Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

The river was swelling.

His cosmic efforts led to no convincing result, of course, neither then nor later, and it would have been strange indeed if the little son of a shipwright from Mohács had succeeded in reconstructing the metaphysical structure of a pantheistic world.

He had the impression that he attributed significance to relationships and analogies that had none or, worse, that he was unaware of certain phenomena and overestimated the significance of others, which kept him from understanding them. He couldn’t understand, for instance, into what category he should put those of his own deeds he considered ungodly.

Yet he kept at it, began over and over again, buried himself in encyclopedias, ventured into the thick of phenomena and data, wandered off, fell into the depths. He tried to take inventory with his sense organs of every manifestation of every element in his environment and to assign them their possible positions. He realized with alarm that one prerequisite of this effort should be not to make arbitrary choices and separate individual objects from each other, but to know what belonged to what, to clarify the causality of their belonging together, to penetrate them with his imagination down to the last detail, and at the same time to remain outside and, aided by physical and cultural experiences, to establish relationships among all the things he observed, not only between them and himself. He should discern what in their functioning was similar to or different from human functioning, what was personal in the universe, what remained impersonal; by connecting the contact points of the various systems he ought to be able to map the construction, the higher mechanism that perhaps held all autonomous things together.

That was his guiding vision.

He would have liked to uncover how Creation’s objects fitted together; in return for this knowledge, he was ready to be burned alive like Giordano Bruno on Campo dei Fiori.

If they had told him what he was really doing, what he went on thinking about even as an adult and why he did it so compulsively, as if possessed, he would have replied, raising his somber eyebrows, come on now, balderdash, I am not looking for any kind of god.

He leaned against the railing, holding his visored Scottish cap of the same material as his suit, and lost himself in admiring the familiar river as its mute shores lined with silver gray willows floated by.

They were going downstream. The old steam engine scarcely had to work.

The nicely arched bow, ending in a long, broad prow adorned in relief with the bifurcated wavy hair of a mad mermaid, was noisily parting the golden yellow silk of the water. Metal sliced water. The rather high-pitched sound of this was steady, yet the water also made smaller, one might say more objective snaps, plops, and splashes around the prow, and these sounds seemed to link the two substances’ interwoven progress with the currents of the depths.

Madzar was going home to Mohács.

The wide paddle wheeler sank comfortably into the water as the river carried it on its murky back.

He could not stop himself from imagining that the woman was coming with him; he was taking with him her stranger’s breath, which reached him even here, at the railing of the upper deck; he carried the image farther, imagining they were going together back to his childhood. To share something that was close and unique and dear to him, something the woman did not know what to do with. They had not seen each other for days, did not want to, no, no, and the will remained mutual, and it hurt them both. Madzar had expected not to have hurt feelings himself because he considered jealousy or longing to be senseless, pointless, its complications old-fashioned.

So many things that should simply be eliminated from the modern world.

No psychic illness or emotional misery should darken the doorstep of his consciousness.

Since their talk about furnishing the clinic, however, a shadow had fallen on the demands he made of himself, and he was surprised to discover that despite his encyclopedic efforts and Gnostic passion, he had been unaware of it. Although the phenomenon of death could not elude his attention, he hardly paid attention to illnesses and ill persons. He himself had never had even a toothache; on occasion a mild head cold.

He was not aware of his own health.

Ill persons should be aware of their ruined fate; that’s the real reason her office must not suggest clinical sterility — so as not to strengthen this awareness of their illness.

As if the demands Mrs. Szemző made were at odds with every system his imagination had ever concocted, dangling incongruously from them, as it were. As if he were saying that one cannot see one’s fate for knowledge of one’s own illness. Or awareness of one’s own health. And in that case wasn’t everything other than direct personal experience missing from one’s thinking. I might be pathologically healthy. It gave him pause to think that perception of futile and unreasonable things might be missing from his consciousness because it did not fit with his strict empiricism.

I may be headed for big trouble, there is something I haven’t understood or keep misunderstanding.

He began to be afraid.

Mrs. Szemző, however, protested vehemently against his word usage.

I beg of you, she laughed, showing her frightening gums above her strong teeth, please stop talking to me about illness. What I deal with is not illness; it is not maladie but, at worst, malaise . We must keep the concept strictly in its social context; I insist on that, if you don’t mind. Each soul has its given nature and characteristics just as the body does. The people who come to see me, and this is what has to be considered, my dear architect, do not behave in conformity with conventions.

But that is not illness.

Or it may be exactly the other way around: they cling so strictly to conventions that they become ill. And then it’s clear that the illness has to be considered the consequence, not the cause.

Making himself even more ridiculous, he awkwardly protested against Mrs. Szemző’s protest, childishly repeating that he understood, of course he did, he had read enough psychoanalytical literature.

Mrs. Szemző interrupted the sentence she had begun.

With a glance she grasped that what he had said was partly true; he must have heard or read something on the subject. Then she flooded him again with her full-throated laughter, because she liked to hear the man stretching the facts a little, and under the weight of her glance Madzar once again showed his weak side, blushing deeply.

He watched the woman, envied her for her keen glance, wanted to avenge himself.

He imagined that a woman as self-possessed as she felt none of the pain or embarrassment he did but, head held high, went impassively about her daily tasks.

He couldn’t imagine this completely. After all, he was unfamiliar with the life and daily routine of a well-to-do, pampered Jewish woman of Budapest.

Instinctively he knew that she felt the pain, he could not have been so far off the mark; of course she did, she had to.

Still, he asked himself, why would anybody miss me. Because he was not thinking of a single woman in the cool twilight, but, parallel with Mrs. Szemző, he thought also of the rich Dutch woman from whom he had fled when he left Rotterdam behind. He was very familiar with that woman’s daily routine and deduced from it what Mrs. Szemző’s might be. He imagined the moment when the piano teacher says good-bye but would like his monthly payment before going, which these people always forget, and just then the other Szemző boy rings the bell, having returned from his language lesson. Mrs. Szemző feels that everything is in hopeless disarray again in the old downtown apartment from which, in a few months’ time, they will move to their brand-new house in the great green outdoors. Her husband, on the telephone with someone, is pointing at her and gesticulating about something, but she must change her clothes. And before leaving for the opera with her women friends, she must talk to the maid about next week’s menus and she didn’t want that discussion to make her late for Margit Huber and Mária Szapáry.