Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  And he said that before the army he had never worked anywhere.

  Which made a big impression on the others. Bizsók did not like to remember this.

  And how excited this calm boy, this János Tuba, became when he said, right in front of the others, that lightning might easily hit that big tree. He flouted Bizsók’s authority not with opposition but with excitement. If they didn’t steer clear of trees like this, then the lightning wouldn’t steer clear of them. And he turned his dark frowning face away not only from the men but also from the gigantic, solitary tree. He moved among them with his head bent as if his prediction might come true at any moment, as indeed it did two days later.

  They never talked of these events among themselves, not then or later. But Bizsók could not forget the centuries-old giant tree splitting in half right before their eyes. How with a frightful clap the brilliant light struck among them, and its flame, sizzling and whimpering with living sap, burst up to the sky raging in the darkness.

  And who could tell what Tuba remembered or forgot or what he was thinking about all the time.

  The man fascinated everyone, not just with his size and behavior but mainly with his beauty.

  What anyone could see with his own eyes was, oddly, the thing everyone chose to keep quiet about. Perhaps it was better that way. Beauty is not something worth talking about with anyone. Bizsók had the reputation of a man who loved fairness and equality. Then why would he concern himself with another man’s looks. Everybody should do his job properly, that was all that counted. Some people believed he was a member of some sect in the Alföld, Jehovah’s Witnesses or Anabaptists. It was rumored that Anabaptists had to immerse themselves, one after the other and stark naked, in the waters of the Tisza or the Túr, at midnight, while other members provided light with tar torches. Of course, the compelling characteristic of a good reputation is that it binds to the person concerned even if that person hasn’t the slightest inclination to be fair, say, or even if the notion of equality goes contrary to his personal interests.

  Bizsók treated others with unusual consideration, so his men counted on his considerateness and wouldn’t have allowed him to be inconsiderate.

  It was also rumored that men and women did this contemptible obscene thing together in the Tisza and the Túr. And they took young girls there too.

  They too could feast their eyes on my old man’s balls.

  Bizsók knew that no matter what people believed or said, there was no one who knew more about old machines and motors than he did. Maybe as much as he, but not more. Since there wasn’t a whit of show-off in him, he remained modest about his knowledge. Whenever he became absorbed in his work and the irrelevant sounds receded from him, in the pleasant giddiness of work he caught himself feeling on his hand and on the nape of his neck the weight of his father’s stern regard. He did everything as his father taught him, perhaps the way his father had learned from his father, stealthily watching him work. But he could not hide from his father the new techniques he developed using his own common sense. He had to introduce these methods in defiance of the paternal surveillance, as it were.

  Or perhaps it wasn’t that he felt something but that suddenly his neck began to itch and he had to turn around.

  These moments became even more peculiar if it turned out a live person was observing him.

  In Tuba’s silently observant huge eyes, Bizsók discovered his own hungry childhood face. Whereupon he reverted to being the unpleasant but reliable father, the eternal master who keeps on teaching his sons. He had never bothered with his sons as much as he did with Tuba. And though he wouldn’t officially give his name to his foster daughter for anything in the world, and would have preferred to pay for only half of her apartment, no more, yet he loved her more than he did his boys. Passion is not something a man can will; at most he can be on the lookout for it and make sure it won’t engulf him.

  In everything that required extraordinary physical strength, inventiveness, or quick-wittedness, this young man was better.

  For example, nobody could light a fire out in the open more adroitly than he. The wind could be blowing, rain falling, no matter how wet the firewood was, his fires burned clear and smokeless. He knew which wind carried rain, how the shade would shift, what the arc of the birds’ flight meant, which well had stale water, and, when necessary, what could be made out of what.

  He was also the first to find common ground for trust with strangers, even though everyone was averse to Jews and Gypsies.

  Or they’d hardly have arrived at a new place when he’d be bringing to his fellow workers a capful of mushrooms, wild strawberries, and pigeon eggs, and rolling them out for the others.

  Bizsók did everything to keep the men from seeing how deeply this touched him.

  During the last months, when on quiet evenings, having stared at the dying fire’s random flames for long minutes under the majestic night sky and the stars spread over them, and then amid groans and yawns and cracking of numbed joints they turned in, Bizsók closed his trailer door feeling he had failed to take care of something important.

  Perhaps because in his family he had taken care of almost everything.

  The fire’s heat and light fed a feeling of closeness among them, but this could be sensed only when the fire died and it became dark and cold and they missed the closeness.

  Neither here nor anywhere else did they have a home.

  As he listened to the sound of thumping feet, various thuds and seemingly endless murmurs and rummaging about, Bizsók contentedly acknowledged that their place was too small for the Gypsies. His contentment had to do with his privileged position, and perhaps there is no just man who doesn’t find his enjoyable privileges flattering.

  Somehow he had to consider himself to be a little above the others.

  To do this, he sometimes considered himself better because he was their supervisor and mechanic, sometimes because he was older, sometimes because he was Hungarian, and sometimes because, to his great good luck, he was not a Catholic.

  They were all lonely here, so much so that they couldn’t accustom themselves to other people anymore, couldn’t share their loneliness with others. But they were also used to the fact that in their loneliness they lived in close proximity to their fellow workers’ loneliness. Although he enjoyed his small rightful privileges very much, with passing years Bizsók began to miss, especially in the night hours, the special silent attention of another person. As he locked himself in his trailer every night, he’d sometimes think that tomorrow he’d take care of this too. To spell it out, what he meant was that he should make up for what he’d missed or neglected. First thing tomorrow morning he’d move this other man’s bed into his trailer. He was thinking not of Tuba, not of sharing his privileges, but of Tuba’s bed.

  He had already picked out a place for the bed.

  We’d be much more comfortable like this, he would say bashfully on that imagined tomorrow morning.

  The Gypsies shouldn’t be so cramped.

  When talking to himself, he addressed Tuba as if he were not a Gypsy. In the mornings the dangerous proposition would lurk in the back of his mind because, ever since Jakab had started working with them, the day began very rambunctiously in the other trailer. Luckily, by afternoon he’d forget what he had wanted and didn’t remember it until going to bed again. What he envied was not their rambunctiousness but something indefinable. Actually, he could have said it out loud, for now there was no other Hungarian on the team from whom he’d have to hide his generosity and love of humankind.

  He imagined the festive moment; they would all be together. He imagined the deep silence that would follow his words. But it was precisely the image of this pampered silence that kept him from finding an appropriate occasion for the needed words.

  They knew everything about each other, or almost everything.

  Behind János Tuba stood his dead grandfather who had raised him until he was twelve. Everything he knew he knew from him—h
is concentration, the broad arcs of his movements; he learned his ease and dignity from him too. His grandfather had neither land nor house; there was nothing anyone could take from him. No one had given him anything for free, either, but he had a fine axe, a good gouging hoe, and a few homemade curved and straight-blade knives. From early spring until the first snowfall the two of them roamed the villages along the Mura. Tuba very seldom saw the inside of a school when his grandfather was alive. If gendarmes turned violent or county officials threatened his grandfather with fines, they stayed outside a little longer than their work required. When there was nothing left of a tree felled in autumn and his grandfather could make nothing further from the shavings, they had to move on. For a long time he had no idea what it was like to play; his childhood passed without a friend who might have initiated him into secrets or knowledge other than his grandfather’s.

  At school he observed the Hungarian children with great concern, watching what sort of things they did among themselves, because he understood neither their enjoyments nor their meanness nor their little business deals.

  Not only was he unfamiliar with their feelings but he didn’t understand the words Hungarians used to try to restrain their freely rambling desires and fickle attractions. He and his grandfather slept under the open sky. He didn’t know why his grandfather had been cast out by his own people or why the two of them had to live beyond the boundaries of their own tribe. They spent every winter on the mountain in Rátka, in a remote, well-concealed hut his grandfather had built. They could see from the house the great bend in the frozen-over Mura, with the willows. Border guards would interrogate his grandfather when they were looking for fugitives, and they’d shout and swear; once they took him away because they thought he was lying. But other people could not see the hut, not from any angle, unless they spotted smoke rising from its chimney. They came off the mountain only when it began to thaw, when at night the ice cracked and popped in the river.

  They could be content because in every village people waited for them impatiently.

  They could find lodging in any house.

  Uncle Tuba this and Uncle Tuba that, you know how much we love you, an’ the little boy’ll feel better with our young ’uns; with words like these, the peasants would coax the grandfather.

  You don’t have to worry about food, the woman is cooking for nine anyway.

  It was most difficult in the autumn because that was when his grandfather had to bargain hard with the peasants.

  When life had gone to sleep in the trees, old Tuba’s raw material, a peasant would go with them to pick out the right poplar, willow, chestnut, or linden in his woods or at the edge of his hayfield. Of course the obstinate peasant wanted to trick the Gypsy, which made him act foolishly, as if deliberately setting out to get the worst deal for himself. The peasant would never let old Tuba cut down a tree that he had singled out as a good one—and from which, when spring came, Tuba could carve for the peasant a scalding tub for plucking chickens, a washbasin, baking peels, a tray, and spoons for lard. Or the peasant would cut it down himself and by springtime would have used it all up for firewood, stupid peasant. They started with the larger pieces, the scalding tub and washbasin; from the interior of such bowl-like pieces they lifted, very smartly and economically, wood for the smaller items, so that in the end only shavings remained. The peasant needed everything that could be carved from his tree, just as the carvers could not have survived for more than two weeks without the grandfather’s labor. But a variety of profound irritations and annoyances lurked in this necessary and strict exchange.

  You won’t cut down that tree of mine, you filthy Gypsy, damn your mother’s dear God Almighty.

  And when after all the unnecessary jabber they finally came to terms, the stupid peasant always wanted to have more things carved from his tree than there was wood for. He’d roll his eyes and watch from a distance to see if the old man and boy were not cheating him. Or he’d ask for something that old Tuba would not carve from a tree for all the money in the world.

  That’s a peasant for you, doesn’t even know the value or nature of his own tree.

  Of course there was always more in a tree than what the peasant could imagine in that hard noggin of his. But they didn’t let him know that, let him be content thinking he’d managed to trick the Gypsy again. The Gypsy can’t help it if he has more brains than the cunning peasant, who always wants more and who always loses everything.

  The extra objects disappeared for a while under ashes or shavings and turned up later in faraway markets and fairs.

  They could have made even more money on each tree if they’d had a horse and wagon, so Grandpapa Tuba daydreamed; necessity made him more honest than he could reasonably be expected to be.

  They were given food and shelter, this and that, some produce, some secondhand clothes, but to survive the winter they needed a little money as well. The old man did not want much—to carve out no more than a few extra spoons, well, maybe a bowl or washbasin. The peasant who could outwit him had not yet been born, and if he had been, old Tuba and his grandson would give his house a wide berth.

  Because they kept their eyes and ears open at all times, they saw that there were peasants whom even other peasants avoided; no Gypsy either would have anything to do with such people.

  There were threatening beings in the familiar world, some of them more powerful than Gypsies, and every evening the grandfather would tell his grandson a story about one of their deeds. Souls and ghosts would appear from the dark woods and move toward the fire, but they could be friends of neither fire nor light. When the tale ended, the grandfather threw a few more shavings on the fire, making it smoke a little, letting the wild animals prowling around them smell it, and the ghosts gently withdrew into the night filled with bloody secrets.

  They could hear the village dogs yelping one after the other as the ghosts passed by, and they kept barking for a long time after to keep the ghosts from returning.

  Every successive day brought back the light again.

  In the memories of older people in the area, the boy and his grandfather are preserved as two figures in tattered clothes who reappear every spring looking haggard and pitifully thin as they turn into the muddy yards. At that time of year the plump peasant gleams with the extra weight he has put on during his idle winter. If a dog barked angrily, they would stop outside the fence or hedgerow. They never walked side by side; the boy either lagged behind or walked in front of his grandfather, and when they talked while walking they shouted. And they never wound up side by side, as if there weren’t space for that, or as if neither of them needed help or encouragement from the other. The old man wasn’t tall, but the dignity of his bearing heightened his figure in the peasants’ eyes. The women would have liked to touch and hold the little boy, for his beauty moved them, but he radiated only refusal.

  For a long time Tuba seemed untouchable; later he seldom longed for physical contact with anyone.

  The old man carried a large sack on his left shoulder; he also carried his axe on the left so he had one hand free. He parted his thick gray hair in the middle; according to an ancient law, no barber’s scissors could touch it. And if the masters or the gendarmes were to do that to a Gypsy, as sometimes they did—and the old man imprinted this possibility deep in the little boy’s mind—no greater shame could befall him in his entire bitter life. The way he’d avoided this shame, his grandfather told him, was that when they had wanted him in the army, he took out another birth certificate in the priest’s office in Korpavár. One had to claim to be a few years older or younger when filling out forms so as not to be taken away.

  The priest always found somebody in his book with a convenient birth date.

  And ever since then he and his children have been going around with this false name. When he went to see the priest in Korpavár, the real Tuba had been dead a long time.

  And his grandfather was four years older than it said in his papers.

  Accor
ding to ancient custom, two tight plaits of hair called kader in Romany framed his nicely furrowed, stern face; he allowed no emotion to move a single muscle of his face because that would offend his forebears.

  By the way, this sack on his shoulder was the big sack with which peasants frightened misbehaving brats. The Gypsy will cut you in two, put you in his sack, and take you away. He carried the sack as his ancestor had done. The strutting foolish peasant believes he is cussing you, but in his language too, cigány, Gypsy, means human being.

  And he feels good when he says, hey, cigány, this or that. For us it’s like he’s not saying anything.

  Grandfather Tuba remembered old events as he had heard about them from the stories of his own grandfather; if he could not remember something he rounded off the story by giving his own version. János Tuba told stories the same way to his fellow workers, saw the old fire his grandfather had built in place of the fire around which the road workers sat, and while he filled in the missing pieces from his own experiences he saw his grandfather squatting in the slow-moving veils of smoke, scraping the dying embers with his stick.

  When Bizsók was with them, János Tuba skipped over certain things on purpose, so as not to initiate a Hungarian into important knowledge; or he might stretch some facts in other parts of the story.

  But among themselves none of these men liked talking about himself or about real events of his life.

  And the evenings were not too long either.

  After work they had to wash up, and even though they neither washed nor mended their clothes—they took their clothes home and left these chores to their women—they always found things that had to be put in order. While one cleaned the trailer, another would cook. The Gypsies ate what they had cooked together, but Bizsók ate separately. Occasionally they would all go out for a spritzer or, more rarely, a beer, and Bizsók would go with them if only because he didn’t like their being on their own. Four Gypsies appearing in the inn of a strange village was something fearsome; in some places it was not even advisable to go in. Sometimes one of them would want to be alone and would stay back while the others went out. Winding up in the midst of strangers’ lives increased their sense of belonging together; Bizsók looked somewhat askance at this but, as their supervisor, realized that these experiences gave them material to talk about. And since he also had to forge his team into a socialist work brigade, after such an outing he could enter in his log that the brigade members had practiced socializing in their communal life after work.