Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

For long seconds, as they arranged the delicate proportions of fairness and politeness between themselves, they stood silently in the light of the opaque lampshades, their eyes wandering over each other’s features.

Two figures of almost equal height only an arm’s length apart, but without the expectation of touching each other. No empathy, no murderous impulse, neither such love nor such understanding. Everything they felt was either more or less than necessary. One woman was strong and solid, with a weighty body; the other was delicate, extremely thin, down to her bones and tendons, yet not with the air of someone whom the next gust of wind would blow away.

One lamp hung from the ceiling, the other was above the sink; their bleak light was fractured by the unusually large white wall tiles and aging surfaces of the mirrors.

Now let’s take a deep breath, said Mária, her words accompanied by one of her loveliest smiles, forget that I asked you, or what I asked, as if nothing had happened, don’t be angry with me. And now we’ll go in to see Elisa. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, believe me I don’t, Irma, but I feel such hate.

For what.

Myself.

I feel it.

If you feel like seeing her at all.

Why wouldn’t I, Mária, answered Irma lightly, even though what she wanted to say was, why harbor so much hatred, there’s no reason for it. It’s hard to hear something like that. She really couldn’t have had a good reason, at least no personal reason, or maybe only a little. Still, Irma couldn’t say this out loud. She could not absolve Mária because of the dead ones, though her sons were not on her mind now. No. She couldn’t. Just as Mária could not go farther than she had.

This was the last word that could be uttered.

And we’ll drop the story, at least for today, she continued, well disciplined and composed, because she understood correctly the stubborn silence emanating from the other woman. If I may say so, we’re going to forget it.

They both laughed a little at this, and found it mutually enjoyable to intertwine their laughter.

It’s correct, that’s right, it is, Irma replied. If there is no remembering, how can there be forgetting. There is no forgetting either.

One of them had to continue with her loveliest, most attractive laugh suffused with suffering, the other with the pleasure provided by the workings of the mind, both of them neutral toward each other.

In truth, they both felt bad about this brief conversation and impulsively concealed their bad feelings from each other.

With your permission, I’ll go first.

Of course.

And while she unsparingly reproached herself, she could not help being happy about Irma’s coming with her. She treated her friends cautiously; she did not burden them overmuch with the sick woman. Irma was the only one to whom she had entrusted, albeit under pressure, the story of her and Elisa. Which, for quite a time in the late 1930s was the topic of avid, excited gossip in upper-crust circles.

Irma did not follow her in right away; politeness and consideration demanded that she hang back a little in the bathroom doorway. Which was useful, because she needed time to forbid herself to think of her sons. Although she would witness the scene, she should leave some time to be shared by just the two of them.

But her hesitation had another, no less delicate reason.

According to the rules of her profession, she couldn’t feel repugnance for anything or anyone in theory, because repugnance, again in theory and in the parlance of her profession, would indicate that she’d been unable to analyze something, that there was something in that other person or in herself she could not see or perhaps deliberately tried to avoid. No matter how often she rehearsed these reasons and arguments, she had to admit that from the moment she laid eyes on her, as they say, she felt a most profound physical aversion to Elisa Koháry, whom she had known slightly when the younger woman was still healthy.

By the time Irma returned from Vienna, this woman was simply there, belonging to Mária, and there was no way to get around her or to separate her from Mária.

Mária had been taken away from her.

There were hardly any opportunities for brief, private conversations, and for this reason she simply loathed Elisa.

Although with her mind she comprehended the real reasons for her aversion and fear, she could not change her emotions with her intellect.

The moment the door opened, she could see the hapless woman; she sat at the edge of a swan-necked divan in the brightly lit room wearing a faded, floral-patterned print dress. She was whimpering, evenly and persistently, swaying her head to the rhythm of her sounds, to the right, to the left, frighteningly, untiringly, while she kept hitting her paralyzed knees with a fist.

This was the only decently furnished room in the large apartment, or more correctly, Mária had made sure that no valuable object in this room was sold, even in periods of great privation. The room was just as it had been when they set it up, according to Elisa’s taste, during the first, not exactly blissful weeks of their living together.

The repeated gesture was understandable at first sight. She must have been doing it for a long time. It was easy to see she was punishing herself, was passionately dissatisfied with herself, her miserable knees not moving and she being unable to get up from where she was sitting. And it was impossible to forget how well proportioned and shapely these legs had been in their fine silk stockings, with fashionably graceful, thin-soled, indecently high-heeled shoes showing off her ankles, calves, and thighs. Now her swollen feet were forced into two down-at-heel, checkered felt slippers. Her downy blond, naturally wavy hair, richly interlaced with gray, which made her blondness even more exciting, fell into her face because of her continuous, practiced gesture of passionate self-punishment. She looked like a lunatic, but this exaggeration was a part of that particular language of gestures with which she could still express her will and feelings, and for which she mobilized incredible reserves of strength.

Her left shoulder and arm were partially and her lower body completely paralyzed as a result of hereditary arteriosclerosis, which can afflict young people. This diagnosis was well supported by the facts that her grandfather, Baron Dénes Koháry, chief counselor for hunting matters to the minister of agriculture, had died following an unsuccessful treatment of his syphilis, and her father had had a long bout with serious circulatory problems. Elisa’s anus and vagina retained their full sensitivity, however; she felt her needs and could to a certain extent take care of them herself. She could no longer formulate intelligible sentences except for one, though with great effort she could produce sounds that for practiced ears were not completely indecipherable.

A person who, according to all medical prognoses, should have been dead long ago.

Mária hurried to help her up. Relax, patience, she called out coolly. Calm yourself, stop making such a ruckus, for God’s sake. I’m not completely deaf. But she had barely touched her when the blond woman, with the same rage with which she had been hitting herself, now, throwing her head high, freeing her oval face from the dense mass of her blond hair with its silvery highlights, rudely shoved her away.

I don’t know , she shouted in English several times, I don’t know , quickly, angrily, plaintively, passionately. Or so it could be interpreted.

I see you didn’t make any kaka and you didn’t pee, exclaimed Mária, glancing impassively at the bedpan lying in front of the swan-necked divan in which there was nothing but a little water. Then tell me what’s up, but a bit more clearly, what do you need.