Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Delight made her giggle like a little girl. She thought she was laughing at what she was seeing, though in fact it was because of what she was feeling.

To gauge properly one’s actions, one needs a bit of emotional perspective.

She was tittering, enjoying immensely the distance that Médi could open up and then throw a bridge over with her voice.

Being a costume designer, she observed the theatrical banality of Médi’s temperament from the viewpoint of a sister profession; to provide some extra income for herself and Elisa, she worked as a cutter and seamstress for all sorts of minor stars. It was as if she were suddenly saying to herself, but this is great, a white lace blouse over a wrinkled bosom tanned to brown.

But her laughing made the pile of dishes, raised and supported by her arm on the edge of the sink, lose balance and slip.

A red enamel lid was first to slide off, and it seemed to set in motion the rest of the variously sized platters and dessert plates. Clumsily, from the bottom, she reached for the moving dishes with her other hand. She missed, and the dishes went on sliding, gaining momentum on the big chased surfaces of trays. And under all this, a glass broke in her hand, of course; when it cut her finger she cried out and involuntarily gave a forceful shove to the entire pile. Which was followed by a deafening noise. The two women in the doorway moved to jump forward. The clatter, clang, and clangor, and the sliding that in a single second strewed a profusion of bouncing, rolling colorful shards all over the kitchen floor could not be stopped.

Now there was no clear space to which they might jump or advance.

And just as quickly, silence fell over the battlefield.

Rooted, mesmerized, all three stared at the wretched result. Mária, her wounded finger in her mouth, backed away from the shards all the way to the open door to the maid’s room, and the moment she leaned on it, the door slammed against the wall. But what was this sight compared to the devastation they had already seen in their lives. For a few seconds, until the three of them began to laugh, glad that this was nothing compared to the sights in their memory, they could hear the deep, pulsating sound of the tugboat. Though they could also hear in it — in the meantime it had absorbed — another pulsing rhythm. Perhaps another tugboat was approaching. Probably from the opposite direction, from the Árpád Bridge, and the rhythms of the two tugs differed. Mária slid slowly down the smooth door as if pulled by her own weight. And she could have told them that the tugboat has just come abreast of the empty section of the shore in front of the Protestant church on Pozsonyi Road, where it does not echo so loudly.

The only time it was quiet over the river was when it was either frozen or full of drift ice.

You see, Margit Huber bellowed, you see, she chortled, I could have told you it would happen, I saw it, I swear I did.

Oh, let’s see your finger, cried Izabella Dobrovan anxiously, wanting to turn their unsuppressed laughter quickly into sentimental empathy.

It may be a deep cut.

From behind her finger, which she kept sucking, Mária Szapáry cried along with the other two, while shaking with laughter or weeping.

Oh, my entire sixteenth century.

Her mouth filled with the taste of blood. She slid down the door until her buttocks reached the floor. She was clowning for them because she was a little ashamed of her clumsiness and the condition of her kitchen.

My entire sixteenth century is gone.

There she was, legs spread on the kitchen’s checkered tiles, in the midst of the shards that were all that was left of her majolica dishes, true museum-quality dishes from an Urbino workshop, and it was hard to believe that this was, once again, the end of the story.

It wasn’t her finger that hurt.

When someone rang the bell outside, once, briefly, she was thinking that this really wasn’t an act of fate, and it wouldn’t be worth her while to resist it.

Anybody heard the elevator, she asked, and was amazed that she hadn’t heard something she should have.

I haven’t.

No, nothing.

Could she have walked up.

It seems that way.

Should I open it, if you’d like me to, asked Dobrovan politely.

I’ll get it, came Mária’s firm response, but she was in no hurry.

She wouldn’t have trusted them with opening the door; she needed this opportunity.

That evening, Irma Szemző had made it up the stairs very slowly indeed.

She stopped on all the landings, her thoughts repeatedly carrying her away, or more precisely, for long moments she forgot where she was or where she was going. The higher she climbed, the warmer she felt, even though the gallery windows facing the inner courtyard were wide open. The white marble walls were mottled with yellow- and blue-grained pink spots, and there was silence and cleanliness. Today she hadn’t wanted to look at the concierge’s face, swollen by alcohol — and not just because he disgusted her in general. Ultimately, she was one of those people who, though unwilling to be absolutely honest, battle with themselves to become dishonest since they lack the talent for it. Every evening in the spacious, mirrored elevator cabin, Mrs. Szemző would impassively observe the uncertain, soft, slightly flat profile of this man struggling with melancholy; his eternally bowed head, his short, retracted neck, his strong, well-built body which nevertheless projected weakness and from which the sour odor of mental fustiness emanated; when he spoke, the emanation was overwhelmed by his powerfully foul breath.

She observed the essence of his neurosis, scanned his constitution, which accommodated a strangeness bordering on madness, where, one might say, neurosis found an appropriate breeding ground.

Each time she had to tell herself that he was a borderline case, she could not help him.

In 1944, Varga had helped Mária Szapáry, which had meant taking considerable risks. However, he loathed himself for this as if for some weakness.

He hadn’t done it out of conviction.

He had nothing but contempt for the suspicious characters that turned up at Countess Szapáry’s place: wandering Jews, communists and socialists forced to live and work underground, various kinds of deserters; he thought of them as nothing but riffraff. The reason Hungarians are always divided is that they always have these kinds of people among them. People who, like weeds, should be extirpated down to the last one. Varga was an advocate of a firm hand, strict social order, and Hungarian unity. The Germans, their manners smoothed by their racial brutality, and the screeching Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross men, impressed him. After all, they both meant to do only good: to make permanent order at last in this Jewish whorehouse. He himself was a member of a secret patriotic organization that has gone on operating to this day. But Countess Szapáry simply paid him off, bribed him, overwhelmed him, would not let him choose another way. That was his weakness — money and aristocrats of various ranks and orders who in his eyes, after all, did symbolize everything Hungarian, and against whom he felt defenseless.

He couldn’t very well denounce them to the authorities when at the same time, out of greed, he was helping them save the riffraff.

Two apartments opened from the gallery on each floor, on the top floor only one. Here, stepping out of the elevator, one found oneself in a space made coolly brilliant by marble all around, illuminated during the day by natural light coming through the loophole-like windows; opposite the elevator, one faced a heavy oak door. From a steel door behind the elevator one could, on an uncomfortable steel ladder, climb up to the elevator housing and gain the flat rooftop, but very few people knew about this.