Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

To hell with the piano teacher’s monthly fee.

Couldn’t we please do this next week, she asks peremptorily. Although the young man gives her a desperate look, she considers the matter closed. There, you see.

But in this series of pictures she resembles the slightly hysterical Dutch woman more than herself.

The breath of their indifference reached him from their fulfilled lives.

In the badly insulated, unheated street-front room of his parental home, in its pervasive mustiness, he will return to his illusions; he would still prefer to spend the night with the Dutch woman rather than with this one, whom he does not yet know and has already abandoned.

He did not understand anything.

Occasionally a dark object from the depths of the river surfaced.

He did not see how his life would settle down at the side of another person.

Which is usually referred to as resignation or calming down; perhaps he was waiting for America.

As the days passed he was continually occupied with looking for solutions to minor architectural problems, but this brought him no closer to an overall solution. Already in Rotterdam, the question of what his future should be, with whom he might share it, had become an insoluble problem. While the work-filled weeks rushed by he failed to give proper attention to this more general and clearly more significant question, and he could see that the weeks would grow into months and whole long seasons. He reluctantly acknowledged that, judging by his behavior, he put a certain amount of passion into his work, a need for emotional fulfillment that could be neither avoided nor dissolved or even annihilated by the joy of a job well done. He should share it with someone, but not just anyone. The crater of an absence grew deeper in his consciousness. And if he found the someone with whom to share his passion, then he foresaw life-organizing problems that one couldn’t solve with this person, maybe with someone else.

If he did not want to step into chaos, he had to step back, along with his passion, or move on.

How could he tell the wife of a Dutch industrialist to pack her things, dress her children, call a cab, and let’s be on our way. He had to step back — to his work and to nothing else. If he were to maintain the living standard to which these people were accustomed, within a week he’d have been unable to pay the hotel bills. Yet they had been planning earnestly, because they passionately wanted to escape from that doll’s house. In the midst of their fervent daydreaming about their future, Madzar realized the woman had no idea of the dimensions of poverty. She dreamed of ways to rescue her dowry from her husband’s business, but the distrustful look on her face showed that she wouldn’t like to entrust her money to a nobody like Madzar.

She didn’t dare reveal how much money she had.

As if Madzar were looking into a sanctuary of guileless honesty where petty and scheming dishonesty ruled.

Because hard as she tried, she could not imagine things in any other way but that a man would take care of her; after all, that was their obligation.

And with Mrs. Szemző, the whole misery would start all over again.

He had decent colleagues with whom he saw eye to eye on nearly every important professional question — structural engineers, mechanics, and civil engineers, many of whom supported his professional career because they shared his ideas about modernizing the technical and spiritual aspects of architecture — but he had no friends. They’d hardly get to the end of an exciting discussion when these men would hurry off; they had secret nets that supported their personal lives. He had no insight as to how others had managed to acquire a safety net; he seemed unable to do so. If only he had some friends. Or if he could give up his desires, his emotional preferences, which kept sending him into the arms of women who were complete strangers and whose unsolved life problems he was then obliged to take on. The only obvious solution would be asceticism. After all, it was all about the purity of lines drawn on a sheet of white paper, and for that he had to see his place and function in the entire human world of strangers.

And if this was not possible, then he should, at least in his personal life and in the interest of clear-sightedness, step out of the vicious circle of passions.

The water brought an object to the surface, spun it rapidly around, brought it closer, moved it farther away, let it drift with the current.

Sometimes the object showed more clearly, was fully exposed; at other times it plunged back into the water, perhaps to vanish forever. It was hard to guess what might happen next. He always feared that instead of a waterlogged tree stump, board, or spinning tree trunk, he’d get hold of a bloated corpse or blackened carrion, a pig or cow, or, worse, that his grapnel would not hold the target but would grasp something that would pop, squirt, tear, rip open, and spill guts everywhere. This fear, part of the risk in anything he undertook, accompanied him throughout his childhood.

Even in the summer after his last school year in Pécs, he continued with this insane sort of fishing, though he missed the great spring spate.

To have spending money, so he wouldn’t have to play poor boy next to the young gentlemen who, in fact, were poorer than he yet had to behave as though they were richer to comply with the demands of their social class.

He also did it out of some obsession.

When the water was high, they went in a flatboat or punt; at other times they would swim to get a tree stump or trunk, occupy it, steer it, ride on it. The struggle among the competing gangs was brutal. To possess a more valuable tree trunk they were willing to tear at one another’s flesh with their grappling irons. The higher and colder the water, the richer the catch was. They hit one another with shovels. He began as a member of the German-speaking gang, given his mother tongue, but on Sundays he would go to the Hungarian church, which in Mohács was what they called the Protestant church, located behind a stone wall on Calvin Street, so he wound up in the Hungarian gang.

He had never been forgiven for that.

And what he did could not be done alone; he had to betray someone, either his mother or his father.

And he was unable to repair this rift.

There was always need for an observer at the top of the willows; that’s where the smallest boys began their careers. There was also need for a boy who’d push off the flatboat or punt the moment the others were in, and another small boy who, though not yet proficient in rowing or steering, would unhesitatingly throw himself in to catch the floating prey, defying rain, wind, or ice-cold water. He did everything to make the Hungarians accept him. A floating trunk or stump could not always be caught with the grapnel; it would turn over and spin out of reach, slip away. The others were suspicious of him; after all, he had already betrayed the Germans. It made no difference that he had betrayed the Germans because of and for the Hungarians; the Hungarians did not want to understand the logic of betrayal, and the joy of betrayal remained a well-guarded secret. Someone had to sit by the fire night after night and guard the loot until the timber merchants came to pick it up and ship it away. In this, he had to agree with his mother, who always said that Hungarians were the biggest lamebrains in the world. Driftwood was a valuable commodity: the heavier trunks and the ones not yet water slogged were bought by the Serbian merchant Gojko Drogo; stump wood, assorted chunks, and less valuable pieces they sold to the Jew with a lumberyard below the pier on Halász Street.

Suddenly he could not remember the Jew’s full name, but he did recall that his first name was Ármin.