Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  A week later, in the presence of the bishop, the secretary was ruminating over the abstract doctrinal question whether a Christian, having to choose between ecclesiastical solidarity and national interest, shouldn’t give preference to the latter.

  The bishop replied without batting an eye that for a man belonging to any of the reformed churches, the two interests could not be in conflict.

  This silent battle had been going on for years.

  Finally state officials tried stealthily to have the village presbyters turn against the pastor and send him away on some pretext.

  The physician’s wife and the secretary of the local party council were called in several times for so-called conversations, which is to say the two were taken, in a car with government license plates, to a secret-service apartment in Szentendre. The physician’s wife had a nervous breakdown, she did not stop crying and kept asking why, but why. The bishop would not stand for such strong-arm tactics in his diocese. He was also a member of the secret society then trying, under the guise of willing cooperation and tactical accommodation, to alleviate some of the damage caused by the Russian regime.

  Thus he had to make some very sensitive concessions in order to gain some indulgence from government authorities in Varró’s case.

  Varró knew very little of this, except that from then on his bishop was even more annoyed with him. He took it amiss when in 1957 the pastor’s son was hanged and not even given a proper grave. Because of his attitude, Varró assumed that the bishop sided with the government officials after all or perhaps worked directly for them, that that was the true state of affairs.

  And he could not deny that he revived the idea of his own retirement after hearing the lamentable life story of the retired prison guard. But what tranquillity would he find in retirement, having failed to find any in his life. The only correct deed of his life would be to give up his calling, because then he’d cease deluding himself or others about being able to serve them honorably.

  Just as his bishop wanted to be rid of him, it was good for him too to be free of himself.

  Yet the way he thought about these matters differed greatly from the bishop’s thinking. Because the bishop kept the church’s interest, which is to say its principle of utility, in the forefront of his mind, for him the borders between tactical accommodation and forced cooperation were blurred. Varró, however, did not believe that what was useful or unavoidable was necessarily moral, and this pagan thought positively tortured him. The only deed that might please God, he imagined, would be if once, just once, he could convey to one other soul his own true feelings. And by this he meant the sheer human readiness for faith, which had appeared in him on an overcast day under the mighty sky when he was a small child and had accompanied him ever since. Faith justified truth; faith was also the test of true feelings, not the other way around. Until he could conjure up at least the necessity of faith for another human being, he could not retire; without that he would find no rest.

  By retiring, he would only be doing a favor to his bishop or to some bigwig officials, which for him was the same thing.

  So what was he to do, then. He did not delude himself into imagining that he was at some sort of turning point in his life. He had long known that the living agony always seeks a timely handle, and that is when it begins to eat away at faith.

  Tension of the mind could be increased to the extreme, and that is how thinking considered to have some utility deflected his attention from his agony.

  In certain cases he did not use his mind, precisely because he did not want to think about the world the way his bishop did.

  Because he saw with alarm what his prayers were like. He did profit from them, the profit was personal, nothing else. With prayer he diverted his attention from his exhausted thinking and found himself ever farther from the agony that never ceased.

  What could take him farther from the mercy of suffering, the only balm of the wretched, if not the cunning double-dealing of the life force.

  He stood up to see about his grandson. Given the chaos of his soul, it was always a relief to see the innocence in the boy’s face. Even though he knew that at the boy’s age innocence was mainly illusory.

  He looked for him everywhere and kept returning to the entrance to his office.

  The tipcarts at the distant mine kept moving with their even creaking, and he knew the men working them were prisoners.

  He did not want to shout. He stopped at the end of the brick walk, from there he only watched, did not want to disturb the boy or step on the dewy grass, he waited for him.

  Softly he called his name.

  The boy’s pajama-covered back moved under the moonlight, and he straightened up; slowly they walked toward each other.

  The pastor remembered exactly what repulsive effect the overripe odor of adult bodies had had on him when he was a child. He worried about the boy; he would have preferred to know of his every step, though he knew he could not protect him from all the dangers lurking around him. He did not touch his grandchild carelessly. The slap the day before and the hug the day before that were the results of exhausted feelings.

  He asked the boy why he’d once again refused to be obedient.

  Alternating between complaints and excuses, Dávid deflected the rebuke; it wasn’t his fault, he couldn’t help it if he’d had another bad dream.

  Seriously, almost with scientific interest, they looked at the glossed-over feelings in each other’s eyes, visible in the bluish glow of the darkness. The pastor wanted to see the bad dreams. And Dávid well remembered the exhortation about what he should and shouldn’t do if he wanted to have pleasant dreams. He did not do the forbidden things anymore. He had some mild pangs because of them. Now they let it go at this; they knew their duties and without a word, walking side by side, returned to the office.

  The pastor closed the glass-paned door but did not turn the key in the lock.

  I didn’t have any bad dreams, said the pastor quietly and hesitantly, but frankly I couldn’t sleep either.

  Dávid stopped near the door. His grandfather did not usually talk about himself. In the warm stuffy darkness he could smell the old furniture.

  Sit down, please, said the pastor, with barely perceptible embarrassment. You must know there are some sleepless nights in everyone’s life.

  It felt good to say this, though he did not think the confession was quite proper. It was as if in the guise of honesty, he was bragging about his weakness.

  Then, with slow steps, they pleasantly cracked the sensitive silence taking shape between them.

  The darkness told Dávid that this situation was real; this time there would be no scolding. Relieved, he groped for a bench, and as he lowered himself to it he felt gratitude to the night. The pastor sat at the harmonium, automatically pulling the stool close to the instrument. Under his foot the worn pedal of the bellows creaked and the harmonium’s innards began to groan and rattle. This beginning, meant to be playful, struggled with an insistent clattering until the aged instrument found its proper breath in the familiar melody of the psalm.

  It was an unassuming little melody, moving in a limited range. It never ended, only returned to its starting point. After the third repetition, the pastor shouted in a terrifying voice.

  They kill widows and orphans, he sang.

  He did not trust his powerful sonorous bass to the arc of sounds summoned from the old mechanism, he did not fight the unpleasant noises, he gave voice to the darkness. At the same time his hands continued the tune, ignoring his shout. When he raked the tune through the lousy pipes of his instrument for the seventh time, his voice thundered with the shards splintered from the melody.

  Suffers everything in silence, in silence.

  With loud shouts, he informed his God that he suffered everything in silence.

  And while the pastor thus sang out his most sensitive theological worries for his grandson to hear, Balter, sitting on his chair, quietly fell asleep in the doorway of his hous
e.

  Whatever had been written in advance, whatever had to happen, happened only on the following night.

  In his sleep he plopped into the lap of that young girl whom he did not remember but who kept coming back to him from his childhood. The ice-cold light of the moon no longer tormented him. Carefully it went away from the back of his neck, leaving him alone with the weight of the young girl’s head. He was awakened by the creaking of the tipcarts at the distant mine, though he did not know when or where. Prisoners doing work outside the prison were brought over around this time in a special transport. He lay on the floor where he had fallen from his chair in his sleep. He seemed to hear the stamping of their feet at the ferry. The shifts at the Dunabogdány quarry were changed once a week but, straining his memory as he lay there, Balter could not remember what day it was.

  He recalled only that the change happened on Tuesday nights.

  It was dawning out there in the threat-filled deep-gray landscape.

  They herded them across the island, then across the bridge, and then up the mountain.

  During the entire day ahead of him, he must find an answer to the question of how the footprints could go from the trunk of the apricot tree to the low-lying dirt road when there were no footprints leading to the apricot tree. Naturally he could find no explanation.

  When the police officers told him later, he nodded, smiling gently at his own stupidity.

  When he reached the dirt road, he could still make out the contours of the footprints, but after a few steps they disappeared, dissolved in the sand, and he stood there foolishly before the mystery.

  He placed his foot in the tramp’s last footprint and stared stiffly as he saw a perfect match.

  He preferred to continue being thirsty than to venture farther from his house. He listened long into the silence of early dawn with the birds waking; would he hear the prisoners marching from the direction of the paved road. As he walked he pulled the rake across his every footprint.

  He preserved only the footprints leading from the trunk of the apricot tree to the dirt road, signs left by the son who was planning to kill him. It also occurred to him that perhaps a prisoner thirsting for revenge had been prowling around him.

  He drank from the water he had used two days earlier to steam the string beans. The jars, wrapped in newspaper and old clothes, were still standing in the big dishwashing pot; some of them stayed there for good.

  Shortly after the midday bell he left the house after all and followed his son’s footprints. He knew these tracks well and hoped to discover new ones farther off. He felt like crying when he thought of the many occasions he had taken the little toes of his kicking baby son into his mouth.

  He hid the rake in the thick prickly blackthorns by the side of the dirt road.

  Perhaps chance led him this way, perhaps predestination; at any rate he wound up at the pond. He had heard about it but had never seen it before for himself. The picket lay there, the one he had seen once before in the presbyter’s hand. Two nails were sticking out of it. It was an old piece of rain-beaten wood with brand-new nails. He thought about that for a long time, could not decide whether to touch it. As if he had to decide to what power he should entrust himself. He could not comprehend what sort of connection the pastor and the presbyter could have had with his son. Even though the picket lay there as clear proof of this close connection.

  Then he decided to go for sure; he took the picket with him.

  A few days later, when the unforeseen events were reconstructed, the presbyter could corroborate Balter’s confession. He was the one, indeed, who had forgotten the picket and left it there when he found Dávid’s sandals at the edge of the thicket. Later this corroborating evidence gained decisive significance. Because if the old piece of wood had not belonged to the presbyter and Balter could have quickly hammered the two nails into it, then not only the intent of his deed would have become provable but also its particular cruelty.

  The presbyter had already removed the old pickets of his fence when he realized he might not have enough new pickets. He had to replace the old bent nails on the old pickets with new ones. To make sure they wouldn’t be loose in the old holes, he hammered one in a little higher and the other a little lower than the old holes. Experts found his testimony truthful. The pastor had called to him just as he was about to refit the picket, but he took it along with him because without a weapon one never knew what might happen in an encounter with a tramp.

  No, he would not have hit him with it, because of the nails.

  Balter gave his account of everything without hesitation.

  He caused some difficulty with his behavior only when he had to relate the immediate circumstances of the deed.

  It’s lucky the culprit was not my son, he repeated gently, smiling with great satisfaction, very lucky, that is my great luck.

  They attributed his words to his inevitable confusion.

  At the time when the offense was committed, fallen apricots almost completely covered the ground, and more kept falling. The investigating policemen picked up undamaged apricots a few times and ate them.

  Balter did not deny the deed; therefore his hazy details or gratuitous smiles did not hinder the investigation in the least. The police dutifully contacted Budapest and let their colleagues in the Zugló precinct see what they could find in the Balters’ apartment in Turul Street, but for a long time they had no response. Not only the new uneven spots on the ground and the abundant bloodstains smeared everywhere, but also the trampled thick pulp of apricots were sufficient evidence of a struggle between the two men.

  To re-create the events of that night they had to rely on marks that could be mapped exactly. Based on the injuries caused at different times, the coroner estimated that the perpetrator dragged the body into his house about four hours after the death. Balter confirmed this. Outside it was getting light all right, that’s for sure, he said, smiling gently.

  But it was still night inside his house.

  He did not light the kerosene lamp, he explained; instead he ate everything edible he could find in the dark. That means you had to step over the body several times, the policemen noted. That’s right, he agreed, he did not deny that he went to the pantry for food and then back to the table because that is where he ate his meals. First he ate what had been left over from the string beans seasoned with garlic, but he did not want to lie, he was still hungry. He went to the pantry again. He had one and a half dry Csaba sausages, which he ate with three scallions but without bread. He went to the pantry a third time, he does not want to lie, and put away a full packet of sweet biscuits while standing there.

  Then you must have been looking at the body, man, while you ate, said the policemen, because you were standing right above it.

  He doesn’t want to lie, he replied, smiling gently, that’s right, that’s how it happened. At the kitchen table he also polished off three cubes of processed cheese. He ate them sitting down, the way he ate the sausage. He peeled the skin off the sausage, because he can’t eat anything with the skin on, not even sausages.

  The empty saucepan with the spoon in it was still there on the stove, next to the dishwashing pot. On the table tops of scallions, bits of sausage skin, the large knife, the biscuits’ torn, empty cellophane wrap, shreds of tinfoil torn off the cubes of processed cheese.

  But to the question what he had been doing between 11:30 in the evening and 3:30 in the morning, Balter could not give an acceptable answer.

  Maybe I fell asleep, he said with his gentle uncertain smile.

  During those hours, of course, it became lighter in the house, still warm from the previous day’s heat, where, the policemen assumed, Balter had to smell the odor emanating from the torn flesh.

  He smelled it; he did, for sure.

  At dawn he took off his clothes.

  He did not put his soiled pants and shirt with the rest of his laundry but on the kitchen chair, properly folded and rolled into a package. He took a few bottles
out of the dishwashing pot and dipped his towel into the water from which he had been drinking, very economically, for two days. A little bit was still left at the bottom. He squeezed out the towel, not to waste any, and that’s how he washed off the stains from his hands, face, and neck.

  He would not say bloodstains.

  Those stains came off easily enough; sweet apricot is much harder to wash off, because it is sweet and sticky as honey. He had to dip and squeeze out the towel several times.

  But you saw, man, didn’t you, that everything was becoming bloody.

  He did; he doesn’t want to lie.

  The bloodstained towel had dried in the meantime; they found bloody water in the dishwashing pot.

  Truth was, he didn’t pay much attention to that because he was in a hurry. He washed off most of it, wanted to catch the first ferry. It leaves at 4:40 unless someone requests a special trip.

  He would not have wanted to wake up the ferrymen for a special trip.

  He put on the same white shirt, the same dark suit in which he had taken leave of his mates on the Vác shore to take the first ferry in this direction.

  He carefully locked the house with the body inside.

  The sleepy ferrymen noticed nothing unusual about him.

  On the far side, at the end of the landing dock, a young woman waited for them that summer dawn. She had a medium-size suitcase in her hand. Halfway across, the navigator had already noticed that little Melinda was coming home. With irrepressible joy he passed the news to the ticket taker. Until the side of the ferryboat bumped against the landing dock, the two men wondered why she was arriving at such an unusual time. They could see that she maintained her smile, though she seemed a bit sleepy. The ticket taker did not tie up the ferry and the navigator did not even shut off the engine, rather they both began to shout to her, asking her to get on board, they’d take her across on a special trip.

  Balter the murderer stepped off the boat without saying good-bye, and the lovely girl got on, laughing. The special trip across the river carried Dávid’s sister, who had thought out well in advance what she would say to the ferrymen and to her grandfather, and how she would satisfy her kid brother’s curiosity.