Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

The sounds had different qualities, all of them filled with satisfaction.

Bella liked especially to make sounds with her lips because she could steal the kiss for herself across the years, the penetrating taste of the cock, its smooth slopes and strong rims, as it smacked her lips.

It was almost the other way around for Mrs. Szemző; for her it was an enormous effort to keep up appearances. As she giggled, she and her mates were being driven across the old bridge of Regensburg, in the spring snowstorm, stumbling and sliding on the slippery cobblestones.

Erna Demén’s daughter was no longer with her.

According to the value of the picked cards, Dobrovan is to be Szapáry’s partner, and Mrs. Szemző will team up with Médi Huber. With their sounds of approval they in fact reveal disappointment. Mrs. Szemző, however close she was to Szapáry, liked best to be partners with the soft-spoken Dobrovan, while Médi Huber and Szapáry, despite the loud conflicts punctuating their relationship, preferred each other as partners in the game.

Once again the cards had not complied with everyone’s wishes.

Quickly they changed places as was necessary and sat down again.

And those two in the maid’s room of the seventh-floor apartment realized that it had been quiet for a long time, that their bodies had been cooling off in the silence and that no more streetcar noises were coming from below.

Above their heads a draft was slowly swinging the window giving on the dark sky.

Tonight, luck arranged it so that Mária Szapáry again sat facing the terrace.

That was the place they all liked most.

Looking up from the cards from this position, one could see the pale dim lights of the gas lamps, like a flawed string of pearls along the promenade on the other shore of the softly rolling dark river, and the deep shadows of the Buda mountains, sliding in and out of each other above the flat block of the rowers’ clubhouse illuminated by reflected lights.

From here, of course, they could not have seen what was happening on the island, around the clubhouse, or under the gaslights, but in the city, people knew in general what kind of place it was.

It wasn’t proper to talk about things like that.

As if the promenade were empty.

Occasionally, however, one could see, even with the naked eye, solitary little figures stepping out from among the bushes and trees, waiting for someone or hurrying to escape someone else, all but fleeing on the promenade, and then, a few meters farther on, casting furtive looks about, disappearing into the sparse grove of yellow acacias and then returning to the trails cut in the meager undergrowth to the ruined medieval cloister, stinking with human excrement, where the gently swaying light of gas lamps could barely reach.

Over Izabella Dobrovan’s silk-clad shoulders Mária Szapáry glanced at the other shore.

It was like a victory that fell into her lap; she was waiting for her cards.

She was deliberately avoiding Elisa’s eyes. Neurasthenia was visible on the features of the other three women. Try as she might to appear as a person of democratic persuasion, she considered everyone below her rank neurotic. She always saw their exasperation showing through their disciplined behavior.

They were not free people.

They were not sufficiently self-disciplined; they could not provide an acceptable framework for a base emotion.

She despised them.

The three despised women, however, were busy wondering whether Elisa’s behavior truly left Mária Szapáry cold.

She seemed neither interested in nor touched by it, but merely to be waiting for the cards to be dealt.

The mutual anger lasted into the next day. After their friends left Mária severely reproached Elisa, though by then she had managed to calm herself down; she knew, idiot that she was, that she’d forgive Elisa. And that Elisa would throw a fit, slap at things, cry, rave and rant. I always forgive, she said to herself, as if hypnotizing herself to forgive, yes, forgive her, but it was becoming harder and harder to force forgiveness out of herself.

There will come a moment when the accumulated pardons will keep her from any further forgiveness.

She will kill her and then herself. But she laughed to herself about this, remembering she had another choice.

She could go to confession.

The question was whether to kill first and then confess or the other way around.

To confess and then not kill.

They all had a way of covering one illusion with another; a tiny bit of reality would show through only when they had lost their way among the illusions or failed to hide themselves in time behind another illusion.

I did feel it on my back.

They had been watching me, flaring up now here, now there with their cigarettes under the blooming trees. There might have been four of them altogether, maybe more.

I did not recognize them, though the older one might have been among them, the marvelous giant with his mustached assistant. Sometimes they pretended not to belong to each other. The older one is very excited in his gingham shirt that’s too small for his chest and his dark-blue, much-laundered overalls. When I walked past him, something exceptional emanated from him along with the strong odor of his sweat.

It reminded me most of hot tar.

They stood quite far apart from each other but about the same distance into the flowering grove.

From where they could see the wide promenade on the riverbank, who came or went on it, but where the darkness kept their figures incognito. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t identify any of them. Something showed of their shirts, but the greens, yellows, and blacks of his shirt’s little squares I could of course only hope to see; this marvelous man had disappeared. There were those who always returned to the same places, like me, and others who appeared only once and then disappeared for good.

From the depths of the foliage’s shadows, strangers called out with the flaring embers of their cigarettes.

The night whispered with light breezes; the water made bubbly sounds on the stones.

What I understood of this was that they were intentionally revealing their presence with their cigarettes.

As if they were saying, pay attention to me, I am watching you, and at the same time they were competing with each other, watch me, I’m here. With their insistent glances they almost reached across the promenade, I almost understood their words on my body. More correctly, they weren’t talking to or reaching for just anybody above the jasmines, not at all. First, for a long time they observed everything from behind the mask of darkness, and when they finally selected someone, they took a brief drag on a cigarette. I’m here for you, that’s what that means. I’m waiting for you, come to me.

And if the other one replied to this signal with a signal of his own, then they took a longer, deeper puff, with which they prolonged the duration of the embers’ flaring and their faces glowed a little, and thus they strengthened the alluring promise of their devotion and fervent wishes.

These four, under the trees there, probably couldn’t even see one another’s silhouettess. The jasmine along the promenade covered lots of things; maybe they could see one another with their embers hovering above the white budding bushes. They took care, or so it seemed, not to signal simultaneously, to be understood each in his own language. One would make his cigarette flare up for me very briefly, another would do it rhythmically or lazily, or maybe in a more leisurely way. It was flattering to know that four of them were courting me at the same time. Because of that leisurely signal, I thought the older man was among them in his awful checkered gingham shirt that somehow looked good on him.