Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

In the sharp air, Döhring’s sweat cooled quickly on his shoulders, a fine film settling on his face.

He said he liked riding but he didn’t have his bike with him; frankly, he hadn’t thought to bring it along.

The super was glad that he could use every question, reply, and suggestion as an excuse to prolong the conversation.

He said there were three bicycles in the garage left by a former tenant, a Hungarian engineer.

He didn’t know why, but Döhring asked what kind of Hungarian engineer. He was surprised to hear that someone would leave three bicycles at a former residence.

With his lips, with his head, the super indicated his agreement that this was suspicious behavior. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head so vehemently that the stream of water shook in his hand. He said he had tried to find out but could not, the Hungarian left no forwarding address, he had talked to the old super too. Also there were no trademarks on the bikes.

The spots left by their removal were still there; two had been simply taken off, the third must have been scraped off. If he felt like it, he should take one, any one of them, at any time, nobody else uses them anyway, occasionally his wife. If he wants, he could show them to him right now.

Although Döhring went down to the garage with the super only to be polite, that very afternoon he took one of the unknown Hungarian’s bikes and with very little effort, to his great surprise, quickly wheeled out into the thick of the city.

On these end-of-summer days, the sky above Berlin opens as if the firmament, this closer one, was going to open into another, farther one. However calm or hot the weather is, cool breezes and occasionally icy squalls arise. On the facades of buildings the shadows lengthen, the street perspectives deepen. Cool are the misty dawns and cold the foggy nights, of which something spills into the day as well.

During these days, Berliners stay on the sunny lakeshores until the last possible moment.

After a short hour’s ride, he did not even know where he was. Except that he was in some woods. He rode fast so he could feel the breeze on his body, but he was in no hurry.

He’d practically run away from his home, and now he had ten full days until the beginning of the first semester, during which he could get to know the city where at last he would be living alone.

Although he left behind the uniform noise of the expressways, no point of the wood’s well-kept orderly sections was out of range of the city’s pulsation. He did not know where he was but he did not care. He didn’t have to worry about getting lost. Or if he did, well, what of it. The highways were now closer, now farther, their proximity sometimes indicated by the smell of gasoline caught among the trees.

Occasionally he would see a solitary person. Someone running with a dog. Or couples strolling dreamily. And he was struck by the way people in the forest looked long and curiously at one another.

The way the super had looked at him that morning.

They were interested not only in his intentions, and they did not seem distrustful. He could not ride by anyone without being looked at. Politeness emanated from their faces, in a kind of advance on the first spoken word.

They also turned to look at him.

True, he also turned to look back because he could not resist the attraction of the glances directed at him, and he expected to be addressed.

Whether he wanted to or not, he had to look back, but he became repeatedly embarrassed because nothing happened.

And then he seemed to be past the area that people from the city reached on foot. A lone person on horseback far away, and then no one for a long time. He was now in a thick pine forest; the slightly wet, soggy dirt road rose insidiously; pedaling was difficult. It was becoming dark among the pines, for the afternoon sun was barely reaching across the ridge. Stifling, thick silence reigned among the tall somber trunks; occasionally a solitary bird warbled into the silence or another one screeched. Riding was hard in this area because horses’ hoofs had torn up the slippery incline. The acrid smell of resin pleasantly permeated the dry and stifling air.

He should have alighted and pushed the bicycle but he did not give up; he preferred to look for patches of solid ground along the roadside to keep under the wheels for each stroke of the pedals.

Döhring came from a tiny town in the plains of the Lower Rhineland. Lots of sand there too.

Not far from the slow-rolling Niers river, outside town, was their old farm, where they spent their summers. His eyes were used to vistas in which hedgerows, groves, and wooded areas punctuated the landscape. Everything uniformly flat. Though the pinewoods at home had a different fragrance. There were depressions in the eternal flatness in which rainwater would collect; springs burst forth and then leaked away into nothingness, and groundwater rose and fell as dictated by the seasons.

Sand everywhere, sand, marshy in the flatland’s depressions. A thin layer of sand, blown by the wind, covered the surface that slowly became hard, and in it, as if to deceive someone, clumps of long-bladed grass grew everywhere.

Not a terrain without perils; one never knew where to step next.

In the puddles of the depressions throve those tall, tangly, coniferous pines more yellowish than green, with which he now involuntarily compared this forest growing in the Berlin sand; site of his childhood adventures, site of horror.

The boggy ground was fragrant.

One frequently remembers what one is breaking away from, or at least feels oneself ready to break away from.

Many years earlier, in the spring of 1961, the year when in distant Pfeilen other obscure matters were also coming slowly to light, the celebration of the national holiday* in the Hungarian capital turned out badly.

According to the weather forecast, the next day was to be sunny, warm, decidedly springlike. At times like this, though, one never knew, because forecasts on the eve of official holidays were always falsified. They reported something either better or worse than what was actually expected, though occasionally they kept to the facts, with some cosmetic adjustment. There was hope that this time the report would be different, since the previous days had indeed been sunnier and warmer than average, but whatever the officials did or did not know, at dawn on March 15 turbulent northern winds were raging furiously over the country, a three-day hurricane that hit the capital especially hard. The false forecast, based on a compilation of daily requests about and reports on the general public mood, was prepared in the disinformation department of the secret service, whose submitted recommendation could be accepted or rejected only by authorized party functionaries at the next session of its political committee. At such times, the weather report, traversing strange paths, would not come from the Meteorological Institute, but would be delivered, as top secret, by runners to the editorial offices of every newspaper, where it was the duty of the editors-in-chief to supplant the real report with this one before going to press.

When in March the sun enters the sign of Aries and the exceptional hour of the vernal equinox approaches, the elements of nature often collide.

Suddenly the mercury dropped eight degrees Celsius; it was almost freezing again. Something terrible happened at the site of the official celebration, but no one had the details. Swelling clouds rushed across the sky, it was light and then it was dark, it drizzled, it was wet, closed windows rattled in the icy squalls. Festive flags were soaked and flapping wildly above Budapest’s empty streets, the national flag between two red ones. Tiles fell from the roofs; from broken rain pipes water gushed freely. There were hardly any pedestrians; anyone who braved the wretched weather also risked having something fall on his head. In the general din, the streets seemed to have become abandoned battlefields. Heavy broken branches lay everywhere. Anyone trying to make progress by clinging to the walls of buildings would get rain directly in his face and water pouring down his neck from the leaking gutters. And the noise reached its climax when for a long moment at several distant points in the city fire trucks and police cars blared simultaneously and, their sirens blasting continuously, went speeding toward the center of the city.