly. Before that, she’d turned her head away whenever we met by chance in the staircase or on one of the landings and then, to be sure I had no doubts about her feelings, she’d make a face to show me that my sheer presence disgusted her.

  Or maybe they had already planned what they were going to do and that’s why she was friendlier, out of plain calculation. From then on she always had something to say about the piano teacher, the lesson, Szilvia and Viola. One day she said I should go up to their place after my lesson because her mother would be going to work then.

  The piano teacher gave her free lessons, and she practiced on the teacher’s piano because they didn’t have their own.

  Because of all the beds in their apartment, they couldn’t fit in even an upright piano, Viola said, and they didn’t have the money for it either.

  The image of the congestion in their apartment scared me and did not make me want to go there, though she repeated her invitation many times and always added that she would be alone.


  Come on, Szilvia said, they’d have plenty of money for a piano if only they knew how to economize. The reason we have money for everything is because Daddy makes sure every penny goes a long way.

  They squander everything, I’m telling you, they’re a bunch of spendthrifts.

  But we’re telling this only to you, confidentially.

  We’d never say this straight to Ilonka, not for anything in the world.

  The truth is they haven’t got enough money to rent even a lousy old upright for her.

  On the Stefánia, no one would have said anything like this. And if the girls talked so arrogantly and conceitedly about Ilonka Weisz, then why did they call themselves her best friends.

  It always seemed to me that Aréna Road was a real border between the two sections of the city. On the other side of this border, one did not understand many things.

  There were three siblings in the Weisz family; Ilonka had two older brothers, Ernő and Dezső, famous hoodlums in the neighborhood who avoided school, but Ilonka was considered such a great and brilliant musical talent that the piano teacher could not let her go to waste. Many people in the building had a great respect for the piano teacher; they called her an unselfish soul. True, the boys lugged up wood and coal from the cellar every Friday afternoon for her, and their mother scrubbed her floors during the spring and fall cleanings, thus giving proof of the family’s gratitude, but the boys showed absolutely no interest in Ilonka’s piano studies.

  Neither did her mother, she just let it happen, if it had to happen; she had enough troubles of her own.

  I did not talk to anyone about these things, but Viola and Szilvia told me about them along with many other matters. They gave me the impression they never stopped prattling. The moment one of them stopped the other continued, and sometimes they spoke over each other’s words so that I couldn’t understand either of them. I learned important things from them about everyone; without them, I wouldn’t have found out where Ilonka Weisz lived.