Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

It was as if for the first time in my life I’d blurted out my wildest wish to a total stranger. Until then everything had been the other way around: I either rejected or expected crude invitations from others, which was much simpler. And I still did not have enough insight into the secrets of men, I still didn’t know exactly how they carried on the dangerous game of making overtures, even though I observed things very carefully, wanting so much to learn the ropes.

I probably should have appeared before a woman in the guise of an innocent, instead of presenting my wish as gloomily as I did when it finally burst out of me. My awkward sullenness made it awkward for both of us to begin like that. Her immediate response to my gloominess was a sadness of her own. As if she were saying to me, this is not what I’d expected from you. I should have been lighter, kinder, sweeter, and hidden my secret wish between two more innocent sentences. Shouldn’t have barged in like that, asking for a date. However, I was anything but innocent. Should have given her every opportunity to refuse without offending me, or to pretend she hadn’t heard right.

She wore a wedding ring, and seemed older than I was.

She shouldn’t have been able to humiliate me even if she rejected me.

Yet to my great surprise, she did not reject my proposition. But not because I played the role of seductive lover well. She must have had some other reason.

Maybe she enjoyed my ridiculousness.

She closed her eyes for a moment, I could observe her dejection, and then she opened them again and nodded. And by that time her sadness was gone. Maybe it had been neither dejection nor sadness but something quite different. I understood nothing; nothing made sense to me, least of all my own existence. Facing each other we were just as much strangers as we had been before, and she’d said not a word. We ran out of time as someone with a receipt headed toward her from the cash register. The key moment was over and we hadn’t even set a time or place for our date.

And we couldn’t, not only because of the approaching stranger but also because it was no longer clear why we should meet at all, never mind where or when.

I was unprepared for her sadness and unprepared for her acceptance, which like my proposition was unrefined and undisguised. If I’d had a way of knowing what she wanted from me, perhaps I’d also have known what I wanted from her. I had just enough experience to decide on having a little affair and I did take the first step, but then had no idea why I should take a second one if she wasn’t glad about the first. I figured that if others did this because they found joy in their amorous romping, then I too should learn how to do it. Something told me that without this knowledge I’d perish. If I get up every morning, I should know what other people do in the successive hours of their day. The thirst for learning urged me on, but the object of my study looked back sadly at me.

My fate had once been shaped by coincidences, but for some time now I had been gripped by decisiveness.

After voicing my awkward proposition, I hadn’t expected much beyond a sweet little laugh and then her telling me, come on, kid, what do you think I am. That would have been a game, something joyful. I had a prepared sentence for it too. And when it didn’t happen that way, it was precisely my calculated decision, nurtured over several weeks, that made me not know what to do. Not with her sadness, her resigned indifference, or my prepared sentences. I didn’t understand anything.

Why is it already turning out differently, why can’t it be predicted.

Other than what my eyes let me see, I knew nothing about her. I did not understand what complete strangers might possibly do with each other so suddenly. Or why they didn’t sink into the ground in shame if they wanted to start something together. I had entered into something that offended my sense of decency, though I’d expected it to turn quickly into liberating pleasure. When you live in a herd of juveniles or students, everything happens by itself, because one way or another everyone is familiar, everyone is driven by similar compulsions to a wild search. Now I was standing by the counter, bare and exposed, having stripped naked. This woman wasn’t a classmate whom I’d run into because of coincidences in our class schedules. It was as if I had said to her, very loudly, that I wanted her and that I wanted to realize this wish of mine as quickly as possible.

Which wasn’t true.

I didn’t even want her by my side. I liked looking at her; at most, I’d have liked to find a way not to have to observe her secretly. I didn’t even want to talk to her. What did she or I have to say to a complete stranger. And I definitely did not think of touching her.

What I wanted was something I always had to be alone with, otherwise it couldn’t have raged.

I thought to myself, all right, now we’ve tried this too. I’m free to go. As if again I had several persons within me, which was not at all surprising, and one of them has been incited by the others to commit this stupidity.

But now it was all over.

She wasn’t looking at me, as if I were no longer there or never had been. I was free to go, all right; nothing was stopping me. I kept standing there clumsily with my glass of coffee, undecided whether to put it down on the marble counter but remain flagrantly in place, or perhaps withdraw with it and watch her secretly in the mirror as I had done many times before, or put down the coffee, which was only an excuse for my staying, and simply walk out of the place.

On the rainy street, a bus pulled up and spewed out a cluster of people in overcoats, some of whom came inside.

On this blustery spring day, central heating was still going strong. The small establishment’s vaporous warmth was filled with the smell of coffees, teas, pastries, and wet coats.

It seemed unlikely that we could exchange any more words.

There are moments when one’s attention is so reduced that one sees only a single object, nothing else. At other times one’s attention may be so fierce that objects aren’t even visible. There was this big coffee machine with horn-handled levers and small towers of glasses on top placed inside one another, warming up. She grasped a lever with both hands, pressed it down, and kept her entire weight on it until the hoisting gear clicked across a buffer; only then did she let it go. She had to make a big effort because her body in her white work coat was incredibly light; I truly enjoyed watching. Her breasts or bra bounced against the robe, I could see the outlines, and her strong buttocks and hips made an equally good showing. The lever returned to its original position; out of the resulting steam she smiled at the older man who stopped before her, holding his receipt. It was as if I saw nothing but the irritating glitter of the heat-and-steam-producing metal cylinder and heard only voices in the distance.

You certainly came early this morning, Counselor.

They began to talk right away, speaking as if the words had no meaning, only a place and a role to play.

I knew this older man by sight, a lawyer and confirmed bachelor. He lived nearby, behind the boulevard, in Eötvös Street, very close to the noisy maw of the Hunyadi Square covered market, in the so-called Podmanicky Palace, which had once been a very grand building, but the neighborhood was now considered one of the least attractive in the city.

They were playing exactly the kind of game I should have learned. They said nothing that was not ridiculously simple. First, they talked about the coffee, whether today it should be stronger or weaker, that’s how the game began. They were inexhaustible even on this simple subject, not because they had something valuable or new to say about coffee but because they observed in each other’s words and eyes new possibilities opened up by their lighthearted, carefree expressions.