Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

As if with their words they could coax out of each other’s mouth this special, this elusive and secret something.

Then came the weather: today it will probably be like this or like that.

The wind was howling, raging, and they readily agreed it was raging, sweeping water out of gutters, tearing off roofs; the wind uprooted trees, and they said that it uprooted trees. The red flags and national tricolor flags were soaked in the rain, and the wind slammed the drenched rags onto flagpoles and electric cables.

Somewhere, the aerial cable of a streetcar had snapped, the lawyer mentioned in a whisper, and had electrocuted a number of schoolboys. I understood this happened at the National Museum, the site of the official ceremony. The boys were being led across the street on their way to the Museum Garden. Nobody knew how many casualties there were, but the entire area had been closed off. The official ceremony had been canceled.

The police are on a general alert.

According to a reliable source this might be considered a counterrevolutionary provocation.

I would never have ventured to talk about a topic that did not interest me or that irritated me, and that’s why I’d never lose my clumsiness. And how could I be sure that a stranger might be interested in something that depressed me or made me happy. And if, protected by their lighthearted words, they played with each other so cleverly, why didn’t they arrange a date immediately.

I didn’t understand that either.

They kept playing with secret challenges. I had never reached this point, so in theory jealousy should have been eating away at me. He stepped closer to the woman, who very quietly asked him something, hissing between her teeth, as if I weren’t there at all.

They took me for air.

Who knows, replied the lawyer a little more loudly, but seeing that fortune’s wheel keeps spinning around, today at least we are free.

As he spoke he plopped his big briefcase on the marble counter, and this movement also had something homely about it. He placed his hat carefully on top of the briefcase. As if, in the proximity of the woman and for however brief a moment, he was allowed to set up house. A worn old briefcase a little heftier than a doctor’s bag, a hat made of water-resistant rabbit fur. Now I didn’t have room to put my glass down. At any rate, continued the lawyer confidentially, all court cases have been postponed with no prior notice. And I mean every trial. Well, this also has an advantage, I could see your pretty face earlier.

They should have had a titillating little giggle at this remark, but the smiles meant for each other had faded.

I didn’t exactly understand that.

The tragedy at the museum must have been too large and the pervasive police presence too dangerous for everyone.

The man glanced at me, his look lingering; I must have seemed familiar to him from somewhere. And if he knew me from somewhere he must have been asking himself whether he should say in front of me what he was about to say. Or maybe his eyes were wondering whether I was that other kind of man. Men’s eyes often tried to catch mine, and that’s the question they’d ask themselves. Sometimes they looked at me for so long that I got red in the face. Men are very curious about that question when they look at young men or their own sons.

Now of course I remembered exactly from where I knew him.

And now I was getting in everyone’s way; many people with their paid receipts were trying to reach her to be served. I had to retreat with my glass. Maybe that’s why he didn’t hesitate. Anyway the others couldn’t understand what he was talking about or pretended not to understand.

For security reasons, everyone preferred to pretend they didn’t notice what other people did or said.

Anyway, take a look out there, you’ve never seen so many wet policemen. They were called out on a first-degree alert. Now there’s no use dreaming about a long trip abroad, for example. Even I couldn’t get a travel permit for your sweet person.

They allowed themselves a careful little laugh, and again, what became important was that they were doing something secretive in public.

This did not hurt, did not even make me jealous; I was admiring them.

I took no more sips of my hot coffee, but I ate the lump sugar, first one cube then quickly the other. I shall wait for her. I must prove my faithfulness to her. No matter what happens, however humiliating it might be, I shall wait until everybody is gone again. I was waiting for a single glance from her.

She could not have forgotten her promise to me so quickly.

I had waited for her for more than two months. Ever since they reopened this shop. It’s not possible that I wouldn’t have another opportune moment with her. It did not occur to me that her seemingly credible indifference only made our mutual game more serious.

Because it couldn’t occur to me that I was playing.

On this badly damaged block, this was the first store that after five years had reopened. Young people don’t count the years.

One simply went along observing that everything was slowly changing from what it had been, or thinking that everything had somehow been restored. This side of the boulevard had been completely destroyed in a single night in 1956 by Russian tanks firing from Oktogon Square. The entire row of stores was gutted by fire; their ceilings and the floors above them crashed down. They first restored the ceilings and the second-floor apartments, but for a very long time nothing happened behind the boarded-up shop entrances. The situation remained unchanged for so long that it no longer reminded anyone of anything. The buildings’ facades were painted; later the scaffolding was removed. Streetcars were running. A shoe store, a drugstore, a flower shop, and something else, maybe a tobacco shop, and farther on a woman’s fashion shop — their absence didn’t seem to bother anyone. I couldn’t remember what kind of store had been there before. Who cared that there was nothing behind the boarded-up entrances. Life was not much fun anyway. Very few things remained that still had meaning. And when you remembered something, what came as a surprise were the many things you had managed to escape.

Sometimes this sort of fleeting feeling made my walking around feel unbelievable. It was not plausible that I could get from one place to another just by taking one step after another.

As if I couldn’t completely convince myself that I was able to put one foot in front of the other and, with this peculiar activity, carry my physical weight forward.

This, more or less, is what memory, or oblivion, consisted of.

Because no one could have thought seriously that holed up in some unfamiliar cellar one would survive the night.

By midnight, there was neither electricity nor water. As if the bowels of the earth were on the move, everything was quaking, rumbling, booming, and trembling all at once. Saltpeter was falling from the bare brick ceiling. The way this became integrated into my life was that afterward I never wanted to go down to the cellar, but when I did these memories did not surface; it seemed advisable to forget even the associated anxieties. Explosive blasts first sucked in the candle flames and then extinguished them. Still, somewhere, there was always a new-lit candle. Everyone went deaf, everyone screamed, yet people did not understand one another. They were stumbling around helplessly, groping in the dark, or running around berserk, driven by fright, pretending to have something urgent to take care of.

Someone must have thought that the cellar door should not be closed.

Men opened it and carefully barricaded the passage leading down to it.

Mildewed crates, ancient cupboards, ripped armchairs, and wobbly sofas were dragged out from the cellar’s deepest compartments. Not everybody helped, because some people were busy with themselves, with their crying children, with their families. The latter set up their own sections in the cellar, hoping that the wooden partitions would give them perfect protection. But neither laments and swearing nor the sound of running footsteps could be heard. I didn’t try to figure out why suddenly there were so many of us but instead kept watching the gaping and opening mouths set to scream in fright or hysteria. Still, news spreading in the cellar’s dark passages about contingencies and possibilities sounded sensible. However numb one may be in such a situation, one’s brain fills with speculations. Somehow, there were always more people who tied their feverish desire for action to the remnants of reason and some palpable hopefulness.