Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  He said this to himself several times a day, hundreds of times a week, without becoming bored with the feeling that could be expressed in these words or with the ultimately empty words themselves.

  Silence reigned over the landscape, stillness and peace pervaded the lovely sunshine-filled early summer.

  With those four words, which he had heard so many times from released prisoners, he had to reassure himself about the correctness of his feeling, which he had never voiced to himself nor said out loud. In a peaceful state, noisy with the rush of blood, work-induced heavy breathing, and the buzzing of bees, he returned without realizing it to the time of that feeling, which he thought had been lost forever.

  Memory first gave him signals when he moved; the movements led him back to knowing how to hold his tools, spade, hoe, and scythe. Then his muscles reminded him how to manage his movements. He returned here, to the past with its out-of-the-way groves, abandoned fields, and empty pastures, vineyards overrun by weeds, and decaying orchards where the normal silence of nature reigned; peace. He wished to reconquer this abandoned landscape with his labor, except that what he had forgotten most during the lapsed time in his life was how to manage his energies sensibly.

  A while later, when the remembered movements led his muscles back to the forgotten times, for brief moments his childhood summers flickered up and glowed. An unknown bird would screech. He would look out from behind a grapevine as if peering out from behind the shaded leaves of the erstwhile bower into the wild blue, and he seemed to hear the voice of his long-dead mother calling him. He did not know to what place she was calling him. The blue of the enamel bucket, its familiar clinking, the water, some of which always splashed on his dusty feet—that’s what he remembered, such cloudless summers, the blue enamel bucket.

  And the sweetly hovering dust, the sound of cowbells coming closer, together with the approaching twilight, his feet stamping in the dirt.

  Now too, time went by, day after day, week after week, without the tiniest cloud in the sky, and it seemed as if all those long-ago summers had also been cruelly and eternally blue. Had he not felt free, had not the river, misty in the cool nights, produced a little dew on the blades of grass each dawn, he would have found these signs threatening, ominous, terrifying.

  And they were indeed ominous.

  It made a difference how much each planted thing yielded, because he wanted to be sure that what he raised would last through the winter. The threat of a protracted drought hovered over the incandescent landscape. He was free at last. But he could not but remember the long, oppressive, and dizzying spells of privation from his childhood.

  When it made a big difference how many of them sat down at the table.

  For all he knew, doomsday might be near.

  He did not expect rain either.

  He rarely saw anyone, did not long for anyone’s company.

  Did not think about whether he was cheerful or sad; he was now in the process of forgetting thoughts that were indispensable for the awareness of happiness, just as earlier he had forgotten his youth and childhood. Still, he did sense something of his happiness; after all, he kept telling himself he was free at last. As a person who has reached his destination; his calling was answered by his being free. At last, he kept telling himself, he was free. As if he had served out a long sentence. Perhaps he kept repeating this because he was coming close to a state in which he would neither long for nor insist on anything.

  Being bitten by horseflies was the only thing that upset him during these weeks.

  And a horsefly bite is indeed very unpleasant.

  A horsefly always appears out of the blinding blueness, it circles unnoticed above the deliciously sweating skin, slyly picks its spot, lands gently, and even if you shoo it away, it finds another unprotected spot where it will bite you, ejecting its saliva into the living tissue. If the attack occurred in the middle of the day, there were at least two, sometimes three horseflies coming at him in formation, one to divert his attention while the other two bit him elsewhere. The bite is painful; a hard lump swells under the skin, turns tight and itchy, burns and tingles in the flesh. And if at times like this he turned and bent over his nicely thriving plants more obstinately and restlessly than usual, as though denying that something might be bothering him so much, it was because in his own way he was trying to find an infallible method for outfoxing the horseflies, so to speak.

  But he should have realized that horseflies are infallible.

  He remembered the horses and the silky-hair-covered bony knot on the tails of cattle, the swishing and slapping sound of their swatting at pests.

  After all, he reasoned, a horsefly was not as lighthearted and cunning a creature as the common housefly, but in comparison rather sluggish and clumsy. In the instant it bites you it’s easy to whack it, and it’s no small satisfaction when its dust-gray body cracks under your palm.

  But by then it’s too late; its secretion is already spreading and working under the skin.

  Whenever the horseflies’ hour arrived, his entire body became covered with gooseflesh because of the awful unrest; he was annoyed, he fumed and grumbled; why wasn’t man more resourceful than a horsefly, being so much smarter. He should be more inventive in that crucial fraction of a second. Why wait for the moment of the bite, why not act beforehand, why does his skin signal him only afterward, he complained. As if with only a little adjustment of Creation everything would be perfect.

  Anyway, I’ll kill it, he kept repeating to himself, although in his new life he found these repeated little murders rather disturbing. But his attentiveness, practicality, and circumspection must have had a predetermined sequence, an order with its own definite conditions and boundaries. Despite his struggle and experimentation, despite his belief in the superiority of the human mind, he could not in his own animal state anticipate the moment of the horseflies. He would flail, slap, strike out, dodge, become annoyed, rack his brain, endure the bites, flee, at times rave—not so much at the ancient enemy as at his own human helplessness.

  There is nothing more profound, more secretive, and more abominable than hatred conceived in solitude.

  He was pensioned off on the last day of February, and after the party given in his honor he did not return to his home in Budapest, the family house on the shore of the Rákos creek he had built with his own hands over ten long years. By then the little wooden house on the other side of the river was ready, fully furnished. He had prepared well in advance for a quiet retirement. He had put away enough money for it too, which no one knew anything about. They had a good time at the Kőkapu, the famous little inn in Vác by the triumphal arch built to honor a visit from Empress Maria Theresa. A traditional haunt of lawyers, prison guards, and released prisoners. He sat at the place of honor, smiling benevolently; no one could have noticed anything exceptional about him. He waited patiently until dawn, though from midnight on he made sure he was gradually sobering up. He knew this was his last drinking binge with the boys. He liked their company; he belonged to them and to no one else in the entire world.

  As he sobered up he felt his heart would break when he left them.

  He took the first ferry across the icy river.

  The ferrymen knew him well; he had been coming and going, spending his days off here for the last two years.

  His mates, still tipsy, whooped and shouted farewell from the receding shore of Vác. By then he felt nothing for them.

  Only later, in a coldly composed letter, did he inform his family of his final decision. He could hardly write; his emotions, more than anything else, drew the letters from his fingers. Let them wait for him, have the police look for him. But the family would be glad he’d disappeared. They might squander his pension just as they had squandered his salary, but he was going to live here alone and did not want them to visit. He wanted to keep at least his remaining years clean. He had had enough of his wife and son, he no longer needed to know about their deeds or misdeeds—enough of the loud word
s, fights, and treacherous family intrigues that had filled his life. This is what he wrote, brutally, with his awkward words and ugly penmanship, but there was nothing false in what he put down on paper. Spring was cold that year, windy, overcast, and stormy; he kept warm by the fire in the iron stove. The change did not displease his wife; in fact she was a little sorry the man had turned up at all. She waited a long time before answering his letter. She would have felt happier if he had disappeared without a trace. In a few lines she let him know that his crippled younger brother was dying in the urology ward of Szent János Hospital and in the meantime his irresponsible daughters had been slowly selling everything of any value from the nicely furnished super’s apartment on Teréz Boulevard. They couldn’t wait for their miserable father’s death. And since that apartment was a service apartment, what else would it be, they’d probably have to move out of it, and she worried that they might, being relatives, after all, want to move in with her.

  She wouldn’t let them, not the girls and not their unreliable mother.

  This was followed by a single sentence, red-hot with anger.

  She prays to the Lord Jesus and Mary every night that Balter should not regret his decision.

  The woman wrote with nice round letters, like a schoolgirl, being proud to this day that in elementary school her teacher had always held up her handwriting as the example to be followed.

  Far from regretting his decision, Balter was surprised to feel that every day spent in freedom made his life more meaningful. A life perfect in all its aspects, in a way he could hitherto not have imagined. Then slowly, gradually, he shed every piece of clothing as regularly as day followed day, as the land slowly grew warmer and later very hot. First he put aside the green quilted jacket, then the shirt, later the wide blue work pants, on a particularly hot afternoon the white undershirt, and finally he kicked off his blue twill shorts that were the same color as his bucket.

  He was fifty-seven years old, slept without clothes, and naked stepped out of the house into the blue mornings. His nudity was no more surprising than that of a gracefully aging wild animal.

  Just as his body had become indifferent to him, others had to become indifferent to it too.

  Strangers’ eyes could see him only from a great distance, anyway.

  He could thank fate for his hulking, indolently muscular body.

  First the gendarmes kept an eye on him, but then everything turned out differently. His tread was slow and heavy, which might have been the reason no one thought of becoming familiar with him or calling him by his first name.

  A man of long strides and slow wits.

  His name was Balter. More precisely, that is how people referred to him, Balter did this or Balter did that. His relatives did the same; even his wife had called him Balter for thirty years, as if they enjoyed having the family name be so corporeal and weighty. His only son, who took after him in both build and features and who, to Balter’s great sorrow, also bore his first name, Gyula, got mixed up in very bad company when he was still a child, no matter how much and how often Balter had beaten him. The son led a life that Balter could not follow, neither with his common sense nor with his imagination; he only guessed at what was happening around him, even though his job made him familiar with the inner lives of men.

  They had no secrets from him; he knew what they were capable of doing.

  Horseflies appear in the middle of July, when the apricots begin to ripen. No matter how many mean things he had committed in his life, how much he had cheated or stolen to supplement his salary and put some money aside secretly for himself, he had never been cruel or tyrannical. Because of the damned horseflies, he first put his wide work pants back on and then his shirt; the flies robbed him of his hard-earned freedom. Frankly he had quite a few things to regret and, strictly speaking, many men would have good reason to beat him up. No matter how much he blustered and flailed about. Several men had indeed threatened him when they got out. To preserve the freedom of his days, putting on his pants and shirt was an inadequate precaution; his neck and profusely perspiring face, so tasty for horseflies, remained bare.

  Again, he had to give up more of his freshly gained freedom, again to comply silently with his circumstances and to bargain with them.

  When the sun reached its zenith, he put his tools aside and retreated into the shade, where horseflies were reluctant to follow. Still, after several days of senseless battle against the pests, his retreat did not regain for him the peace and quiet he had so joyfully enjoyed before the arrival of the horseflies. To endure again, to wait, to tolerate. This made him wonder whether his miserable younger brother was still alive, but it did not occur to him to take the train on the other side of the river, from the station built in honor of the visit of Emperor Franz Joseph. If his brother was no longer alive, well, so be it.

  He did not think so highly of human life that he wished it on anyone.

  He kept sitting in the breezy shade of the apricot tree, his head hanging between his drawn-up knees, and he felt a prisoner in his clothes.

  That was his greatest worry.

  But at least new bites were not irritating his flesh, nothing burned or itched, his skin was no longer tight over the subsiding berry-size lumps.

  He could never evaluate what he thought or what he did not know, and he never attributed importance to things he didn’t think about. He tried not to think about his dying kid brother; true, he had never given him much thought. And he definitely did not think about how he had beaten his son and his wife, about the sound of a nose breaking, about flesh being pummeled, about how much hair remained in his hands. This did not mean that he was unable to think about things as flexibly as anyone else, or that in other cases he had not suffered in the absence of certain thoughts. He was not a talkative man, though rather taciturn, not wanting to seem more stupid than he was. But whatever kind of man he was, he could not have had practice in following thoughts woven in solitude and or in finding his way in the thicket of missing thoughts. He no longer thought about the released prisoners’ four-word magic sentence, for he was anything but free, though he did not notice this, since the objects of freedom were still with him: his bucket, his house, his work-induced heavy breathing, the sky’s cloudless blue, his tools, summer’s warmth, his money in the bank, a few pieces of jewelry in a small box hidden under the floor, and his footprint in the dust.

  Actually, he began to suffer from the absence of the disappeared words, the four words that had given meaning and rhythm to the passing days, nothing else.

  Suffering became quiet and persistent, like the touch of a blunt blade, for it would have been senseless to say the situation was as it was because of horseflies, because of his miserable kid brother, or because the thought of death hovered so close by. The memory of prisoners in his charge kept coming back to him. Sometimes when they went berserk he hit them with his cudgel wherever he could, true, yet he had been one of the friendlier guards, one of those who maintained secret little business connections with the prisoners. He had all sorts of confused desires, though his long-term plans were reasonable enough. For example, he longed for cold beer. He envisioned a very young girl approaching, though he saw very well that the path was as empty as ever.

  He dreamed of the hairless lips of a young girl’s vagina.

  There was a woman in the village who offered to cook for him so that he, being a man, could have warm meals, but he rejected this indecent offer.

  By summer’s end he wanted to reach the stage where he could grow strawberries and raspberries to sell on his small property, as nearly everyone else in the nearby villages did with their household acreage.

  For this he first had to dig a well.

  A pox on it, maybe he’d get dressed properly and go to the capital to visit his crippled kid brother and especially his brother’s big sluttish daughters who, though they don’t know it, are probably his, their uncle’s, by-blows.

  If words won’t do the job, he’ll beat the shit out of
them.

  Four stakes marked the borders of his garden, but he owned the entire abandoned landscape with his gaze. He stood at the center of an enormous flat plate strewn with lowland groves, willow plantations, uncultivated or barely cultivated fruit orchards and vineyards; beyond the gigantic branches of the invisible river, mountains bulged on the rim of the plate. As if the big wide world started beyond that point, where so many baffling things happened, though none of them had anything to do with him except the expected selling price of strawberries and raspberries. He tried to force all his pleasant and unpleasant thoughts and feelings to the rim of this plate. He did not drink beer. He turned on the radio only on Sunday morning when Gypsies played sweetly plaintive Hungarian melodies.

  His visions and images came and dwindled, to be replaced by new ones. The persistently quiet suffering drew myriad little grooves on the old feelings.

  He did everything as he had done before and he forgot everything according to his sensibilities, but he began to fear his own emptiness, which he had not noticed before; he especially dreaded the unavoidable, dull suffering.

  As if feelings were calling his attention only to things of which he had no definite memories.

  Perhaps it was better that he didn’t.

  Namely, he was scared that his son or one of the released prisoners might surprise him here.

  His own son will kill him.

  During the spring days when he was still going about naked, such a thing had not occurred to him; he would not have thought about his son or the prisoners or anyone. When in the afternoons he fastened to his bicycle his two flat plastic containers and went to the public well in the nearest village for drinking water, he carefully locked up the house and hid the key under a stone. The stone often reminded him of his crippled kid brother, whom he used to beat throughout their childhood, and he thought he could use this stone to beat his own son to death. It felt good to beat his brother, he’d longed to do it; after all, their mother wanted it that way. That he should not have to live his miserable life. He understood his mother’s wish that somehow, gradually, he should beat his brother to death.