Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Generally, the addressed person would be embarrassed because he didn’t know what he was supposed to do, but the miserable man said not another word. He pushed and raised himself, plopped back down, and braked so fast that anyone seeing him for the first time could not properly follow the order of his precisely planned series of movements.

As he propelled himself across the street, the person he had appealed to would follow resignedly. The four little metal wheels made a terrible racket on the cobblestones.

I saw him often and followed him many times to find out where he went.

Men on two legs were seized by shame and abject terror. A childlike zeal, an incomprehensible shame, was expressed in their faces and comportment. If it hadn’t been the torso of an athlete who had asked them to follow him on their healthy legs, perhaps their backs wouldn’t have slumped like that. Making its own infernal din, the rolling board jounced, rattled, and clattered on the uneven cobblestones.

Cars stopped; sometimes the streetcar did too.

When he reached the other side of the street, the torso leaned forward and his two gloved hands found support on the sidewalk, the strong shoulder muscles tautened, and, as if performing an exercise on parallel bars, he elegantly and easily heaved himself up and held himself in the air.

The other person was then supposed to lift the board and place it on the sidewalk, awaiting the stump.

Everyone understood this; there was no need for words or explanations. Still, men with healthy legs would have liked to do something more demanding of their abilities and adroitness, as though they had to look for something else that might be truly helpful. But the torso asked for nothing more, nothing less, and as it rolled away on the smooth asphalt among the hurrying feet, the two-legged men were left, unsatisfied, with their shame.

I don’t know where he went, or, to be precise, I observed him from a distance and even followed him for a while.

There was also a two-legged, walking third-degree burn. Judging by her clothes, graceful movements, and well-chosen words, she was a young lady. Not a single lock or individual hair curled out from under her giant hat. The folded-down brim somewhat covered her forehead and shaded her face. There was an improbable dent on her brow. As if there had been a rending, a violent crushing or tearing along the seam of the frontal and cranial bones but no sign of external injury. Indeed, only on her dented forehead was the skin unblemished.

Scars, cuts, welts, crudely creased stitches all over her face. No nose, no lips, only a lipless gap, and two dark holes where the nose should be. Usually she wore dark silk clothes that covered every inch of her; she made her neck disappear in tightly wound silk scarves, and if the scarf slipped a bit, one could see that her neck was completely burned too. Probably her entire body was burned. She wore chamois gloves and improbably thick opaque stockings. Her breath wheezed, she spoke from her throat through the hollow of her mouth and she had no other means with which to shape words. Hers weren’t real words, in fact; rather, one understood the meaning from her articulation, from the way she divided her syllables. If we wound up standing together in a line at a store, I pretended I had other pressing business elsewhere. I could not bear her awful wheezing at such short range.

It was as if my eardrums would explode from the pressure of those sound waves, when in fact it was my heart that nearly broke, but I could not admit this to myself because what can a person do with another person’s broken heart.

Others may have been more indifferent or more patient with her, and she probably had become accustomed to this emotionless patience.

But this too could have been determined if she had had a face to reveal it.

Besides, she spoke like the ladies on the boulevard, used to giving orders, who took their maids with them when they did their shopping in the stores and markets.

Have you some Roquefort left? Very well, then let me have some bologna, but slice it thin, please.

No, not from that one, it seems stale. From the other, yes, the fresh one, yes, it’s very kind of you. And please, only a few slices.

I saw her last when the store ran out of bread.

One could not even get into the store; the selling was being done at a table in the doorway.

The curfew had been in effect until eight in the morning, but if one did not join the line at early dawn there was no chance of getting bread. The line was like a long serpent snaking along the sidewalk as far as one could see.

Almost every hour the radio reported that the belligerents had definitely come to an agreement about the terms of a cease-fire, but when the firing stopped in some places, it flared up at others and then spread throughout the city again. This had been going on for three days and very few people had supplies left.

Everyone was lacking something, and therefore everyone was on the move, going somewhere in the city as if the most important thing in the world was to obtain the necessities and to replenish and maintain one’s reserves. As if amassing these reserves was more important than one’s life.

From behind the table set up in the store entrance, the manager was screaming that he had run out of bread and there’d be no further shipments, because on government orders the bakery on Király Street was now working only for the hospitals. Some people screamed back that he should have told them that earlier, to spare them a long wait for nothing. Stay in line only if you want sugar, semolina, flour, or oil, screamed the manager. There’s nothing else, not even salt. And don’t ask him again from the beginning, because he didn’t have yeast or matches either. But at Glázner’s they’re planning to bake all day, and probably everyone can get something there.

The line quickly began to thin out.

On that occasion I saw the burned woman. She had on a short Persian lamb coat, pants, and military boots, and she was explaining something to an older man. We were all on our way to Glázner’s, on Szent István Boulevard.

This sort of thing happened often in those days, and nobody seemed bothered by having to walk to another store. It was not advisable to stay too long in one place anyway. Sometimes one heard, without any official announcement, that something valuable was still available elsewhere in the city, and then an anxious, smaller crowd would start toward a new uncertainty. No one complained. One couldn’t predict anything anyway, not even whether things would be safer or more uncertain somewhere else. There was no future; all that we had was the present moment. One surrendered to necessity, which made one anxious, but moving on to other places gave one some safety. At times it turned out that because of fighting on the streets one could not reach the desired destination, not even in roundabout ways; at other times the goal was reached but the store had closed, or had never opened, or perhaps had been blown to bits in the meantime.

Yet, somehow, something worthwhile always presented itself. And driven by the hope of this something, everyone worked out a strategy.

Everyone seemed to know which way to go and which way not to go.

It was no good to detach oneself completely from the crowd, because that kept one from benefiting from the flow of information, yet too many people all together was also dangerous. Everything was in constant flux. One shuttled back and forth between swelling and thinning groups. It was no easier during the day than in the dark, foggy dawn. Early dawn already had a wintry edge, though an autumnal smell remained. It appeared as if everyone followed their own noses, yet everyone watched closely where others were heading; maybe they knew something. And because of this strange feeling, which in peacetime usually divides a populace, people bunched together. Of course, this was not so good either. Because one guessed that maybe no one knew more or better than the others, were only talking through their hats, and it would be best to continue on alone. For a short time one might be armed with some actual information, or at least knew that others had a different view on the same permanent uncertainty yet were talking nonsense. But alone, one could not decide, for example, whether to cross a square or playground or to try a completely different route.