Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  The first thing that occurred to Balter was that the woman was undressing by the chair, which had been kicked aside. While, in fact, he was trying to figure out which of his moves he should change on this most painful wedding night to keep from ruining his marriage forever.

  He began to ruminate on this, for the first time in his life, yet what he was seeing was his sister-in-law taking off her bloomers and later letting her skirt down. Which Balter thought was heartrending, and in his brain the blood simply stopped moving; he nearly lost his self-control. This wily woman was curving her back so as to offer the least surface of her skin to the yellowish light. Only then did she lift over her head the pink satin slip glittering wildly in the light. Her big firm ass slipped out from under it, followed by her undulating spine.

  As though the big slut was struggling with her meager feminine modesty.

  He also remembered the bones sticking out of the half-eaten aspic on the plates.

  Gyula, stop gobbling up Imre’s aspic.

  She was yakking too as she took off her clothes, as if she had been his mistress for twenty years.

  But I will, dearest Aranka, I won’t leave a single mouthful for Imre, you can be sure.

  She didn’t wear a garter belt but elastic stockings, the kind old women wore.

  All I’m saying is leave him a plateful, that’s all.

  Not only will I leave nothing for him, I’ll chew, look, everything off the tiniest little bones too.

  The woman stuck two fingers under the elastic while with showy bashfulness she pressed her thighs together.

  You’re doing that so I can’t see your pussy, eh, Balter yelled at her from the table, his mouth full. But he continued to chew and to tear off more bread.

  The woman did not reply but with her hands and arms kept stroking her long curly pubic hair to keep him from seeing her pussy, which he wanted to see so badly his brain nearly exploded with his boiling blood.

  Then for the sake of your mother’s ass, at least eat it properly, with the marinated onion. You shouldn’t leave him any of that either.

  Balter was panting as he inhaled her powerful smell pervading the kitchen.

  I’ll take a look at yours, don’t you worry, I will, for the sake of your mother’s good goddamn lord, he yelled at her, and his body kept swelling from the urge to take his revenge. I’ll surely fuck this one, he thought.

  Meanwhile, though, he did not leave the aspic tray.

  They both had been drunk for quite a while and he wanted to sober up a bit so he could fuck her with a cool head.

  Then he asked her was she ashamed, seeing how she kept hiding her thighs.

  Or maybe he asked her that before.

  He remembered that in response to his question the woman shook her freshly curled dyed blond mane as a horse would when breaking into a full gallop. She looked back at him sharply, her teeth flashing as she laughed, and then slapped her foot on the chair, which made the ample flesh of her thigh tremble. Leaning on the chair with all the weight of her compact body, as though not caring about the man at all, she rolled the elastic stocking down to her ankle. The movement meant, who the hell would feel ashamed in front of you. The moment she reached her ankle, her breasts with their swollen nipples swung forward from under her arms and the enormous apple of her bottom opened.

  The silence became thick indeed and remained so for the rest of the night.

  At least there were some cells from which a heavier silence emanated, where they were preparing to do something or were already doing it, though not every activity was to be noticed. No prison guard strictly observed all the house regulations in every case. After all, one has one’s own interests; a prison guard is also a human being, isn’t he. Let them do it, it won’t make him either poorer or richer. At other times he didn’t let them do it, or maybe he knew in advance whom they were going to kill and he let them, or whom they would screw in the ass, and he didn’t interfere.

  At most, he would look surprised in the morning when his relief found a dead body.

  He always sensed things correctly, even though he didn’t always know exactly what.

  As to the nature of a silence, Balter could not be fooled.

  As it was, the tramp had been sitting in Balter’s tree since four in the afternoon, not too high up, and he too was thirsty but no longer could get away unnoticed. His animal-like attention made the silence tense, which Balter recognized with the concentration of an experienced but helpless man. He had already been sitting there when Balter carefully marked his fallen apricots under the tree.

  But Dávid decided to act: he rolled onto his side and, preparatory to getting up, stuck his foot out cautiously from under the light summer blanket. After all, the armchair filled with human shadows did not seem hostile. He wanted to anneal himself to his false feeling or expose the feeling as false.

  He had to put his courage to the test in the middle of the night. He will not grow up to be a real man unless he passes the test.

  He let the chair alone for now; let it hover on top of the furrows in the cold light.

  But Balter’s hearing could not reconcile itself with the dense silence, with its personal characteristics, as it were, because he was counting on flitting and crackling sounds, on footfalls and familiar rhythms, on his son’s huge build, large beefy nose, and grinning face sporting a Hungarian mustache.

  He was familiar with the logic and mental state of crime but not that of insanity.

  That night, Dávid was visited by his dead father.

  There was no image to match Balter’s feelings. And the same thing happened to Dávid that night. His experiences and expectations did not match the reality of the apparition. With his breathing, he whimpered audibly into the impossibility of his feelings. At which point he could not separate his desire from his dread, and this was the happiness necessary for confirmation. He could still hear his own breathing. The shadows in the armchair did not move. He was able to straighten up in front of it, a move that instantly emptied the chair, however.

  It was not empty because no one had been in it before.

  Rather, it became empty as if only now something was missing from it. The peculiar quality of this emptiness, like a blow to his body, annihilated his hope and, by the same measure, increased his fear.

  He had to flee from the accursed room, which had once been his father’s nursery.

  And Balter’s apricot fell when the tramp shifted.

  Then he also remembered he had to get started, couldn’t stay with Imre’s aspic and let the greasy food sober him up. He remembered sliding his arm down the woman’s downy neck to take a heavy breast into his hand and weigh it while his other hand slid into the crack of her ass and then farther to the front. He had no time to waste, had to pull the woman’s hot cunt onto his stiff cock. He took into his mouth the muscular curve that takes the neckline to the shoulder and nibbled on it. Meanwhile she was pulling her stockings off her feet, in which there was a little indecent resistance. He knew her cunt would be sopping wet and hot but did not yet dare dip his fingers in it.

  Instead he let go of the tasty mouthful and whispered into her ear, come to me, for the sake of your mother’s good goddamn lord, come here, I’ll give it to you.

  But the woman shook her head in protest, which Balter could not see but he felt resistance in her body.

  Stop fucking around with your pants, damn it. I want you to do it this way, the woman said soberly and from a great distance.

  The forgotten sensation of having to do it this way hit his brain like a nightstick blow to the skull. Like the blows that, even if not of his own will, he had dealt to other people’s heads. If fate gives one enough time, one learns how to remember. Defenselessly he received the inappropriate image. What he saw was a rubber nightstick though it was his cock that became erect by remembering; involuntarily he buried his face in his hands. Not to see what he could not possibly feel any more strongly. He stayed like that for a long time. There was nothing to be don
e about it; the enjoyment of the horrible image sought refuge in his loins. And Dávid stopped in the doorway of the adjacent room. This was the pastor’s office. This was where the learned pastor held his Bible studies, from which the local youth had been staying away of late, and where during the winter prayer week members of the thinned-out congregation gathered. Although the pastor thought he had put his heart and soul into his job, nobody was interested, not even the ones who showed up. A few old benches stood along the walls, an ancient creaky harmonium, and the old rosewood writing table that, with the matching bookcase, had allegedly been brought here from the legacy of the pastor’s maternal great-grandmother Duchess Odescalchi of Braccano, Italy, and of which he was very proud. Holding his arms defensively before him, in the darkness slightly illuminated with stripes of blue moonlight, Dávid was hurrying on his way to the exit when his grandfather spoke up behind him, asking where he was going at such an hour.

  To take a leak, Dávid replied.

  Why are you going outside, the pastor asked quietly from near the harmonium. Why aren’t you going to the toilet as you’re supposed to.

  The boy did not answer these questions; he felt for the key and turned it in the lock. He could not say to his grandfather that he had met his father and was now following him on his otherworldly travels.

  When he stepped outside and carefully closed the door with its trembling glass panes behind him, he was not disappointed. The shadow that had disappeared from the armchair was not leading him on, but it stayed behind him and followed him. He had no doubt: it could only be he. He had not even been a schoolchild when they’d executed his father, and the family knew nothing about it. He did not dare reach into the fly of his pajama pants, how could he do that in front of someone. Even when they found out they did not talk of it; they had not been allowed to know the charges against him. The wound was open in all of them; the pain remained.

  Dávid did not know that one could urinate in the presence of one’s father without hesitation, that some boys very proudly urinate together with their fathers, making awareness of their manhood all the stronger.

  He’s your father, you stupid boy.

  At this invitation, he took a long deep breath of air filled with the mist coming off the river and, feeling quite relieved after urinating for a good long time, walked slowly back into the shadows. His feet took him along the lukewarm brick pavement that led to the shed, but he did not stop there. The light carried and guided him, as well as a secure feeling that his unknown father was with him. Until he turned onto the footpath leading out of the parsonage garden onto the low-lying, molehill-ridden pasture at the edge of the village.

  He could not continue on, because realizing where his feet might take him turned him into an immovable knot. He had vowed several times that he would never again go to the pond. He remembered this vow, as if seeing the madman waiting for him there, making him come. Dávid did the simplest thing in the world; he dropped to his knees, pressed his forehead to the ground, and with both arms protected his head from the moonlight and his imagination.

  Actually, the madman wasn’t waiting for anybody. Wearing Balter’s shirt and Dávid’s pants, he was perched on a forked branch of the apricot tree. He sat on one of the large crotches and thrust his feet up against another. Now and again he reached out for an apricot to quench his thirst, and then a number of other apricots would fall to the ground. He was quite comfortable; he could even support his back. He followed Balter’s every tactical move with great interest, and watched as he sat, sunk into himself, his face buried in his hands.

  They both felt on the nape of their necks the lunatic hooked face of the quarter-moon.

  It was not a delusional feeling; this is how the figure stood before Dávid, wearing the stolen pants, challenging him.

  To go on, to go out to the pond where the madman was waiting for him.

  Never, he kept repeating to himself, as if speaking to the moonlight and, via the moonlight, to his dead father. As if wanting to convince his father that everything would be all right and he would not yield to temptation. He had rattled the man’s madness when their glances had slid into each other’s and, like two oil stains, blended into one. It was so good to speak in his own language that the shirt in his hand hadn’t mattered at all. He did not protest; his mouth simply stayed open in astonishment when the shirt disappeared from his hand and then, along with it, the mate of his own watchful countenance. Dávid ran away with it. When the noise of running had died away, silence ruled in the thicket. He stared at his extended hand, his face grew pensive, almost somber, and then he started toward the water as if looking for his lost mate. Dávid’s pants were too tight and too short on him. He waded into the peaceful water up to the top of his thighs and still he was looking at his empty hands. On his pimply face appeared that certain smile indicating that he knew what he had to do.

  Using both hands at once, he disturbed the peace of the water’s surface.

  He found the most reliable trace, yet he did not get to what he was looking for. Once the surface was smooth again, he repeated the movement; water and the palms of his hands splashed noisily.

  He stared stiffly at his strongly arched hands and with tilted head listened to the sounds. His excited nerves were searching for a comparison, but there is no comparison without memory. As when one feels that something is about to pop into one’s mind, except that with this feeling one cannot comprehend one’s mind because the direct connection between feelings and mind has been severed.

  Movement and the sound of movement became the comparison of his inability to remember.

  He had discovered in the other human being something that he could not otherwise have realized in himself.

  Excitedly he was looking for it between the good and the bad; the unceasing slaps of his palms on the water, speeded by impatience, threw him back to where he would have hastened if he could have remembered. He repeated the movement until the urge to urinate deflected his attention. Although the fly of his pants was open, like a wedge-shaped hole, he did not reach into it until he stopped urinating and the stain on the pants touched the water. Perhaps his hand was led by aggressive angels. He watched the urine stain on his thighs reach the water and then he took out his weenie, shrunk to the size of a child’s. Those angels, like humans, were pushing and pulling the foreskin on it, which made the member’s little hollows fill with blood. It kept growing. They flashed across his mind the lights of another world to make him not worry about what he had lost or could not find. They took away from the dimness of this world as much as they gave from the light of the other world.

  Thus did they take away from him what Dávid had left in him of the secret madness of his countenance. For the sake of total forgetting, they even returned a little bit of his memories.

  He caught sight of himself crawling along the edge of a deep ditch. At the bottom of the ditch lay a kitchen alarm clock, still ticking, but while with his ten fingers he scraped decaying fallen leaves to cover it up, it slowly stopped.

  Nobody should see what he had done to the alarm clock, nobody should hear of his sin.

  I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t mean to, he shouted as his foster father beat him with his belt, beating him bloody. His foster mother followed with screams, but not because she wanted to protect him. His foster father’s belt buckle hit his thighs, waist, and back; the man hit anything he could reach.

  And he kept scraping the decaying leaves, unto his sin, until it grew dark with the lunatic brightness.

  An ambulance took him away in the middle of the night while, his lips turned blue, he was still thrashing about and shouting, frothy saliva flying, I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t mean to do it.

  Mighty was the struggle the angels put up for him and with him, and it tired him so much he could barely drag his dripping limbs to the shore.

  They were lurching, staggering with him, tugging at him; their eyes were frightened by the indifferent sunshine. They tottered into the thi
cket, helplessly going around in circles with him, until they found a comfortable place under a bush where they would put him to sleep.

  That is why his pursuer could find his abandoned sandals on the empty shore.

  While they were shouting back and forth, hunting for footprints, finding fresh ones, he slept sweetly in his hiding place.

  This is how it happened; all of this did happen. While the pastor found that no matter how much he had thought about all this, Creation’s logic would remain hidden from him. An uncomfortable time had gone by since Dávid went outside without a word. The pastor sat in the dark for hours, praying, and now it felt good to rest his thoughts on Dávid’s disobedience.

  If they find the tramp, they might kill him.

  His prayers led him nowhere.

  What a mean, useless child, he thought. Didn’t I tell him to urinate inside the house. Now I must go looking for him.

  What he could be grateful for to his God was that they found only some footprints and could not kill him.

  When he had returned home the evening before, greatly agitated by his defeat and having found no prayer with which to calm his primitive hatred, he decided that, citing illnesses, he would ask his bishop to let him retire. Why in the world does that good-for-nothing kid want to piss outside all the time. There will be no problem, the bishop never thought much of the pastor’s temperament or service. Varró was a man of great learning, the bishop admitted, but he preferred to use brawn rather than brain; that was the sum of his opinion. But he mentioned this only to his secretary. He did this on purpose because the secretary worked for the state security services and the bishop knew it.

  If he carefully conveyed information to them through the secretary, in time he received a correct and practical response.

  Varró kept his mouth shut, the bishop could be pleased about that, but he bluntly refused to cooperate with state officials, behavior that the bishop had both approved privately and several times taken exception to publicly. Because of the pastor’s executed son, the bishop had had to face the music at the ministry of religion.