Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Trouble occurs only when one does not accept one’s place in the universe. Actually, this is not my place, you say to yourself, and, unguardedly, you give voice to your indignation. Most people are wary of this trouble.

Sometimes a common fear even stifles a quarrel that has already started.

Not rationality.

There was silence.

Everybody is afraid.

This could have been the silence of an ordinary autumn morning. There were no sounds of gunfire anywhere.

I got lucky and could lean my back against a wall. Of course, I did a bit of manipulative navigation to reach this position. One could still see on the building wall the damage left from the Second World War. Bullet pockmarks in the plaster had been blackened by soot. I grew up in this city and never thought that this should not be so. But our silence now was not a real silence, because it was touched by a uniform rumbling sound coming from far away.

By then I knew that in the bakery three ovens were working simultaneously, producing a new batch of fresh bread every thirty-five minutes. We figured that we could progress about thirty meters with each new batch. Provided the ovens could keep up the pace. If there was enough firewood and they didn’t run out of flour or received a fresh shipment in time. If they could manage the kneading and leavening as fast as the ovens did the baking.

This was not likely.

We also knew that as of last night, all the ground-floor apartments in this building had been taken over for the purpose of leavening the bread dough. Some people figured out that at such a pace we needed to wait for twenty-five baking sessions and we’d be done in the late afternoon. The question was not whether we could stick it out but whether we’d get our bread before nightfall. Or, if we didn’t reach the entrance by then, would they lift the curfew, giving us more time.

To violate the curfew was harder in the evening than at dawn. It was virtually impossible in the evenings because the city then swarmed with various patrols. The fighting always died down by dawn.

The rumbling steadily grew louder. After a certain point no one had any doubt that it came from an approaching column of tanks. Columns of tanks were not especially frightening. Tanks turned up from somewhere and then moved on to someplace else. Unless they stopped, there’d be no trouble. And it was unlikely that they would choose to come through this narrow street. They preferred the wider streets and avenues, moving at the edge of the road so it would not be easy to throw Molotov cocktails at them from the buildings. The rumbling came from the direction of Angyalföld, and we could guess from the noise that the tanks would have to pass through either Pozsonyi Road or Pannónia Street. And when in this maddening rumbling we could also hear the squeaking of caterpillar tracks, it was clear that they were rolling on the yellow ceramic pavement of Pozsonyi Road, on which every squeak sounded harsher and was more amplified than on regular asphalt. First, only the rumbling filled with squeaks took up the space between the buildings, and then, in the sunny junction of the small side street, we saw the tanks.

They kept an equal distance between them as they moved. One would disappear; the next one would appear. The faint sun grew blurry above the clouds of gasoline fume.

No one in the line moved. Those who could see into the side street paid close attention. But the stench of gasoline grew so strong, the noise increased so much, that everyone kept quiet; no one would have been heard anyway. It seemed the column would never end. The buildings picked up the trembling, as did the street and the sidewalk; I could feel in my limbs how the various tremblings blended into one. It wasn’t I who was trembling.

The rumbling and trembling increased as the tanks, squeaking and screeching ever more loudly, turned up on the ramp of the Margit Bridge, and now the entire bridge was shaking. We could feel the bridge in the soles of our feet. I’ve got a city; my city is split in half by a river, and now the familiar bridge over the river has turned into a sensation. The bridgehead took on the shaking of the bridge, the bridgehead’s shaking was taken over by the blocks of buildings around the bridgehead abutment, and I felt the trembling in my back also. Because of the trembling, one did not think of anything; at most one could listen to the trembling of one’s body.

I sensed no danger. And it did not sound as if anything was about to end.

After all, there were larger military operations for which the Russian troops regrouped, but the civilians did not bother too much with them.

In those days, it was not completely out of the question that the Russians might leave altogether. Leave the capital or maybe even the country.

From where I stood, I could see into the small street. I saw the tanks following one after the other in front of the Szamovár coffee bar. Behind the sunny glass of the display window hung a large photograph of Hedda Hiller, the aging, beautiful nightclub singer who had appeared there every evening until a few days ago. The coffee bar was open and full of people even now. Faces were glued to the glass, watching the passing tanks. Some people stood on the sunny sidewalk, watching the tanks from there. Then something happened that to this day I find it hard to make myself believe. Lazily, as if still thinking about it, one of the tanks seemed to change its mind, and it turned into this small narrow street, grazing the sidewalks with its tracks and making the curb throw sparks, scattering the people on the sidewalk. People ran into the coffee bar, some into the adjacent building. The street emptied out in a second. Only the smell of gasoline and the wide strips of sunshine pouring down from over the roofs remained. We, in the line, did not move. The tank was coming toward us, its barrel raised.

It occurred to me for a second that perhaps this tank was securing the safety of the moving column, in which case everything was all right. It advanced halfway down the small street, stopped but did not turn off its engine.

Nothing happened.

Then I thought that perhaps something was wrong with the tank and that is why it had left the column. But I felt that trouble was near. In the next instant the tank’s barrel moved gently downward. Nobody moved. It seemed to be taking aim at the building opposite or at the wide marquee above the entrance to the Danube Movie Theater. But there was nothing there; people in the bread line were waiting underneath it, motionless. It happened so fast my mind could not keep up. My eyes saw it. Still, I could not acknowledge that the flame bursting out of the barrel and the backward jerk of first the turret and then the entire tank meant that a round had been fired. And then another one.

Two mute pictures.

And a horrific explosion in between. And the next one slamming into the crumbling, collapsing chaos within the cloud of dust, also followed by an explosion.

Tearing up everything.

A few days later, Madzar was standing alone on the deck of the Carolina , the oldest steamboat on the Danube, and he felt very lonely in the spring twilight.

Under his feet, down in the deep bowels of the boat, the engine was working at a uniform rhythm.

The enormous mass of water absorbed the muted puffs rising from the hollows of the ship, not allowing them up to the deck.

The muted, delayed vibrations, the thrusts of the steam engine’s pistons, the metallic trembling of the hull, the gentle breeze that carried the scent of blooming as well as the cold, heavy fish smell of muddy water from the shore, all coursed simultaneously through his body.

Boarding this ship, which sailed regularly between Vienna and Belgrade, meant journeying back to his childhood. Already then, one of his favorite daydreams was to penetrate the immense universe that breathed like an animal and was, in every single one of its elements, suffused with the currents of existence. Let me see how every species of all living things, along with their functions, all the stars, internal organs, and snow crystals, pulsing bloodstreams, myriad details of bridges and cathedrals, how all of these are linked together.