Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Ambulances moved in formation along the dead Grand Boulevard.

Why doesn’t somebody pick it up, was heard at the same time in the depths of a huge apartment on Grand Boulevard, a demanding female voice.

She was shouting from the bathroom, but since her youthful strength had been long diminished, she could hardly overwhelm the wind howling in the airshafts and stove flues, or the squealing of ambulances. Please pick it up, somebody, I never.

Still no one picked up the phone, though there were at least three other persons in the well-kept huge apartment fitted with every bourgeois comfort, a home that somewhat defied its historical time.

The sirens of receding ambulances slowly dissolved in the wind.

From four rooms in the third-floor apartment one could see the alternately illuminated and darkened Oktogon Square, while two other rooms and the maid’s room, opening from the kitchen, which gave on to the inner courtyard, remained dim in all seasons. There was a day in June when around noon a thin stripe of light appeared on the eggshell-colored wall in one room facing the courtyard, and this stripe not only reappeared in the following days but grew longer and wider, came earlier and departed later, until in mid-August it vanished for good. Its disappearance was like an otherworldly signal that few people would understand. But now everything was booming, rumbling, whistling, and crackling in this dark inner courtyard, as if something or someone were drumming on the roof tiles, plucking the wrought-iron railings of the red-marble rounded galleries on the courtyard side of the house, playing a trumpet in the depths. To boot, in this morning hour of housecleaning and lighting of fires, all the huge white double doors in the apartment were wide open and therefore no one could deny hearing the telephone or the old lady’s shouts from the bathtub.

The telephone rang three separate times in the largest room, which members of the household called alternately salon and sitting room. Twice it relented, but the third time it kept on ringing.

Each of the three persons thought one of the others would pick it up because each had personal reasons not to.

A pale, freckle-faced woman in her early thirties, kneeling in one of the back rooms, trying to light the fire in the stove, showed the same reluctance to move as did the other woman, a few years younger than she, who in the dark depths of the adjacent back room was lolling on the wide French bed, among the rumpled bedclothes, and with her thin dark-skinned naked arms desperately pressed a pillow to her head so she would not have to hear anything. Her presence here was not exactly welcome, so she picked up the telephone only in emergencies. She felt like an intruder, and rightly so because that is how the others thought of her, and as time passed her situation had become more and more unclear.

She had no place to go to, or rather she did not have the strength to make the unavoidable decision.

The pale woman busy with the stove did not go to get the phone, and not only because the fire she’d managed to light kept going out in the draft with every new gust of wind, which then would blow out of the tile stove and into the room in billows of thick dark smoke, but mainly because she kept to the rules. When people of the house were at home, she was not allowed, even in the morning hours of cleaning, to appear in the front rooms without being called. Although she knew no one was in the sitting room now, she did not go.

Let them pick it up if they want to, she said to herself, as if answering the old lady’s shout from the bathroom, and shrugged her thin shoulders.

She was not the rebellious kind and had no reason to be dissatisfied with her position here; still, at times she enjoyed being quietly vindictive. In fact, it was her little boy’s situation, which she felt to be injurious and humiliating, that made her like this — that, and of course her own self-respect. They lived in the ever-dark maid’s room, opening from the kitchen, and at her employers’ request she had to forbid the boy to leave the kitchen. This was the magic boundary of their living space: the kitchen walls. The child could comprehend it, but how could he possibly accept it. And not only was she, the mother, unable to overcome the constant border violations, prompted by anger, but the little boy’s rebellions continually exposed her willing servility. It was very difficult to find a place for the two of them, and in the difficult hours it seemed they had to pay too high a price for their security. The lively little boy, barely five years old, as pale as his mother, was not even allowed to play in the dim, musty passageway they called the hall, where, except for mealtimes, no one ever set foot.

They made cutting remarks; they would not suffer the boy. Ilona, why don’t you put that child back in the kitchen, the mistress of the house would say. I’d hate to have him break things here.

The hall was the only space in the apartment, by the way, that revealed the changing times and the unpleasant deterioration of circumstances. Originally its sole function was to be the place from which to reach the bathrooms, the two bedrooms, the dining room, and the kitchen — a kind of inner corridor but much wider than similar passageways found in other apartments. In an earlier interior arrangement of the apartment, this is where large linen closets had stood and it was the place for ironing clothes. For the last few years, however, it has housed an old sideboard of imposing proportions and a matching large dining table with stern-looking chairs. Yet not even by mistake did they refer to the space as a dining room. Necessity and expedience do not necessarily make life friendly, and that is why they couldn’t call it by that name. Although the hall window, kept shut at all times, was concealed by silk drapery and the glass in its panes was opaque, it gave on to a narrow airshaft, and the air was often filled with the stench of sewage or equally offensive smells from strange kitchens, not to mention embarrassing noises emanating from toilets and bathrooms. During meals, the most they could do was to pretend not to notice any of this, to pretend they did not hear, let us say, that somebody on the second floor was groaning, pushing, and evacuating while they went on discussing cultural topics and enjoyably consuming their beefsteaks. It happened once, while they were at dinner, that somebody on the fourth floor heaved a burned and still smoking milk pan out the window and into the airshaft, where the pan unluckily hit the wall, ricocheted, broke through the double glass of the opaque window, and landed at the diners’ feet.

For long minutes no one at the table could speak.

In their unpleasant situation, it was no help to them that an oriental rug covered the floor, that the table settings remained more or less intact, and that two exceptionally precious paintings were still hanging on the walls. These paintings, by the way, could hardly be discerned in the dimness. They were old, darkened pictures in heavy gilded frames, and only a single unshaded wall lamp provided some light in the hall. It was kept on day and night to keep people from tripping on the wrinkled rug or from bumping into an out-of-place, stern-looking chair. The many-branched gilded baroque chandelier dangling from the ceiling, with its complicated tendrils appearing as a shapeless shadow capable of endless metamorphoses, was turned on only at mealtimes.

The ringing of the telephone reached all the way into the hall, but now there was no one in it. On the larger painting one could just make out scenes of a battle, the shiny deep-brown haunches of rearing English thoroughbreds, a Hungarian banner as it fell from the standard-bearer’s hand, half-naked human bodies trampled under hoofs. Glimmering vaguely from the recessed gilded frame of the other painting were the rosy cheeks of a young man’s face, painted in glazed colors; he was József Lehr, a captain in the Hungarian army of 1848, who with dreamy eyes looked out from the space in the parted silk drapery into the eternal dimness of the airshaft. From the bathroom one could hear running water and the quick, rapid squelching sounds of soap.