Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  What those two men had rubbed his nose in was precisely what he understood in this life of his. He’d follow the giant anywhere without giving it a thought; he understood that. And at any time; he understood that too, if only momentarily. Of course, his imagination did not bother with hope, madness, or norms. He would never again make the big mistake of not reciprocating the giant’s surprising and generous love calls and strange kisses, whether because of the giant’s lack of restraint or his own paralyzing dread. It took him a very long time to understand the sensual meaning of those kisses. But in time his imagination repeatedly completed or continued every unfinished movement and gesture. Nor would he behave differently; in his imagination he turned loose on the giant all his mental strength and physical cheerfulness. Perhaps the giant perceived his cheerfulness on his lips, perhaps in the kiss that was not an immersion but rather a brave staying on the surface. It was not a figment of the imagination that he had been living with him in his imagination ever since that first time. It’s not that without him there was no self-gratification, without his cheerfulness. They did it for each other, not he for himself.

  How could he have thought he was hopeless.

  He couldn’t think something like that because of Klára.

  No greater devotion or loyalty is possible in a person’s life. How many months, how many hours had passed, and he was still clinging loyally and cheerfully to him. The clinging between them was not one-sided. Their mutuality had turned their lives into pure kitsch. Without it he’d never have known about lovers’ harmony. This clearly meant, however, that other people, if they could see into him, would consider him completely mad, because in reality he lived in the giant’s imagination as the giant did in his, and they would never find each other or their place among people, only the mere illusion of that place.

  And knowing this for certain made him totally happy.

  He should not have made the woman’s acquaintance. He thought of himself using the giant’s head. But using his own head, he had to think that the giant probably would not want to be betrayed.

  Sometimes he did not know which one of them was doing the thinking for him.

  Except for him, nobody could have known about this cheerful coexistence encompassing all the senses, but the giant did—and how.

  What would he accomplish with a primitive and boring rebellion against his family such as the woman had suggested.

  He knew of a different rebellion, perhaps the only heroic tale that might impress the woman.

  Their imagination, or their mutual loneliness in the realm of imagination, the continually gained sensual knowledge about each other and their parallel lives, than which there was no stronger bond—this he had discovered on his own. Not the law of free fall, not the Demén-style coke basket—those he did not discover—but this he did. With the giant they did not look at the water to see its currents. It was very clear that Klára belonged in the realm of ordinary people, and it was to that realm that she wanted to entice him. She weighs the offenses and figures out the retaliations, but no thanks, he doesn’t want that, doesn’t want to accept her suggestion. And the giant’s mustached assistant believed they’d managed to get rid of this little prick for good, and since he needed the giant just as much, he said, let’s go, we don’t have to worry about this little jism anymore, but boy, was he mistaken, and he also couldn’t have known that the pictures mutually nurtured in their imaginations never faded, that Kristóf and the giant had made a gift to each other of the sensation of these pictures.

  Ordinary people don’t consider such things.

  Ilona could not help noticing the big stains on the sheet, some on the silk quilt cover too, where it must have fallen back after the semen had shot up in a double-beat rhythm as if breaking through an obstacle, soaring high and then falling down heavily. They did it every night, how could she not notice it; torn with jealousy, Ilona followed the events as she changed the bedding on Lady Erna’s instructions. Not to mention his handkerchiefs flung into the hamper, which Ilona sniffed fearfully; how could she not have sensed what was happening during the night without her. Sometimes he saw on her face that she not only had discovered their secret but was also afraid or afraid of herself for him. They did not talk about this either. Something happened between them early that morning when, after he’d failed to kill himself, he staggered back to the apartment on Teréz Boulevard, his clothes torn, his body filthy and, standing in the kitchen just as he was, bloody and unwashed, wolfed down the leftover rice chicken straight out of the pot; neither of them could mention this to anyone, ever.

  To catch it at least with a handkerchief.

  Even after the inevitable moment, he didn’t have the self-control to tear himself away from the giant. All he could do was follow him with the handkerchief. He was no longer in his right mind, and given the nature of the thing, this should not be understood metaphorically. And the reason he and Ilona could not talk about anything was not that their sense of decency forbade it, but because everything was right as it had happened. Which he also attributed to the giant’s strength. This made him feel so strong and powerful that he expected he’d be the one who at the right moment would block the giant’s way in his frightening and cheerful urge to run amok.

  For that he would have to find him first, to go back to him from his imagination, as it were.

  That is how the heroic tale might have been realized, their terrible happiness.

  It did not occur to him that the giant might have another life, small children who were his spitting image, but that the giant daydreamed about him he felt on his skin, in his aching frontal lobe or in his unavoidably erect penis, in the temperature of his body and the rhythmic tempo of his breathing. Or that the giant might be making love to someone else in his stead, doing it very seriously and, along with this stranger, might be looking for him, Kristóf, in the universe. He saw how they filled him with themselves, with their parts, but he was not envious of them, he had no reason to be jealous. In his imagination the giant had to remain as free as an outlaw. This was the basic condition in the functioning of his imagination, and it would have been senseless to cancel it with jealousy. Neither his body nor his soul was tied to anyone but the giant; that was the big truth; he had become the giant’s prisoner, his slave. Impartial curiosity and imagination had set him loose from everyone else; there was no one left to whom he’d earlier been bound or belonged; put another way, impartiality would not let him get close to anyone. He observed impartially even those to whom he was close. He had to distract Klára’s attention from all this so they could more thoroughly observe each other. And while flitting among his various stories about the city and its architectural styles, explaining things loudly and pragmatically as they drove along, he felt how immoderate a man he was, what an evader, a rambler who made himself laughable with his awkward, pitiful life, and no matter how hard he tried, his story was never nice and round, and there was no way back.

  Only forward, deeper into the thick of things.

  When it comes to sharing one’s story with someone else, the storyteller tries to retailor the story to fit the measurements of the listener, as it were. Then many things come to mind that cannot be told or shared with anyone, which slows down the telling; and with the constant jabbering the storyteller never gets to the end of anything or never returns to the beginning. Either another story joins the storyteller’s own censored tale, or the storyteller trails some silly fairy tale behind the original story.

  It’s not necessarily modesty that keeps him from the story of the other person; of course, that too.

  But he wouldn’t even know where to begin.

  Which makes him think he should strictly separate the stories so that they won’t ever again make contact so dangerously and unguardedly. To separate the secret story from the acceptable one; they mustn’t dribble into each other. But how could things have turned out differently from the way they did. The mere question tortured him. Or what might have happened if he’d mana
ged to make them turn out differently. After all, when telling one’s life story to someone else one manufactures not chronicles but legends for oneself. He keeps telling the legend until he too is taken in by the credible presentation, according to which his life has a nicely rounded conclusion, a brief clever punch line, an epilogue, and a lesson to give some meaning to it even beyond death. And it occurred to him again how many things he and the giant should have done differently to arrive at a different fate, one that might have led him not only to the shuddering happiness of presentiment, intuition, and imagination, but also to the other man’s ordinary, boring, everyday life story.

  No matter how he looked at things and events, this other possibility, this should-have-done-it-differently, planted itself before him, constantly, demandingly. The way things did not happen and wouldn’t have been decent if they had. To achieve another story, he most likely would have had to do things about which, without information concerning the giant or himself, he could not know. How many things they had missed. One after the other they’d mishandled every illusion. Perhaps they missed another story. But lacking the necessary information, how could he describe his misses, or how and to whom could he complain about the lost illusions. His body had revealed much more of the giant than he could factually be aware of; his palms, his thighs, everything, the scent of his hair revealed him, and for that Kristóf did not even have to know his name. Perhaps he had come to possess knowledge of his soul. But he remained unfamiliar with his ordinary weekdays and couldn’t share his own with him. And what if he could. Did fate’s plan, if fate had a plan and if there was human fate at all, include impetuosity, profligacy, and enormous omissions.

  And if these latter were taken into account and his fate could not be imagined without them—because the Creator, let’s say, built them into the plans as a gaping lack—is it worth talking about misses and omissions.

  Why would it be.

  Is it worth trying to make up for his omissions and to pursue his pleasure to the point of exhaustion. Or, to put it the other way around, one should ask how the giant could have known him well enough to hit all the right keys on the keyboard of his guts and take possession of him just as he wished. How could there be such congruence in nature. He did not understand this. Perhaps there are no differences between men because they are nothing but stupid mirror images, which is why they immediately recognize themselves in one another. And in that case, men’s life stories are nothing but repetitions and empty experiences. Any intelligent mind can foresee everything that might happen to them. Sometimes primitive things are harder to understand than complicated ones. And how can he hope to make up for his omissions with a person whom he’ll never meet again, no matter how hard he searches day and night all over the city.

  He had the same difficulty imagining this never-again as he had with infinity, or with space, or the complete emptiness at the original place of creation: the Beginning. He made several attempts but did not succeed, because he saw that the vessel of space might be infinite, and then what sort of a beginning would it have, would it have a limit, could it fit into a larger vessel; he could not imagine that there was nothing before the beginning and therefore there wasn’t a beginning either. Or it happened that suddenly the giant was there, standing before him in his corporeal reality, even though he hadn’t found him in the city. As if he knew his name, János, his name was János Tuba. And if not the man’s corporeal self, then his memory stood before him, a picture, the memory of a gesture or an odor, the giant’s thinking emerging as his own.

  And as if in the darkness he were blinded by the dazzling of days, he buried his face in his hands.

  In the light of day he never would dare ask anyone out loud, but now from behind his hands he did ask.

  Locked inside the friendly darkness of the old car he felt secure.

  It was a special pleasure that the question he addressed to Klára Vay referred to the giant.

  With whom can’t one talk of such things, what one calls philosophy.

  He would have to leave him, and reflect and meditate on him with the woman. Philosophy must be a painful activity, then. Had he told himself forever, he could not have borne his pain, infidelity, and betrayal of the giant without Klára’s noticing it.

  She must not notice it.

  So he tried to keep some of the cheerfulness he had appropriated from the giant.

  And he managed to surprise Klára with it; she was unprepared for it after his serious questions; she stammered—a bit mockingly and not completely free of her earlier banter—as she took a new hard look at the young man, seeing him as for the first time, at the height of his physical and mental powers, at the border of insanity, perfectly composed.

  Have you gone out of your mind, she asked angrily, but her eyes flashed with joy when she heard the splendid questions.

  Why would I have gone out of my mind, moaned the young man, and for a moment he looked out from between his fingers.

  Klára Vay had inherited her improbably large eyes as well as her persistent and neutral attention from her father.

  And what if I’ve gone mad, so what, he added so as not to sound too childish.

  How did he know from whom Klára had inherited the physical texture of her eyes. And the organic world was presumably based on these silly resemblances and relationships.

  Your response depends on it, Klára replied, beaming, and now it was she who ignored Kristóf Demén’s banter and disregarded his viewpoint—and in her great excitement didn’t realize she was addressing him in the familiar.

  First of all, you should be able to formulate your response, she corrected herself, speaking formally.

  But I’m the one who’s asking, I’m the one asking the questions, cried Kristóf in the darkness, at least this once I am.

  To show what your viewpoint is, whether you’re a determinist—in which case the world is a strict system with no room for faith or chance, that’s the question you have to answer—or maybe the opposite.

  How should I know what my viewpoint is, the reason I’m asking is because I don’t know.

  Do you think that vital life processes, or life’s phenomena, even your own, are absolutely and exclusively in a causal relation with one another. Or in your view is there no such relationship among them. That’s another big question.

  The young man lifted his head from his hands, looked out at the pavement glistening in the rain as the moving car gradually devoured it; amazed at how many stones he had tried to move in his great spiritual quest, he preferred to remain silent.

  First he must answer these questions, after that they could talk about anything.

  Klára answers questions with other questions, he replied, dissatisfied; this was too trite even for a trick.

  Why should she need a trick, or what sort of trick did he have in mind.

  To avoid things, to go around them.

  He may not be aware of this, but asking questions is a classical method used in philosophy.

  Then he’d rather take back his dangerous questions.

  Does he believe in predestination, answer that one quickly. What does he base his faith on. Does he believe in free will or believe that the Almighty conceived and decided everything well in advance.

  With the same effort she might as well have asked whether he believes in free fall.

  Exactly, because he can imagine the universe as a gaping void, with not a living godhead anywhere, a kind of desolate metaphysical wasteland, and in this void he would attribute greater significance to contingency or chance than to will, decision, necessity, and so on.

  He doesn’t know; how would he know.

  Doesn’t he understand that people must talk over these things among themselves, people have to show one another the way and make one another realize things, why doesn’t he want to understand this.

  He often has the feeling that one acts before thinking, though it would probably make sense to do things the other way around, Kristóf continued after a brief
silence. At any rate, he says things first and then thinks about them, and as a result he justifies them only later, which makes his whole life kind of laughable.

  Klára did not respond for a while, but clicked her tongue admiringly.

  Perhaps she was busy with the car, with the driving and the empty streets, or perhaps she liked and enjoyed the thought.

  Later they could not have said when they started in again or how many times they stopped.

  How would he know what the order of things should be.

  Kristóf had to know this for himself, and she could not decide it for him.

  They were approaching Dürer Ajtósi Row, where they’d have to turn.

  He should name the reference points of his personal perspective, the so-called pivotal points.

  He has no personal perspective.

  But of course he does.

  He’s one big knot of feelings, nothing else, he’s a nobody. That things might have pivotal points—what an idea.

  Enough of this maudlin stuff. They should be talking more sensibly.

  It’s Klára who’s talking to him like a strict schoolmarm.

  And right now I’m being relatively gentle, I’ll have you know.

  Klára should stop sounding so high and mighty too.

  Sensing the possibility of falling back to pointless mockery and teasing, they both had to tamp down their aggressiveness.

  It’s not about categories that he wants to talk with Klára.

  Does he think that world affairs will slowly become knowable and, once they are, can be sorted out in line with his admirable views. Like pralines, candy, dragées, and bonbons. These here are the ones with fillings, those over there are without; or sorted according to the kind of filling, caramel or hazelnut cream, raisins or almonds.

  You’re joking again.

  It’s easy to joke, but at the store they must perform this thankless sorting job at least once a week because even when one takes great care and pays close attention things have a way of becoming mixed up, and it’s no laughing matter, not at all.