Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  Both Klára and Kristóf were used to going to completely unfamiliar places where people were celebrating a fiasco or solemnizing a devastation. Yet a few years earlier no one would have shown up uninvited anywhere. But these decorum issues had ended in Budapest. One could virtually name the hour when this had happened. It was not that no one now hewed to the old obligatory codes of behavior—some people did—but that it was impossible to know who would comply, when, or why somebody would not, or even what should be complied with.

  A lean figure in a white shirt was lying on the steps, his torso reclining against the grating that surrounded the elevator shaft.

  Hesitantly they stopped above him.

  At the very same instant, amid noise and music, the tall wide door of the apartment upstairs opened, and along with thick clouds of smoke a loud group of people emerged, shouting back and forth.

  Stop, how many times do I have to tell you.

  Above their shoulders one could see that the apartment hallway was also full of people; the wonderful chaos was complete.

  I’m afraid you’re dreaming.

  Different kinds of music reached them simultaneously: somebody, in a whiny voice, was demanding love, a man’s voice on a tape recorder or record; and somebody deep in the apartment was pounding away on the piano with great conviction and screaming at the same time as if beside himself, or anyway it sounded as if the pianist and the screamer were the same person. People in the group streaming out the door were all talking at once, each taking great pleasure in speaking over the other voices. The group included young women and somewhat older men, all quite gentle, almost shy figures and all of them completely drunk. As they started down the stairs, they too stopped above the figure lying on the steps, held on to one another, swayed back and forth—which was not without danger because their hands and arms were filled with empty bottles—groping for support on the walls, banisters, and one another. They sobered up a bit in the drafty staircase and began to giggle at this other drunk stretched out on the steps, but what the fuck.

  They not only appeared to be but were kindly souls, if a little too loud. They had banded together with the purpose of collecting all the empty bottles from between people’s feet, redeeming them, and, at the last moment before sobering up, buying more booze with the deposit money. If their hands hadn’t been full, they would have pulled up the figure lying on the steps and taken him back to the apartment. This would not have been empathy, goddamn it, but some kind of communal spirit, of sportsmanlike good will.

  They all saw that this man was not only drunk but weeping, big dumb ass. One arm was wrapped around his head—maybe he had some injury—and he was pressing his face to the rusty grating of the elevator shaft, his back convulsing sporadically.

  Well, let God put his cock where he wants to, but this guy sure has some big-ass grief.

  Others fumbled awkwardly with their bottles, trying to put them down on the stairs, but in their inebriation they could not figure out which steps were closer or farther away, or they feared the stone paving was too hard for the glass, and the whole thing turned into an awful clanking and sniggering.

  Hold it, Kristóf said quietly, I think I know this guy.

  At the sight of his filled bottles, the ones above him on the staircase laughed loudly, cheered, and neighed that now they didn’t even have to go out because relief had arrived, looka here, damn it, they’re bringing vodka in huge bottles.

  Klára fumbled with her bottles and, giggling along with the others, warned that she might at any second drop them both.

  The pretty miss has nothing to worry about, they’ll be happy to help her.

  When it comes to booze they’re willing to sacrifice the life of their friend.

  They might sell their bosom buddy’s whore of a mother, but even Kristóf couldn’t do anything with this drunken animal.

  A nasty piece of work, they laughed stridently, all of them together, they know him well.

  A pale-faced small young woman at the top of the stairs spread her arms wide and, nobody knew why, yelled into the bare and echoing nocturnal staircase, her voice surprisingly loud, that she would kiss every ass, she’d do it willingly, there’s no ass she wouldn’t kiss and lick, but nobody should expect her to put a good face on it or be happy about it.

  But people paid no attention, and acted as if they hadn’t heard her drunken nihilism. And the clinking noises increased as they quickly left their empty glasses all over the place.

  Somebody kicked over a bottle, which set other bottles rolling, but none of them broke.

  They left quickly with their booty and went back to the apartment with the wine and vodka; the clanking sound of their return echoed in the stairwell for a long time.

  If not for Kristóf and Klára’s arrival, these people, at the risk of sobering up, would have marched across stormy Rákóczi Road all the way to Teréz Boulevard to get deposits on their empty bottles in the only food shop in Budapest that stayed open twenty-four hours a day.

  Everything was all right—just as things unfolded in the simplest possible way in the following half hour.

  By then, no one took the future seriously anymore.

  The crowd in the big apartment readmitted the unknown company, along with Klára, and left the hallway door open behind them. And in a place like this, issues such as acquaintance or stranger or introduction or any other stupid formality simply didn’t exist.

  Not because fellow feeling had suddenly become popular, but because everyone was equally indifferent to everyone else.

  Simply shit on everything.

  Fuck it, man. I shit on your filthy mug.

  What makes you think I don’t shit on everybody.

  To be exact, the magic moment had arrived late in the afternoon of New Year’s Eve 1956, shortly before nightfall. The curfew was still very much in force, and because of piles of debris in the middle of Ferenc, József, Teréz, and Lipót boulevards waiting to be carted away, streetcars had not yet started running and there was only just enough room for buses and cars to get by. At some places collected debris was piled on sidewalks, at other places, where they had not even started to clear away the results of the bombing, bare beams, bathtubs, remnants of chandeliers and furniture were spilled and strewn everywhere, flowing and crashing into one another. The furnishings of collapsed apartments and burned-out businesses.

  In theory, these streets and roads were supposed to be empty by eleven o’clock at night, because traffic halted at ten, superintendents were supposed to close and lock all main entrances by half past ten and check, no, report, on who came in at the last minute; during the night only the booted footsteps of police and special antiriot units could be heard.

  Occasionally a shout—a solitary shot too.

  But on that late afternoon the number of people in the streets kept increasing and they were vociferous. As if they had a common plan for everyone to head to the boulevards. It was cold and dry, the sky heavily overcast and public lighting sorely lacking. It was impossible to know where so many people were coming from in the rapidly descending darkness.

  These people were not making demands or demonstrating against anything; they just climbed up on the dangerous piles of debris, and did so silently, not talking to one another or anyone. They drank; and those who were already drunk yelled at the top of their voices. To which the authorities could have no special objections, which is to say the yelling, which should have been quickly forbidden, was tacitly permitted because people were not yelling together; everyone was hooting or yelling for himself. Some brought their children’s toys with them, the ones that entrepreneurs started making anew only later on, and whistles, which could be found in families everywhere because there was no Young Pioneer* without a whistle and schoolchildren all had them hanging around their necks on red or blue strings; also paper trumpets, drums, baby rattles, clappers, small bells and cymbals, hissing paper snakes, rubber animals for bathtubs that whistled, quacked, or croaked when squeezed—anythin
g that could make noise.

  They did not even sing; there was no tune they could have danced to. And they did not congregate or assemble; after all, the alleged right of assembly had been suspended by order of the police, and any gathering of more than three persons was considered a conspiracy against the state.

  They shouted into one another’s faces, showed one another their throats and fillings, whistled grinningly and tooted into one another’s ears, spun their clappers next to one another’s ears—and most of them were far from being preadolescent youths.

  Silently they offered each other drinks, to make the other person drunk, turn him into an animal, the kind of animal I am.

  The whistling at one another, the tooting and yelling at each other were only for themselves; they made the noise for themselves, not for someone else. While silence reigned in the farther reaches of Buda, in Pest the city was once again out on the street. But nothing happened; the light traffic petered out; no one expected or counted on anything, and the infernal noise people were making may have helped them suspend their fear, which is why they didn’t give a damn about the curfew. Everybody drank from everyone else’s bottle without even wiping off the bottle mouths. This was probably the first great dress rehearsal, the dress rehearsal of passive resistance. Well, what infection should they be worrying about. It was impossible to know where all that booze suddenly appeared from, cheap table wines and stinking home-distilled brandies.

  This wasn’t a cheerful event; it was anything but pretty; it didn’t even try to flaunt its foulness. It became loudest at midnight, or rather, it just became louder, since no one had any wishes to make and they weren’t going to sing the national anthem. Long years had to pass before it occurred to people that one might want to wish somebody something good for the New Year. It wasn’t that this gloomy event was not forbidden, but that it would have been impossible to give orders to fire into the midst of so many drunken people.

  And what if it was possible, so what, who gives a shit.

  It was getting colder, well below freezing, and the number of people kept growing even after midnight; the noise as well as the crowd’s unbridled inner muteness steadily increased.

  They were camping on top of ruins, lighting smelly little signal fires along the boulevards, using flammable parts of the debris. The snow, which had begun to fall around ten o’clock, became quite thick by midnight and was trampled into slippery slush by many shoes and boots. Snow remained at the peaks of ruins and on the charred guts of buildings and vehicles, and it shone brightly in the light of the fires.

  Around two in the morning, the boulevards began to empty out, and slowly the snow could settle on the sidewalks, deadening the sounds of the few insistent shouters.

  When dawn came, one could still hear some lone tooting in the distance.

  Only during the following day, the first day of the New Year, did one have the impression that in the wake of all this there would follow only eternal night and deafened streets.

  But all this happened long ago, and it might not even be true.

  Kristóf crouched down on the stairs, close to the boy, who was a few years his senior but similar in build. He grasped his shoulders and shook them, told him to stand up, even threw in a few obligatory swearwords so they’d better understand each other’s bewildering, overflowing feelings; he kept shaking the boy gently, asking him what had happened, while his heart was jumping with joy at seeing him again.

  What he wanted most to say was, my sweetest pal, if you only knew how much I’m in love.

  It was a good thing Klára had disappeared upstairs in the throng, though he’d have a job finding her.

  And he would have told his story on the spot, to give the other boy part of his happiness.

  Because he loved him so.

  Suddenly he couldn’t remember when and in what circumstances he had seen him last. But he did remember Podmaniczky Street, where the boy had been carrying his ammo box on his shoulder and the water had been turned on again.

  But his friend would not let himself be handled, not then and not now, no, he pressed himself against the grating and Kristóf had to struggle with him.

  It wasn’t the mere physical contact and not even the pleading but rather the earthly tenderness that convinced him; he broke into a loud, drunken sob, to which the staircase instantly responded with a drunken echo.

  As though in reply, someone upstairs whose nerves could no longer endure the sobbing kicked or slammed the hallway door shut.

  For God’s sake, tell me what’s happened to you.

  Left me, his friend cried, then shouted the words: just up and left me.

  Kristóf could not conceive of anyone leaving his friend—about whom he had heard nothing for many long years. This is one of those moments when, of all the things he could not anticipate and from which he felt shut out, what confronted him most clearly was his own naïveté, exposing him to senseless, blunt nothingness.

  He recognized instantly that this was not some ordinary lovesickness, not one of the many kinds he was familiar with. The boy’s shirt was white, but his lovesickness stank of tobacco and alcohol. And in his drunken obstinacy he was strong enough to keep from being dragged away.

  It was as if he were doing penance with the barbarity of his soul.

  The alcohol level keeps him on the surface of pain, maintaining a sufficient degree of physical torment, that is why he has to stay here, that is why he is shouting so destructively.

  Kristóf looked at him, amazed and fearful, yet he cradled the familiar shoulders and back on his knees with a certain restraint, since at any minute it might turn out he had made a mistake. The boy might turn around, or he would manage to turn him over, and it would be revealed that he was not Pisti whom he had met on Podmaniczky Street.

  Now he was yelling down the elevator shaft that he had been deserted, bawling through the grating.

  No matter how hard Kristóf looked, there was no part of the boy that he could have mixed up with someone else’s.

  He’d seen him last in Wiesenbad on an ordinary summer morning when, just as he was, in shirt and pants, he’d been taken away from the place under the giant pine trees by a military vehicle with Russian license plates; he resisted and kept pointing to the third floor of the Wolkenstein house, indicating that he wanted to get his things, but he was expertly shoved into the car, with extra care taken not to injure his head; and only the crunching sound of pebbles, the silent peaks of the pines, and the sky with its clouds remained behind him.

  Upstairs the boys found all their belongings on the stone floor of the dormitory, the mattresses overturned on the beds, only this boy’s locker was empty, they had taken away all his things along with him.

  Left me forever, he shouted. I know it’s forever.

  Then Kristóf called him by his name, he no longer had any doubts but wanted to be certain, and he did not feel like swearing anymore.

  He would rather be exposed by his blind love.

  Pisti, please, he said, pull yourself together, stop making so much noise.

  It’s me, knocking on your door, he said, and he was indeed knocking on the boy’s back.

  Give me some sensible explanation, what’s happened, who has left you.

  And why on earth are you lying on the stairs here.

  The drunken figure suddenly swerved, as if to throw his entire stiff body at Kristóf; he probably only now recognized Kristóf by his voice or by the knocking on his back, their old game.

  He stared intently, could this really be Kristóf; the strain wrinkled his face.

  My dear Pisti, please get up.

  You listen to me now, buddy, said the other boy, his voice bullying and almost sober in its sternness, I am not your Pisti.

  Kristóf could only stare at him; he said nothing.

  And don’t you tell me again that I’m dear to you, he said slowly with a drunkard’s helplessness, and tried to sit up at the same time but only managed to lift his head off the step.


  And you know that goddamn well yourself, don’t you, and if I let you have one upside your head, by Jesus, that’d be worse than God’s curse. You know that too, don’t you, little buddy.

  He talked as if he had not forgotten that they still had a heavy account to settle.

  In fact they had nothing to settle, not then and not now, except perhaps the terrible raw dread with which they had feared that Pisti would be tracked down before he had a chance to leave Wiesenbad.

  Fuck it, man, I’m not your dear, I’m telling you, and remember that, goddamn it.

  Kristóf, alarmed, could only think that Pisti suspected him of something.

  You’re a big shit-head, you know, a ridiculous little fop, Pisti said contemptuously, which reassured Kristóf a bit because the boy could have called him a dirty Jew. A lousy craven shit, that’s what you are, little buddy, he shouted, I’m telling you right here and now, damn it, say it directly, right to your face, I’m not any kind of dear one for a shitty little fop like you.