Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  Now he was standing under his apricot tree, holding in his hand the elusive proof of measured time: his dry shirt.

  A little later he saw two bicycling figures approach.

  Because in the meantime the pastor had come home from his mission in the cathedral town across the river, and been told by the puzzled yet malicious ferrymen that there had been no noonday bell. They were godless, all of them, and if they could do nothing else they swore terribly in front of their pastor. And he waited in vain for his grandson, first by the window in his cool office and much later at the gate; the boy didn’t come home on the street but turned up much later from the direction of the gardens. When he heard behind his back the dull thud of feet on the long brick-paved veranda, at least he no longer had to struggle with a fear that perhaps the boy had drowned in the river.

  He was puffing like a child.

  With the momentum of his inexplicable anger, the pastor swiveled around and Dávid received a powerful slap on the face.

  Barefoot, wearing only his small red bathing trunks, the very shy, daydreaming teenager stood before him, shirt in hand. He was at the age when boys begin to grow as if they were being stretched and their voices deepen but they are completely unaware of the maturing processes in their bodies. From running, his thin naked body was thickly covered with dust in which his perspiration drew stripes.

  He’d run more than two kilometers in the scorching sun. In his head, throbbing with the pulsing blood, the heat, the thumping of his feet, and fear, he had thoroughly prepared to account for his time, but this he hadn’t expected. He’d known that his negligence would not go unpunished, and he also knew that his grandfather would be back from the city at half past one. But the slap caught him unprepared. He had truly hoped that his grandfather would not be told of his negligence. He had to make his carefully prepared explanation credible, and therefore he could not pay much attention to the sudden physical or mental pain.

  The effort to ignore it distorted his features, but his eyes, filled with real tears, remained attentive. And, waving his blue-striped shirt, he said, winded and weeping, that a man had wanted to take this away from him.

  What man wanted to take it from you, what did he want to take from you, shouted the pastor, famed equally for his great physical strength and for his gentleness.

  His voice reverberated down the street.

  How could he miss the boy’s cunning look.

  It seemed he not only had to avenge the already committed negligence but might also be catching his grandson on the verge of telling a terrible lie, committing a deadly sin.

  Dávid had never heard such sounds escaping from his grandfather. In his alarm he wanted to add something to his explanation, but anger at his grandfather blocked his words.

  How dare he hit him.

  If Melinda had been here, he wouldn’t have dared. But at the moment his much older sister was visiting in an old villa in Leányfalu, working on her dissertation out on the villa’s lovely wood-framed veranda. Without Melinda he had no support. His mumbled words turned into hiccups, but he managed to squeeze out that he had no idea who the strange man was except that he was completely naked.

  The pastor did not intend to restrain his raging anger. He regretted neither his loud outburst nor the slap. Let everyone on the street see it and hear it. He owed this much to his prestige in the village.

  The negligence is unforgivable; it cannot remain unpunished.

  But the words, coming out twisted because of the crying and hiccupping, made him lose confidence.

  What naked man, the pastor groaned.

  A hot rush of blood in his eyes darkened the yard, shaded by chestnut and linden trees.

  Where is he, he groaned.

  If someone had told him, trembling and devastated, that his grandson had drowned in the river, then his faith in the boy’s innocence would have poured balm on his immense pain, and he would have accepted God’s will. But the way things were, he had to take himself into the worst thicket of horrors. Had to be careful what to ask and how loudly to ask it. The sun beat down mercilessly on the back of his thick neck and a single careless step might pull his heavy body into the bog.

  The village had to be compensated, but it did not have to know everything.

  The prison guard from Vác came to mind first; many people talked about this man because he shopped in the general store and took his water from the common well, but he had not yet met him or seen him walking about naked, not even from far away.

  If he had not been blinded by anger, he would have sensed the nature of the problem immediately, because Dávid would never show himself naked in front of anyone, not even in the greatest heat. He yanked the boy to him with both hands. He wanted to know everything. Peremptorily, shaking the boy’s bare shoulders, he asked what the man had done to him.

  Dávid sobbed, leaning against his grandfather’s chest.

  He tried to make it understood that he was sobbing, trembling, and reproachful because of the mercilessness of that slap. But in fact his helplessness was weeping behind the deceit.

  He didn’t do anything, he sobbed.

  And where did you leave your pants, asked the pastor, his voice growing thin as his impatience mounted.

  He took away my pants, cried the boy. He wanted to take away my shirt.

  As if the boy’s smudgy tears were dissolving his light body on the pastor’s chest.

  The innocence of this reply gave the pastor some relief, yet fighting his conciliatory urge he thrust his grandson away, but without letting go of him.

  Why would he take away your pants, how could anybody take away your pants, he shouted.

  The boy stopped bawling, he was hiccupping. From his grandfather’s point of view he indeed had to consider himself an incorrigible recidivist many times over, so it was important to muster everything he could to dispel all possible suspicion. From his incoherent answer his grandfather understood only that he had been to the big pit.

  He admits having gone into the water and having swum to the other side. From there he saw the man taking his pants away.

  He ran after him, managed to get the shirt out of his hand but failed to retrieve the pants.

  Gone were his nice summer pants.

  At this, the pastor released his grandson from his strong grip and with large steps took off for the shed.

  What the villagers called the big pit was a long-abandoned sand mine. More than a hundred years earlier Gypsies had made adobe here every summer. They soon ran out of the material necessary for adobe. Under the layer of clay was an enormous amount of brimstone-yellow sand glittering with quartz; people came to take it away by the wagonload, even from faraway villages. They gave up sand mining only when they reached, about four meters down, a water-permeable layer of gravel in direct contact with the riverbed. The gravel was peculiarly granulated, like rare pearls. And the shovels turned over rather curious things in it. Shards of pottery burned black, sooty bellies, ears, and beaks of cooking vessels with small legs. Worn-down thin blades of crudely forged iron tools and human bones turned spongy or polished to a marble smoothness: split pelvises, skulls smashed in with battle-axes, and fractured shinbones.

  The first heavy snowfall put an end to a shameful treasure hunt.

  Older people still recall the spring when, where the pit had been, they found a lovely round little pond with translucently motionless water.

  Now not even children went to swim in it because nobody could forget that there was a cemetery under the water. And strangers had no way of knowing that behind the clusters of trees this pond lay concealed. What was under the water was a treacherously destroyed military camp of the early Avar era.* Ice-cold ghosts populated the area; the pond became the home of ringed snakes, water spiders, and frogs. His grandfather did not believe in ghosts but he forbade Dávid to go into the water there alone. No one who lives on the shore of this mighty river should forget that water is strong and always unpredictable. Silver-leafed and gray-trunked p
oplars, willows slowly dripping their sap, and thick growth of shrubs surrounded the pond and barely let the light graze its mirrorlike surface. That day, Dávid was at the pond when he should have been at the belfry to ring the bell. Here the trees had spread their branches so generously that the surface of the pond could not be seen even from the church tower, so he believed that his peculiar feeling was safely concealed and for the first time in his life he forgot about ringing the bell. He did not forget the place itself and the hearsay connected with it, not to mention the relevant proscriptions. Almost every year he spent his vacation months with his grandfather. Once, when still a small child, amid terrible shuddering, he had swum across the pond all by himself on a dare and a bet.

  He won a popgun, which in the end he did not get.

  He did not take the fears of the local boys very seriously, but despite all the prohibitions he too was a little afraid of ghosts. This summer he rarely did things together with the boys. He preferred the dark, cool, and spacious rooms of the parsonage, where he read romantic English novels, replete with screeching wind in old fireplaces, abandoned dusty rooms, and haunting ghosts in whose company he roamed by himself, dreaming of his future life, or together with them looked for isolated places by the river whence he could observe the bathers and rowers who sometimes camped on the island for weeks and lived their own mysterious lives before his eyes.

  He sentenced himself to sheer observance; he tried to renounce everything that might be considered amusement or was beyond a strictly objective survey of the world. He was curious to learn what the minimal activity was that he needed to exist. His impression was that the smaller the area of contact with his surroundings, the smaller his food intake, and the less love spent on others, the more clearly he would see his own intentions, would not lose his way, and could hope to find more meaning in his actions in the dim world of instincts and in the pitiless chaos churned up by adults.

  His grandfather noticed in all this only that the otherwise lively and talkative boy now fell silent for days, the once voracious child hardly touched his food, sat daydreaming with a book in his hands, listened to inspiring parables with a blank expression of incomprehension, evaded questions showing concern about him, or simply lied. The grandfather could not have known that the boy’s monastic vows, made to himself, were dictating and determining this changed behavior.

  He was silent not because he had something to hide but because he had vowed not to speak. He picked at his food not because he had no appetite but because he was testing his self-control. He was daydreaming not because he was uninterested in the continuing chapters in his grandfather’s devotional history but because he was timing the duration of his ability to keep his mind on a single topic.

  He failed with his most delicate vows.

  He decided not to let his thoughts flit about unbridled. He also decided not to go to the pond ever again since he already knew everything there was to know about it; but a compelling force was still at work contrary to his vows, and no matter how carefully he listened for it he could not catch it; undetected, it laid him low. Indeed, he knew everything in advance that was worth knowing of the joy and sorrow of sheer existence, but he considered his knowledge as straying, because he had no idea that everyone had the same experiences.

  There is no human being without a functioning presentiment. He wanted to overcome his penchant for this sort of special knowledge and experience, but for that he would first have had to ascertain the falseness of his experiences and the incorrectness of his knowledge. He found no finer tools than those already at his disposal. The greater ascetic authority he acquired over himself, the greater his awareness became that this was still not adequate knowledge or experience. The rectitude of presentiment can be checked only over time; one has to look back on it from the distance of decades.

  He began resorting to trickery and double-dealing, and not only with his grandfather but with himself too.

  He wanted to reach the point of having no wishes, since they color all exact knowledge, and thus he could not imagine what the world would be like without him.

  He wanted at all cost to keep from going to the pond; and if he did go, he had to do so as if it had no significance, with no continuation or consequence. The deep, slightly inclining former wagon trail led him into the dense thicket. Uninitiated eyes could detect no road here. The hard clumps of grass covering the erstwhile wheel tracks never sprouted into bushes or nettles. A forward-moving body brushed open the loosely bent shrub branches, which would then close gently behind it.

  He met with his death and with rebirth.

  He would hide for good from all human eyes; nothing would reach him. With these words did the unavoidable feeling address him. If he succeeded in withdrawing himself from the world, he would see what he’d become.

  Everything was part of this single feeling: the touch of every branch bending aside and closing behind him, the soft squelching of his steps, the silence made vaporous by the midday heat, the alarmed screeching and awkward flight of pheasants startled from their cool hiding place, the gooseflesh gently invading his skin, and the blind certainty with which his feet led his eyes to the sight of the calm water revealing itself to him. And his feeling was not changeable, depending on what happened; he reached it differently on each occasion.

  He entered a place, he arrived at a place whither he never need return.

  A sense of mortality addressed him with words like these. He could not want anything else or anything more, because the peculiarity of his feeling was that no compulsion or wish could touch him.

  The poplars tilted up their leaves with their silver undersides, the rich undergrowth under the willows dripped their sap, saplings reached for the light, dwarf elders, sharp grass of tussock, bulrush, meaty-leaved saltbush, and emerald-green moss completely covered the pebbly soil all the way to the edge of the small pond. That the pond’s seemingly motionless surface still moved somewhat could be measured on the narrow strip of sand that with its brimstone-yellow edge encircled the water. It was as if the water were breathing; its inhalations and exhalations, rising and falling, left telltale wet traces, though it was impossible to know if it was secret waves or a flood tide.

  Of course he lied to his grandfather; he had not swum across the pond that day, he had simply walked around it on the wet sand. He had to protect his feelings from every strange opinion. This was a pagan ritual into which he could not initiate his grandfather, who officially and passionately persecuted all superstition and paganism. Out of necessity Dávid gave himself up so he could keep the main thing a secret.

  It began when he slipped out of his shirt, kicked off his sandals, and then took off his pants and laid them on the green. But he did not take off his bathing trunks or underpants. He had to be very precise when stepping on the wet gray sand; he allowed neither his heels nor his toes to touch the dry yellow sand or to slip into the water. His soles could sink only deep enough to leave a discernable trace in the wet sand. From time to time he looked back. Moving this way he circled the pond, and by the time he stepped out of his masterfully calculated last footprint, the outline of the first one had faded almost to invisibility. Now he had to step into this one so the wet sand would not drink or swallow forever his former steps. He stepped exactly, precisely, into his own footsteps; this peculiar passion, to continue his way around the pond in his own fading footprints, was so powerful that he may never have missed a step.

  And when he returned for the third time, the once-reinforced traces had not faded as much as they had the first time. As the number of completed rounds increased, the deeper the traces of the eternal metamorphosis became, though they always lost some sharpness in their outline.

  This was no game. The story behind it was no more than the story of a mathematical problem solved with numbers.

  He paid attention to nothing except making sure his steps precisely covered his previous steps. That is how the glowing imperfection of every step on the wet sand became permanent.


  There was a direct connection between the depth of his footprints and his own imperfection.

  He worked himself up to a ritual concentration, seeking nothing in the world except the most perfectly matching footprints, satisfying his need for perfection by nothing but flashes of light gliding on the water, the dense thicket, and the swishing of the giant trees’ green wall, everything he caught with his peripheral vision. He had to place his feet in the previous footprints with increasing decisiveness because with every step he was approaching the bottom of the sand. When he reached silt, the silt always spilled into the hollows where water had been forced out by pressure, between the empty footprints and his toes.

  From then on he destroyed something with every step. First his steps made the upper rim of the footprints cave in; later, the entire sand wall of the print collapsed too.

  He could not stop or in any way give up this ritual undertaking.

  It turned into a cold, pure intoxication that removed from his consciousness the image of beginning or end.

  His feet were squelching in tiny muddy puddles.

  Earlier he had taken off his pants so that no possible traces of muddy silt on them would betray his secret activity. He would have felt his sense of honor violated if he’d voluntarily stepped out of the circle. The pleasure was so pervasive that even the sight of the muck pressing up between his toes, its smooth matter, and the stench rising from the gray bog, which nauseated him, was part of his peculiar feeling, as was the gentle grazing of the wet sand’s surface with his first steps. He did not quicken his stride, but the silt welling up between his toes made his steps grow heavy. Slowing down held the threat of having to return to the outside world.

  The closer he got to a sense of finality, the more unsatisfactorily his feet carried him.

  Until, hurling himself onto dry grassy sand, he collapsed.

  He always made sure he fell on his side, not to leave traces in the sand of his eternal defeat.

  That is the sum of a young body’s share of sobering lessons. He rolled onto his back, lolling on the green with outstretched arms, his temples and his heart beating to an upset rhythm.