Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

I don’t know why, but lately blood disgusts me more and more. Just the very thought that it is constantly flowing and beating inside you.

Yes, a quite unpleasant feeling. Irma looked up from the wound.

She loved the coarse and ill-proportioned features of this face so much that occasionally love stopped her breath.

Just now, when I really sucked it hard, I thought I’d throw up.

Something you don’t know what to do about, alone.

What do you mean I don’t know, asked Mária, surprised, like someone touched at a sensitive point. How do you know what I know or don’t know.

It’s not exceptional, I mean. You are not alone in feeling that way.

Even though it’s not like me, I mean feeling the disgust, aversion. At least I hope it’s not like me, she continued, sounding uncertain.

For example, I used to like roast blood on larded onions. Now I can’t even look at it.

We had a cook who added a little green pepper and sliced apple to the onions. Or pheasant blood with cranberries, heavenly, I must say.

Luckily, I’ve never had any. In a normal Jewish family one doesn’t prepare something like that. It sounds quite brutal.

And when I think how I went hunting regularly, not to mention that one keeps menstruating regularly as long as one can.

If not irregularly.

Stay a little while.

This isn’t going to bleed any more, and you probably have some healing powder in your medicine cabinet. We’ll just disinfect it, that’s all. Maybe I haven’t told you this, but in the camps we simply stopped menstruating.

One doesn’t need a camp for that, Irmuska. I left off that pretty habit of mine in the Majestic.

Except for the kapos, they kept on having their periods, and not only because they had food. And the Blockälteste , the head of the barracks, she menstruated too. They had permanent lovers, they had so-called normal sex lives and got extra portions of margarine. These are elementary conditions. All I need now is a piece of plaster and a pair of scissors and you’ll be properly taken care of.

The attention felt good to Mária, who was praying that Irma would go no further with her story, but whom she wanted to have close because, to be not the caregiver but the recipient of care was a treat she rarely had a chance to enjoy.

And telling a story was part of the care.

Mária had been taking care of Elisa night and day for more than two decades, and this period included air raids, bombings, living in the cellar, arrests during which she had no idea whether anyone was looking after Elisa in her stead, the endless days of the siege, the war. She should have interrupted, found another topic, but could think of nothing else to distract Irma with, until she remembered that when they couldn’t carry Elisa down to the cellar during air raids she took the girl’s head on her lap, right here in this bathroom. If anything should happen, at least she wouldn’t see it.

It happened, they couldn’t resist it; this is where, in their fear, they kissed and licked each other all over, surrounded by the shaking walls and bottles, they acted as two people who had reason to hurry. In her confusion, a little awkwardly, with her good hand she again twirled and then tucked behind her ear a strand of her straight gray hair.

You might even find some antiseptic pills there, she said. Médi is right: my whole apartment is one big mess.

And this is probably so, said Irma, continuing what she’d been saying before, as she found what she needed in the mirrored medicine cabinet, because in the end one’s left with nothing but one’s admirable or not so admirable traits. Don’t you think. There can’t be that many surprises. Or there can be, but nobody wants more injuries. The way your heart beats, that’s personal. But your blood is not, blood is impersonal.

Maybe that’s what you find repulsive. When one is young, one simply doesn’t acknowledge such embarrassing things.

You don’t mean to tell me that the same kind of blood circulates inside everybody.

Not in you, of course, you are the big blue-blooded exception. But think about it, she went on, her wry smile still on her lips. Your blood has its substance and its type, but even according to its substance or type, it doesn’t taste differently from other blood. Bókay always made the students in Andor’s class taste one another’s blood, a pretty hair-raising idea, wouldn’t you say, but in those days they had different ideas about hygiene. Blut is ein besonders Saft, jedenfalls , a special juice that’s not part of your character but exactly the other way ’round, you’re a part of it, along with your famous character, because you are one of the warm-blooded creatures, and I’m putting it mildly. This is annoying and insulting. What’s the good of all those original independent thoughts, what’s the point of this glorious individuality of ours. It means that you are also ruled by this enormous rabble, and who is to stop the janitors and dictators from following behind.

She sat back down on the rim of the bathtub and again carefully took hold of and raised Mária’s strong hand with its injured finger.

You know damn well I don’t know what to do with such concentrated social psychology, replied Mária quickly. She judged these dictators to be very dangerous and they might take Irma away from her.

She shrugged a little, as if to indicate that she was aware of the riskiness of her own moral relativism.

They can follow right behind or go where they please for all I care. My starting point is that there is a given surface and if I want something, I should be moving inward on that surface. Or downward, or upward, hell-bound or heavenward to the angels, anywhere.

And you are always doing the very opposite.

I can’t presume that people have character or can possess any traits. What I have to follow is a man’s shape. For me that is his only trait — the surfaces, curves, configurations, the limbs. All of which is flesh, only flesh, and form. What might happen, at best, is that after a while you discover that another human being has something you wouldn’t mind being attached to, has, let’s say, something properly constituted that determines his behavior, that has some sort of permanence and keeps making him repeat some sentence or gesture. But this is rare. In other cases, what you discover is that the person’s behavior has no iconography at all, and then that becomes the person’s characteristic feature. That’s what makes people adaptable, my dear. Whatever happens, they must remain flexible.

Nothing can compel them, or at least they feel no moral compulsion. That’s what produces their blissful chaos. You can stare at me like that all you want, but yes, this is your average human being. You talk as if everything had been already decided, and that’s why everything can be arranged. Well, nothing is decided.

No, no, generally, I talk about two things at once, but people usually hear only one.

Two is too many for me too.

Your monologue is very nice, maybe a bit much even for you.

It sometimes happened that one of them offended the other.

They were watching something on the surfaces of each other’s eyes that in good conscience could not be called personal yet was not impersonal.

Like lamplight reflected in the eyes.

At which both could change course. Mária could get over being offended, and they could both hear from the other side of the door Elisa’s odd, rhythmically repeated little whimpers. They never wanted to reach a conclusion in their conversations, never, and perhaps that is why their contact was so powerful.

The moments they bestowed on each other kept them captive, but this did not explain why they hadn’t spent their lives together.