Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  Tuba was more likely to go out on his own or more frequently to stay back in the trailer.

  Bizsók did not like this much.

  Sometimes Tuba’s army buddy would show up; the men would find them together when coming back to the trailers, the mustached Hungarian who’d come with Tuba when he joined the team. He always arrived as if materializing out of the ground, and he disappeared in the same imperceptible way. Bizsók had nothing to say about that. He liked that someone had such a loyal friend. They were similar in build too. He always vanished without a word and returned without saying anything; the men could not ask a person like that where he had been or what he had been doing. At most they could tease him, and he could respond in kind. They all noticed that during the days after his friend’s appear-disappear visit, Tuba himself would vanish. But not always. This was impossible to predict, just as it was impossible to comprehend how the mustached man from Budapest always found them no matter where they happened to be working. Bizsók was puzzled, but he neither said nor asked anything. Still, he was left with a tiny ache that reminded him of something he preferred to forget. And he did not like the way the man with the mustache grinned constantly. But over his long years of work, he realized, having thought a lot about it, that the grinning friend had come with Tuba the first time so that the Gypsy would not be alone when he applied for work. Bizsók liked this in Tuba’s friend, with whom he never spoke and whose last name he had a hard time remembering.

  He barely remembered the man’s first name, Gyula, because he wanted to cast it out of his memory, and that is when the name would reappear unexpectedly.

  Whatever the men did, whether together or separately, they were all very careful, more so than with anything else, not to touch another man’s life, not with words or looks. This basic rule was not to be broken by anyone. Once, the day after such a violation, Bizsók told the malefactor to return his work permit; the man left immediately. Everyone knew what had happened, but in the closeness of their lives they could preserve their self-respect in the future only if no one talked about another man’s private affairs. Of course, there are unguarded movements or words with potential consequences, inadvertently open or meaningful looks that one remembers later. An error may slip into one’s interpretation that may darken another man’s face or brighten it.

  Bizsók did not understand many things, but the three other Gypsies could not understand how it was that Tuba could disappear and miss two workdays with impunity. Bizsók would have fired any of the others for such a violation.

  At noon, when they came back from having a couple of beers and discovered the strange items in the trailer, a similarly inexplicable thing happened, but this time among the Gypsies.

  Tuba slapped Jakab on the face, hard.

  And at the same time the older Téglás brother lowered his eyes; if he had not, all the emotions that goodwill and sufferance were curbing would have flared up in the darkness of those eyes. Bizsók grunted loudly. Imre Téglás began to shout and flail his arms.

  He stopped instantly because his brother obviously wanted something else.

  In the machine was the molten material for at least another sixteen rounds with the wheelbarrows, the tarry mix that had to be poured out at the right places before Bizsók could start with the steamroller. He kept watching his men from behind his thick glasses, but he was at a loss as to what to do.

  As though his leniency with Tuba had now come to avenge itself.

  Jakab threw himself, screaming and crying, on the floor of the hot trailer, not because the slap had been hard but in desperation. He denied having stolen these expensive, strange items. He kept banging his shaven head with his fist, and if they hadn’t stopped him he would have banged his head against the trailer wall.

  He yelled and argued in Hungarian and in Romany, as the good Lord was his witness it wasn’t him, what did He want from him, it wasn’t he who stole, somebody else had stolen his new work clothes.

  Actually nobody had accused him of anything.

  But how did that expensive pair of pants wind up on the clothes rack, and that fine high-class shirt, pale-blue oxford, and where had those welted, barely used old English box* shoes come from, now under the racks, one neatly side by side with the other, that is what they all asked themselves.

  And how indeed could the boy’s brand-new work clothes have disappeared at the same time, clothes he had never worn and which he so treasured he’d rather wear his uncle’s old things.

  And what happened to Tuba’s rubber-soled protective boots.

  It was clear to Bizsók that if he went to the local gendarmes and reported the case to the company, he’d lose three of his men in one fell swoop. Judging by the Téglás brothers’ behavior, he could expect nothing from them. But if he did not report anything, what would they do with the new shoes and expensive clothes, which could only have come from one of the vacation homes in the area, where many old-fashioned gentlemen lived. He was angry at Tuba for his arbitrariness. But the anger bursting from the other man gave him a good feeling. As if Tuba had done for him what he, Bizsók, would never do.

  Not even in disciplining his own sons had he ever resorted to beating, for which he had been repeatedly reproached, and he had always been ashamed of this characteristic of his, which could be construed as a personal flaw.

  Bizsók had been given back his life as a present, and therefore he was averse to bullying and violence. When trouble occurred his soul would not move; he only watched what was happening around him the more closely. He was a stout man, in height just short of what is usually called medium-tall. He wore his hair in a crew cut and he had discovered it had turned gray only when, released from captivity, he looked at a mirror for the first time in years.

  He had arrived home for harvesttime; it was midday. Perhaps nobody noticed him, the village was silent, he did not find the key in the usual place. Telling this story to his men one time as they sat around the fire, he said he had not even looked at anything around the house; he washed his face and drank some water from the well and sat down on a bench on the porch. He probably didn’t fall asleep; he felt neither fatigue nor hunger, but it seemed to him that twilight followed noon almost immediately.

  Then he heard women’s voices approaching on the road and a frightened child stared at him, as did a cow trudging in through the open gate.

  The child ran back out and began shouting that an old beggar was sitting on their porch.

  The source of laughter is not always gaiety; that is how his listeners laughed.

  First he wanted to know why the key wasn’t in its place.

  The others knew that his wife was a very beautiful woman and they understood that he had a distrustful and jealous nature. He always expected the worst, though until now he had shown no signs of this. The woman reached up and took the key out of a crack between the wall and the doorpost, where he could not have found it; he could only widen his eyes in astonishment. The woman opened the door, they went inside, and she immediately squatted down before the stove as she had always done.

  She looked back at him from there.

  But from that point he did not go on with the story for the others.

  It was as if he had walked into a strange place; he hesitated. For two whole years he had not seen this person to whom he now returned, not even in his dreams.

  In the morning she made dumplings rich in shortening, as if she knew exactly what he wanted.

  He did tell this part to the Gypsies but kept quiet about how the two of them had finally embraced. Yet in the light of the fire, the others could easily discern on his dreamy countenance what he was bashfully holding back from them.

  His face showed that night with her as he saw it through the fire.

  The next day he could swing the scythe only about three times, if that, before he became so dizzy he had to lie down.

  And he did not tell them that the woman poured cold water on her kerchief and rubbed his heart and wiped his forehead with it. Ev
en in the shade he kept breaking out in waves of cold sweat.

  What was to be done, he weighed only forty-seven kilos, doctors had weighed him, he told the Gypsies by way of explanation. In that condition he was hardly fit for harvesting.

  In his sleep angry waves of the sea occasionally hurled themselves at him, right under his eyes.

  He saw the golden brilliance of the sea before him, the ways that insistent dry winds ruffled wheat fields under an infinite sky and with their whirlpools beat down and twirled the ears of grain.

  At other times the sky was dark, and sand was churned into the dully glittering waves. He had froth between his teeth. This is how the afternoon when he had first seen the sea below Husum returned to him in his sleep.

  They had surrendered below Husum, in the sand dunes. Dense sharp sleet slashed their faces, and in the sudden silence the victors’ triumphant shouts carried a long way. They were rounded up like trapped animals. The fools who still tried to run away or hide somewhere were shot on the spot.

  The wind instantly obliterated all footprints.

  The morning when in the other trailer they sheared Jakab’s head, Bizsók was startled to wakefulness very early. A person who remembers, or whose dreams compel him not to forget, does not analyze the past. To avoid having to be grateful for the miserable life that, in his dreams, often ended in death, he got up right away. To keep the thought of being helpless to make changes from wandering about too much. He took off the top of his striped pajamas and stepped out into the open as if uninterested in what sort of day was waiting for him.

  The sky was growing lighter under a gentle mist.

  He put his clean enamel washbowl on the step of the trailer and poured water into it from a pitcher. In the morning, he did not use soap, only bent over the bowl and splashed some water on himself. First on his face and neck, then on his armpits and arms, a little on his back too and on his hairy chest, but these latter areas he tried to dampen without letting the water drip on his pants. He dried himself, threw the dirty water under the trailer, and stood the washbowl on the step so it could dry properly in the sun.

  The empty pitcher stayed on the step; it was the boy’s job to bring fresh water.

  He locked the door again. The stifling night air sat heavily in the space; hardly any light filtered through the small window. While getting dressed he could see almost nothing without his glasses. He wore his wide work pants no longer than a week but changed his underwear and shirt every other day. The shirts were all checked gingham, differing only in their colors, about as much as sun-bleached black might differ from faded blue or dull gray from washed-out brown.

  János Tuba wore the same kind of shirt except he preferred to work half naked.

  The bulging lenses stared at him in the dimness, because he always laid down his glasses the same way in the evening, with the temples folded in. It was autumn by the time he regained his health somewhat, and spring when he realized that although his body was strong enough, his vision had not cleared up. Since then he’d had to change his lenses twice for stronger ones; the optician was none too pleased the second time.

  Where was that grumbling optician by now.

  Bizsók traveled home every two weeks; from the railroad station he had to cross the marketplace on foot to the bus station, and he could stop at the optician’s place on his way. There the two young women who waited on customers wore short white smocks made of some translucent material, and they both had their hair set in a tower of layers. All the new frames were too expensive for him and not to his taste either.

  His loyalty was not to his old, obviously worthless glasses but to something else he couldn’t have named.

  Every morning he pulled open the drawer in the little table and took out the chamois from next to the empty payroll envelopes. His life had no more absorbing and fulfilling moments than this. He guarded his dreams with his deliberate awakening, and his dreams guarded his past. He was alert, because the fatigued material demanded caution, but he did not need to think. The act he performed was simple, but it was done among past events. Every morning he held brittle fate in his hands.

  First he folded out the temples, making sure the brads were still all right. It was not a big problem if a brad became loose or fell off, since at home he had a very small hammer—he had no idea how he had got it, only watchmakers and jewelers used such an instrument, but there it was, he had it. With this hammer he was reassured about the brads. But a temple broke once, and an even more difficult situation arose when the frame around one lens cracked and then snapped.

  He smeared hot tar on the uneven surface of the fracture, and when it set, he wound a thread dipped in tar around the temple, and on top of that a length of copper wire hardly thicker than the thread. The broken frame was harder to repair. With a glowing-hot steel pin, he burned holes in the plastic. It took even longer to manufacture a clip small enough to fit into the holes and hold fast on both sides.

  Between two fingers he held the bridge of the glasses tight, very tight; otherwise, if he tried to do it in a gingerly way, he’d have more trouble. While cleaning the lenses with the chamois and being careful not to let the need for cleanliness become stronger than what the frame could bear, he was actually preoccupied with what was no longer humanly possible to comprehend in the inner nature of things, even though they were not a secret to anyone.

  The sense of treacherously prowling dangers compels everyone to moderate their behavior, even though immoderate behavior can sometimes turn out well.

  Twenty-seven men of their regiment remained in the infinite, vanishing dunes where they had been surrounded for two days. They had no place to retreat, only to the sea, and while the threat to life compelled some to surrender, it urged others to hold on and find a way to slip out of the trap. These were the last minutes of the war for them, why should they die now. At the same time they had to keep an eye on each other; and they went at each other, hissing and yelling; there was nothing left in them but endless swearing. They were careful that none of them would lose his sanity or endanger the life of a comrade. There was no place where one of them could go alone, and together with the others in this dangerous group, it also no longer made sense to venture into unfamiliar areas. They knew the sea was out there somewhere, they even felt its presence, but none of them knew what he felt about it.

  A sergeant kept their spirits up. He was literally intoxicated by his heroic conduct during the hopeless battles of the previous days and by the weight of his duty to command and lead other men on the road between life and death. Fervega was the sergeant’s name. As far as he was concerned, he said, his face weary, anybody could go wherever he wanted to, but anybody staying with him must obey him. Until then they’d thought of him as a rather meek man; perhaps they had failed to notice it was restrained blind anger that made him look so drowsy, and not the lack of sleep that tortured and exhausted them all. They had nothing to eat and, more important, no potable water. And they knew they wouldn’t find any here. They did not know where they were. They had a page torn from a German school atlas but no means of orientation. They were very close to the sea in this incredibly wide, flat terrain that gave them no protection, but none of them had ever seen the sea and had no idea what feature of the terrain signaled the proximity of water. Nevertheless, first they had to leave the highway and then a dirt road, even though it was the only familiar feature of the terrain. Sergeant Fervega was a precision-instrument maker in civilian life, a man with able hands, the rest were rough-mannered peasant boys, and there was one Gypsy among them.

  They must have come very close to the sea several times, but they could not distinguish the rhythmic lapping of the waves from the strong booming and whimpering wind.

  Their inexperienced eyes saw ridges of desolate dunes on the horizon. They were walking in a wakeful dream.

  Yet after a while Fervega realized that when they managed to go inland the wind, which held them in its grip and blustered with all its might in their ears, we
akened and became more musical, as it were, and grew stronger when they came close to the water again. And something similar must have been happening with their vision. Where the water was close there was no longer any sky and no longer distinguishable clouds; it was difficult to separate visions and illusions from these unfamiliar phenomena. Still, Fervega thought it was better not to go right up to the sea with this handful of men, if only because he knew nothing of the nature of the shore or the water; but, equally, it was better if they didn’t move too far from the sea either, since it was more dangerous inland.

  Eventually they would surely find some human settlement, which they should first observe from a safe distance. It would be advantageous to approach from the direction of the water. Ever since they’d been driven across the Hungarian border, following retreating German troops, they had the feeling that no matter where they wound up, even if at the edge of the map, there’d be no end to this damned Germany; they’d never get out of it.

  Some of them cried whenever they stopped, even for a moment; the others had to turn away from them.

  Fervega did not want them to stop.

  After a spell of walking, they saw a black stone building on the desolate horizon under low-flying black clouds. As they kept walking, they saw it was a solitary building far from any human settlement. It was reminiscent of a granary on some estate, or a cathedral nave. They approached in a spread-out-chain formation, alternately ducking and straightening up, hoping to find a well, and a fire so they could at least dry themselves. Near the building, where the movement of the air seemed to change, they thought they heard disconnected snatches of the hum of voices or some church melody. It reminded some of them of a beehive buzzing or the drone of a distant marketplace.