Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

The problem was much too big.

It was a sensible idea to leave the cellar’s steel door open yet obstruct the entrance to it. Because if the house were to fall on us, rubble would make it impossible to move the door and we’d never be able to dig ourselves out. Who could count on outside help. Well, all right, the Americans were on the way. If the water main broke, on the other hand, having no exit, we’d drown in the water flooding the cellar. The earth was moving so violently that somebody must have thought of this too. We have no water because the main broke. And there was no way of knowing whether it was going to be over very soon or was just about to start in earnest. Through the flues opening into the enclosed courtyard, we could see that something was burning nearby. Two steep flues opened upward, not far from each other. The formidable sight before us was far beyond what could still be considered real.

Above the building’s high four stories, the red conflagration was reflected in the night sky.

It was like a gigantic shadow play, a licking of the sky.

While a few watched the mesmerizing reddish shadow of tongues of fire reaching into the sky, the cannons ceased for a while. Then one heard only one’s own deafness, which was perhaps more frightening than the noise. Later, from the depths of deafness, one heard machine-gun bursts, which was almost like peace returning.

And it seemed that the cellar walls were being pounded steadily.

The ones who ran out for fear of a burst water main began to smash the cellar’s rear wall in an effort to break through it in the direction of the buildings on Eötvös Street, parallel to us, which were less threatened. That night, people opened a veritable labyrinth under the city through the walls separating cellars, but I heard about this from Pisti only the following summer when we were at Wolkenstein House in the valley of Wiesenbad. The women remembered from the days when Budapest had been under siege in the Second World War, and they could tell the men where to break through the walls. Shortly, there was a huge explosion, and in the renewed cannon fire a fine coat of soot covered the faces of those standing under the flues, and then everything went dark as dense smoke filled the courtyard. It might have been the other way around, first the dense smoke and then the fine soot. In which case the cause of death would be not water but smoke, not drowning but suffocation.

Which is to say, backing away from suffocation. Fleeing from the bodies jostling one another.

And somebody must have thought about how and with what we should stuff up the flues before we all suffocated. Or that same somebody, while fleeing, must have found the right material. While it was still usable, while somebody was still able to do it. Newspapers arrived from the depths of the passageways. Everyone knew this made sense, even though it might not change the situation drastically. One hand passed it on, the other crumpled it, and somebody, in the ghoulish light of a flashlight, that revealed the serpentine streaks of smoke, holding her breath, grasping the grating and seeking the wall’s support, kept on stuffing and stuffing.

It was a tiny woman. I had never seen her in the building before and never would again. Such openings could not be stuffed up with newspapers. Until some thicker wrapping paper arrived, they made very little progress.

We were all gasping for air.

The coughing could not be heard, of course. As if not the smoke itself but the sharp odor of the smoke had torn the mucous membranes. There was no water to wet kerchiefs or rags with, which occurred to me just as it must have occurred to others too.

The ribbed wrapping paper with a waxy feel to it came from Diósgyőr and not in sheets; it had to be pulled off a large cylindrical roll on which one could read IGNÁC REICH, DIÓSGYőR; there was plenty of it, people were tearing and crumpling it. Newspaper was used to fill the smaller gaps. Of course, not to the point where all seepage could be stopped, that was impossible. Partly because everything was quaking, moving, and rumbling, and we couldn’t hold our breath forever. The paper rolls from Ignác Reich’s paper mill in Diósgyőr had been stolen from somewhere in the darkest days of the Second World War by Arrow Cross men, and then, just as senselessly, they left it in the building, in Balter’s care, whose daughters later used some of the paper for wrapping their schoolbooks and notebooks.

We’ll die of asphyxiation.

As if some sweetness had flooded my mouth, which the sharp stench nauseatingly rips open.

Someone stuck a flashlight into my hand when we first started to run away from the smoke, but then somebody found the newspapers necessary for a sensible defense. There was no longer any point in having a flashlight, yet everybody insisted that using it made sense. A small Bakelite lamp that fit one’s palm and produced electricity via rhythmically applied pressure. The longer and more steadily I kept pressing its corrugated metal plate, the sharper and stronger its beam became. Except it could no longer penetrate the smoke and, when it did, I couldn’t see because I was suffocating. Because of my fitful coughing, the light had not been hitting the spot where people doing the senseless work still insisted they needed it.

And then something peculiar happened.

Nobody wanted to escape from the cellar. The beam of my flashlight was jumping, flying in all directions, but somehow I managed to retrieve it, and it did produce some visibility when I kept pumping it. And there wouldn’t have been anywhere to escape to. It was only a matter of time before the smoke would fill every passageway.

Everybody was holding out, yet everybody was running at the same time.

One can hold out only until the last breath and not beyond that, and the physiological needs are uniformly unavoidable for everyone. I was only retching, but several people were vomiting.

The tiny woman also vomited.

She tore the checkered shawl from her neck as if it were choking her. My light slipped off her too, even though I stopped near her in the hope that at least the light would help her. While the light was on her, she could see that she had vomit on her pants and combat boots. Either she had vomited on herself or someone else had. If I’d continued to watch for another second as she wiped off the vomit with her shawl while still retching with only saliva coming out, I’d have thrown up too. I was fleeing with my own retches, though I empathized with her, wasn’t at all repelled.

The building held on decently too, it did not collapse on us. Actually, the buildings on the other side of the boulevard, which were being fired on, were the unfortunate ones, which was our good luck. Ours had to withstand only blasts produced by explosions. None of the survivors speaks of this needlessly, because they all know that no matter what, nothing happens the way one imagined it would.

I’ve never even asked anyone in the neighborhood what happened that night to the people on the other side of the boulevard.

Survivors are busy with themselves and I wasn’t interested in the lives of others either.

In the early afternoon hours, the shop became very busy and I knew there wouldn’t be another opportune moment. This woman not only made the coffee but also did the dishes and waited on customers.

One week she worked in the morning, the next in the afternoon.

When the lawyer finally made himself scarce, I managed to spit out that I’d wait for her after she finished.

Not here, she replied softly and quickly, as if she had to defend herself fiercely against me.

Luckily, she didn’t say that I shouldn’t wait for her.

Continuously, without letup, relentlessly, I thought of only one thing, that I had never seen such beauty and never would again if I left her even for a moment. Her eyes, the color of her eyes or her glance, I don’t know what, but it paralyzed me. Her scent probably had a part in this but I could reach only the edge of it because she took it with her, though sometimes she left thick clouds of it behind. Here eyes were not blue but not green either. As if I were looking down into the depths of unfamiliar waters. I did not understand the angry darkness, but the color of the water was throwing sparks at me. No human can have eyes of this color. There is no water of this color, no material of any kind. I didn’t even have a chance to ask her where, if not here, because her partner was looking at us anxiously, an older bespectacled woman with whom she always worked as a team, as she measured out candy, then fudge, and finally handfuls of jelly beans to an insatiable child.