Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

I suppose I’m bringing you into this American dream of mine, he continued, because, he added quickly but still indecisively, I won’t find for myself there the kind of clean architectural situation I once dreamed of.

But in the empty twilight this meant that he might stay for the woman.

Mrs. Szemző hastened to help the man out of his discomfort. And I’ve realized, you know, that the structure and characteristics of our utopias may be similar, but their substances are different, and we mustn’t forget this. I don’t know, I must not, no, for me it is outright forbidden to transplant my problems elsewhere.

But that’s exactly what he had come to understand, the man responded gratefully. Your sense of reality must work more strongly than mine or, put another way, I’m still chasing ideas that somehow insulate me from the same reality that you cannot ignore. This is the actual difference. But it’s also possible that my profession is what gives me freedom. I’ve been thinking about that too, whether I can simply move on with my ideas. Perhaps I’m guilty of turning away too quickly from something or of turning my back on things.

Perhaps, the woman replied.

That’s the question I’ve been thinking about all afternoon, said the man, which of course was only half the truth.

Until now they had been standing motionless, speaking through the open door from one echoing empty room to the other. Madzar noted that the apartment’s lights seemed no less improbable in the twilight, and so he did not tell her about the theoretical question he had been brooding on in the afternoon. The lights occupied his full attention. As if his powerful passion for the woman were sliding into his professional passion for lights. Up above the nacreous sky was tending toward crimson, while below, closer to the street, yellow-beamed lamps were already shining through the loose green foliage.

Then it’d be better if I left you alone now, the woman said.

The man did not respond, because he felt he might stutter and somehow embarrass himself.

He had expected from himself something other than what happened.

That once again he was about to choose his work over a body.

But the woman was alarmed, sensing that it was not so simple to carry out her hasty decision. Perhaps it was only via the man’s body that she would find her way out of this apartment, which, after all, was her property.

Why should she have to part with it.

She caught herself observing the man’s attractive body, searching for an exit and at the same time repeating to herself the words my property, my property. She fell into a trap and felt ridiculous.

No, there was no exit anywhere, and she was procrastinating. She could not deprive her sons of their father, who, incidentally, constantly cheated on her.

Now, for the first time, she understood what it was that her husband could not resist.

This was too much, much too much, barely tolerable. No one could be expected to resist it.

And the man was so taken by their multilingual, and also mute, dialogue — in which their respective languages, so foreign to the other, along with their obstinate and disciplined silences, could neither be separated from nor substituted for each other — that he couldn’t speak.

Or say anything.

He was gripped by his old, adolescent fear that he could not give or say anything meaningful to a woman.

Now Mrs. Szemző had a saving idea.

She thought that the architect should divest her of her property; otherwise, she could not work with him. And that would be the same as divesting each other of their clothes.

And she tarried no longer because her new realization gave birth to a new rhythm of action in her. She started to leave, but for a single fleeting moment stopped next to the man and did something she otherwise would not have done in any circumstance: she dropped her gloved hand on his arm and squeezed it gently. With which she entrusted herself to his care and handed over her property; through his coat and her glove she absorbed the penetrating feel of his strong arm, but she also put an end to her unreal fantasies. So of course she felt a little sorry for herself.

Without a parting word, she hurried through the open door and out of the apartment.

Madzar did not move for a long time. The sudden absence left him breathless. As if he had lost his hearing because of a toothache.

He took in the space to which he had once been so averse. First, with his eyes he greedily felt his way around all the lights in the place as a sort of compensation, so he would not have to experience the woman’s sudden departure as a defeat and humiliation; then he immersed himself in the lights and, forgetting everything else, kept weighing and measuring them.

Although it had grown dark in the meantime.

The insane yellow of the street remained, though, and it transformed the shadows of the foliage.

During the day, in addition to direct light there were two indirect sources of light. This building on Pozsonyi Road stood opposite Palatinus Mews, over which one could look out on the Danube beyond. The lively, weightless reflection of water therefore permanently hovered on the ceilings; the rooms were also flooded and colored by the heavier light thrown back by the enormous, intricate, partially tin-covered roofs of the Finnish-style Palatinus buildings.

Of course, the effect was different on moonlit nights.

At twilight a third, indirect light joined the reflections. This was the multicolored reflection on the thinning green foliage created by the yellow-beamed streetlamps, swaying gently on cables stretched at third-floor level above the road, itself paved with insanely yellow tiles. These effects changed with the seasons and with the time of day. Even at night, there was never a moment without some interesting play of reflected lights. He should try to separate out the mutable elements in this milieu and then perhaps trap them somehow, in some material, so as to stabilize their effects permanently.

He forgot about the woman in an instant.

At most, a first little drop of sperm made the beak of his foreskin stick to his underpants, and he tugged it free.

They had come to an agreement earlier about having to lift the psychoanalytical clinic out of the classical, almost obligatory semi-darkness.

That meant dimming the direct light but without shutting off the outside world, bringing it inside, conveying the local rhythm of eternal changes.

He made the surface of the inner windowpanes into something like a loose quadrate net, having small squares of the glass chemically treated to become opalescent and then sprayed with the finest sand. The opposite procedure was applied to the outer surface of the windows, where the squares were untreated but the borders of the net were made opalescent. Neither vertically nor horizontally did the two systems of net exactly coincide, and this produced two important results. One could not see out of these double windows, but whoever passed or made the slightest move in front of them could see narrow slits of blue, gray, or cloudy sky, nothing more than unexpected flashes, glints of the unnamable outside world. And the outer net conveyed direct lights as shadow, as if filling the space between the processed panes with itself, and these shadows, intermingled with the sky’s reflections, continually played on the walls, left mostly bare.

He left the walls bare but not smooth; their speckled surface gave the walls an irregular texture.

He placed very few pieces of furniture in the available space.

Which opened up on the courtyard side, allowing light to enter, explore, and revive the dead and scandalously proportioned hallway. He did this by replacing the primitive doors to the kitchen and maid’s room with suspended sliding doors fitted with four-square, opaque-glass panes. Here he did not repeat the net motif, which on the double outside windows of the kitchen, maid’s room, and inner rooms formed strong elongated and multiple shadows on the walls, but he did suggest it with an unfinished frame around the glass. As if to say that although one couldn’t look into or out of just anywhere, in certain conditions the space was not baffling at all. The transparent frames, gaps, crossings, strips, and intersections might be helpful; there might be a system here that you’ll recognize.